"This is a critically important volume, the third in Grace Jantzen's grand and compelling invitation to a new moral imaginary. It is about choosing life over modernity's preoccupation with death, about opening ourselves to beauty and the need to be vulnerable that is part of that aesthetic. From her own engaged 21st century Quaker perspective, Jantzen offers us this new paradigm that both transcends modernity with its anxieties and fears about beauty, and subverts it with her focus on the inner spiritual dynamic of the Quaker conception of Light. Whilst we always may hope for what else might have been in the writing we will now never see, this book seals our ability to respond and encourages us to do so with urgency. In good Quaker tradition, this is prophecy at its best." - 'Ben' Pink Dandelion, Professor of Quaker Studies, University of Birmingham, UK
"Remarkably coherent and polished... This creative work is both fascinating and potentially fruitful." - Rhiannon Grant, University of Leeds, UK, Quaker Studies
Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Part 1: The Anxieties of Beauty 1. Beauty and the Beast: Ambiguities and Openings 2. Beauty Denied Part 2: Beauty, Quakers and the Inner Light 3. Beauty and Spirituality 4. Quakers and the Inner Light 5. Choose Life! Early Quaker Women 6. Fanny Henshaw and the Question Self-Deception 7. Before the Rooster Crows: The Betrayal of Knowledge in Modernity Part 3: Beauty, Desire and Engaged Spirituality 8. In the Eye of the Beholder 9. Beauty and the Body 10. Beauty, Desire and Need 11. Flourishing: Towards an Ethic of Feminist Theory 12. On Changing the Imaginary Index
The late Grace M. Jantzen (1948-2006) was Professor of Religion, Culture and Gender at Manchester University and a widely respected feminist philosopher and theologian.
Jeremy Carrette is Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kent and is the author of Selling Spirituality (Routledge, 2005) and Religion and Critical Psychology (Routledge, 2007).
Morny Joy is University Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary. She is author of Divine Love: Luce Irigaray, Women, Gender and Religion (2007).