spiritual beliefs, practices and attachments; and experiences of liminality. The use of a short format allows for the presentation of key findings from large research ...
Vol. 5, no. 2 (2015), 197-199 | DOI: 10.18352/rg.10109
Review of Nicola Slee, Fran Porter and Anne Phillips (eds.), The Faith Lives of Women and Girls (Explorations in Practical, Pastoral and Empirical Theology series), Farnham: Ashgate 2013, 260 pp., ISBN 978-1-4094-5618-7 By Rhianon Grant, Leeds University, UK This is a collection of short essays on a wide range of subjects relating to the faith lives of women and girls. The nineteen chapters are divided into five sections, dealing with: feminist research perspectives; neglected aspects of the faith lives of women and girls; diverse ecclesial and geographic contexts; spiritual beliefs, practices and attachments; and experiences of liminality. The use of a short format allows for the presentation of key findings from large research projects and experienced academics as well as contributions from MA students whose dissertation work is published here. The inclusion of the latter ensures that the volume includes fresh voices on the topics considered – many of them not dealt with in depth if at all in previous literature – and the editors of the volume have clearly made an effort to include a diversity of perspectives. Overall, the argument of this book, if a collection of this kind can be said to have a single argument, is that the faith lives of women and girls have been neglected in previous research and reward further study, a position for which it provides ample evidence in the form of a series of fascinating studies on that topic. The first section, ‘Feminist Research Perspectives’, contains two essays which introduce some aspects of practical feminist theology as a discipline. The first, ‘Feminist Qualitative Research as a Spiritual Practice: Reflections on the Process of Doing Qualitative Research” is by Nicola Slee and outlines some features of feminist approaches to such work, including viewing some normally neglected aspects of qualitative research as having spiritual potential. In particular, attention to the process of transcription is shown to be rewarding. The second essay in this section, Jan Berry’s ‘From Privacy to Prophecy: Public and Private in Researching Women’s Faith and Spirituality’ reflects on another set of issues likely to arise in the kind of qualitative research on which most of the essays in the book are based: the tension between private and public, personal
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and political, and the ways in which academic research can push across this boundary. The second section, ‘Neglected Ages, Stages and Styles in Women’s and Girl’s Faith Lives’ contains four essays. Two of these, Kim Wasey’s ‘Being in Communion: Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion in Young Lay Women’s Experience of Eucharist in the Church of England’ and Anne Phillip’s ‘God Talk/Girl Talk: A Study of Girls’ Lives and Faith in Early Adolescence, with Reflections on Those of their Biblical Fore-sisters’, focus on the experiences of young women, while Abby Day’s piece ‘Understanding the Work of Women in Religion’ comes out of her work with elderly women in the Church of England and Sarah-Jane Page’s ‘Feminist Faith Lives? Exploring Perceptions of Feminism Among Two Anglican Cohorts’ compares the responses of women of different ages. The third section, ‘Female Faith in Diverse Ecclesial and Geographic Contexts’ contains four essays covering women’s faith lives in Northern Ireland, Wales, mainstream and charismatic evangelical traditions, and the Church of God of Prophecy. Fran Porter’s ‘The ‘In-the-Middle’ God: Women, Community Conflict and Power in Northern Ireland’ looks at the role of religion in women’s efforts to contribute to peace-building by being “in the middle between different and even hostile groups” (p101), while Manon Ceridwen James’s essay ‘Fat Chicks, Blue Books and Green Valleys: Identity, Religion and Women in Wales’ begins with her own experience and expands to include the experiences of contemporary and historical women to build up a picture of the ways in which religious views about women’s behaviour, especially women’s sexual behaviour, has affected their identities. The other two essays both consider the word: Ruth Perrin’s ‘Searching for Sisters: The Influence of Biblical Role Models on Young Women from Mainstream and Charismatic Evangelical Traditions’ looks at the ways in which finding Biblical role models can be both difficult and empowering for young women, while Deseta Davis writes in ‘The Use of Patriarchal Language in the Church of God of Prophecy: A Case Study’ about her analysis of the representation of women in sermons. Although the overall findings, that sermons contain overwhelmingly masculine language about God with a very few exceptions and tend to be sexist when discussing human characters, are unfortunately not surprising, I found this one of the most interesting essays in the book: the carefully conducted small-scale study produced some observations about the way men and women are presented in sermons which made me think again about the Biblical texts on which they are based and on the selection procedures. For example, a contrast of presentation shows a potential elision of some Biblical texts. Davis points out that of all the men discussed in the sermons, “none needed to be cured of diseases”, while, on the other hand, the very few women mentioned included prominently the woman with the issue of blood. As men who are in need of healing are hardly absent from the Bible as a whole, this emphasis suggests that some texts are being ignored and others stressed to women’s disadvantage. The fourth section, ‘Women’s Spiritual Practices, Beliefs and Attachments’ includes six essays. Some look at ritual, such as Susanna Gunner’s ‘Integrating Ritual: An Exploration of Women’s Responses to Woman-Cross’ and Alison Wooley’s ‘Silent Gifts: An Exploration of Relationality in Contemporary Christian Women’s Chosen Practices of Silence’, while on the other hand Emma Rothwell’s study ‘Broken Silence: Researching with Women to Find a Voice’ used some aspects of ritual as part of the research methodology. Caroline Kitcatt’s essay 198
Religion and Gender vol. 5, no. 2 (2015), pp. 197–199
‘Boundaries and Beyond: Weaving Women’s Experiences of Spiritual Accompaniment’ is a valuable addition to the literature on what spiritual direction or accompaniment is like for those who participate in it, while Eun Sim Joung’s ‘Patterns of Women’s Religious Attachments’ draws on psychological work to look at how attachment functions as part of women’s religious development. Finally, Francesca Rhys writes about ‘Understanding Jesus Christ: Women Explore Liberating and Empowering Christologies’ with an eye to improving the inclusiveness of christologies used in church. The fifth section, ‘Experiences of Liminality on Women’s Faith Lives’ contains three essays, covering death, birth and abuse as spiritually significant parts of women’s experience. Jennifer Hurd’s ‘The Relevance of a Theology of Natality for a Theology of Death and Dying and Pastoral Care: Some Initial Reflections’ draws on work by Grace Jantzen and extends it in directions which are both theological and pastorally useful. Noelia Molina’s ‘The Liminal Space in Motherhood: Spiritual Experiences of First-time Mothers’ acknowledges mothering a newborn as a liminal space and often a difficult one, but one which, especially with the right support, can be a spiritually transforming one. Finally, Susan Shooter’s ‘How Survivors of Abuse Relate to God: A Qualitative Study’ does one of the things which qualitative work does best: brings to our ears the words of those who need to be, but often are not, heard properly. By focusing on the experiences of survivors before beginning theological reflection, Shooter is able to bring out themes from their interview data which might not have appeared from a theoretical perspective. This final essay illustrates neatly the lesson of the whole book, which is that the faith lives of women and girls reward study, and especially empirical study, and that the discipline of practical feminist theology is a fledgling but growing and significant one.
Religion and Gender vol. 5, no. 2 (2015), pp. 197–199
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