Search Results (38)

While active female Benedictine monasteries in the United States presently are in a state of decline, the needs of the Church and world indicate that the Benedictine charism is greatly needed today. This article explores some of the historical developments that have played a part in bringing active Benedictine women’s monasteries to where they are, from their immigrant foundations through societal shifts around and since the time of Vatican II. This article then provides a review of key magisterial documents relating to religious life issued since the Council. In the themes enumerated, it can be seen that the Church provides and asks of women religious an identity that is both meaningful and fully in accord with Benedictine tradition. A synthesis of U.S. Benedictine women’s experience and developments in theology is proposed, along with some possible ways forward that could put this synthesis into action. Full article

The climate crisis is now a defining challenge of the Anthropocene era, underscoring humanity’s profound impact on Earth’s ecosystems and the ethical responsibilities that accompany this influence. This paper explores how religious and philosophical frameworks can provide transformative approaches to the climate crisis, particularly through the lens of intergenerational ethics. Ecofeminism critiques humanity’s exploitative relationship with nature, advocating for an ethos of respect and intrinsic appreciation—a perspective that has evolved into fourth wave feminism, embracing digital activism and intersectionality. Similarly, Pope Francis’ ecotheology calls for a “conversion of heart” that redefines humanity’s relationship with the environment, urging us to view nature not as a mere resource for exploitation but as a fraternal partner deserving of care and respect. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s “hermeneutics of appreciation” further complements this perspective by demonstrating how language and dialogue shape our attitudes and behaviors toward nature. Moreover, contemporary ecofeminist voices have exemplified how historical insights are extended through modern, intergenerational climate justice initiatives. By integrating ecofeminism, Gadamerian hermeneutics, and Pope Francis’ ecotheology, this paper proposes a comprehensive framework for addressing the ethical, spiritual, and philosophical dimensions of the climate crisis. It emphasizes the need for a fraternal and inclusive relationship with nature, aligning with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 13 on climate action. This interdisciplinary approach contributes to the scholarly discourse on religion, spirituality, and sustainability, offering novel insights for meaningful ecological change in a rapidly evolving global context. Full article

In contemporary development, feminism is divided into two major trends, that of difference and that of equality. The former tends to rely more on ontology and religious symbolism, and the latter on sociology and political praxis. This paper aims to show that this antagonism has as its background the complementarity and unity between both approaches, which are based on religious symbolism. Religious symbolism has both an ontological value and a sociological value, which give both internal consistency and external form to society. Full article

As a patriarchal country with dominant religious and cultural values, it is not easy to accept feminism in Indonesia. However, the idea has been growing and gaining acceptance in Indonesia for the past couple of years, influenced by media and technology. Feminism is not only embraced by women but also by men, which may affect men’s sexual behaviour with their partners. Therefore, we conducted a cross-sectional study with an online data survey by distributing questionnaires involving 335 participants. Our pilot study reported the sexual behaviours of (heterosexual feminist) in Indonesia compared to (non-feminist) men. Despite some indifferent behaviour, feminist men tend to ensure the satisfaction of their female partners as a form of respect for their partners. Some sexual behaviours that were significantly different between heterosexual feminist and non-feminist men always began with foreplay duration of foreplay (average) asking for the position (p = 0.001), and asking if the partner was satisfied or not. This study implies that heterosexual feminist men exhibit tremendous respect toward women and can contribute to more equitable and fulfilling relationships, fostering mutual respect and more profound emotional connection. Full article

Feminist studies have increasingly highlighted the contributions of women from various backgrounds; however, a gap remains in the research on conservative religious women. This article presents findings on Casilda Iturrizar, a bourgeois and religiously conservative woman who significantly influenced 19th-century Bilbao. Three surveys with 442 participants and five communicative interviews with educators were conducted using a communicative methodology, which has pioneered the current criteria for social impact and cocreation in the Horizon Europe scientific program. The results revealed that most people in Bilbao were unaware of Casilda’s contributions, with feminists and institutions neglecting her achievements. The findings from the communicative interviews suggested that Casilda’s contributions have been overlooked, contradicting recent efforts in education to address the invisibility of notable women. Such findings potentially have social impact by opening feminism to all women, including those made invisible for having conservative religious thinking. Full article

Faced with the hegemony of racial superiority, the oppression of gender dominance, and the demands of religious homogeneity, Mexican American Gloria E. Anzaldúa proposes a New Mestiza Consciousness that seeks to achieve a multifaceted transcendence of La Frontera (Borderlands). Using Krsiteva’s semiotics and mythology-based feminism as a theoretical guide, this paper will analyze the cultural, gender, ethnic, and religious manifestations of New Mestiza Consciousness and the logic behind this consciousness in terms of women’s writing in the Chicana women’s literary community and the re-shaping of the maternal mythological archetype in indigenous culture. Full article

