Feminist Theology

In Exodus 2, Moses has two mothers; his Hebrew mother, who nurses him and the daughter of Pharaoh, who financially supports his Hebrew mother, adopts him, and names him. Pharaoh’s daughter appears in scholarly discussions, yet little attention is given to her role as mother of Moses. Indeed, this motherhood is downplayed in the biblical texts, and also in biblical scholarship, wherein the daughter of Pharaoh is absent from many discussions of biblical mothers and is at times relegated beneath the birthmother in commentaries. This article argues that we should remember and celebrate the daughter of Pharaoh as a mother of Moses.

This article retells the story of Luke’s bleeding woman with insight from history, social reconstruction, the Jewish law, and medical detail. It argues that the woman did nothing wrong in touching Jesus’ ritual fringes, and in fact acted as a priest by doing so, breaking new ground for women. Her life was ebbing away as she continued to bleed, but she, as the active agent in the story, pleaded with God for mercy, and by her faith, she was healed.

This article considers the Pauline construction of a “spiritual body” in 1 Corinthians 15 and his flesh/spirit dualism more generally in light of Paul’s probable disability. I suggest that this rhetoric functioned as a strategy for Paul to claim social power in his social context by deemphasizing his physical presence, and thus reflects a negotiation with cultural patterns of disability abjection rather than a meaningful part of Christian teaching. Because of the active harm done by these dualistic constructions, however unintentional such an interpretation may have been on Paul’s part, liberative Christian theologies must reject this framing and work to integrate not just “body” and spirit but also flesh and its more negative bodily associations such as weakness, pain, illness, and death.

In this article, I take up Uri McMillan’s work in Embodied Avatars to rethink the subject–object relationship in women’s preaching. In performance art, the subject (the artist) fashions herself into an object (the art). I stretch the performance art genre to include preachers Rachel Baker, Jarena Lee, and Florence Spearing Randolph, arguing that these women have strategically performed objecthood to navigate gendered and racialized constraints in Christian proclamation. Examining these three women preachers through the lens of performing objecthood opens up theological understandings of how the Spirit works in a world marked by social sin (sexism and racism). Contrary to theologians who describe submission to the Spirit as self-effacement, I show how submission to the Spirit can counter worldly authorities, while enabling women preachers to transform perceptions of gender and race in a liberative way.

This study aims to portray the self of the sacrificial subject, specifically the feminine sacrificial self. The Christian discourse on sacrifice is dominated by the scholarship of René Girard and his followers. This study briefly presents Girard’s approach and pinpoints its weaknesses in order to complement it with the work of Julia Kristeva and Jan Patočka. All these approaches, taken together, provide a complex picture of what the autonomous feminine sacrificial self looks like. Starting from thorough theoretical and analytical analyses of Girard, Kristeva and Patočka, this study then applies their insights through the particular example of the feminine sacrificial self of Milada Horáková. The example of this political prisoner and victim of a Stalinist showtrial in 1950s Czechoslovakia aptly illustrates the uniqueness of the feminine sacrificial self.

Theistic cosmologies have inspired many religious communities to alienate transgender individuals. While the growth in tolerance among congregations and institutions is important, there remains a pressing need to address the cosmologies at the root of intolerance. A re-examination of theological conceptions of God and the human person reveal not only acceptability, but significance, in the trans experience itself. Synthesizing gender studies with theology, this interdisciplinary article argues that God’s nature as deeply personal Love implies a sacredness in gender authenticity. The human person is part of an evolution toward deeply personalized consciousness. Gender, when freed from rigid constraints, is a social expression of this personalized self in a common cultural language. As infinite Love, God actualizes in the universe in deeply personal love. Therefore, by personalizing knowledge of one another and enabling deeper love between human persons, gender authenticity, in its fluidity, ambiguity, and continuous newness, deepens God’s existence. Ultimately, I argue, expressing one’s authentic gender(s) is a sacred act.

In this article, I highlight systemic oppression related to identity construction and ontological performativity. I introduce the concept of inter-relationality as a discursive tool that builds upon intersectionality, feminist theology, and quantum entanglement theory. For a case study, I recount my experience observing sex-trafficked boys in Thailand in order to demonstrate the analytical model I present. My chief analytical guiding principle in the treatment of the case study is the way masculinity operates to re-enforce oppression. I propose queering masculinity using an inter-relational perspective for the purpose of de-constructing oppressive systems and replacing them with liberative ones.