Playing for God by
When sports ministry first emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, its founders imagined male celebrity athletes as powerful salespeople who could deliver a message of Christian strength: "If athletes can endorse shaving cream, razor blades, and cigarettes, surely they can endorse the Lord, too," reasoned Fellowship of Christian Athletes founder Don McClanen. But combining evangelicalism and sport did much more than serve as an advertisement for religion: it gave athletes the opportunity to think about the embodied experiences of sport as a way to experience intimate connection with the divine. As sports ministry developed, it focused on individual religious experiences and downplayed celebrity sales power, opening the door for female Christian athletes to join and eventually dominate sports ministry. Today, women are the majority of participants in sports ministry in the United States. In Playing for God, Annie Blazer offers an exploration of the history and religious lives of Christian athletes, showing that evangelical engagement with popular culture can carry unintended consequences. When sport became an avenue for embodied worship, it forced a reckoning with evangelical teachings about the body. Female Christian athletes increasingly turned to their own bodies to understand their religious identity, and in so doing, came to question evangelical mainstays on gender and sexuality. What was once a male-dominated masculinist project of sports engagement became a female-dominated movement that challenged evangelical ideas on femininity, marriage hierarchy, and the sinfulness of homosexuality. Though evangelicalism has not changed sporting culture, for those involved in sports ministry, sport has changed evangelicalism.
The Pastoral Care of Women in Late Medieval England by
The question of how priests were taught to think about and care for female parishioners is the topic of this book. As neither misogynist villains nor saintly heroes, clerical authors of pastoral vernacular literature persisted both in their characterization of women as difficult parishioners and in their attempts to recognize women as ordinary parishioners who deserved ordinary pastoral care. Focusing on the important vernacular writings of John Mirk, hisFestial and Instructions for Parish Priests, the author reveals how even a small number of influential sermon compilations, exempla, and pastoral guides could have significantly shaped the perceptions, attitudes, and- perhaps - actions of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century priests. Shedding light on the mental universe of the late medieval parish, this study offers important new insights into the reality of how priests perceived and fulfilledtheir spiritual obligations to the women they served. BETH ALLISON BARR is Assistant Professor of European Women's History at Baylor University.
The Making of Biblical Womanhood by
USA Today BestsellerChristianity Today 2022 Book Award Finalist (History & Biography)"A powerful work of skillful research and personal insight."--Publishers WeeklyBiblical womanhood--the belief that God designed women to be submissive wives, virtuous mothers, and joyful homemakers--pervades North American Christianity. From choices about careers to roles in local churches to relationship dynamics, this belief shapes the everyday lives of evangelical women. Yet biblical womanhood isn't biblical, says Baylor University historian Beth Allison Barr. It arose from a series of clearly definable historical moments.This book moves the conversation about biblical womanhood beyond Greek grammar and into the realm of church history--ancient, medieval, and modern--to show that this belief is not divinely ordained but a product of human civilization that continues to creep into the church. Barr's historical insights provide context for contemporary teachings about women's roles in the church and help move the conversation forward.Interweaving her story as a Baptist pastor's wife, Barr sheds light on the #ChurchToo movement and abuse scandals in Southern Baptist circles and the broader evangelical world, helping readers understand why biblical womanhood is more about human power structures than the message of Christ.
A Mysterious Life and Calling by
Preacher, teacher, and postmistress, Charlotte Levy Riley was born into slavery but became a popular evangelist after emancipation. Although several nineteenth-century accounts by black preaching women in the northern states are known, this is the first discovery of such a memoir in the South. Born in 1839 in Charleston, South Carolina, Riley was taught to read, write, and sew despite laws forbidding black literacy. Raised a Presbyterian, she writes of her conversion at age fourteen to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, embracing its ecstatic worship and led by her own spiritual visions. Her memoir is revelatory on many counts, including life in urban Charleston before and after emancipation, her work as a preacher at multiracial revivals, the rise of African American civil servants in the Reconstruction era, and her education and development as a licensed female minister in a patriarchal church. Crystal J. Lucky, who discovered Riley's forgotten book in the library archives at Wilberforce University in Ohio, provides an introduction and notes on events, society, and religious practice in the antebellum era and during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and places A Mysterious Life and Calling in the context of other spiritual autobiographies and slave narratives.
