Women, Writing, Theology

Transforming a Tradition of Exclusion

Emily A. Holmes, Wendy Farley, Emily A. Holmes, Wendy Farley

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781602583764
• eBook ISBN: 9781602583771
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Women's theology has traditionally been pushed to the margins; it is "spirituality" or "mysticism" rather than theology proper. Theology from women has been transmitted orally, recorded by men as sayings or in hagiographies, or passed on as "stealth theology" in poems, hymns, or practices. In the past forty years, women have claimed theology for themselves and others as womanists, feminists, mujeristas, Asian, third-world, disabled, and queer women. Yet in most academic and ecclesial theology, the contributions of women skirt the borders of the written tradition. This unique volume asks about the conditions of women writing theology. How have women historically justified their writing practices? What internal and external constraints shape their capacity to write? What counts as theology, and who qualifies as a theologian? And what does it mean for women to enter a tradition that has been based, in part, on their exclusion? These essays explore such questions through historical investigations, theoretical analyses, and contemporary constructions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page, Title Page, Copyright, Dedication, Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Mending a Broken Lineage
• 2. Fear and Women's Writing: Choosing the Better Part
• 3. A “wretched choice”?: Evangelical Women and the Word
• 4. “My God became flesh”: Angela of Foligno Writing the Incarnation
• 5. Speaking Funk: Womanist Insights into the Lives of Syncletica and Macrina
• 6. “A moor of one's own”: Writing and Silence in Sara Maitland’s "A Book of Silence"
• 7. With Prayer and Pen: Reading Mother E. J. Dabney’s "What It Means to Pray Through"
• 8. Writing a Life, Writing Theology: Edith Stein in the Company of the Saints
• 9. Writing Hunger on the Body: Simone Weil’s Ethic of Hunger and Eucharistic Practice
• 10. The Body, to Be Eaten, to Be Written: A Theological Reflection on the Act of Writing in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s "Dictee"
• 11. Not with One Voice: The Counterpoint of Life, Diaspora, Women, Theology, and Writing
• 12. Embodying Theology: Motherhood as Metaphor/Method
• 13. Postscript: Wounded Writing, Healing Writing
• Contributor Biographies
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover