Download or read book The Revolt of the Widows written by Stevan L. Davies and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No child of this century, women’s liberation existed as a Christian movement in the 2nd century. In this first study of the social context that produced the Apocryphal Acts, Stevan L. Davies contends that women wrote the Acts and that the “Acts appear to have been a striving by Christian women for both a mode of self-expression and a way to preach rebellion for the sake of sexual continence.” These early rebels—called widows because they left their husbands for the church—refused absolute subservience to the male hierarchy of the church. The three parts of Davies’s study include an investigation of the magical world view of late 2nd-century Christendom; a close look at the people the Acts describe as new Christian converts; and a summary and analysis of the nature of the authors of the Acts. These women, like their sisters today, were seeking equal standing with men in the Christian church.
Download or read book The Revolt of the Widows written by Stevan L. Davies and published by . This book was released on 2012-06 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles were among the most popular extracanonical writings of the second century. The Acts of John, Peter, Paul, Andrew, Thomas and Xanthippe tell stories of the legendary wanderings, preaching and miracles of the apostles. Besides talking beasts, extravagant healings and moral discourses, the Apocryphal Acts reserve an important place for stories about women. Each of the Acts describes a woman who converts to Christianity, leaves her husband for the sake of the church and then lives in sexual abstinence. Davies argues that such women were known as "'Widows', a group which could at times include both wid-ows and virgins; widows were sexually continent, often dependent upon the church for financial support, often of advanced age, expected to pray constantly, and resolved to remain faithful to Christ. Such a group of women would have had a collective identity, even a semi-clerical status." He shows that these texts featured sexually continent Christian women in their narratives and they they are likely to have been authored by Christian women. By analyzing the social world behind the apocryphal Acts, Davies reveals the way in which Christian women in early centuries sometimes sought to have equal standing with men by rejecting their traditional roles as wives and mothers. In addition to surveying the roles of women in ancient Christianity.Revolt of the Widows emphasizes the magical world view that dominated in ancient times both among Christians and pagans, In an extensive new afterword Davies tackles the canonical Acts of the Apostles and provides convincing evidence that the author-traditionally identified as Luke-was a woman, a "mother of the church." "opens up whole new vistas on the self-understanding of women in the early church." - Carolyn Osiek, Catholic Biblical Quarterly "provocative . . . deserves to be taken seriously as another attempt, in turn, to take seriously those voices which have been muted by an aristocratic scholarly establishment for these many centuries." - Devon Wiens, Journal of Biblical Literature "Davies perceptively notes how the apocryphal Acts represent males as ethically dangerous, liable to temptation, and confused about their faith-the very tendencies most patristic writers ascribed to women." Elizabeth Clark, Church History
Download or read book Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses written by Todd C. Penner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays on early Christian, Jewish and Greco-Roman religious discourses in antiquity, focusing on the construction of gender in relationship to broader cultural and religious themes, argumentation and identity formation in the early centuries of the common era.
Download or read book The Revolt of Sundaramma written by Maude (Johnson) Elmore and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity written by Dr. Katherine A. Shaner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enslaved persons were ubiquitous in the first- and second-century CE Roman Empire, and early Christian texts reflect this fact. Yet the implications of enslaved presence in religious practices are under-examined in early Christian and Roman history. Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity argues that enslaved persons' roles in civic and religious activities were contested in many religious groups throughout ancient cities, including communities connected with Paul's legacy. This power struggle emerges as the book examines urban spaces, inscriptions, images, and literature from ancient Ephesos and its environs. Enslaved Leadership breaks new ground in analyzing archaeology and texts-asking how each attempts to persuade viewers, readers, and inhabitants of the city. Thus this book paints a complex picture of enslaved life in Asia Minor, a picture that illustrates how enslaved persons enacted roles of religious and civic significance that potentially upended social hierarchies privileging wealthy, slave-holding men. Enslaved persons were religious specialists, priests, and leaders in cultic groups, including early Christian groups. Yet even as the enslaved engaged in such authoritative roles, Roman slavery was not a benign institution nor were all early Christians kinder and more egalitarian to slaves. Both early Christian texts (such as Philemon,1 Timothy, Ignatius' letters) and the archaeological finds from Asia Minor defend, construct, and clarify the hierarchies that kept enslaved persons under the control of their masters. Enslaved Leadership illustrates a historical world in which control of slaves must continually be asserted. Yet this assertion of control raises a question: Why does enslaved subordination need to be so frequently re-established, particularly through violence, the threat of social death, and assertions of subordination?
