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| Author | : Susan Starr Sered |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
| Total Pages | : 358 |
| Release | : 1996 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 0195104676 |
In this fascinating and path-breaking work--comparing 12 women's religions--Sered investigates how women's religions differ from those dominated by men. She then reveals how these religions relate to the special ways women around the world experience reality. 19 halftones.
| Author | : Julia Meszaros |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 290 |
| Release | : 2013-09 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0199659281 |
Leading specialists in theology, anthropology, religious studies and history elucidate the modern debate about sacrifice from interest shown in the sixteenth century through to the present day. Individual chapters discuss anthropological theories, theological controversies, philosophical interpretations, and literary uses of sacrifice.
| Author | : Karla Simcikova |
| Publisher | : Lexington Books |
| Total Pages | : 202 |
| Release | : 2007 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 9780739111604 |
To Live Fully, Here and Now formulates a coherent and comprehensive understanding of Alice Walker's spiritual wisdom in the age of heightened global awareness, natural devastation, and spiritual crisis. Simcikova argues that to fully understand Walker's complex and multi-layered concept of spirituality, we have to move beyond the womanist model to incorporate and/or accommodate all the influences that have had a significant impact on Walker, particularly her interest in Native American spirituality. Simcikova also offers a new paradigm of wholeness, unity, and interconnectedness for critical analysis of her Walker's latest works. This ground-breaking book will find audiences across disciplines as it addresses the fundamental ethical question of what it means to be human.
| Author | : Ross Shepard Kraemer |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 344 |
| Release | : 2010-12-27 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 0190453923 |
In her latest book, Ross Shepard Kraemer shows how her mind has changed or remained the same since the publication of her ground-breaking study, Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religions Among Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Greco-Roman World (OUP 1992). Unreliable Witnesses scrutinizes more closely how ancient constructions of gender undergird accounts of women's religious practices in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Kraemer analyzes how gender provides the historically obfuscating substructure of diverse texts: Livy's account of the origins of the Roman Bacchanalia; Philo of Alexandria's envisioning of idealized, masculinized women philosophers; rabbinic debates about women studying Torah; Justin Martyr's depiction of an elite Roman matron who adopts chaste Christian philosophical discipline; the similar representation of Paul's fictive disciple, Thecla, in the anonymous Acts of (Paul and) Thecla; Severus of Minorca's depiction of Jewish women as the last hold-outs against Christian pressures to convert, and others. While attentive to arguments that women are largely fictive proxies in elite male contestations over masculinity, authority, and power, Kraemer retains her focus on redescribing and explaining women's religious practices. She argues that - gender-specific or not - religious practices in the ancient Mediterranean routinely encoded and affirmed ideas about gender. As in many cultures, women's devotion to the divine was both acceptable and encouraged, only so long as it conformed to pervasive constructions of femininity as passive, embodied, emotive, insufficiently controlled and subordinated to masculinity. Extending her findings beyond the ancient Mediterranean, Kraemer proposes that, more generally, religion is among the many human social practices that are both gendered and gendering, constructing and inscribing gender on human beings and on human actions and ideas. Her study thus poses significant questions about the relationships between religions and gender in the modern world.
| Author | : Rachel S. McCoppin |
| Publisher | : McFarland |
| Total Pages | : 238 |
| Release | : 2023-04-10 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 1476649340 |
It is often assumed that the female characters found in popular folk and fairy tales are little more than inconsequential stereotypes--mostly serving as hapless victims in need of rescue, boring one-dimensional princesses, or egotistical and conniving villains. This book presents more fully-realized portraits of these female characters and the ways in which they actually represent bold and powerful connections to the goddesses of classic mythic narratives. The rich legacy of female goddesses, shamans, queens, and priestesses is in fact preserved and celebrated through these more modern representations, whether as brides who can transform into animals, wise old women who live alone in the deep wilderness, strong warrior maidens, or witches who can conquer and command the elements of nature. In contemplating this revised analysis of female characters within global folktales and fairy tales, readers can see that the goddesses of old have never truly been forgotten.
