Muriel Porter lives in Melbourne and is a familiar speaker at Anglican meetings such as Synod. She’s written ‘The Christian Origins of Feminism’, found in Maryanne Confoy, Dorothy A Lee and Joan Nowotny’s Freedom and Entrapment: Women Thinking Theology. Porter has an agenda in writing this piece: she’s an avid supporter of women’s […]
When I blogged on Women Only Communities I mentioned a paper I was intending to read on the place of women in Muslim societies. The author uses both her experiences of living in the Middle East for 20 years and scholarship to ask how understanding this might help in the evangelism […]
She Can Read is Emily Cheney’s attempt to answer the feminist question of whether it is possible for a ‘her’ to read. While some feminists highlight women’s writing over men’s, others suggest that because language is so laden with patriarchy, even when women write or read, they reinforce that patriarchy. […]
Exum raises a number of questions about how we read biblical texts that seem to oppress women. One question is what they say about women. Another is what they say about God. One problem is that there is no perfect culture. All human interactions are tainted by sin. But what […]
In The Pleasure of Her Text Alice Bach counters those who believe that gender is too narrow a lens for re-interpreting the bible: “Resistance comes usually from those who have never thought of gender as influencing reading. The male gender has dominated the voice of the text, including also its […]
An important feminist principle is to self-define womanhood rather than defining woman according to men. For example, women whose primary self-understanding is as wife, mother or widow are defined by their relationships to men; sister and daughter are often not very far behind. If women are described positively in masculine […]
I noted after reading Cheryl Exum’s work on Deborah that the Old Testament’s conception of motherhood is broader than family or biological ties. Though the Reformation elevated and celebrated biological motherhood, there were some women who claimed a larger title of mother. Katharina Schütz Zell (KSZ) was one such woman […]
Meet Jesus at uni 