In the inquisitorial archive of Pedro Onofre Cortés, alias Moixina, we see fellow practitioner protesting his son’s marriage to Clara Sureda because she was an Old Christian. The poor match was blamed on the breast milk that was ingested as an infant, “andaba con cristianos porque había mamado leche de una mujer cristiana” (he went with Christians because of the milk drunk milk from a Christian woman) (Picazo y Muntaner). In early modern Spain, breastmilk was seen as responsible for transmitting virtues and vices, religious expressions of faith and moral traits. Following Galenic medical understanding equating milk with blood, it was women who were responsible for the transmission of purity, impurity (Alexandre-Bidon 175), for contamination and difference (Martínez 47). This brief citation reflects the hybrid environment and the dual practices that deeply informed the lives of the converso Jews. Moreover, the understanding of the hereditary nature of these traits, and the traditions of Judaism and Christianity, so often mixed in unique combinations are clearly demonstrated in the Inquisition trials of Cortés and his Chueta brethren. As regulation over the mother and the female body became increasingly important in controlling Iberian subjects and its empire, conversos complicate the feminization of impurity. This article explores how the conversos known as the Chuetas of Mallorca understood their religiosity and difference as seen through the lens of hybridity, breast milk and maternal care. Full article

Over the past decades, Iran has been witnessing the growth of a burgeoning feminist movement. With its origins deeply rooted in the early 20th century, the Iranian feminist movement, as such, is not a uniform body: it embodies various, opposing even, political ideologies under the umbrella of feminism, reflecting the divergent social locations of its protagonists. While the movement has been criticized for its centralist, middle-class and at times apolitical tendencies, academic scholarship has yet to offer intersectional analyses that problematize historically rooted and daily materialized relations of power within the movement, particularly in relation to axes such as ethnicity (and race), religion, gender identity, sexuality, and (dis)ability. In light of this gap, the present article aims towards documenting and theorizing the intersectionality of the challenges facing Iranian feminist activists belonging to various ethnic nations and religious beliefs. Drawing on ethnographic research, it argues that minority feminists find themselves between a rock and a hard place: the rock being masculinist politics within their minoritized communities, which prioritize ethno-nationalist demands over gendered ones; the hard place being a centralist liberal feminist movement that fails to reflect the intersectionality of their experiences as non-Persian non-Shia women, thereby reproducing hierarchies of power in relation to ethnicity, religion, and class. Full article

In his 2018 survey of twenty-first-century American Judaism entitled The New American Judaism: How Jews Practice their Judaism Today, Jack Wertheimer references a 2015 Pew Research study that presupposes the secular-religion binary as the analytical metric for its determination that both the American public and American Jews are becoming less religious. Nonetheless, Wertheimer’s use of this analytical frame prohibits him from making sense of many details of the twenty-first-century American Jewish life that he seeks to describe. Indeed, any survey of the contemporary American Jewish scene is remiss if it does not discuss the rise of orthodox Jewish feminism, current trends towards substantial denominational change, and/or the emergence of a “post-ethnic” Judaism. Even so, recent historical-ethnographic accounts have outpaced analytical challenges to the secular-religion binary. Contemporary historians and ethnographers find themselves forced to choose between an analytically deficient model and a default rejection of analytical tools altogether. Arguably, the roots of the current impasse are derived from the influence of what scholars refer to as the secularization thesis. Therefore, to overcome this impasse, ethnographers and historians of American Judaism need access to a more refined categorical lens. In this essay, I argue that they may find the analytical support they need by turning away from the secularization thesis and turning toward far more complex accounts of the relationship between Judaism and modernity provided by the canon of modern Jewish thought. Such a turn yields an analytical category we may refer to as the “new secularity” which, when applied to studies in Jewish life in America (and potentially elsewhere) sheds light on communal realities that the secular-religious account misses. Full article

The Gezi Park protests in Istanbul (Türkiye) gained worldwide attention in 2013. Both men and women took part in the protests, which were heavily cracked down on by the government. The present study examined 273 Turkish women’s attitudes and motivations for taking part in the protests. The results show that the following variables had a significant impact on protest participation: lifestyle threats posed by religious values/norms and by the government; feelings of marginalization as a woman; political dissatisfaction; gender discrimination; and affiliations with feminism. Regarding the impact of attitudes on women’s political participation and discrimination, this study provides insights into the state of research on gender discrimination and feministic identity. Full article

