Gender and Diversity Issues in Religious-based Institutions and Organizations

As religions grow and evolve, they adapt to their current circumstances, with new ideologies often deviating dramatically from their roots. The variety of religious institutions in modern society necessitates a focus on diversity and inclusiveness in the interactions between organizations of different religions, cultures, and viewpoints. Gender and Diversity Issues in Religious-Based Institutions and Organizations elucidates the impact of gender identity and race within religious-based institutions and organizations. Policymakers, academicians, researchers, government officials, and religious leaders will find this text useful in furthering their research related to inclusiveness and diversity in their respective roles. This essential reference source builds on the available literature on gender and diversity issues in religious-based settings and contexts with chapters relating to race relations in the Churches of Christ, the role of women in religious movements in Latin America, gay-straight alliances at religious-based colleges and universities, and lessons and insights for religious institutions and faculty.

Blanche Jackson Glimps is a professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education, at Tennessee State University (TSU). She earned an undergraduate degree from Eastern Michigan University, a Masters of Education degree from Wayne State University, 30 hours beyond the masters in Learning Disability at Wayne State University, a doctoral degree from The University of Michigan, and she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Bush Institute of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has served as chairperson of education departments and as a Vice President for Academic Affairs at religious-based colleges and a secular universities. At TSU, she is involved in the preparation of teachers and teaches primarily special education courses. Among her research and writing interests include the following: spirituality and teaching, culturally responsive teaching, diversity issues, and the overrepresentation of specific ethnic and gender groups in special education classrooms in the United States.

Theron Ford obtained her doctorate from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She has decades of classroom experience having taught at every grade level from Head Start through university graduate students. Additionally, she has a background in special education. She acknowledges that the endless efforts African Americans and their allies from other races and ethnicities have used in an attempt to actualize the concept of social justice in American came into her consciousness when she was in middle school when she lived through the disparate behaviors of some teachers and administrators in her school. As a youth, she found herself in marches for equal rights and in protest of the war in Vietnam. Her research interests focus on issues of race, class and culture within the spheres of education and religion as well as education and women in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1998 her work in Malawi with a Non-Governmental Organization earned her an award for outstanding teacher.