Voices Long Silenced by
Hundreds of women studied and interpreted the Bible between the years 100-2000 CE, but their stories have remained largely untold. In this book, Schroeder and Taylor introduce readers to the notable contributions of female commentators through the centuries. They unearth fascinating accounts of Jewish and Christian women from diverse communities--rabbinic experts, nuns, mothers, mystics, preachers, teachers, suffragists, and household managers--who interpreted Scripture through their writings. This book recounts the struggles and achievements of women who gained access to education and biblical texts. It tells the story of how their interpretive writings were preserved or, all too often, lost. It also explores how, in many cases, women interpreted Scripture differently from the men of their times. Consequently, Voices Long Silenced makes an important, new contribution to biblical reception history. This book focuses on women's written words and briefly comments on women's interpretation in media, such as music, visual arts, and textile arts. It includes short, representative excerpts from diverse women's own writings that demonstrate noteworthy engagement with Scripture. Voices Long Silencedcalls on scholars and religious communities to recognize the contributions of women, past and present, who interpreted Scripture, preached, taught, and exercised a wide variety of ministries in churches and synagogues.
The Laywoman Project by
Summoning everyday Catholic laywomen to the forefront of twentieth-century Catholic history, Mary J. Henold considers how these committed parishioners experienced their religion in the wake of Vatican II (1962-1965). This era saw major changes within the heavily patriarchal religious faith--at the same time as an American feminist revolution caught fire. Who was the Catholic woman for a new era? Henold uncovers a vast archive of writing, both intimate and public facing, by hundreds of rank-and-file American laywomen active in national laywomen's groups, including the National Council of Catholic Women, the Catholic Daughters of America, and the Daughters of Isabella. These records evoke a formative period when laywomen played publicly with a surprising variety of ideas about their own position in the Catholic Church. While marginalized near the bottom of the church hierarchy, laywomen quietly but purposefully engaged both their religious and gender roles as changing circumstances called them into question. Some eventually chose feminism while others rejected it, but most, Henold says, crafted a middle position: even conservative, nonfeminist laywomen came to reject the idea that the church could adapt to the modern world while keeping women's status frozen in amber.
Work, Family, and Faith by
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of rural southerners were dependent on agriculture and eked out a living as tenants on land owned by someone else. Women took on multiple duties, from child rearing to labor in the fields, to help meet their own goals of independence, well being, and family persistence on the land. Over the course of the century, however, women found their lives and their work transformed. Government intervention, the Great Depression, and industrial job opportunities created by the two world wars and the development of Sun Belt industries lured or pushed tens of thousands of black and white rural southerners off the land. As the American South changed around them, becoming more urban and industrialized, some women struggled to help their families survive in the increasingly large scale and commercial agricultural economy, while other women eagerly seized opportunities to engage in rural reform, get better educations, and work at off farm jobs. Whether they moved to the cities or stayed on the farms, most of these women continued to struggle against poverty and relied on tradition and inner strength to get by. This well researched, sharply focused, and keenly insightful collection of essays takes readers across the twentieth century South, from rural roadside stands to tobacco fields to Sloss Sheffield Steel's "Sloss Quarters" in Birmingham. Covering the full scope of southern rural women's varied lives, this book will be of particular value to anyone interested in sociology, women's studies, or southern history.
Christian women in Chinese society : the Anglican story by
Christian Women in Chinese Society: The Anglican Story expands on the long-standing debates about whether Christianity is a collaborator in or a liberating force against the oppressive patriarchal culture for women in Asia. Women have played an important role in the history of Chinese Christianity, but their contributions have yet to receive due recognition, partly because of the complexities arising out of the historical tension between Western imperialism and Chinese patriarchy. Single women missionaries and missionary spouses in the nineteenth century set the early examples of what women could do to spread the Gospel, yet they might not have intended to instill the same free spirit into their Chinese converts. The education provided to Chinese women by missionaries was expected to turn them into good wives and mothers, but knowledge empowered the students, allowing them to become full participants not only in the Church but also in the wider society. Together, the Western female missionaries and the Chinese women whom they trained explored their newfound freedom and tried out their roles with the help of each other. These developments culminated in the ordination of Florence Li Tim Oi to priesthood in 1944, a singular event that fundamentally changed the history of the Anglican Communion. At the heart of this collection lies the rich experience of those women, both Chinese and Western, who devoted their lives to the propagation of Anglicanism across different regions of mainland China and Hong Kong. Contributors make the most of the sources to reconstruct their voices and present sympathetic accounts of these remarkable women's achievements.
Strategic Sisterhood by
When women were denied a major speaking role at the 1963 March on Washington, Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), organized her own women's conference for the very next day. Defying the march's male organizers, Height helped harness the womanpower waiting in the wings. Height's careful tactics and quiet determination come to the fore in this first history of the NCNW, the largest black women's organization in the United States at the height of the civil rights, Black Power, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Offering a sweeping view of the NCNW's behind-the-scenes efforts to fight racism, poverty, and sexism in the late twentieth century, Rebecca Tuuri examines how the group teamed with U.S. presidents, foundations, and grassroots activists alike to implement a number of important domestic development and international aid projects. Drawing on original interviews, extensive organizational records, and other rich sources, Tuuri's work narrates the achievements of a set of seemingly moderate, elite activists who were able to use their personal, financial, and social connections to push for change as they facilitated grassroots, cooperative, and radical activism.
Women and Christian Origins by
This new collection of fourteen integrated, original essays by prominent scholars and experienced teachers provides a comprehensive and accessible entree to current research on women and the origins of Christianity. Engaging for both the interested reader and the specialist in religion, Womenand Christian Origins is sensitive to feminist theory and attentive to distinctions between the (re)construction of women's history in early Christian churches and ancient constructions of gender difference
Modern Women Modernizing Men by
During the interwar era, the world of mainstream Protestant missions was in transition. The once-dominant paradigm of separate spheres -- "women's work for women" -- had lost its saliency, and professional women often entered work worlds largely peopled by men. Medical missionaries Belle Chon� Oliver and Florence Murray and literature specialist Margaret Wrong were three such women. Using these women's experiences in colonial India, Korea, and sub-Saharan Africa as case studies, Modern Women Modernizing Men explores how professionalism, religion, and feminism came together to enable missionary women to become the colleagues and mentors of Western and non-Western men. The "modern" Christian woman missionary, the author demonstrates, was in fact more an agent of modernization than an angel of domesticity. This book -- a bold exploration of changing gender, professional, and race relations in colonial missionary settings -- will be of interest to scholars engaged in gender, women's, and postcolonial studies, as well as to readers interested in the history of the international missionary movement.
British Women Missionaries to Bengal, 1793-1861 by
'British Women Missionaries in Bengal, 1793-1861' looks at the arrival of the early British women missionaries in Bengal, especially when travelling to India or working in missions was neither a spontaneous nor an acceptable career decision for white women. The book aims to throw light on a key moment in colonial contact, a new interface between two races, religions and ways of life. From a hesitant beginning as 'helpmeets' to a more confident phase of mission activities in the form of setting up formal educational institutions, writing books and so on comprise a long legacy of white women's participation in overseas colonial encounters. Historicizing imperial feminism will enable those who choose to use the past to locate and interrogate its ramifications on more 'modern' notions of feminism. The advent of the Baptist missionary William Carey in Bengal in 1793, followed by others, significantly altered how mission activity was perceived in India. From Hannah Marshman, who helped her more famous missionary husband Joshua Marshman to open schools for girls, to Mary Ann Cooke, the first single British woman missionary to come and work in India, to Hannah Mullens's contributions to zenana education, were all part of a long journey which helped professionalize women's missionary work in the colonies. With the death of Hannah Mullens in 1861, the 'early' phase of missionary work came to an end and then began a more proactive phase of evangelization and missionary activity in India.