This article theorizes Islamic feminism as a form of ‘friendship with/in tradition’, drawing creatively on Sufism. It unpacks these feminist friendships as forms of ‘radical, critical fidelity’ which includes commitments and loyalties to tradition while simultaneously engaging critically with sexism, patriarchy, and homophobia. Core epistemological and ethical concerns are explored, including the nature of relationships to tradition; analytical methods for engaging with Muslim tradition from a gendered lens; religious authority and authoritarianism; and most significantly, engaging with emancipatory horizons of imagination that are attentive to the contemporary axes of power and privilege. The paper turns to rethinking approaches to hierarchy and possibilities for abuse, focusing on the shaykh–murīd and broader teacher–student relationships. It presents a nuanced approach to engaging with hierarchies as a serious analytical category that requires attention. Positing fluidity, transparency, and accountability as central to cultivating responsible hierarchical practices, the article suggests that friendship as a modality of relationships can contribute to such positive transformations. This article, emerging from a project on Muslim feminist ethics, presents creative theorizations of Islamic feminism as a liberatory project of human and divine friendships, inspired by Sufi ideas of walāya. Full article

This article analyzes the ways in which religious actors opposing the legalization of abortion adjusted their arguments and public actions to the Argentine democratic culture between 2018 and 2020. Data were collected through a qualitative research approach by conducting in-depth interviews with activists, studying public position statements in secondary sources, and analyzing pronouncements and interactions on social media platforms. Religious agents conceived of democracy as the rule of the majority that they intended to promote by means of secular arguments, demonstrations in public spaces, and the construction of electoral alternatives. Marginally, the categorization of feminism through conspiracy theories and the use of dilatory legal maneuvers ran counter to the logic of the expansion of rights. According to the empirical evidence gathered, the religious agents showed increasing adjustments to the language and criteria inherent to democratic life. Full article

In this article, I discuss the experience of two daimista female leaders located in The Netherlands and in Japan. The reason why their stories are here is because of the prominence of Santo Daime in these countries per world region (Europe and Asia), where the leadership of these women have great projection in the daimista transnational field. The data discussed here were collected through in-depth interviews by using the life history technique. The objective was to analyze how these women experience this religion outside its context of origin. Their religious background appeared as something very important to their lived religion, showing cultural elements with which Santo Daime ends up having to negotiate in the religious global flows. Also, it seems that the feminization of Santo Daime is not only about women’s entrance in this religion, more than that, it is about a feminized way to live and experience religion. Over all, there is a reflexive relationship between Santo Daime and these women because their lives are changed by this religion just as their agency contributes to changes in the core of it and its transnationalization process. Full article

Islamic feminism, as a discourse within feminism, aims to re-read the Qur’an from a modern egalitarian perspective, which is outside the traditional and patriarchal interpretation of Islam. Islamic feminists reclaim an ethical vision of the Qur’an by presenting a reinterpretation, especially regarding verses that deprive women from having equal rights in the family, as well as in society. However, while Islamic feminism presents a gender equal interpretation of the Qur’an and raises new discourses and debates on gender relations in an Islamic context, a critical insight of Islamic feminism can provide a new gender and religious consciousness that, in turn, develops further perspectives on gender equality in a religious context. This paper aims to provide a critique of Islamic feminism from a social psychological perspective of gender using the theory of Abdulkarim Soroush. His theory considers revelation as the prophet’s word resulting from his religious experience. Soroush defines revelation as an inspiration; in this way, revelation or Qur’an is not directly God’s word, but Muhammad’s word resulting from a divine experience. Accordingly, this paper deals with a social psychological perspective of the lived experience of the prophet as a man in a certain epoch of history, in which the lived experiences of women were not represented, and the revelation or the Qur’an is based on a male lived experience. It begins with an overview of Islamic feminists as well as the more general current of Islamic reformists and their efforts to view the revelation as the word of the prophet in order to avoid attributing the non-scientific content of the Qur’an to the direct word of God. This is followed by a critique of Islamic feminism based on Abdulkarim Soroush’s theory of the recognition of the revelation as the word of the prophet, as well as gender theories from the field of social psychology. Full article

This article explores how competing images of Jewish corporeality and gendered identity are emerging in Israel through classical ballet by religious girls and women. It traces the cultural, political, and religious implications of this in the context of masculine Zionist ideals of the valorization of the corporeal. Focusing on a group of pioneering Israeli women it traces how they have reshaped the study of ballet into a liberatory yet modest practice for Orthodox women across a range of Israeli religious communities. The revolutionary efforts that linked the founding of the state of Israel with a new body are viewed through a revised feminist perspective, one within the paradigm of a religious counterrevolution. Just as the laboring body of the secular folk dancer of the Yishuv has stood for socialism, egalitarianism, and muscular Judaism while relegating the religious body to the sidelines, it is possible now to read an image of the return of the religious, via the feminized body of classical ballet, as emblematic of the new Jewish woman of Orthodox communities. I argue that through the study of ballet a politics of piety is operating among Orthodox Jewish women making it a medium through which they are changing assumptions about agency, patriarchal norms, and nationalist politics. Full article