Gendering The Spirit: Women and Religion and the Post-Colonial Response

Rating:
Summary: Asian Feminine Perspectives on Theology
Review: Finally, formal discourse on asian, post-colonial AND feminine perspectives on spirituality and theology. Don't assume that this book is rebellious and dissenting just for the sake of it. There have been and are women's voices, issues and work in the mainstream of traditional religions but rarely and not enough have they been formally presented, acknowledged and inculcated into the higher echelons, dogma.

Worthy of reading and consideration for what the heirarchies of traditional religions should take into consideration if they are to stay current, evolve, and survive the needs of civilization whose needs are ever-changing and reaching.

Here is more info about the book that may help you:

With essays by Ahmed. Madhu Khanna, Hema Goonatilake, and Sr. Mary John Mananzan, OSB and Grace Odal.

Sections: Women and Religion:
Alternative Perspectives; The Hidden Woman and the Feminine; Perspectives on Violence.

Essay titles:
-The Last Frontier
-The Goddess---Woman Equation in Sakta Tantras
- Women in the Catholic Church
- Women Psychology and Religion
- The Forgotten Women of Anuradhapura: "Her Story" Replaced by "History"
- 'Mother' Victoria Vera Piedad as a Mutya Figure: A Study of an Archetypal Image of the Self
- Suprema Isabel Suarez
- Parallel Worlds of Madhbobi Ma, 'Nectar Mother': My Encounter with a Twentieth Century- Tantric Saint
- 'Real Men, Naked Women and the Politics of Paradise: The Archetype of Lal Ded
- Righteous Violence and Non-Violence: An Inseparable Dyad of Hindu Tradition
- Theological Reflection on Violence Against Women (A Catholic Perspective)
- Violence and the Feminine in Islam: A Case Study of the Zikris

from the back cover:
This book is about the devotional subcultures which women have always created. Its authors draw their evidence and inspiraiton from the Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and Christian traditions of Asia, in particular.

Here we find women as healers, goddesses, saints, gurus, nuns and heretics. One thing these remarkable women all share is their defiance of orthodoxy and fundamentalist interpretations oppressive of women. Instead they have created religious alternatives which appeal profoundly to huge numbers of women. Not that these altenatives, as the authors who have written this book show, are accepted by the mainly male religious establishment. Indeed women's rejection of patriarchal interpretations of religion and their creative revisioning of religion in their daily spiritual practice
can be very dangerous activity.

In addition to fascinating glimpses of little known aspects of the feminine within the great religions, this book is also a reflection of the newly emerging spirituality of women in Asia as they experience and respond to the political and social injustices they confront.

Ashis Nandy comments: "This remarkable collection of essays should disturb the world of frozen knowledge and its ideas of what constitute sane dissent and a proper ideology of resistance... This is unconventional scholarship at its most intriguing..."