Download or read book Jewish and Christian Scriptures written by James H. Charlesworth and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-07-29 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion written by Margaret Y. MacDonald and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-10-03 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of how women figured in public reaction to the church from New Testament times to Christianity's encounter with the pagan critics of the second century CE. The reference to a hysterical woman was made by the most prolific critic of Christianity, Celsus. He was referring to a follower of Jesus - probably Mary Magdalene - who was at the centre of efforts to create and promote belief in the resurrection. MacDonald draws attention to the conviction, emerging from the works of several pagan authors, that female initiative was central to Christianity's development; she sets out to explore the relationship between this and the common Greco-Roman belief that women were inclined towards excesses in religion. The findings of cultural anthropologists of Mediterranean societies are examined in an effort to probe the societal values that shaped public opinion and early church teaching. Concerns expressed in New Testament and early Christian texts about the respectability of women, and even generally about their behaviour, are seen in a new light when one appreciates that outsiders focused on early church women and understood their activities as a reflection of the group as a whole.
Download or read book The Widow Traditions in Luke Acts written by Robert M. Price and published by Society of Biblical Literature. This book was released on 1997 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Of Widows and Meals written by Reta Halteman Finger and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though "community" has become a common byword in the contemporary Western church, the practice of communal sharing has effectively fallen by the wayside. Unfortunately, it is often the poor who are left wanting because we no longer come together. Reta Halteman Finger finds a solution to this modern problem by learning from the ancient Mediterranean Christian culture of community. In the earliest Jerusalem church, in holding the responsibility for preparing and serving communal meals, women were given a place of honor. With the table fellowship and goods sharing of the early church, Luke says, there were no needy persons among them (Acts 4: 34). Finger thoroughly examines this agape-meal tradition, challenging traditional interpretations of the community of goods in the Jerusalem church and proving that the communal sharing lasted for hundreds of years longer than previously assumed. "Of Widows and Meals" begins a discussion of need in community that can revolutionize the contemporary church's interaction with the world at large.
Download or read book William and Louisa Anderson written by William Anderson and published by . This book was released on 1897 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Luke Widows Judges and Stereotypes written by Febbie C. Dickerson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biblical narratives are not simply sacred stories for religious communities: They are stories that provide transformative insight into cultural biases. By putting historical criticism and reception history into dialogue with womanist biblical hermeneutics, Luke, Widows, Judges, and Stereotypes offers a provocative reading of Jesus’ parable about a widow who confronts a judge and obtains what she seeks by means of physical threat. Rather than simply reading the widow as the model for “one who prays always and does not lose heart” (Luke 18:1), Dickerson shows that read in the context of Luke’s wider narrative, the widow, domesticated and robbed both of her agency and moral ambiguity, is more likely demanding vengeance instead of justice. Likewise, rather than simply reading the judge as one "who neither feared God nor had respect for people" (Luke 18:2), Dickerson argues that the judge is both an ideal man and one who compromises standards of ancient masculinity. Then, reading both the widow and judge through African American stereotypes (Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, Cool Black Male, Master-Pastor, and Foolish Judge) that are used to degrade, debase, and control, and reading them into and in light of the parable, Dickerson demonstrates how the parable calls into question these stereotypes thereby producing new liberative readings.
Download or read book Widows Reminiscences written by Anonymous and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2024-04-22 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint of the original, first published in 1843.
