Search Results (42)

Spiritual care is summoned by suffering—by ‘wounds’ that are psychological, relational, spiritual, embodied, and political at once. As disciplines continue to be entrenched and siloed amidst the growing sociopolitical tensions and global crises in a decolonial age, what is at stake is the ability to care for each suffering Other in their complexity. This article offers a selective genealogy and relational integration of psychoanalysis and spiritual care (in a decolonial age). Against both clinical reductionisms and theological certainty, we argue for renewed dialogue between psychoanalysis and spiritual care through a relational integration framework, both as an ethical stance and hermeneutic framework. We first trace how pastoral and practical theology have approached each ‘wound’ in spiritual care through clinical pastoral education, psychoanalytic pastoral care, practical–theological hermeneutics, and liberationist, intercultural, postcolonial, and decolonial turns. We then consider how psychoanalysis itself has undergone significant transformations through object relations, relational–intersubjective theories, existential–phenomenological approaches, and feminist, intercultural, liberationist, and decolonial critiques. Finally, we propose embodied, hermeneutical, developmental, and intercultural commitments for relational integration, further clarified through spiritual dwelling, seeking, and crucibles of transformation. These commitments orient practitioners toward more accountable forms of interdisciplinary formation, witness, healing, justice, and liberation with the suffering Other. Full article

Marriage remains a central social institution among the Vatsonga, functioning not merely as a union between individuals but as a cultural institution through which gender identities, kinship relations, ritual obligations, and communal belonging are constructed and transmitted across generations. While scholarship has extensively explored marriage and gender in African societies, limited attention has been paid to the genealogical processes through which Vatsonga marriage rituals have historically shaped gender identities within changing social, political, and religious contexts. This article examines marriage as a site of gender construction by analysing the relationship between ritual practices, identity formation, and social belonging among the Vatsonga of Southern Africa. Using the genealogical approach of Michel Foucault and the theories of African feminists and decolonials, this study employs interpretive qualitative methodology, which entails the analysis of interdisciplinary literature in African philosophy, anthropology, gender studies, theology, and ritual studies. As a result of this analysis, it becomes evident that marriage rituals continue to play a great role in constructing masculinity and femininity, as well as kinship and community. At the same time, however, these rituals are dynamic and have undergone changes in light of colonialism, Christianity, urbanization, migrations, constitutional democracy, and modern concerns regarding gender equality. This article does not present marriage rituals of Vatsonga as static and monolithic practices, but rather shows their historical contingency, cultural dynamism, and continuous negotiation amid social change. Therefore, this study calls for critical engagement with marriage rituals in order to protect culture as well as to ensure gender equality and the dignity of all parties involved. With regard to the application of genealogy to marriage practices of Vatsonga, this article brings new perspectives to current debates on ritual, gender construction, African epistemologies and the decolonisation of marriage studies. Full article

Nuclear contamination challenges assumptions that harm can be contained through technological control, political borders, or bodily separation. Across the Asia-Pacific, radioactive exposure moves unevenly through racialised, gendered, and colonial histories, rendering some bodies more vulnerable to ecological violence than others. Nuclear regimes continue to depend upon theological logics of purity, sacrificial exclusion, and protected innocence. This article develops a spirituality of fermentation through Asian eco-feminist theology and the Korean practice of sakhim. Fermentation becomes a practice of sustaining wounded life through endurance, permeability, and communal care. From this spirituality of fermentation, I develop the concept of Vital Fluidity as an ethical and theological framework for understanding how life continues through shared vulnerability, where bodies, nourishment, and histories remain deeply entangled. The article contributes to intersectional debates in theology, religion, gender, and ecology by approaching contamination through relation rather than separation. Under nuclear conditions, ethical responsibility emerges through practices that hold grief, contamination, memory, and nourishment together within shared existence. Fermentation therefore becomes a practical theological model for living with nuclear bodies. Full article

