Book Review: Faith and Feminism: Ecumenical Essays

Abstract

Faith and Feminism: Ecumenical Essays. Edited by B. Diane Lipsett and Phyllis Trible. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014. xiii + 273 pp. $35.00 (paper).The relation of faith and feminism is constituted hy multiple arrays of difference-religious commitments; race, ethnicity, nationality, language; social location, economic position, access to resources of many sorts; choice of cognate disciplines, whether anthropology, social theory, linguistics, literary theory, or archaeology-and of course by how gender is itself constructed in the interaction of these differences. This book of fifteen essays brings together what might be considered a Babel of voices into something that might well provoke the favored side of Pentecost, hearing each speak in voices we may recognize.The introduction by the editors uses these two biblical stories to frame a set of essays in three areas: Biblical Studies, Interreligious Ventures, and Theology and Ethics. Contributors come from five continents, and are active participants in Muslim and Christian communities of faith. In this compilation, Women speak their stories and hear the stories of others. But the speaking and hearing do not always coincide-nor need they. The results may yield blessing, perplexity, or even dismissal. (So Scripture reports the human condition under heaven.) (p. 6). This is an exercise in learning to appreciate plurality and the conflicts as well as the richness it involves.Each of the three sections offers faith-grounded perspectives on pressing contemporary issues. Phyllis Trible reads Genesis 1 as advocating not dominion over the earth but responsibility in a hierarchy involving all creatures in promoting the goodness of creation. Here, humans have the greatest responsibility, not the greatest license. Hisako Kinukawa sees Jesus' sharp, even hostile response to the Syrophoenician woman as rejection of food distribution disparities between rural producing areas and urban consumer ones. Her riposte reminds him that among the privileged, many still suffer inequities. Ulrike Bechmann notes that interreligious dialogue often focuses on Abraham the patriarch, as if Judaism, Christianity, and Islam speak with one voice about him. Better, she argues, to begin with Sarah and Hagar: doing so starts with the difference and conflict and uses this as a tool for social analysis and as a warning in order to find a different way (p. 175). This focus also challenges and decenters the focus on patriarchy in all three religions.Many of these essays look at the fraught relation between religion and secularity in geopolitical realities of colonialism and neocolonialism, today subsumed under the notion of a War on Terror. …