Creating Women's Theology: a Movement Engaging Process Thought

Synopsis: Creating Women's Theology engages women's questions: - Can women from different religious traditions engage one theological approach? - Can one philosophical approach support feminist religious thought? - What kind of belief follows women's criticism of traditional Christianity? Creating Women's Theology offers a portrait of how some women have found room for faith and feminism. For the last twenty-five years, women religion scholars have synthesized process philosophy with their feminist sensibilities and faith commitments to highlight the value of experience, the importance of freedom, and the interdependence of humanity, God, and all creation. Cutting across cultural and religious traditions, process relational feminist thought represents a theology that women have created. This volume offers an introduction to process and feminist theologies before presenting selections from canonical works in the field with study questions. This volume includes voices from Christianity, Judaism, goddess religion, the Black church, and indigenous religions. Creating Women's Theology invites new generations of undergraduate, seminary, and university graduate students to the methods and insights of process relational feminist theology. Endorsements: Fifty years ago Valerie Saivings noted the congeniality between the process critique of the philosophical and theological tradition and the insights of Christian women. This remarkable volume shows how the work of women process theologians and of feminists and womanists who found process categories useful together constitute a single richly textured movement. From the perspective of this male process theologian, this movement is today the most promising expression of process theology. Indeed, I view it as embodying the cutting edge of Christian theology as a whole. --John B. Cobb Jr. Claremont Graduate School and Claremont School of Theology Creating Women's Theology is an important contribution to the literature. It offers a good summary of the relation to feminism and process theology. It also delves into some basic questions about the universality of feminist approaches to theology in different religious traditions. This book will be a helpful introduction for courses in feminist theology. --Rosemary Radford Ruether Claremont Graduate University In its relational structure and transtemporal movement, this book works like a society of occasions in process should It is a beautifully aimed series of reflective events, displaying the transgenerational trajectories of the feminist and womanist process theologies as they have been massively but often indirectly unfolding. By making this movement within a movement so becomingly readable and so dialogically explicit, by highlighting its intersections with other movements and its internal differences, it will lure yet another generation of thinkers into a vital conversation. --Catherine Keller Drew University Theological School Editor Biography: Monica A. Coleman is Associate Professor of Constructive Theology and African American Religions and Co-Director of the Center for Process Studies at Claremont School of Theology and Associate Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. She is the author of The Dinah Project: A Handbook for Congregational Response to Sexual Violence (2004) and Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (2008). Nancy R. Howell is Professor of Theology and Philosophy of Religion and Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean at Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri. She is author of A Feminist Cosmology: Ecology, Solidarity, and Metaphysics (2000). Helene Tallon Russell is Associate Professor of Theology at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Indiana. She is author of Irigaray and Kierkegaard: On the Construction of the Self (2009).