The Abortion & Religion study has collected over 200 personal narratives of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women having abortions in the United States in the midst of an increasingly hostile and stigmatizing sociopolitical climate. Rooted in feminist theoretical claims about the epistemological value of situated knowledge, the Abortion & Religion study seeks to center the voices and experiences of people having abortions as a corrective to dominant negative attitudes about abortion in US cultural spaces. In this paper, three of the principal investigators engage in a methodological analysis of the study design using Tone Stangland Kaufman’s five categories of reflexivity to demonstrate how our epistemic insight as researchers who have also had abortions is a critical aspect of the epistemological insight that is foundational to the Abortion & Religion study. Since one of the goals of the study is to address the fictive “abortion imaginary” that shapes how people in the US think and talk about abortion, this methodological discussion of the study’s design demonstrates the epistemological value of centering the experiences of people who have had abortions as a corrective to the abstract, disembodied knowledge that shapes the epistemic injustice of the abortion imaginary. Full article

This article investigates how women’s relative absence from medieval textual archives can be reconsidered through the study of visual and material culture. Focusing on Mongol and Yuan China and read in relation to The Travels of Marco Polo, it argues that women’s artistic production functioned as a form of embedded counter-archive that preserves traces of participation obscured in narrative sources. Drawing on Black feminist epistemology as a heuristic framework and employing critical fabulation and poetic inquiry as analytical methods, the study interprets silence as a meaningful historical trace rather than a void, and considers silence not as absence but as a structured condition of archival production. Four case studies—Guan Daosheng’s literati bamboo painting, the handscroll tradition associated with Lady Su Hui, imperial phoenix embroidery, and Silk Road textile fragments—demonstrate distinct modes through which women’s presence becomes materially legible: mediated visibility, formal containment, infrastructural anonymity, and circulatory displacement. These “quiet arts” reveal how women’s labour and creativity persisted within and alongside patriarchal inscriptional systems even when textual attribution receded. In dialogue with the shadow silhouettes of contemporary artist Kara Walker, the article further situates these premodern archives within a broader visual language of absence and recovery. Rather than reconstructing lost biographies, it proposes a transdisciplinary method—integrating art history, feminist theory, theology, and poetic inquiry—for reading material culture as a site where historical silence becomes structurally legible. It proposes a transdisciplinary approach that expands art historical methods for interpreting gender, authorship, and archival silence in medieval visual culture. Full article

In this article, I argue that a significant stream of Asian and Asian American Protestant theology is best understood not only as recurring themes (e.g., suffering, marginality, race, diaspora) but also as the methods through which lived experience is translated into theological reasoning. It proposes a methodological typology that differentiates operative logics across five experiential sites: woundedness and healing; coerced in-betweenness and liminal creativity; political struggle and praxis; racialized peoplehood and communion; and postcolonial/feminist diasporic imagination. Across these types, “Protestant” functions as an analytic theological grammar—Scripture-centered hermeneutics, the grace-justice dialectic, reform and public witness, and eschatological hope expressed as praxis—rather than a mere denominational label. By specifying experiential sites, theological problems, operative methods, and normative aims, the typology clarifies internal differences among influential figures whose vocabularies often overlap and provides a framework for extending analysis to additional Asian and diasporic Protestant trajectories. Full article

Feminist and women religious scholars seek reconciliatory resources beyond the conservative/progressive binary that fuels conflicts, undermines communication and agency, and sustains oppressive structures. Drawing on feminist theology and religious anthropology, this qualitative study investigates how progressive clergywomen in South Korea exercise agency to move beyond this binary. It argues that their agency integrates resistance with measured accommodations of conservative elements, reflecting reconciliatory self-reconfigurations shaped by Korean historical and theological shifts across democratization, an intertwined conservative—progressive landscape, and personal influences, especially family. Central to this shift are (1) anthropological and theological reorientations that emphasize human vulnerability, resilient Christian faith/identity, and a shared foundation of Christian life transcending dichotomies—faith/activism, personal/social salvation, and oppressed minjung/oppressor—and (2) a rediscovery of conservative elements, including biblical centrality and everyday sharing. These reorientations find practical expression in contextual sensitivity, embodied faith, and a gradualist approach. Building on earlier scholarship—especially in Korea—that highlights conservative laywomen’s agency, this study analyzes rare cases of progressive clergywomen pursuing change amid tensions with conservative congregations, identifying feasible and sustainable pastoral resources. Their resistance to binary anthropology and their reconciliation of faith and social engagement contribute to renewing Minjung theology. The study further enriches religious anthropology by illuminating the organic interplay between personal and public motivations. Full article

