This work explores the impact of Christian women—as scholars and leaders representing the ethnic, national, racial, and denominational diversity of Christianity today—on all aspects of life. Women and Christianity explores the experiences of women and how their daily lives interface with their spirituality and faith. Beginning with a historical overview, the book presents essays grouped under five broad headings: women, family, and environment; socioeconomics, politics, and authority; body, mind, and spirit; sex, power, and vulnerability; and women, world view, and religious practice. These essays focus on multiple aspects of women's experiences and contemporary Christian realities, involving the interrelatedness of faith, thought, and activism across many strata of global society. They wrestle with the daily experiences and challenges women face integrating their lives as women of faith—as they are advocates, experience agency, and work for mutuality. It shows how in all these roles, women must negotiate power, injustice, and the impact of sexism as they work within systemic oppression amid a patriarchal system, nevertheless championing change and refusing to be severely compromised.

This book examines the critical and often undervalued contributions of women to the culture, well-being, and subsistence of their communities as active, powerful, and wise ritual specialists. From the Dalit midwives in India to the women of the Nahua region in the state of Morelos, Mexico, from the indigenous nations in Turtle Island in Canada to the shamans (male and female) of South Korea and Vietnam, there are still many vital indigenous cultures around the world in which women often hold positions of religious authority and leadership. Women and Indigenous Religions addresses specific issues in the study of religion, such as the multifaceted tensions between indigenous traditions and gender and the genealogy of positions of authority in religion or spiritual matters. A close examination reveals that native religions, with their women specialists, are still a source of inspiration for millions of men and women even in the "advanced" areas in the world. This fact challenges the opinion that indigenous cultures are becoming extinct.

First an expression of black urban youth, Hip Hop music continues to expand as a cultural expression of youth and, now, young adults more generally. As a cultural phenomenon, it has even become integral to the worship experience of a growing number of churches who are reaching out to these groups. This includes not just African American churches but churches of all ethnic groups. Once seen as advocating violence, Hip Hop can be the Church s agent of salvation and praise to transform society and reach youth and young adults in greater numbers. After looking at Hip Hop s socio-historical context including its African roots, Wake Up shows how Hip Hop has come to embody the worldview of growing numbers of youth and young adults in today s church. The authors make the case that Hip Hop represents the angst and hope of many youth and young adults and that by examining the inherent religious themes embedded in the music, the church can help shape the culture of hip-hop by changing its own forms of preaching and worship so that it can more effectively offer a message of repentance and liberation. "

In The Undivided Soul: Helping Congregations Connect Body and Spirit, Cheryl Kirk-Duggan offers a worship, study, and sermon planning resource containing meditations, responsive readings, poems, and prayers for use by pastors, educators, and small-group leaders. This volume is designed as a teaching/learning guide. Each chapter explores various aspects of faith, health, and spirituality. The book can be used as a worship resource for Sunday worship, retreats, or other gatherings; it can be used as a devotional resource for small groups; it can be a study guide for group study or retreats. This resource is designed to help persons and groups explore the relationship between the faith journey, physical bodies, and spiritual discipline.

Key Features: Explores various aspects of faith, health, and spirituality as well as how the three are connected Provides ready-made worship and study materials Includes ideas for one-day seminars Ideal for both pastors and small-group leaders

Key Benefits: Helps readers understand the relationship between faith journey, physical body, and spiritual discipline Provides pastors, worship leaders, Bible study leaders, and small-group leaders with ready-to-use resources (such as responsive readings, meditations, prayers, and vows of commitment) Provides group leaders with resources for seminars, short-term study, or occasional devotion or discussion topics Provides retreat leaders with abundant resources for spirituality retreats "

A collection of worship services for various special days celebrated in most African American churches. Programs provide an introduction tying the African American heritage to the occasion, with a welcome address, prayer, litany, Scripture, and suggested parament colors. Includes graduation/promotion, homecoming, Mother/Father's Days, groundbreaking and cornerstone services, mortgage-burning, Black History celebration, and others.

What does religion have to do with fomenting or transcending violence? In this fascinating work, Kirk-Duggan documents and analyzes religion's involvement in violence -- for good and ill -- in the Bible, slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and the youth scene of today.

Who are the mothers in the biblical text? What do they do? What kinds of power do they have? Issues of identity, authority, violence, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, sexual exploitation and rape-marriage, murder, and relation to God have haunted the characters and representations of motherhood from Eve to Mary and beyond. For better or for worse, these images speak potent messages even today. To explore biblical mothers and their relationships with their daughters and sons, the contributors to this volume participate in a comparative analysis between biblical mothers and mothers in popular media, history, literature, and the arts. The diversity of methods they employ prompts a rich discussion on the deconstruction of motherhood, offering new ways of envisioning both biblical and contemporary motherhood.The contributors are Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan and Tina Pippin, Madeline McClenney-Sadler, Wil Gafney, Brian Britt, Frank M. Yamada, Mignon R. Jacobs, Linda S. Schering, Mark Roncace and Deborah Whitehead, Andrew M. Mbuvi, Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, Brenda Wallace, Margaret Aymer, Tat-siong Benny Liew, and Alison Jasper.

The Bible is hardly the first text that comes to mind when the general public considers gender, sex, and violence, yet within its first four chapters the Bible includes the creation of the first couple, thus gender designation; procreation, thus sex; and violence via the first murder. "Pregnant Passion presents essays excavating some of the biblical stories that explore the dynamics, intersection, and relatedness of gender, human sexuality, and violence in the Bible, with themes spanning the realms of feasts and famines, betrayal and bloodshed, seduction and sensuality, power and politics, virtue and violence.
Contributors include Randall C. Bailey, Valerie C. Cooper, Nicole Duran, Barbara Green, Gina Hens-Piazza, Barbara A. Holmes, Susan E. Hylen, Hyun Chul Paul Kim, Mignon R. Jacobs, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Madeline McClenney-Sadler, M. Fulgence Nyengele, Mary Donovan Turner, and Susan R. Holmes Winfield.
Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org)