Tina Beattie has written a stunning book on the theology of woman. Her stated objective is to discern the place of the female body in the Christian story of salvation and she has done so from the very heart of Christian stylisations of the female--the figures of Mary and Eve.Beattie has pursued her subject with the aid of French psychoanalytic feminism--these writers are preoccupied, as is Catholic theology, with questions of language and symbolism. But she deliberately puts herself at odds with neo-orthodoxy and feminist liberal theology; she believes that theologians like von Balthasar...

This theological investigation explores the significance of woman in the Christian tradition from various perspectives. It is written as an open-ended quest for meaning in the form of a 'theopoetics' rather than as a systematically developed argument. Weaving and circling around the Christian idea of woman, the book offers an unfolding vision of the problems and possibilities inherent in the story of Christ and the Church, with its historical legacy of silencing and exclusion and its unfulfilled promise of freedom and flourishing. Tina Beattie concludes that woman is not a form of being...

Gender, Religion and Diversity provides an introduction to some of the most challenging perspectives in the contemporary study of gender and religion. In recent years, women's and gender studies have transformed the international study of religion through the use of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural methodologies, which have opened up new and highly controversial issues, challenging previous paradigms and creating fresh fields of study. As this book shows, gender studies in religion raises new and difficult questions about the gendered nature of religious phenomena, the relationship...