Women's Spirituality Research Articles

Feminism, Women's Spirituality, Helen, Multi-Ethnicity: The Woven Fabric of My Perspective on Ancient Greek Drama, Literature, and Culture

Feminism, Women's Spirituality, Helen, Multi-Ethnicity: The Woven Fabric of My Perspective on Ancient Greek Drama, Literature, and Culture

Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino of Siena & His Audience (review)

Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino of Siena & His Audience. By Cynthia L. Polecritti. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. 2000. Pp. xiv, 271. $61.95.) Polecritti accomplishes what few historians of or have accomplished over the last generation: she paints the vivid image of what these words actually meant in the context of a culture, time, and place, setting the larger framework of doctrine and tradition against a local nexus of faction, feud, violence, and revenge. Yet her analysis of Bernardino da Siena's preaching and peacemaking campaign in Siena in 1427 emphasizes less the history of peace and peacemaking in Renaissance Italy than the society that formed their context. Her approach is refreshing since she largely avoids the standard approach to peacemaking based on literary and religious texts. Instead, she takes much of this deep Judeo-Christian background for granted and focuses on how these ideals came to interact with the dense fabric of Sienese society in the early Quattrocento: the life of the commune as it emerges from the contrada and the faction, from the family and the feud, always set against the external military and political threats to Siena's liberty. Thus Polecritti's book explores as much an urban society as the actual practice and conceptualization of peacemaking: how human societies both regulate and idealize themselves. Polecritti's work derives from Gene Brucker's socio-political analyses of structures and institutions, Peter Brown's text-based and anthropological opening of religious sources, and the new forms of gender history that pay special attention to women's spirituality and social roles in forming behaviors. Polecritti carefully analyzes the prediche volgari of Bernardino from 1424/25 (edited by Ciro Cannarozzi, 7 vols., 1934-1958) and from 1427 (Carlo Delcorno, 2 vols., 1989) to provide the reader with a well organized and convincing synthesis of much recent research on gender roles, visual language, ritual, codes of honor, and textual literacy in the period. To this she adds a succinct summary of trends in the anthropological and structural interpretations of violence, feud, revenge, and peacemaking in medieval and modem contexts. After a useful introduction to his life and career, Polecritti analyzes Bernardino's vivid, often apocalyptic imagery and his own self-image as a divine agent, the rhetorical and story-telling devices of his sermons that placed them firmly within the everyday lives of his listeners, the nature and size of his audiences, and the structure of a typical series of sermons leading up to mass public acts of reconciliation and peacemaking. She rightly stresses the special role of women, both as audience for Bernardino's sermons and as cultural catalysts of his reforms. …

Women's Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America

Women's Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America

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Commonalities in women's spirituality and women's health.

Both women's spirituality and women's health movements have grown dramatically in recent years. If clinicians understood in greater depth the commonalities between these two perspectives, then they would be better positioned to foster the health of women more fully. In this article, concepts of feminism, religion, spirituality, and women's health are described briefly. After identifying some assumptions, themes, and characteristics of both women's spirituality and women's health, the commonalities between these two perspectives are delineated. Next, processes critical to women's spirituality and women's health are proposed. Finally, implications for clinical practice are offered.

Comptes rendus / Reviews of books: Voices and Echoes: Canadian Women's Spirituality

Comptes rendus / Reviews of books: Voices and Echoes: Canadian Women's Spirituality

Women's Spirituality Research: Doing Feminism

Journal Article Women's Spirituality Research: Doing Feminism Get access Tanice G. Foltz Tanice G. Foltz * Indiana University Northwest * Direct correspondence to Tanice G. Foltz, Ph.D., Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Indiana University Northwest, 3400 Broadway, Gary, IN 46408, e-mail: foltz@iunhaw1.indiana.edu. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 61, Issue 4, Winter 2000, Pages 409–418, https://doi.org/10.2307/3712524 Published: 01 December 2000

