Kathryn Mcphillips
Biographic Data
| ID | 76760 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kathryn Mcphillips |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kathryn |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcphillips |
| SIGNATURE | MCPHILLIPS K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Newcastle Australia |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8390-7924 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 147 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Politics of Vulnerability Concerning Sexual and Spiritual Abuse in the Catholic Church
This article addresses methodological approaches to the study of vulnerable cohorts with specific attention to definitions of the term vulnerability. In particular, it investigates the issue of adults, particularly women, who have experienced abuse in the Catholic Church. Relevant analysis in this area is primarily interdisciplinary-based research and includes sociological and psychological perspectives and theological and historical analysis. Th…
Creating and Sustaining an Ecofeminist Theological Hermeneutic in the Community of Pacific Women Scholars
Creating and Sustaining an Ecofeminist Theological Hermeneutic in the Community of Pacific Women ScholarsAn Interview with Elaine Wainwright Kathleen McPhillips (bio) and Elaine Wainwright Keywords ecofeminist theology, feminist biblical hermeneutics, social change, women and the Pacific Click for larger view View full resolution Kathleen McPhillips Click for larger view View full resolution Elaine Wainwright [End Page 111] Elaine Wainwright is a…
Does Gender Matter?
Sociological and historical research into sexual violence against children has reported consistently that it is girls who have most often been the subject of sexual, psychological and physical violence in both familial and institutional settings in modernity. However, more recently, public inquiries have provided evidence that during the 20th century, boys were much more likely to be abused in particular kinds of religious settings. This has been…
Does Gender Matter
Sociological and historical research into sexual violence against children has reported consistently that it is girls who have most often been the subject of sexual, psychological and physical violence in both familial and institutional settings in modernity. However, more recently, public inquiries have provided evidence that during the 20th century, boys were much more likely to be abused in particular kinds of religious settings. This has been…
The Sexual Economies of Clericalism
As the sexual abuse crisis continues to plague the Catholic Church across the world, the focus on men as both perpetrators of sexual violence, and victims of child sexual abuse has been at the forefront of media and academic analysis. However, evidence from public inquiries, criminal investigations, academic research and survivor testaments identifies women religious as both perpetrators of sexual and physical violence against children and victim…
Mobilising for Justice
This article investigates the field of social justice responses to institutional child sexual abuse in religious organisations and the contribution of activist-based groups to social change agendas. A sociological analysis reveals that organised survivor groups, lobby groups, the media and individual activists both shape and become a vital part of collective knowledge practices, making a critical contribution to the remediation of the traumatic i…
Introduction to Special Issue on Religion and Violence
.
Introduction to Special Issue on Religion and Violence
Tribute to Professor Gary Bouma, MDiv, MA, PhD, AM (1942–2021)
.
A Tribute to Gary Bouma
Emeritus Professor Gary Bouma was many things to many people. He was Australia’s pre-eminent scholar of the sociology of religion. As an ordained Anglican priest, Gary was noted for his pastoral care of his parishioners and others who sought his counsel and spiritual support. He was a loving husband, father and grandfather. Moreover, his deep commitment to social justice and harmony greatly influenced Gary’s participation in interfaith dialogue. …
Child Sexual Abuse
Religion after the Royal Commission
The findings and recommendations emanating from the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2012-2017) have advised religious organisations that they need to undertake significant changes to legal, governance and cultural/theological practices. The reason for urgency in enacting these changes is that religious organisations were the least child safe institutions across all Australian organisations, with poo…
Silence, Secrecy and Power
Religious groups represented over 60% of all institutions appearing before the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. This indicates that there are specific issues pertinent to the institutional cultures and structures of religious groups with regard to the sexual abuse of children. This warrants close investigation and analysis by scholars of religion. The article provides the background and context to th…
Religion at the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse
This special section of this issue of JASR explores a range of issues that pertain to the recent Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. In particular, and of major concern, religious organisations represented over 60 per cent of all institutions that were called to give evidence at the Royal Commission, which found that many of the organisational responses to disclosures of the abuse of children were inade…
Revisiting BISFT Summer School 2006, Harriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, ‘What’s God got to do with it? – Politics, Economics, Theology’
