Feminist Theology and the Global Imagination

Abstract

Abstract This chapter presents an account of what feminist theology is and how it might help us understand and engage with our globalizing world. The first section provides a non-faith-specific definition of feminist theology as an intracultural activist enterprise aimed at exploring the landscape of religious imagination from a feminist perspective, and also lays out a few of feminist theology's most distinctive “plays of imagination.” The second section turns to faith-informed, Christian feminist theology, describing it as a more narrowly focused activist enterprise that explores the landscape of the distinctly Christian theological imagination from a feminist perspective. Its distinctive “plays of mind” are delineated as well. The third section turns to the topic of globalization and maps out the central features of “the global imagination,” describing the ways in which globalization has impacted and shifted our thinking processes in recent decades, particularly in the global North. The final section returns to Christian feminist theology (and to pluralistic feminist theology as well), suggesting ways its faith imagination—its theological plays of mind—might productively engage the global imagination with the aim of improving, in new and creative ways, the lives of women everywhere.