This book offers a new perspective on the often-overlooked lives of lay women in the English Roman Catholic Church. It explores how over a century ago in England some exceptional Catholic lay women – Margaret Fletcher, Maude Petre, Radclyffe Hall, and Mabel Batten - negotiated non-traditional family lives and were actively practicing their faith, while not adhering to perceived structures of femininity, power, and sexuality. Focusing on c. 1880-1930, a time of dynamism and change in both England and the Church, these remarkable women represent a rethinking of what it meant to be a lay women in the English Roman Catholic Church. Their pious transgressions demonstrate the multiplicity of ways lay women powerfully asserted aspects of their faith while contravening boundaries traditionally assumed for them in an ostensibly patriarchal religion. In fact, the Church could be a place for expressions of unconventional religiosity and reinterpretations of womanhood and domesticity. Connecting together the lives of these women for the first time, this work fills a lacuna in the scholarship of modern Catholic and gender history. Drawing from private collections and numerous archives, it illustrates the surprising range of modes of Lived Catholicism and devotion to faith. Students and scholars of Catholicism, gender, and LGBTQIA+ studies will find significant merit in a book that assigns lay women a more prominent role in the English Catholic Church and offers examples of the flexibility of Roman Catholicism.

What is the role of gender in Eastern Christianity? In this volume, Orthodox experts of different disciplines and cultural backgrounds tackle this complex question. They engage critically with gender issues within their own tradition. Rather than simply accepting pervasive assumptions and practices, the authors challenge readers to reconsider historically or theologically justified views by offering nuanced insights into the tradition. The first part of the book explores normative positions in Orthodox texts and contexts. From examinations of Scripture and hagiography to re-evaluations of monastic, patriarchal, and legal sources, it sheds new light on gender issues in Orthodox Christianity. The second part considers how gendered expectations shape individuals’ participation in Orthodox liturgical life and how ecclesial contexts inflect gender theologically. The chapters reflect diverse Orthodox voices brought together to foster new understandings of the ways gender shapes Orthodox religious lives and beliefs. Rethinking what has been inherited from tradition, the authors proffer new perspectives on what it means to be a man or woman within Orthodoxy in the twenty-first century.

Building on various feminist theories of ethos, the authors in this collection explore how North American Catholic women from various periods, races, ethnicities, sexualities, and classes have used elements of the group’s positionality to make change. The women considered in the book range from the earliest Catholic sisters who arrived in the United States to women who held the Church hierarchy accountable for the sexual abuse scandals. The book analyzes women such as those in an African American order who developed an ethos that would resist racism. Chapters also consider better known Catholic women such as Dolores Huertas, Mary Daly, and Joan Chittister.

This book examines the intersections of faith, race, and gender within the social justice movement in the civil rights era in Memphis, Tennessee. The intertwined experiences of six Catholic women activists demonstrate that the commonalities of gender and faith provided a foundation from which many others built the interracial justice movement.

All over the world there is the move towards just gender relations – even if the odds seem to be less hopeful than a decade ago. This poses a special task for Christians and Churches in service of the marginalised who engage in the fight for justice. The articles collected in this volume provide insights from two intercultural theological conferences. The topic for the European-Asian dialogue focuses on "Gender and Ecclesiology". The European dialogue between western and eastern Central European countries has a special aim for gender theories and their theological and political implications. The book presents contributions from different perspectives and shows how the Christian churches can contribute to gender justice.

Writing as a seminary-trained sociologist, Frederick W. Schmidt, Jr. concentrates on the roles of clergywomen in five denominations—Episcopal, United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran, Southern Baptist, and Roman Catholic. He maintains that behind the façade of equanimity, women are often relegated to the outskirts of church hierarchy. In compelling stories, we learn about the Episcopal woman denied a job because she was too short; the Methodist women burdened by the old saw of women preachers being like dogs walking on their hind legs; the Evangelical Lutheran who, in protest to her denomination's trickle-down reform, camped outside her bishop's office; and Roman Catholic women who, frustrated and beleaguered by their church's refusal to ordain them, become active reformers. To substantiate his assertion that churches are cultures as well as organizations, Schmidt examines both official policies regarding women's ordination in each denomination and the cultural context in which those policies must play out. Through their stories, the clergywomen remind us that the church influences society whether society acknowledges it or not.

Michael P. Carroll argues that the academic study of religion in the United States continues to be shaped by a "Protestant imagination" that has warped our perception of the American religious experience and its written history and analysis. In this provocative study, Carroll explores a number of historiographical puzzles that emerge from the American Catholic story as it has been understood through the Protestant tradition. Reexamining the experience of Catholicism among Irish immigrants, Italian Americans, Acadians and Cajuns, and Hispanics, Carroll debunks the myths that have informed much of this history. Shedding new light on lived religion in America, Carroll moves an entire academic field in new, exciting directions and challenges his fellow scholars to open their minds and eyes to develop fresh interpretations of American religious history.

"Women Teachers and Popular Education in Nineteenth-Century France is a study of the network of women's teacher training schools, known as the ecoles normales primaires, that were gradually created in France during the nineteenth century. Although this study focuses on the recruitment of teachers, their pedagogical and social instruction, and the teachers' professional formation as part of a corporate group, the book also ties these teacher-related issues to the universal development of public primary education in France. Based on numerous national and departmental archives, the study also explores the social values inherent to public education in modern France through the corporate model of the women's normal schools."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"A cracking good story with a wonderful cast of rogues, ruffians and some remarkably holy and sensible people." --Los Angeles Times Book Review Before the potato famine ravaged Ireland in the 1840s, the Roman Catholic Church was barely a thread in the American cloth. Twenty years later, New York City was home to more Irish Catholics than Dublin. Today, the United States boasts some sixty million members of the Catholic Church, which has become one of this country's most influential cultural forces. In American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church, Charles R. Morris recounts the rich story of the rise of the Catholic Church in America, bringing to life the personalities that transformed an urban Irish subculture into a dominant presence nationwide. Here are the stories of rogues and ruffians, heroes and martyrs--from Dorothy Day, a convert from Greenwich Village Marxism who opened shelters for thousands, to Cardinal William O'Connell, who ran the Church in Boston from a Renaissance palazzo, complete with golf course. Morris also reveals the Church's continuing struggle to come to terms with secular, pluralist America and the theological, sexual, authority, and gender issues that keep tearing it apart. As comprehensive as it is provocative, American Catholic is a tour de force, a fascinating cultural history that will engage and inform both Catholics and non-Catholics alike. "The best one-volume history of the last hundred years of American Catholicism that it has ever been my pleasure to read. What's appealing in this remarkable book is its delicate sense of balance and its soundly grounded judgments." --Andrew Greeley