Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality PDF Download

Author: Anna Fedele
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415659477
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Contemporary distinctions between religion and spirituality can often be traced to rebellion against hierarchical institutions with biases towards women and minorities that constrain individual freedom. This opposition is carefully addressed in this volume, with greater attention paid to gender and power in the context of contemporary spirituality and how these relate to the distinction between religion and spirituality.

Author: Anna Fedele
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135114528
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
This book explores the entanglements of gender and power in spiritual practices and analyzes strategies used by spiritual practitioners to attain what to social scientists might seem an impossible goal: creating spiritual communities without creating gendered hierarchies. What strategies do people within these networks use to attain gender equality and gendered empowerment? How do they try to protect and develop individual freedom? How do gender and power nevertheless play a role? The chapters in this book together and separately demonstrate that, in order to understand contemporary spirituality, the analytical lenses of gender and power are essential. Furthermore, they show that it is not possible to make a clear distinction between established religions and contemporary spirituality: the two sometimes overlap, and at other times spirituality distances itself from religion while reproducing some of its underlying interpretative frameworks. This book does not take the discourses of spiritual practitioners for granted, yet recognizes the reflexivity of spiritual practitioners and the reciprocal relationship between spirituality and disciplines such as anthropology. The ethnographic descriptions of lived spirituality included in this volume span a wide range of countries, from Portugal, Italy, and the Netherlands to Mexico and Israel.

Author: Karlyn Crowley
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438436270
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Finalist for the 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year in the Women's Issues Category Crystals, Reiki, Tarot, Goddess worship—why do these New Age tokens and practices capture the imagination of so many women? How has New Age culture become even more appealing than feminism? And are the two mutually exclusive? By examining New Age practices from macrobiotics to goddess worship to Native rituals, Feminism's New Age: Gender, Appropriation, and the Afterlife of Essentialism seeks to answer these questions by examining white women's participation in this hugely popular spiritual movement. While most feminist approaches to the New Age phenomenon have simply dismissed its adherents for their politically problematic racial appropriation practices, Karyln Crowley looks honestly at the political shortcomings of New Age beliefs and practices while simultaneously reckoning with the affective, political, and cultural motivations which have prompted New Age women's individual and collective spiritualities. New Age spirituality is in fact the dynamic outgrowth of a long-standing tradition of women's social and political power expressed through religious writings, art, and public discourse, and is key to understanding contemporary women's history and religion's role in modern American culture alike. Crowley offers a new and provocative assessment of the significance of the New Age movement, seen through a feminist and critical race studies lens.

Author: Sarah Coakley
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470692685
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
In this book Sarah Coakley confronts a central paradox of theological feminism - what she terms 'the paradox of power and vulnerability'. Confronts a central paradox of theological feminism – what Coakley terms 'paradox of power and vulnerability'. Explores this issue through the perspective of spiritual practice, philosophical enquiry and doctrinal analysis. Draws together an essential collection of Sarah Coakley's work in this field. Offers an original perspective into contemporary feminist theology.

Author: Kerrie Handasyde
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100033998X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
This book explores the issues of power, authority and love with current concerns in the Christian theological exploration of feminism and feminist theology. It addresses its key themes in three parts: (1) power deals with feminist critiques, (2) authority unpacks feminist methodologies, and (3) love explores feminist ethics. Covering issues such as embodiment, intersectionality, liberation theologies, historiography, queer approaches to hermeneutics, philosophy and more, it provides a multi-layered and nuanced appreciation of this important area of theological thought and practice. This volume will be vital reading for scholars of feminist theology, queer theology, process theology, practical theology, religion and gender.

