Download or read book Unruly Catholic Nuns written by Jeana DelRosso and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2017-07-25 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unruly Catholic Nuns explores the voices of current and former Catholic nuns and, by doing so, contributes to the global conversation about the role of women in the Catholic Church today. Through autobiography, fiction, poetry, and prose, Sisters and former nuns write about their lived experiences with Catholicism, both in accordance and in conflict with the institutional Church. Through their stories we learn how these women act out their missions of social justice, challenge cultural and governmental policies, and attempt to reconcile their unruliness with their religious orders and the strictures of the church hierarchy. At a time when questions of gender, religion, race, and sexuality are provoking intense debate within Catholicism and other Christian traditions, and when religion is frequently invoked in political rhetoric, these stories provide a vital corrective to our contemporary understanding of the role of women and nuns in the Roman Catholic Church.
Download or read book Unruly Catholic Feminists written by Jeana DelRosso and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of creative pieces, Unruly Catholic Feminists explores how women are coming to terms with their feminism and Catholicism in the twenty-first century. Through short stories, poems, and personal essays, third- and fourth-wave feminists write about the issues, reforms, and potential for progress. Giving voice to many younger writers, the book includes a variety of geographic and ethnic points of view from which women write about their experiences with Catholicism and their visions for the future. While change in the church may be slow to come, even the promise of progress may provide hope for women struggling with the conflicts between their religion and their sense of their own spirituality. Rather than always only oppressing or containing women, Catholicism also drives or inspires many to challenge literary, social, political, or religious hierarchies. By examining how women attempt to reconcile their unruliness with their Catholic backgrounds or conversions and their future hopes and dreams, Unruly Catholic Feminists offers new perspectives on gender and religion today—and for the days yet to come.
Download or read book Unruly Catholic Women Writers written by Jeana DelRosso and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary anthology exploring contemporary Catholic womens experiences. This unique literary anthology is devoted to unruly Catholic women. In short stories, poems, personal essays, and drama, the contributors describe womens struggles with Catholicism and also complicate contemporary understandings of womens relationships to their faith. Catholicism often oppresses the women in these creative pieces, but it also inspires them to challenge literary, social, political, and religious hierarchies. The collection reflects the considerations of a wide range of women from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, geographic locations, and generations; they encompass the gamut of reactions to the Catholic experiencehumor, anger, nostalgia, critique, appreciation, and engagement or rejection on ones own terms. Authors address real life versus Catholic dogma, motherhood, childhood, alienation from the Church, Catholic school days, mentors and exemplary figures, Church strictures on womens sexualities, and leaving or remaining in the Church among many other experiences. Readers will find this a rich and multifaceted exploration, one that offers new perspectives and moments of recognition.
Download or read book Unruly Figures written by Navaneetha Mokkil and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The vibrant media landscape in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where kiosks overflow with magazines and colorful film posters line roadside walls, creates a sexually charged public sphere that has a long history of political protests. The 2014 “Kiss of Love” campaign garnered national attention, sparking controversy as images of activists kissing in public and dragged into police vans flooded the media. In Unruly Figures, Navaneetha Mokkil tracks the cultural practices through which sexual figures—particularly the sex worker and the lesbian—are produced in the public imagination. Her analysis includes representations of the prostitute figure in popular media, trajectories of queerness in Malayalam films, public discourse on lesbian sexuality, the autobiographical project of sex worker and activist Nalini Jameela, and the memorialization of murdered transgender activist Sweet Maria, showing how various marginalized figures stage their own fractured journeys of resistance in the post-1990s context of globalization. By bringing a substantial body of Malayalam-language literature and media texts on gender, sexuality, and social justice into conversation with current debates around sexuality studies and transnational feminism in Asian and Anglo-American academia, Mokkil reorients the debates on sexuality in India by considering the fraught trajectories of identity and rights.
