A valuable intervention in Kristevan scholarship and a significant and exciting contribution in its own right to post-structuralist discussions of ethical and political agency and practice. Contributors: Judith Butler, Tina Chanter, Marilyn Edelstein, Jean Graybeal, Suzanne Guerlac, Alice Jardine, Lisa Lowe, Noelle McAfee, Norma Claire Moruzzi, Kelly Oliver, Tilottma Rajan, Jacqueline Rose, Allison Weir, Mary Bittner Wiseman, Ewa Ziarek

Psychoanalytic perspectives on Kristeva’s fiction.

Even an atheist has a spirituality. Spirituality can be considered as human, rather than narrowly religious. Many today call themselves ‘spiritual but not religious’. It is impossible to define, and so various limited models are suggested by researchers. This book explores these issues and proposes a new model based upon the oeuvre of the Bulgarian/French semiologist, philosopher and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva. Kristeva is an atheist with a respect for religion, its valuing of the non-discursive, and its role in therapy. Her work is supplemented and contrasted by her peers, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. The author proposes a model, based on Kristeva’s work, where themes of Language, Love, Alterity and Transcendence interact to form what we call ‘spirituality’, rather than simply being unconnected aspects of it. Suggestions are given of how this resulting model can be applied to Secondary Education (Religious Education in particular), and also approaches to Healthcare Education.

Explores the cultural history of what underlies popular conceptions of "proper" mothering

For years, mainstream feminist ethics focused criticism on male supremacy. Feminist philosophers in this volume adopt a less male-focused stance to look closely at oppression's impact on women's agency and on women's relations with women. Examining legal, social, and physical relationships, these philosophers confront moral ambiguity, moral compromise, and complicity in perpetuating oppression. Combining personal experience with philosophical inquiry, they vividly portray their daily engagement with oppression as both victims and perpetrators. They explore such issues as how pornography silences women and radical feminist politics' complicity in racism. Among these insightful essays, Sandra Bartky argues that women share guilt for racism when they benefit from it without protest; Susan Brison reflects on uses of narrative in trauma recovery from such experiences as being targeted for rape or murder; Joan Callahan examines fallout of derogatory speech directed at lesbians; Virginia Held proposes carrying care into marketplaces and governments; and, in her introduction, Claudia Card draws on Primo Levi's conception of "gray zones" in exploring dangers of character damage to victims of misogyny. A fitting companion to Card's highly regarded Feminist Ethics, this volume interweaves observations on character, political ethics, violence, and love into an accessible sourcebook for students. It tackles some of feminism's most pressing issues and helps readers to identify and then overcome the real damage caused by oppression.

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theorists such as Freud, Durkheim, Weber, and Marx built their intellectual edifices on what they thought would be the remains or ruins of religion in the wake of modernization. But today the decline and disappearance of religion can no longer be simply assumed. In the face of contemporary entanglements of religion and violence, the establishment of meaning and morality remains troubling; the experience of loss and change remains, paradoxically, constant; and new theoretical perspectives--feminism, race studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, postmodernism--have emerged, challenging the works that mourned religion and created meaning in earlier periods. The effects of this ongoing experience of mourning and symbolic loss on culture, on subjectivity, and on the academic disciplines of religious studies, though immense, are poorly understood and underinterpreted. In order to correct this lacuna in scholarly thought, this volume brings together a notable group of scholars who examine the ways in which recent cultural transformations inform the place of religion in the modern world. Methodologically, they represent the intersection of religious studies and the social scientific study of religion, bringing the disciplines of psychology, sociology, and anthropology into this dialogue.

Maurice Hamington is associate professor of women's studies and philosophy at Metropolitan state College of Denver --Book Jacket.