This article addresses research that deals with approaches to psychological and social trauma and ways to manage its disruptive power. In the first instance I apply this to the life of my great-grandmother in order to help understand why her life became unbearably difficult, the treatment she received as a female ‘hysteric’ in the 1940s and most importantly the impact that her life has continued to have through four generations of family life. In…
Knowing Otherwise
Patriarchal discourses in modernity have positioned intuition as a feminine process. This has resulted in a systemic devaluing of intuition through the privileging of its constituted masculine counterpart, objective rationality. A critical re-thinking aimed at recovering the social value and importance of intuition seeks to challenge this false binary relationship. In exploring intuition through its relational processes we redefine it as a social…
Re-framing Religious Identity and Belief
Gen X women grew up in the Catholic Church in the climate of culturaland theological change brought about by the Second Vatican Council.Given the Catholic Church’s attempt to move into the modern world, itmight be expected that such changes would result in an increase of participationby women in the Church. In fact, the opposite has happened andthe participation of Gen X Catholic women in Church life is at substantiallylow levels. This article re…
Soul Murder”
During its five-year tenure, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse established that faith organisations, with inadequate practices of organisational transparency and accountability, hierarchical structures of power, and patriarchal cultures, have poor track records in child protection and high levels of child abuse. Evidence from the Royal Commission hearings identified spiritual trauma as an outcome of child sex…
Contested Feminisms
Feminism is a relatively recent social movement of radical reform, emerging from the mass political movements of democratisation, secularisation and liberalism that swept across the western world from the 17th century onwards. The first wave of organised feminist political action was articulated in the abolitionist, temperance and suffrage movements in America and Europe in the mid 19th century and culminated in the Seneca Falls Convention of 184…
Women and Religious Authority
The Church, The Commission and the Truth
The NSW Special Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in the Newcastle-Maitland diocese, an area north of Sydney, Australia, held proceedings during 2013. The Special Inquiry investigated allegations made by police whistleblower Peter Fox that the Newcastle police and the Catholic Church colluded to keep criminal sexual activity against children by two Catholic priests from being properly investigated. This article reports on sections of the court hear…
Religion and Gender in the Post-secular State
This paper considers the relationship between women, religion and the Australian state via an examination of federal anti-discrimination law. Much of the social research into religion-state relations over the last ten years, particularly with the rise of neo-liberalism, demonstrates that religious groups and ideas are actively involved in public debate, policy formation and implementation. While this has been examined by some scholars in social p…
Introduction
What's the Problem with Religion?
The study of religion at tertiary and secondary levels of education in Australia has undergone significant challenge and change in the last 15 years. There has been some analysis of this phenomenon during this time, but also, lament and disappointment at the loss of religious studies as an academic discipline. In particular, the growth of religious studies as an examinable secondary subject has not articulated to increased numbers in religious st…
Shifting selves
This essay looks at contemporary art works produced by three young women who took part in a research project that was exploring the spiritual meanings of art in the lives of adolescents. Nineteen students were interviewed and we asked them to tell us about their art works which we then analysed in relation to a set of descriptors that we developed defining spiritual symbols and stories. We developed a central term—Connected Knowing—which seeks to…
Defining (Hetero)Sex
Subject to Romance
Safer sex campaigns directed at heterosexuals have increasingly targeted women to encourage them to take responsibility for condom use. It appears, however, that many women are unable or unwilling to accept this role. In this article we report on one particular kind of obstacle that some women face in initiating condom use. We draw on data from interviews with 14 women, aged 22 to 43 years, about their experiences with, and views of, condoms. The…
If It's Not On, It's Not On'-or Is It
Safer sex campaigns for heterosexuals have sometimes targeted women in particular to take responsibility for condom use. In this article, the authors question some of the assumptions underlying this strategy, for instance, the assumptions of women's relatively unproblematic relationship with condoms and women's control over condom use. The authors interviewed 14 women about their experiences and views of condoms and of heterosexual relationships …
The Sexual Economies of Clericalism
As the sexual abuse crisis continues to plague the Catholic Church across the world, the focus on men as both perpetrators of sexual violence, and victims of child sexual abuse has been at the forefront of media and academic analysis. However, evidence from public inquiries, criminal investigations, academic research and survivor testaments identifies women religious as both perpetrators of sexual and physical violence against children and victim…