| Author | : Karen Pechilis |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 272 |
| Release | : 2004 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 0195145372 |
A distinctive aspect of Hindu devotion is the veneration of a human guru, who is not only an exemplar and a teacher but is also understood to be an embodiment of the divine. Historically, the role of guru in the public domain has been exclusive to men. The new visibility of female gurus in India and the U.S. today, and indeed across the globe, has inspired this first-ever scholarly study of the origins, variety, and worldwide popularity of Hindu female gurus. In the Introduction, Karen Pechilis examines the historical emergence of Hindu female gurus with reference to the Hindu philosophy of the self, women spiritual exemplars as wives and saints, Tantric worship of the Goddess, and the internationalization of gurus in the U.S. in the twentieth century. Nine essays profile specific female gurus, presenting biographies of these remarkable women while highlighting overarching issues and themes concerning women's status as religious leaders; these themes are nuanced in the afterword to the volume. The essays explore how Hindu female gurus embody grace in both senses--as a feminine ideal and an attribute of the divine-and argue that their status as leaders is grounded in their negotiation of these two types of grace. This book provides biographical profiles of the following female gurus plus sensitive scholarly analysis of their spiritual paths: Ammachi, Anandamayi Ma, Gauri Ma, Gurumayi, Jayashri Ma, Karunamayi Ma, Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, Mother Meera, Shree Maa and Sita Devi.
| Author | : Isaac Jack Lévy |
| Publisher | : University of Illinois Press |
| Total Pages | : 292 |
| Release | : 2002 |
| Genre | : Europe |
| ISBN | : 9780252026973 |
Winner of the Ellii Kongas-Maranda Prize from the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society, 2003. Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women preserves the precious remnants of a rich culture on the verge of extinction while affirming women's pivotal role in the health of their communities. Centered around extensive interviews with elders of the Sephardic communities of the former Ottoman Empire, this volume illuminates a fascinating complex of preventive and curative rituals conducted by women at home--rituals that ensured the physical and spiritual well-being of the community and functioned as a vital counterpart to the public rites conducted by men in the synagogues. Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt take us into the homes and families of Sephardim in Turkey, Israel, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States to unravel the ancient practices of domestic healing: the network of blessings and curses tailored to every occasion of daily life; the beliefs and customs surrounding mal ojo (evil eye), espanto (fright), and echizo (witchcraft); and cures involving everything from herbs, oil, and sugar to the powerful mumia (mummy) made from dried bones of corpses. For the Sephardim, curing an illness required discovering its spiritual cause, which might be unintentional thought or speech, accident, or magical incantation. The healing rituals of domesticated medicine provided a way of making sense of illness and a way of shaping behavior to fit the narrow constraints of a tightly structured community. Tapping a rich and irreplaceable vein of oral testimony, Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women offers fascinating insight into a culture where profound spirituality permeated every aspect of daily life.
| Author | : Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 256 |
| Release | : 2009 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : |
The first book to focus specifically on the women of the counterculture movement reveals how hippie women launched a subtle rebellion by by rejecting their mothers' suburban domesticity in favor of their grandmothers' agrarian ideals, which assigned greater value to women's contributions.
| Author | : Martha Ward |
| Publisher | : Univ. Press of Mississippi |
| Total Pages | : 392 |
| Release | : 2009-09-28 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 149680189X |
Each year, thousands of pilgrims visit the celebrated New Orleans tomb where Marie Laveau is said to lie. They seek her favors or fear her lingering influence. Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau is the first study of the Laveaus, mother and daughter of the same name. Both were legendary leaders of religious and spiritual traditions many still label as evil. The Laveaus were free women of color and prominent French-speaking Catholic Creoles. From the 1820s until the 1880s when one died and the other disappeared, gossip, fear, and fierce affection swirled about them. From the heart of the French Quarter, in dance, drumming, song, and spirit possession, they ruled the imagination of New Orleans. How did the two Maries apply their “magical” powers and uncommon business sense to shift the course of love, luck, and the law? The women understood the real crime—they had pitted their spiritual forces against the slave system of the United States. Moses-like, they led their people out of bondage and offered protection and freedom to the community of color, rich white women, enslaved families, and men condemned to hang. The curse of the Laveau family, however, followed them. Both loved men they could never marry. Both faced down the press and police who stalked them. Both countered the relentless gossip of curses, evil spirits, murders, and infant sacrifice with acts of benevolence. The book is also a detective story—who is really buried in the famous tomb in the oldest “city of the dead” in New Orleans? What scandals did the Laveau family intend to keep buried there forever? By what sleight of hand did free people of color lose their cultural identity when Americans purchased Louisiana and imposed racial apartheid upon Creole creativity? Voodoo Queen brings the improbable testimonies of saints, spirits, and never-before-printed eyewitness accounts of ceremonies and magical crafts together to illuminate the lives of the two Marie Laveaus, leaders of a major, indigenous American religion.