Patriarchy has long structured Christian life and practice. In many Baptist settings, even formal affirmations of women in leadership leave a gap between stated commitments and women’s lived experience. This study investigates how Baptist congregations cultivate empowering environments for women by tracing the interplay of beliefs, practices, and processes through which theology is enacted in congregational life. Drawing on feminist theology and lived-religion perspectives, and using constructivist grounded theory, we conducted nine semi-structured interviews with 15 women clergy across seven U.S. Baptist congregations. Analysis proceeded through iterative initial, focused, and theoretical coding with attention to reflexivity and trustworthiness. Findings highlight four interlocking dynamics: structural shifts in leadership and policy that institutionalize gender equity; cultural and theological intentionality in worship and congregational routines; relational practices of support and education; and the persistence of microaggressions and benevolent sexism that complicate progress. Synthesizing these themes, we adapt Cornwall’s cyclical account of empowerment and Carr’s feminist praxis into a Spiral of Congregational Empowerment for Women comprising six phases (see Discussion). This study contributes to feminist theology, congregational studies, and the sociology of religion and offers practical implications for congregations and ministerial formation to align worship, policy, culture and accountability for sustained gender equity. Full article

Film, as a medium, serves not only as a significant source of entertainment but also as a powerful instrument in shaping attitudes, beliefs, behaviours, social norms, and identities. Since its inception, cinematic art has been closely intertwined with religious themes, with many film narratives drawing implicitly or explicitly from biblical texts and religious traditions. Consequently, theologians and ecclesiastical authorities were quick to identify film as a potential locus theologicus. Given film’s ability to spark debates on deeply ingrained views and beliefs, feminist theology, which critically reflects on gender power relations within religious communities and theological texts, finds it intriguing to explore how cinematic narratives can challenge the millennia-old depiction of God as a man. This article aims to examine how the art of cinema contributes to theological reflections on the female metaphors of God, particularly through female Christ-figures and God-figures, which occasionally appear in films such as Chocolat, All That Jazz, Always, Dogma, and The Shack. These characters defy traditional religious language, which often employs masculine imagery and metaphors for God, portraying female God as an independent chocolatier, a single mother, an elegant hairdresser, a beautiful young seductress, a curvaceous African American bread maker, and a witty, clownish girl. In these cinematic depictions, female God is compassionate, empathetic, kind, witty, forgiving, and profoundly in love with her human creations. At the same time, all of these female characters are powerful, assertive, strong, and self-confident. Full article

In this article, the author provides a fresh reading of three women-centered narratives from the Gurucaritra, a sixteenth-century Marathi devotional text. Based on the analysis of three distinct narratives from the Gurucaritra, the author examines the narratives through two key lenses: women’s subjectivity and the “hermeneutics of intersubjectivity”. I argue that although women’s voices are absent or marginalized in religious narratives, we can retrieve and amplify their contributions by reinterpreting traditional narratives to emphasize the roles of female characters. In the process, we can situate these narratives within their social contexts, thereby shedding light on women’s nuanced and multifaceted positions within the social and spiritual fabric of their societies. Full article

The Women’s March on 21 January 2017, opened a new social and political landscape for Muslim women to engage in Islamic liberatory activism. I locate Muslim women’s participation in the marches following the 2017 ‘Muslim travel ban policy’ as a site for discovering the link between the politics of resistance and the utility of Islam as a source for liberation. I argue that Muslim women living in minority and post-secular contexts resort to faith as a source of agentival liberation to address the political rhetoric of anti-Islamic sentiments and policies. The outcome of this research demonstrates (1) how Muslim women activists challenge the Western narratives of being oppressed and explore the ways they want to represent themselves; (2) how Islam serves as a catalyst for theological resistance and how this enhances the role of Muslim women as moral and spiritual agents in transforming their political and social conditions; (3) how the Islamic liberation in the US context historically intersects with Black churches’ resistance toward White racism; and (4) how Muslim women’s agency as spiritual beings is linked to the promotion of justice in the Western liberatory movements. Overall, the article shows how Muslim women resort to their spiritual journey and use such narratives to confront unjust political rhetoric and policies. Full article