Turning Public Issues Into Private Troubles
Residents living in the vicinity of lead smelters are subjected to particularly high levels of contamination from the toxic process of smelting. Yet, public health strategies currently promoted by state health authorities in Australia do not focus their major attention on stopping the contamination at its source. This article focuses on housecleaning regimes, largely implemented by women, aimed at stopping the toxic material from being ingested b…
Soul Murder”
During its five-year tenure, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse established that faith organisations, with inadequate practices of organisational transparency and accountability, hierarchical structures of power, and patriarchal cultures, have poor track records in child protection and high levels of child abuse. Evidence from the Royal Commission hearings identified spiritual trauma as an outcome of child sex…
The Politics of Vulnerability Concerning Sexual and Spiritual Abuse in the Catholic Church
This article addresses methodological approaches to the study of vulnerable cohorts with specific attention to definitions of the term vulnerability. In particular, it investigates the issue of adults, particularly women, who have experienced abuse in the Catholic Church. Relevant analysis in this area is primarily interdisciplinary-based research and includes sociological and psychological perspectives and theological and historical analysis. Th…
Religion after the Royal Commission
The findings and recommendations emanating from the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2012-2017) have advised religious organisations that they need to undertake significant changes to legal, governance and cultural/theological practices. The reason for urgency in enacting these changes is that religious organisations were the least child safe institutions across all Australian organisations, with poo…
Knowing Otherwise
Patriarchal discourses in modernity have positioned intuition as a feminine process. This has resulted in a systemic devaluing of intuition through the privileging of its constituted masculine counterpart, objective rationality. A critical re-thinking aimed at recovering the social value and importance of intuition seeks to challenge this false binary relationship. In exploring intuition through its relational processes we redefine it as a social…
Theme
1999). Theme: Feminisms, Religions, Cultures, Identities. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 14, No. 30, pp. 255-258
The European women's synod 1996
Rituals, Bodies and Thealogy
Interruptus Coitus
Intercourse remains the definitive heterosexual act, implied by terms such as `having sex', `making love', or even just `doing it'. However, the particular bodily mechanics of intercourse mean it carries considerably higher risks (of disease and unwanted conception for example) than other forms of sex. Because of this, we suggest a need to question the taken-for-grantedness of intercourse in heterosex. Drawing on data from interviews with 15 wome…
Subject to Romance
Safer sex campaigns directed at heterosexuals have increasingly targeted women to encourage them to take responsibility for condom use. It appears, however, that many women are unable or unwilling to accept this role. In this article we report on one particular kind of obstacle that some women face in initiating condom use. We draw on data from interviews with 14 women, aged 22 to 43 years, about their experiences with, and views of, condoms. The…
Modernity, Rationality and the Problem of Women's Religious Agency
Theme
1999). Theme: Feminisms, Religions, Cultures, Identities. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 14, No. 30, pp. 255-258
Defining (Hetero)Sex
If It's Not On, It's Not On'-or Is It
Safer sex campaigns for heterosexuals have sometimes targeted women in particular to take responsibility for condom use. In this article, the authors question some of the assumptions underlying this strategy, for instance, the assumptions of women's relatively unproblematic relationship with condoms and women's control over condom use. The authors interviewed 14 women about their experiences and views of condoms and of heterosexual relationships …
Turning Public Issues Into Private Troubles
Residents living in the vicinity of lead smelters are subjected to particularly high levels of contamination from the toxic process of smelting. Yet, public health strategies currently promoted by state health authorities in Australia do not focus their major attention on stopping the contamination at its source. This article focuses on housecleaning regimes, largely implemented by women, aimed at stopping the toxic material from being ingested b…
The `Fair Deal'? Unpacking Accounts of Reciprocity in Heterosex
Reciprocity is a basic premise of egalitarian relationships, and is typically depicted as a `good thing' within heterosexual sex and relationships. Here we examine a discourse of reciprocity - articulated as orgasm for both partners - evident in accounts of heterosex collected from 15 heterosexual women and 15 men. We argue that notions of reciprocity are not necessarily as liberatory as they might seem, as they do not occur in a social or sexual…
Feminist Narratives and the Sociology of Religion
Chapter 1 Introduction 2 Making the Sacred Safe: Woman Abuse and Communities of Faith 3 Queering the Dragonfest: Changing Sexualities in a Post-Patriarchal Religion 4 Women and Clergywomen 5 Studying Close to the Home: The Intersection of Life and Work 6 Hidden Truths and Cultures of Secrecy: Reflections on Gender and Ethnicity in the Study of Religion 7 Women Clergy Research and the Sociology of Religion 8 Women's Spirituality Research: Doing Fe…