Download or read book Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion written by Anna L. Peterson and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion explores the ways that Salvadoran Catholics sought to make sense of political violence in their country in the 1970s and 1980s by constructing a theological ethics that could both explain repression in religious terms and propose specific responses to violence. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the book highlights the ways that progressive Catholicism offered a justification and tools for political resistance in the face of extraordinary destruction. Using the case of Catholicism in El Salvador, the book explores the nature of religious responses to social crisis and the ways that ordinary believers construct and strive to live by ethical systems. By highlighting the importance of theological belief, of narrative, and of religious rationality in political mobilization, it touches questions of general interest to readers concerned with the social role of religion and ethics.
Download or read book Nuns Behaving Badly written by Craig A. Monson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witchcraft. Arson. Going AWOL. Some nuns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy strayed far from the paradigms of monastic life. Cloistered in convents, subjected to stifling hierarchy, repressed, and occasionally persecuted by their male superiors, these women circumvented authority in sometimes extraordinary ways. But tales of their transgressions have long been buried in the Vatican Secret Archive. That is, until now. In Nuns Behaving Badly, Craig A. Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the long-silent voices of these cloistered heroines. Here we meet nuns who dared speak out about physical assault and sexual impropriety (some real, some imagined). Others were only guilty of misjudgment or defacing valuable artwork that offended their sensibilities. But what unites the women and their stories is the challenges they faced: these were women trying to find their way within the Catholicism of their day and through the strict limits it imposed on them. Monson introduces us to women who were occasionally desperate to flee cloistered life, as when an entire community conspired to torch their convent and be set free. But more often, he shows us nuns just trying to live their lives. When they were crossed—by powerful priests who claimed to know what was best for them—bad behavior could escalate from mere troublemaking to open confrontation. In resurrecting these long-forgotten tales and trials, Monson also draws attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose “misbehavior”—seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for priestly wrongdoing in their own archdioceses—continues even today. The nuns of early modern Italy, Monson shows, set the standard for religious transgression in their own age—and beyond.
Download or read book R evolutionary Hope written by Kathleen Bonnette and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-08-14 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is for seekers—for those with restless hearts. It is especially for those who express their hope through the Catholic tradition but struggle with disillusionment and long for something more. (R)evolutionary Hope invites readers to journey toward that More. With theological reflection explored and interrogated through memoir, this work reimagines what it means to be Catholic, challenging readers to remain open to the grace that draws them from certainty to possibility, beyond what is to what could be. By infusing the theological tradition of St. Augustine with the spirituality emerging in contemporary women of the church, (R)evolutionary Hope invites readers to shift their paradigm from one of hierarchy to one of interconnection, offering a theology of encounter that is rooted in tradition, responsive to present realities, and ever open to the future.
Download or read book All About Love Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion written by Lisa Appignanesi and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-07-18 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate and illuminating look at how love shapes our culture and our lives. Unruly, unpredictable—love is a maddening deity. In this insightful and eloquent meditation on that many-splendored thing, Lisa Appignanesi draws together psychology, literature, popular culture, and her own experiences in order to tangle with love's paradoxes across the span of our lives. Beginning with the rose-tinted raptures of first love, she proceeds to love in marriage, triangulated love, jealousy and adultery, love in the family, and friendship. By illuminating the expectations, the joys and difficulties, and the cultural undercurrents that accompany each stage, Appignanesi raises provocative questions about love in the twenty-first century: Has the unbinding of obstacles to love emptied it of meaning? Do our desires for variety and experimentation result in increased anxiety? What gains and losses have come from greater openness and equality and the burgeoning sphere of virtual fantasy? As rewarding as it is captivating, All about Love will leave you a little wiser about the emotion that rules our lives.