Women's Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America

Women's Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America

A Sense of the Sacred

Fifty white and 12 African-American elderly, middle class women were interviewed regarding their life history, self-concept and financial circumstances. The middle class women were a contrast group to women living in poverty. The latter was the focus group for the research project, "Chronic Poverty and the Self in Later Life." Using two case studies (1 from each middle class group), the women's spirituality was explored through their narratives. The study shows that aspiration to middle class norms, such as financial security and acquiring the accouterments of success, holds a complex relationship to a spiritual worldview. Spirituality meshed with the family, work and volunteer oriented lives of the women. Themes of gender were complexly interwoven into women's spirituality. Material acquisitions and financial success remained important to the women interviewed. Age did not lessen a need for, or enjoyment of "things" in the women's lives. (Ethnographic narration, Older women's identity, "Middle-class" spirituality)

Counseling groups for african american women: A focus on spirituality

In this article, the authors describe cultural and spiritual traditions within African American women's experience that form the foundation for group counseling strategies. Literature regarding African American women's experience in groups is reviewed. Specific group interventions such as art, music, dance, imagery, journaling, and rituals that aim at transcendence, empowerment, and self-nurturance are explained. Finally, the authors describe the process, activities, themes, and outcomes of an African American Women's Spirituality Group conducted by the third author in which these approaches were employed.

Cassell's encyclopedia of queer myth, symbol, and spirit: gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender lore

Spiritual traditions: African and African-diasporic ancient near Eastern and Western antiquity Buddhism Chinese Shamanism, Taoism, Confucianism and Syncretism Christianity Goddess reverence Hinduism Islam Judaism Mesoamerican and South American queer spirt radical faeries Shamanism Shinto Sufism witchcraft and wicca women's spirituality.

Religion and the Recovery of Addicted Women

Personal interviews were conducted with 102 African-American and Anglo-American women in Texas coastal communities to determine the involvement of religious organizations in women's initiation and maintenance of recovery from drug addiction, the extent of women's help-seeking for recovery, and women's spiritual needs. Means, frequencies, chi squares, Pearson's correlations, and one-way ANOVAs were used to describe the data. Religious organizations helped about one-third of the women to begin or stay in recovery, primarily through counseling or ministering to spiritual needs. Only one-fourth of the women had sought help from churches. The predominant spiritual needs were forgiveness, love, and understanding. Implications for research and outreach are given.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress: Face to Face with God

Barrett Browning believed that Christ's religion is essentially poetry poetry glorified. In Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress, Linda M. Lewis studies Browning's religion as poetry, her poetry as religion. book interprets Browning's literary life as an arduous spiritual quest the successive stages being a rejection of Promethean pride for Christ-like humility, affirmation of the gospels of suffering and of work, internalization of the doctrine of Apocalypse, and ascent to divine love and truth.Lewis follows this religious crusade from the poet's childhood to her posthumous Last Poems--including such topics as her Bible reading, her introduction to the Greek church fathers and the English Protestant reformers, the theological debates in which she participated, her quarrel with the theology of Paradise Lost, and her scandalous involvement in mesmerism and Swedenborgianism. Using insights from contemporary feminist thought, Lewis argues that Browning's religious assumptions and insights range from the conventional to the iconoclastic and that women's spirituality is, for Browning as well as for other Victorian women writers, separate from orthodox patriarchy. Lewis demonstrates that Browning's political and social ideology--often labeled inconsistent and illogical really makes sense in light of this spiritual quest, which leads her to confront her God face to face.Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual examines not only Browning's most admired works, such as Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh, but also her large body of political works and her important early poems The Seraphim and A Drama of Exile. This intertextual book compares Browning's ideology to that of feminists such as Margaret Fuller, Harriet Martineau, and Florence Nightingale; influential conservatives such as Thomas Carlyle; and those most esteemed of Victorian poets, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning.Concluding with an examination of religion as a central focus of Victorian women poets, Lewis clarifies the ways in which Browning differs from Christina Rossetti, Felicia Hemans, Dora Greenwell, Jean Ingelow, and Mary Howitt. Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress maintains that Browning's peculiar face-to-face struggle with the patristic and poetic tradition as well as with God sets her work apart.

Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298-1545 by Elizabeth Makowski

296BOOK REVIEWS The phenomenon represented by Latinate Jewish wills could well be termed "legal code switching," by analogy with "linguistic code switching." In the latter, bilingual persons or those living in multilingual cultures will switch languages in order to enter a symbolic realm consonant with a specific situation or set of conditions . Thus did Catalan-speaking Jews switch to Hebrew or Latin as events required : most men had double personal names: a Catalan name for daily life,which might be a translation of a Hebrew sacred name (e.g.,Vidal/Hayyim). Similarly, by switching from a Jewish to a Christian legal code, the Jew thereby entered a different normative world, in consonance with a set of specific objectives. A documental appendix contains forty-five previously unpublished texts (dated 1260 to 1343), either wills or documents related to their execution, in Latin, with English summaries. Thomas F. Guck Boston University Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators, 12981545 - By Elizabeth Makowski. [Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Canon Law, Volume 5.] (Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America Press. 1997. Pp. x, 149. $46.95.) When Chaucer's Prioress went off to Canterbury, she violated canon law because in 1298 Pope Boniface VIII had decreed the "strict enclosure of nuns of every order throughout the Latin Church" (p. 1). Canonists commented on the decree throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the Council of Trent re-enacted it. In spite of this continued interest, however, the decree was often ignored in practice. The career of Periculoso thus illustrates the tension between the ideals of the religious life articulated by the reforming papacy and the practical realities of monastic existence. Furthermore, it also sheds light on the way in which female spirituality was understood in the late medieval Church. Boniface was attempting to bring communities of women under tight control, ending the development of "quasi-religious communities of laywomen throughout Christendom" that posed a "potential threat to church discipline" (p. 27). Such groups continued to flourish, however. Periculoso was a major step in differentiating between male and female religious life. Previously, according to Makowski, the regulations for religious life had been similar for monks and nuns. Subsequently, women's religious life was increasingly under the control of men and centered on enclosure. Men's communities , however, were not held to the same standard of enclosure. One unforeseen consequence of this was that this decree, if fully enforced, would have made it almost impossible for abbesses to oversee the operation of the properties upon which the economic well-being of their communities rested, because they could not leave the confines of the cloister. BOOK REVIEWS297 This study provides insight into the way in which the leaders of the late medieval Church dealt with what they saw as the threat that women's spirituality posed to the Church and how to control it. To that extent alone, it is a valuable contribution to scholarship. It also raises some related issues. For example, because the application of Periculoso affected the ability of an abbess to visit the properties owned by the community, it raises questions about the economics of religious life. Just how much did it cost to support a monk or nun? Were there significant differences in the economic bases of male and female communities? As Makowski's discussion of the canonistic commentaries on Periculoso also demonstrates, the later canonists had important things to say. While it may be true that these lawyers were not as creative as those in the classical period of canon law, 1140-1375 (not 1250 as she states, p. 5 n. 10), nevertheless they were quite capable of developing the implications of the work of the classical period to meet the needs of their own day. Study of the canon law flourished in these later centuries as the number of lengthy commentaries and treatises indicates . With the exception of the literature generated by the conciliar movement , however, this later canonistic material has generally been neglected. In her discussion of Periculoso, Makowski follows a path pioneered by Brian Tierney and Kenneth Pennington that is adding to our understanding of the debt that the legal world of the...

