I read more academic nonfiction than I tell y’all about. If you happen to be in my conversational line of fire as I am reading a thing, you will hear about it (sorry, family! sorry, friends! but not sorry enough to stop!), but the blog usually does not. Except sometimes my utterly favorite feminist scholar has a new collection of essays and I can’t resist asking the publisher for it, and then you get to hear about it after all. You lucky ducks.
So, disclosure: I received this book from the publisher for review consideration.
One time I read Phyllis Trible’s book Texts of Terror, a work of feminist criticism and close textual readings of the Bible, and it blew my tiny mind out of the back of my skull. This being my first encounter with reexamination of Biblical texts through a feminist lens, I suppose that was to be expected. In any case, it left me with a lasting devotion to feminist scholar Phyllis Trible, one of the editors of this collection.
As in any collection of essays — particularly any collection based, as this one is, on a lecture series — there are stronger and weaker links. I was intrigued but not fully convinced by Wilma Ann Bailey’s essay on the development of Leah as a character in Genesis, and Hisako Kinukawa’s essay on Asian feminisms and the Syrophoenician woman who talks back to Jesus was not everything I wanted from an essay on my favorite lady in maybe the whole Bible.
But others of the essays were superb. Gail R. O’Day’s “Sacraments of Friendship” places a renewed emphasis on the embodying of Jesus in the Gospel of John, and the ways in which Jesus physically embodies the value of love-in-friendship, as when he humbles himself physically before his disciples to wash their feet. As y’all know if you’ve been around here for a while, I love reading about the importance of friend relationships.
Another essay, Hibba Abugideiri’s “Speaking from Behind the Veil,” explores the history of Western concern-trolling of Muslim women as a justification for invading Muslim countries, and the ways this history has often prevented Muslim women from taking on the label of “feminist.” She discusses the historical exclusion of women from textual interpretations of the Qu’ran, which in turn led to often sexist and oftener exclusionary readings.
Rosemary Radford Ruether’s “Why Do Men Need the Goddess?” was an all-too-brief examination of the construction of symbols of the feminine divine and the purposes they have served for male thinkers in the history of Christianity. Much more of that, please, with comparative examples from other religions!
Now you know what kind of nerdery I get up to when I’m not reading killer fiction. The university press kind, y’all. I am a slave to the university press catalogs. Truth.