Download or read book The Oldest Vocation written by Clarissa W. Atkinson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to an old story, a woman concealed her sex and ruled as pope for a few years in the ninth century. Pope Joan was not betrayed by a lover or discovered by an enemy; her downfall came when she went into labor during a papal procession through the streets of Rome. From the myth of Joan to the experiences of saints, nuns, and ordinary women, The Oldest Vocation brings to life both the richness and the troubling contradictions of Christian motherhood in medieval Europe. After tracing the roots of medieval ideologies of motherhood in early Christianity, Clarissa W. Atkinson reconstructs the physiological assumptions underlying medieval notions about women's bodies and reproduction; inherited from Greek science and popularized through the practice of midwifery, these assumptions helped shape common beliefs about what mothers were. She then describes the development of "spiritual motherhood" both as a concept emerging out of monastic ideologies in the early Middle Ages and as a reality in the lives of certain remarkable women. Atkinson explores the theological dimensions of medieval motherhood by discussing the cult of the Virgin Mary in twelfth-century art, story, and religious expression. She also offers a fascinating new perspective on the women saints of the later Middle Ages, many of whom were mothers; their lives and cults forged new relationships between maternity and holiness. The Oldest Vocation concludes where most histories of motherhood begin—in early modern Europe, when the family was institutionalized as a center of religious and social organization. Anyone interested in the status of motherhood, or in women's history, the cultural history of the Middle Ages, or the history of religion will want to read this book.
Download or read book Prayers of Jewish Women written by Markus H. McDowell and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2006 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Markus McDowell examines how the literature of the Second Temple period portrays women at prayer through an examination of the literary context and character of those prayers. The goal of this work is a greater understanding of how women were portrayed in literary sources and an offering of some fresh insights for the study of women's religious and social roles in the ancient world. The texts are analyzed and categorized within five areas: social location, content, form, occasion, and gender perspective. The prayers are also compared and contrasted with men's prayers in the same sources. The analysis includes locating (as much as possible) the historical, literary, and cultic context of each document in which these prayers appear. By examining all prayers in these texts uttered by women (not just prayers of named or prominent women), and then comparing them with all the prayers of men in those same texts, certain patterns appear. This study adds to our knowledge of women and religion in Second Temple Judaism by primarily exploring patterns that appear among the prayers in the literature of the Second Temple period. While there are fewer prayers by women than men in this literature, the prayers of women are not portrayed as significantly different from those of men in terms of social location, content, form, or occasion. At the same time, the prayers of women exhibit other patterns of language - and in a minor way, form and occasion - that differ from the prayers of men.
Download or read book Christianity and Society written by Everett Ferguson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1999 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Women Deacons Essays with Answers written by Phyllis Zagano and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of restoring women to the ordained diaconate surfaced during the Second Vatican Council and continued to resound in academic and pastoral circles well after the diaconate was restored as a permanent order in the church in the West. This volume contains twelve essays—five translated from Italian, three translated from French, and four in their original English—that answer the questions about the history and possible future of women deacons. Essays by: Yves Congar, OP Philippe Delhaye Peter Hünermann Valerie A. Karras Corrado Marucci, SJ Pietro Sorci, OFM Jennifer H. Stiefel Cipriano Vagaggini, OSB Cam Phyllis Zagano Ugo Zanetti, OSB
Download or read book Ancient Christian Apocrypha written by Outi Lehtipuu and published by SBL Press. This book was released on 2022-08-05 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This latest volume in the Bible and Women series examines ancient noncanonical Christian texts for what they reveal about women, their engagement with Scripture, and attitudes toward them in texts dating to the second to eighth century. Three sections include once-forgotten texts rediscovered in locations such as Nag Hammadi, those that have been in continuous use through the centuries, and works written by women that are traditionally excluded from discussions of noncanonical texts. Contributors Bernadette J. Brooten, María José Cabezas Cabello, Anna Carfora, Ute E. Eisen, Judith Hartenstein, Ursula Ulrike Kaiser, Karen L. King, Outi Lehtipuu, Heidrun Mader, Antti Marjanen, Silvia Pellegrini, Silke Petersen, Uwe-Karsten Plisch, Cristina Simonelli, Anna Rebecca Solevåg, M. Dolores Martin Trutet, and Carmen Bernabé Ubieta examine a range of texts, including noncanonical gospels and acts, poems, prophecy, and grave inscriptions.
