Black Women, Black Church, and Self-Narratives
A selected reading list of classic and contemporary memoir and autobiography from Nyasha Junior’s course.
Category: Women and Religion
‘Literature is Common Ground’: On Reading Virginia Woolf
A Q&A with Stephanie Paulsell on her latest book, Religion Around Virginia Woolf. By Sarah Fleming
A Story of Sarahs: Atwood’s Critique of Second-Wave Feminism
Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments resonates with the energy of dread saturating life under COVID-19 in the Trump administration. By Mara Willard
With Her Head Held High
Even after her imprisonment and torture, a Sikh woman relentlessly pursues justice for her father’s murder during the state-sanctioned 1984 violence. By Kalpana Jain
Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
A selected reading list from Amy Hollywood’s course.
Paths to Abstraction: Spirituality in the Work of Three Women Artists
Exploring the link between spiritual liberation and abstract artistic expression in paintings of Hilma af Klint, Hilla Rebay, and Vicci Sperry. By Ann Braude
Fully Fleshed Out: Religion, Womanhood, and Blackness in Contemporary Media
Positive, complex representations of black women’s religious experience in Queen Sugar and Being Serena. By LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant
Reclaiming Egalitarian Jewish Wedding Customs
Reclaiming medieval Jewish wedding processional customs to open up a liminal space for a woman to be seen in between her attachments to men. By Jessica Rosenberg
Writing from a Paradoxical Place
A writer considers her tradition’s inheritance of childless women and finds strength in her heroines of Jewish literature. By Courtney Sender
Religion and the BRCA Mutation
Women diagnosed with the “breast cancer genes” share complex stories about the impact of this health crisis on their religious beliefs and practices. By Alexandra Nichipor
Can the Women Do Something?
An inspiring call to action from the Nobel laureate who brought women together across religious, ethnic, and political differences to restore peace in Liberia. By Leymah Gbowee
Articulating a Different Future
A Q&A with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza on her newest book, Congress of Wo/men: Religion, Gender, and Kyriarchal Power. By Caroline Matas
Mourning the Unknowable
Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger helps a young woman grapple with her memories of a mother who was in the world but not of it. By Meghan Guidry
The Death of The Buddha’s Mother
The lore around Maya, who died soon after giving birth to the Buddha, illuminates the untold, uncounted stories of women who die in childbirth today. By Kim Gutschow
It’s Time to Restore Bhikṣuṇī Ordination
Given the clear historical evidence, it is time to restore full bhikṣuṇī ordination in Tibet. By Ogyen Drodul Trinley Dorje
Buddhist Nuns, Past and Present
Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women, translated by Charles Hallisey, and Christine Toomey’s In Search of Buddha’s Daughters: A Modern Journey Down Ancient Roads. By Martine Batchelor
Ordain Catholic Women as Deacons
Pope Francis could restore Catholic women to the ordained diaconate. By Phyllis Zagano
What Does Work Mean to Widows in Afghanistan?
In the context of serial wars, liberal agendas of care are problematic. By Anila Daulatzai
Harvesting Souls
Black Pentecostal women’s altar work is physical and spiritual labor that yields individual and communal rewards. By Judith Casselberry
The Ethics of Representing Disaster
Marta’s story from the Talmud stands within a long history of representing crisis through womanhood, in which visual and textual images of women’s bodies become icons of disaster. By Julia Watts Belser
