Search results

Ask a woman about love and you are likely to hear about heartbreak. Ask about her identity, and shame and frustration leak out. Ask about rest and enjoyment, and you will hear laments about time and busyness. We live a small fraction of the life God has for us. The Bible stories in this study follow the journeys of women such as Sarai, Puah and Shiphrah, Ruth, Hagar, Naomi, Hannah and Mary, who learned in the crucible of hardships that God's invitation to them was to live wholehearted lives.

This powerful book shows how many Christians, including pastors, parents and leaders, have unwittingly absorbed many cultural ideas about sexuality that are not supported by the Bible. As people created by God for relationship, our sexuality guarantees that we will long for and be drawn toward others, McMinn provides a blueprint for understanding sexuality--and our longing to be loved-- at all stages of life (childhood, teen years, early adulthood, midlife, and old age), and addresses tough topi...

Acute Melancholia and Other Essays deploys spirited and progressive approaches to the study of Christian mysticism and the philosophy of religion. Ideal for novices and experienced scholars alike, the volume makes a forceful case for thinking about religion as both belief and practice, in which traditions marked by change are passed down through generations, laying the groundwork for their own critique. Through a provocative integration of medieval sources and texts by Jacques Derrida, Judith Bu...

In all three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, marriage is part of God's plan for humanity, as illustrated in the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, and the Koran as well as the religious literature of these three traditions. It is viewed as a sacred bond as well as a means to personal fulfilment. It is more than a legal contract, rather an institution with cosmic significance, legitimized through divine authority. In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the purpose of marriage...

In Divided Houses, Caroline Ford examines how the so-called feminization of religion in France from the French Revolution to the First World War contributed to the formation of a distinctive secular (laïc) republican political culture in France. She also reveals the effect of women's close association with religion on their civil and social status, which gave rise in France to heated debates about the limits of female agency, women's property rights, and women's role in the family and in society...

This is a cross-cultural study of the significance of the female in the philosophy and symbolism of Tibetan Buddhism. It approaches female identity through an account of the historical context of archaic images of the female, and takes a psychoanalytical perspective on the philosophy surrounding the key figure of female embodiment in Tibetan Buddhism, the "dakini". Througn an examination of the unusual patriarchal system which developed in Tibet, important questions are raised concerning the mea...

At a moment when ""freedom of religion"" rhetoric fuels public debate, it is easy to assume that sex and religion have faced each other in pitched battle throughout modern U.S. history. Yet, by tracking the nation's changing religious and sexual landscapes over the twentieth century, this book challenges that zero-sum account of sexuality locked in a struggle with religion. It shows that religion played a central role in the history of sexuality in the United States, shaping sexual politics, com...

HOPE AND HEALING FOR FAMILIES Out of his own experience and the experience of many of those he has served in his counseling practice, Richard Cohen sets out a step-by-step plan that offers a path toward renewed family relationships grounded in love, faith and mutual respect.

From the asparas of Hindu myth to the swan maidens of European fairy tales, tales of flying women-some with wings, others with clouds, rainbows, floating scarves, or flying horses-reveal both fascination with and ambivalence about female power and sexuality. In Women Who Fly, Serinity Young examines the motif of flying women as it appears in a wide variety of cultures and historical periods, expressed in legends, myths, rituals, sacred narratives, and artistic productions. She covers a wide rang...

Between 1920 and 1922, hundreds of members of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement left the defunct Habsburg Monarchy and sailed to Palestine, where a small group of members of the movement established Upper Bitania, one of the communities that laid the foundation for Israel's kibbutz movement. Their social experiment lasted only eight months, but it gave birth to a powerful myth among Jewish youth which combined a story about a heroic Zionist deed, based on the trope of tragedy, with a model for...

This volume presents a comprehensive portrait of Mary Magdalen. It offers original work by well-established Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars on the religious and prophetic experience of Mary Magdalen and her depiction in Christian art, and on aspects of Mary Magdalen's composite identity, which overlaps Miriamic, Gnostic, early Christian, and Manichaean traditions, together with Islamic and patristic traditions of Jesus' Mother. Rather than revisiting her singularity, this volume argues th...