Goddess Religion and Women's Spirituality

Goddess Religion and Women's Spirituality

The Whore and the Holy One: Contemporary Sacred Prostitution and Transformative Consciousness

This text explores the intersection of the women's spirituality and sex worker's rights movements in which a growing body of sex workers describe and experience themselves as "sacred whores." In this cultural encounter, the women's spirituality movement's vision of sexual empowerment has merged with the sex workers rights movement's recontextualization of prostitution and other forms of sex work as valid, fulfilling, and skilled labor. These women are establishing themselves as heirs to a mythology of ancient religious practices in which priestesses made love to men within temples as a holy rite and a spiritual service. My exploration of this movement is grounded in an inquiry into the history and mythology of the "temple prostitutes" of the ancient Near East, and unfolds into an ethnography of the currently emerging sacred whore movement.

“Keener Than Any Two-Edged Sword”: Three Elderly Christian African-American Women Living in Poverty Interpret the “Living Word”

ABSTRACT Fifty elderly Christian African-American women living in poverty were qualitatively interviewed for a research project titled “Chronic Poverty and the Self in Later Life,” Part of the study focused on the women's spiritual and religious beliefs and the importance of these beliefs in the women's lives. Using three case studies from the 50 respondents, this article explores how each woman, in her unique interpretation of the Bible, found present meaning for a painful, impoverished past, enhanced her sense of self-esteem, and engendered hope for an improved future either in this life or the next. The major thesis of this paper is that the women created a personal hermeneutic (mode of interpretation) of scripture based on their life stories. Their interpretation of the Bible reflected a concrete relationship with a God who spoke to them through His living word at the juncture of their individuality.

Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism

Central to both biblical narrative and rabbinic commentary, circumcision has remained a defining rite of Jewish identity, a symbol so powerful that challenges to it have always been considered taboo. Lawrence Hoffman seeks to find out why circumcision holds such an important place in the Jewish psyche. He traces the symbolism of circumcision through Jewish history, examining its evolution as a symbol of the covenant in the post-exilic period of the Bible and its subsequent meaning in the formative era of Mishnah and Talmud. In the rabbinic system, Hoffman argues, circumcision was neither a birth ritual nor the beginning of the human cycle, but a rite of covenantal initiation into a male life line. Although the evolution of the rite was shaped by rabbinic debates with early Christianity, the Rabbis shared with the church a view of blood as providing salvation. Hoffman examines the particular significance of circumcision blood, which, in addition to its salvific role, contrasted with menstrual blood to symbolize the gender dichotomy within the rabbinic system. His analysis of the Rabbis' views of circumcision and menstrual blood sheds light on the marginalization of women in rabbinic law. Differentiating official mores about gender from actual practice, Hoffman surveys women's spirituality within rabbinic society and examines the roles mothers played in their sons' circumcisions until the medieval period, when they were finally excluded.

Developmental stages and spiritual coping responses among economically impoverished women living with HIV disease.

Identifies environmental markers, situational appraisals, perceived ability to mediate situations and outcomes, primary coping strategies, and purposes served by religion and spirituality in 10 HIV-positive women recruited from a regional health care clinic. Findings indicated that the women experienced a disintegration of family during their early developmental years, yielding feelings of hopelessness and isolation; that their sexual development was marked by rape and incest, and their early adulthood was characterized by failed relationships, pregnancies, drugs, and alcohol. Reports that the women's religious influences were predominantly maternal and provided a model for intercessory prayer. Notes that prior to their diagnosis of HIV, participants described their coping as escapist, while after diagnosis they believed there was a divine intercession renewing their spiritual growth and connectedness with others. Reports that the women's personal spirituality was greatly influenced by prayer, television ministries, and reading the Bible. Suggests the interventions that actively recruit women into social support services, health care systems, and faith congregations are needed and that television ministries may serve as access points for connecting women with necessary services.

Women's Spirituality: A Proposed Practice Model

SUMMARY The values and spirituality of clients are an important area for social workers, counselors, and other mental, health professionals to consider in their work. This article addresses the need for professionals to be sensitive to this aspect of growth and development for all clients. Noting that until recently, religious writings have tended to reflect a male-centered bias and patriarchal values, issues related to women's spirituality are identified, implications for therapeutic interventions are discussed, and a model for understanding and facilitating women's spirituality is proposed.