Download or read book A Larger Hope Volume 1 written by Ilaria L. E. Ramelli and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the minds of some, universal salvation is a heretical idea that was imported into Christianity from pagan philosophies by Origen (c.185-253/4). Ilaria Ramelli argues that this picture is completely mistaken. She maintains that Christian theologians were the first people to proclaim that all will be saved and that their reasons for doing so were rooted in their faith in Christ. She demonstrates that, in fact, the idea of the final restoration of all creation (apokatastasis) was grounded upon the teachings of the Bible and the church's beliefs about Jesus' total triumph over sin, death, and evil through his incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. Ramelli traces the Christian roots of Origen's teaching on apokatastasis. She argues that he was drawing on texts from Scripture and from various Christians who preceded him, theologians such as Bardaisan, Irenaeus, and Clement. She outlines Origen's often-misunderstood theology in some detail and then follows the legacy of his Christian universalism through the centuries that followed. We are treated to explorations of Origenian universal salvation in a host of Christian disciples, including Athanasius, Didymus the Blind, the Cappadocian fathers, Evagrius, Maximus the Confessor, John Scotus Eriugena, and Julian of Norwich.
Download or read book Women Ritual and Power written by Elizabeth Ursic and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Christians do not know the Bible contains female images of God because they have never heard nor seen them in church. In Women, Ritual, and Power, Elizabeth Ursic gives the reader insight into four Christian communities that worship God with female imagery, both as a worship focus and a community identity. These Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Catholic congregations operate within their established church denominations and are led by either ordained Protestant ministers or vowed Catholic sisters. Because expressing God-as-She can expose strident claims for maintaining God-as-He, this book shows not only how patriarchy continues to operate in churches today, but also how it is being successfully challenged through liturgy.
Download or read book Embracing Disruptive Coherence written by Kathleen T. Talvacchia and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-04-18 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does anyone need to come out anymore? Queer theory has challenged the idea of coming out as problematic for its false binary and essentialized version of identity. If gender is a socially constructed performativity, then what does coming out mean? At the same time, we live in a society that still struggles with structures of power that define what is considered normal and sanctions those who transgress. The intersectionality of gender with race, class, ethnicity, nationality, abilities, religion, age and other positional markers challenge a simplified belief that coming out is not necessary. Therefore, in the lived experience of many persons coming out still matters. This book initiates a different theological conversation about coming out. It argues that rather than the declaration of an identity category, coming out can be understood as the erotic ethical practice of truth-telling. The formation of conscience and moral integrity embody the two pillars of this erotic practice. Coming out understood as "disruptive coherence" is the erotic ethical practice of truth-telling grounded in our deepest desires to be known authentically in community.
Download or read book From Situated Selves to the Self written by Hisako Omori and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many parts of the world, the Roman Catholic Church in the twenty-first century finds itself mired in scandal, and its future prospects appear fairly dim in the eyes of many social critics. In From Situated Selves to the Self, however, Hisako Omori finds a radically different situation, with jubilant Roman Catholics in an unexpected place: Tokyo, Japan. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, the author provides a culturally sensitive account of the transformative processes associated with becoming Catholic in Tokyo. Her ethnographically rich narrative reveals the ways in which Christianity as a cultural force can effect changes in one's personhood by juxtaposing two models of the self—one based on conventional Japanese social ideals and the other on Roman Catholic teachings. Omori takes readers to a living room ("ochanoma") in a parish, a Catholic bar in a nightclub area, Catholic charismatic meetings, and busy intersections in Tokyo. In so doing, she traces subtle yet emerging changes in women's agentive power that accompany the processes of deepening faith. From Situated Selves to the Self gives us a rare glimpse into Christianity as a cultural force in an East Asian context where Confucianism has historically been the dominant ethical framework.
Download or read book Regimes of Happiness written by Yuri Contreras-Vejar and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Regimes of Happiness' is a comparative and historical analysis of how human societies have articulated and enacted distinctive notions of human fulfillment, determining divergent moral, ethical and religious traditions, and incommensurate and conflicting understanding of the meaning of the ‘good life’. A two-part book, it provides a historical view of the way in which Western societies, the descendants of the Latin Roman Empire, created languages and institutions that established specifi c and occasionally antithetical conceptions of a fulfilled human life or ‘happiness’ in the first part. In the second part, it explores how non-Western societies and non-Christian religions have conceived and established their own ideals of human perfection. 'Regimes of Happiness' is a critical reflection on modern notions of happiness which are typically focused on individual feelings of pleasure.