Global Violence
In these early years of the new millennium the world finds itself in a new age of violence and terror. Acts of terrorism, the war in Iraq, and the ongoing post-colonial struggles have created a climate of unprecedented state legitimated and terrorist-based violence, where the emergence of new forms of national insecurity and vulnerability have impacted on every nation and distant corner of the plane. One looks at the world situation and despairs:…
Roundtable Discussion
Shifting selves
This essay looks at contemporary art works produced by three young women who took part in a research project that was exploring the spiritual meanings of art in the lives of adolescents. Nineteen students were interviewed and we asked them to tell us about their art works which we then analysed in relation to a set of descriptors that we developed defining spiritual symbols and stories. We developed a central term—Connected Knowing—which seeks to…
Gesturing Towards Speech
This is the story of a woman, now long dead and almost forgotten, but for a crumbling gravesite overlooking the ocean at Bronte in Sydney and some small acts of remembrance that functioned to restore her voice ever so partially. The hint of her voice allowed genealogical traces to emerge and help heal the wounds of not only the individual family genealogy to which this woman was almost lost but also for the monumental primordial forgetting of wom…
A Reflection on the “Teaching for Change” Conference and Its Challenges in My Workplace
A Reflection on the "Teaching for Change" Conference and Its Challenges in My Workplace Kathleen McPhillips (bio) My Situation Since 1995, I have worked as a Humanities scholar at the University of Western Sydney. I am trained as a sociologist, specifically a feminist sociologist of religion, but my research interests cover feminist theology, women and religion, and popular culture and religion. I have had a long involvement with feminism and rel…
Gathering Wo/men in the Postcolonial Pacific Region
Gathering Wo/men in the Postcolonial Pacific Region Kathleen McPhillips (bio) As I am writing this editorial in December 2006, thinking about how best to describe recent scholarship and local activism in the field of feminist studies in religion in the Pacific region, there has just been another military coup in Fiji, and island residents are preparing themselves for further violence and social chaos. The prime minister, installed six years ago b…
What's the Problem with Religion?
The study of religion at tertiary and secondary levels of education in Australia has undergone significant challenge and change in the last 15 years. There has been some analysis of this phenomenon during this time, but also, lament and disappointment at the loss of religious studies as an academic discipline. In particular, the growth of religious studies as an examinable secondary subject has not articulated to increased numbers in religious st…
Religion and Gender in the Post-secular State
This paper considers the relationship between women, religion and the Australian state via an examination of federal anti-discrimination law. Much of the social research into religion-state relations over the last ten years, particularly with the rise of neo-liberalism, demonstrates that religious groups and ideas are actively involved in public debate, policy formation and implementation. While this has been examined by some scholars in social p…
Introduction
Contested Feminisms
Feminism is a relatively recent social movement of radical reform, emerging from the mass political movements of democratisation, secularisation and liberalism that swept across the western world from the 17th century onwards. The first wave of organised feminist political action was articulated in the abolitionist, temperance and suffrage movements in America and Europe in the mid 19th century and culminated in the Seneca Falls Convention of 184…
Women and Religious Authority
The Church, The Commission and the Truth
The NSW Special Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in the Newcastle-Maitland diocese, an area north of Sydney, Australia, held proceedings during 2013. The Special Inquiry investigated allegations made by police whistleblower Peter Fox that the Newcastle police and the Catholic Church colluded to keep criminal sexual activity against children by two Catholic priests from being properly investigated. This article reports on sections of the court hear…
Re-framing Religious Identity and Belief
Gen X women grew up in the Catholic Church in the climate of culturaland theological change brought about by the Second Vatican Council.Given the Catholic Church’s attempt to move into the modern world, itmight be expected that such changes would result in an increase of participationby women in the Church. In fact, the opposite has happened andthe participation of Gen X Catholic women in Church life is at substantiallylow levels. This article re…
Soul Murder”
During its five-year tenure, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse established that faith organisations, with inadequate practices of organisational transparency and accountability, hierarchical structures of power, and patriarchal cultures, have poor track records in child protection and high levels of child abuse. Evidence from the Royal Commission hearings identified spiritual trauma as an outcome of child sex…
Sociology (37 works) · Political science (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Gender Studies (20 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Criminology (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (11 works) · Medicine (10 works) · Politics (10 works)