Controversies in Feminist Theology – By Marcella Althaus‐Reid and Lisa Isherwood

CONTROVERSIES IN FEMINIST THEOLOGY . By Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood . London : SCM Press , 2007 . Pp. vii +146 . $26.99 . In this text, which appears in SCM Press's Controversies in Contextual Theology Series, the authors insist that controversy demonstrates the inherently democratic nature of feminist theology and continually pushes it toward new ways of transgressing and transforming oppressive structures. Each chapter examines various feminist positions with regard to a particular methodological or doctrinal issue: gender and sexuality, feminist theological hermeneutics, the Virgin Mary, Christology, life after death, and the future of feminist theologies. While providing an overview of significant feminist theological positions, the authors emphasize approaches, like postcolonial and queer theologies, that more radically challenge the sexual, metaphysical, and capitalist assumptions of Western theology. Both authors have written extensively elsewhere on the need for Christian theology to take seriously transgressive sexualities, and this is the freshest insight that they bring to the discussions in this text (see especially the chapters on gender and sexuality and on Christology). It remains unclear, however, what audience is best served by this text. There is little new here for the reader who is well acquainted with feminist theologies, yet the discussions of various thinkers assume this acquaintance, and are too brief to serve well as introductory summaries. Moreover, the text would have embodied its argument more fully, and demonstrated the stated aims of the series more successfully, if the authors' voices were more distinct, thus performing the dialogically constructive nature of controversy

Christian theology · Christology · Constructive · Epistemology · Feminism · Feminist theology · Hermeneutics · Human sexuality · Sociology · Theology · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious Freedom and Discrimination