Download or read book A Convent Tale written by P. Renee Baernstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Power often operates in strange and surprising ways. With A Convent Tale, Renee Baernstein uncovers some of the nuanced methods cloistered women devised to exert their agency. In the tradition of Simon Schama and Steven Ozment, Baernstein uses the compelling story of a single clan, the Sfondrati, to refashion our understanding of the early modern period. Showing the nuns as neither helpless victims nor valiant rebels, but reasonable beings maneuvering as best they could within limits set by class, gender and culture. Baernstein writes against the tendency to depict women as inactive pawns, and shows that even within the convent walls, nuns were empowered by ties with their (often earthly) families and actively involved in the politics of the period. Both a major contribution to scholarship on gender, family and religion in early modern Europe, and a colorful well-told tale of Renaissance intrigue, A Convent Tale is sure to attract a wide range of academic and general readers.
Download or read book Sisters written by John J. Fialka and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sisters is the first major history of the pivotal role played by nuns in the building of American society. Nuns were the first feminists, argues Fialka. They became the nation's first cadre of independent, professional women. Some nursed, some taught, and many created and managed new charitable organizations, including large hospitals and colleges. In the 1800s nuns moved west with the frontier, often starting the first hospitals and schools in immigrant communities. They provided aid and service in the Chicago fire, cared for orphans and prostitutes in the California Gold Rush and brought professional nursing skills to field hospitals run by both armies in the Civil War. Their work was often done in the face of intimidation from such groups as the Know Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1900s they built the nation's largest private school and hospital systems and brought the Catholic Church into the civil rights movement. As their numbers began to decline in the 1970s, many sisters were forced to take professional jobs as lawyers, probation workers, managers and hospital executives because their salaries were needed to support older nuns, many of whom lacked a pension system. Currently there are about 75,000 sisters in America, down from 204,000 in 1968. Their median age is sixty-nine. In Sisters, Fialka reveals the strength of the spiritual capital and the unprecedented reach of the caring institutions that religious women created in America.
Download or read book Stripping the Veil written by Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Protestant nuns and mixed-confessional convents are an unexpected anomaly in early modern Germany. According to sixteenth-century evangelical reformers' theological positions outlined in their publications and reform-minded rulers' institutional efforts, monastic life in Protestant regions should have ended by the mid-sixteenth century. Instead, many convent congregations exhibiting elements of traditional and evangelical practices in Protestant regions survived into the seventeenth century and beyond. How did these convents survive? What is a Protestant nun? How many convent congregations came to house nuns with diverse belief systems and devotional practices, and how did they live and worship together? These questions lead to surprising answers. Stripping the Veil explores the daily existence, ritual practices, and individual actions of nuns in surviving convents over time against the backdrop of changing political and confessional circumstances in Protestant regions. It also demonstrates how incremental shifts in practice and belief led to the emergence of a complex, often locally constructed, devotional life. This continued presence of nuns and the survival of convents in Protestant cities and territories of the German-speaking parts of the Holy Roman Empire is evidence of a more complex lived experience of religious reform, devotional practice, and confessional accommodation than traditional histories of early modern Christianity would indicate. The internal differences and the emerging confessional hybridity, blending, and fluidity also serve as a caution about designating a nun or groups of nuns as Lutheran, Catholic, or Reformed, or even more broadly as Protestant or Catholic during the sixteenth century.
Download or read book Sisters written by John Fialka and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-01-24 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identifying nuns as the first feminists and sweeping in its scope and insight, "Sisters" reveals the treasure of spiritual capital that religious women have invested in America. 25 photos.