Author: Anna Fedele
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429853181
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? is the first volume to address the gendered intersections of religion, spirituality and the secular through an ethnographic approach. The book examines how ‘spirituality’ has emerged as a relatively ‘silent’ category with which people often signal that they are looking for a way to navigate between the categories of the religious and the secular, and considers how this is related to gendered ways of being and relating. Using a lived religion approach the contributors analyse the intersections between spirituality, religion and secularism in different geographical areas, ranging from the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy to Canada, the United States and Mexico. The chapters explore the spiritual experiences of women and their struggle for a more gender equal way of approaching the divine, as well as the experience of men and of those who challenge binary sexual identities advocating for a queer spirituality. This volume will be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists as well as scholars in other disciplines who seek to understand the role of spirituality in creating the complex gendered dynamics of modern societies.

Author: Helena Kupari
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351329863
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The Orthodox Christian tradition has all too often been sidelined in conversations around contemporary religion. Despite being distinct from Protestantism and Catholicism in both theology and practice, it remains an underused setting for academic inquiry into current lived religious practice. This collection, therefore, seeks to redress this imbalance by investigating modern manifestations of Orthodox Christianity through an explicitly gender-sensitive gaze. By addressing attitudes to gender in this context, it fills major gaps in the literature on both religion and gender. Starting with the traditional teachings and discourses around gender in the Orthodox Church, the book moves on to demonstrate the diversity of responses to those narratives that can be found among Orthodox populations in Europe and North America. Using case studies from several countries, with both large and small Orthodox populations, contributors use an interdisciplinary approach to address how gender and religion interact in contexts such as, iconography, conversion, social activism and ecumenical relations, among others. From Greece and Russia to Finland and the USA, this volume sheds new light on the myriad ways in which gender is manifested, performed, and engaged within contemporary Orthodoxy. Furthermore, it also demonstrates that employing the analytical lens of gender enables new insights into Orthodox Christianity as a lived tradition. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of both Religious Studies and Gender Studies.

Author: Sonya Sharma
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350257184
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Bringing together disciplines across the arts, humanities and social sciences, this Handbook presents novel and lively examinations of the dynamic ways religion, gender and sexuality operate. Applying feminist, intersectional, and reflexive approaches, the volume aims to loosen imperialist and exclusionary figurations that have underwritten and tethered religion, gender, and sexuality together. While holding onto the field of inquiry, the Handbook offers contributions that interrogate and untie it from the terms and conditions that have formed it. The volume is organized into thematic sections: - Forces and Futures - Activisms and Labors - Agencies and Practices - Relationships and Institutions - Texts and Objects Chapters range across religious, geographical, historical, political, and social contexts and feature an array of case-studies, experiences, and topics that exemplify the reflexive intention of the volume, including explorations of race, whiteness, colonialism, and the institutional intolerance of minority groups. Contributors also advance new areas of research in religion including artificial intelligence, farming, migrant mothering, child sexual abuse, mediatization, national security, legal frameworks, addiction and recovery, decolonial hermeneutics, creative arts, sport, sexual practices, and academic friendship. This is an essential contribution to the fields of religious studies and gender and sexuality studies.

Author: Mark Cobb
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199571392
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
Spirituality and healthcare is an emerging field of research, practice and policy. Healthcare organisations and practitioners are therefore challenged to understand and address spirituality, to develop their knowledge and implement effective policy. This is the first reference text on the subject providing a comprehensive overview of key topics.

Author: Eugenia Roussou
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350152811
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This anthropological work thoroughly illustrates the novel synthesis of Christian religion and New Age spirituality in Greece. It challenges the single-faith approach that traditionally ties southern European countries to Christianity and focuses on how processes of globalization influence and transform vernacular religiosity. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in Greece, this book demonstrates how the popular belief in the 'evil eye' produces a creative affinity between religion and spirituality in everyday practice. The author analyses a variety of significant research themes, including lived and vernacular religion, alternative spirituality and healing, ritual performance and religious material culture. The book offers an innovative social scientific interpretation of contemporary religiosity, while engaging with a multiplicity of theoretical, analytic and empirical directions. It contributes to current key debates in social sciences with regard to globalization and secularization, religious pluralism, contemporary spirituality and the New Age movement, gender, power and the body, health, illness and alternative therapeutic systems, senses, perception and the supernatural, the spiritual marketplace, creativity and the individualization of religion in a multicultural world.