This article seeks to rethink martyrdom, suffering, and resurrection from the perspective of queer theologies within the Latin American context and in dialogue with the praxis of the first faith communities who witnessed Jesus’ martyrdom. Starting from the queer body of Jesus—which incorporates in its praxis an ethos without gender violence and discrimination—the theological reflection contributes to the recovery of the fundamental principles of human experience. To this end, the analysis begins by addressing the feminist contribution to the understanding of violence against women to then rethink the intersection of bodies, sexuality, and violence against queer individuals and communities as a theological locus. It concludes by recognizing that queer theologies configure a resistant theological community that empowers queer bodies as a territory of hope of resurrection and transformative political action that does not disregard the suffering and the injustices perpetrated against them. Full article

In recent theological scholarship, there has been a wave of interest in the tradition of spiritual sense and marginal social identities within analytic and philosophical theology. In this article, I explore the theologies of spiritual sense in analytic theology (AT) to highlight part of the reason for the predominance of cisgender heterosexual voices in the field. Many feminist voices in AT express a common concern for a lack of integration between the mind, the body, and spiritual sense, which has enshrined the post-enlightenment cisgender heterosexual ‘man of reason’. Through an exploration of these feminist voices (Sarah Coakley and Michelle Panchuk), I argue that the field does not simply need more diverse voices but also voices of spiritual sense that undo a straight cisgender elitism. This elitism has kept the field from widely examining the anthropological questions of sexuality and gender, ethics, and theodicean dilemmas of desire and faith. By opening analytic philosophical approaches to spiritual sense, the field releases noetic control that has two consequential outcomes. Firstly, the field revalorizes pneumatology and ethics. Secondly, as a consequence of this, the field can see those who were previously unseen and heard, and, therefore, AT can develop into a sensing and thinking discipline capable of perceiving the queer or other in its midst. Spiritual sense and its priority for bodily and cruciform realities of suffering and desire can move the field from homogeneity to embracing the diverse ethical concerns of sexuality, gender, and race, and subaltern or queer subjectivities which are yet to be represented well in its midst. Using a distinctly neo-Augustinian approach, I argue that Augustine’s philosophy of the amor dei, with its emphasis on analytic clarity and inner spiritual sense, can redeem the eyes of AT’s heart. Full article

While Rosemary Radford Ruether is widely, and rightly, acknowledged as a prophetic Catholic scholar–activist, her interest in and experience of mysticism is rarely emphasized. However, Ruether had an impactful mystical experience as a young woman, and the themes of this experience echo throughout her body of work. This paper paints a portrait of Ruether as both a profoundly prophetic scholar–activist and a spiritually attuned seeker of the very divinity that she encountered in her twenties. In the process, this paper first offers a democratized and demystified vision of mysticism by drawing on the work of Bernard McGinn, Dorothee Söelle, and Jess Byron Hollenback. Next, it offers a biographical sketch of Ruether, contextualizing her early mystical experience within the broader pattern of her spiritual and intellectual path. It interprets Ruether’s mystical experience, through which she encountered the divine as a feminine presence suffusing creation, as a meaningful source of inspiration for her decades-long commitment to an anti-patriarchal, ecofeminist theology. Full article

This article discusses an inherent paradox in contemporary conceptualisations of community as a challenge to diaconia. Logics of protection separate insiders from outsiders, producing a fundamental antagonism between those who belong to the community and those who threaten it. During pandemics, this logic is exacerbated. When contagion threatens all, even the community needs to be protected from itself. Immunitarian defences are required for the safety of all community members. However, measures implemented to ensure immunity can also harm people’s mental and somatic health. This paradox presents ethical and practical challenges for inclusive justice, including diaconia. Concerning this dilemma, the article draws on Roberto Esposito’s reframing of community and immunitarian defence. Esposito argues that immunitarian mechanisms must promote tolerance of otherness through openness to its presence within. I suggest that this openness can be seen as a fundamental ontological vulnerability shared by all living creatures. Learning from recent contributions within vulnerability studies and feminist and trauma theologies, I employ Tony Addy’s concept of conviviality as a model for diaconal community building, seeking to elucidate the relevance of Esposito’s thinking to postpandemic diaconal practice. Full article