In this work, Jobling argues that religious sensibility in the Western world is in a process of transformation, but that we see here change, not decline, and that the production and consumption of the fantastic in popular culture offers an illuminating window onto spiritual trends and conditions. She examines four major examples of the fantastic genre: the "Harry Potter" series (Rowling), "His Dark Materials" (Pullman), "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (Whedon) and the "Earthsea cycle" (Le Guin), demonstrating that the spiritual universes of these four iconic examples of the fantastic are actually marked by profoundly modernistic assumptions, raising the question of just how contemporary spiritualities (often deemed postmodern) navigate philosophically the waters of truth, morality, authority, selfhood and the divine. Jobling tackles what she sees as a misplaced disregard for the significance of the fantasy genre as a worthy object for academic investigation by offering a full-length, thematic, comparative and cross-disciplinary study of the four case-studies proposed, chosen because of their significance to the field and because these books have all been posited as exemplars of a 'postmodern' religious sensibility. This work shows how attentiveness to spiritual themes in cultural icons can offer the student of theology and religions insight into the framing of the moral and religious imagination in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and how this can prompt traditional religions to reflect on whether their own narratives are culturally framed in a way resonating with the 'signs of the times'.

The concept of transcendence is emerging as a central category of critical thought, both within and outside the field of religious studies. This collection brings together prominent scholars to ask whether we can re-conceive the category of transcendence from a feminist perspective, taking into account ethics, women's subjectivity, (sexed) embodiment, and differing models for spirituality. The collection begins with a thought-provoking essay by Luce Irigaray, with whose work the majority of contributions engage. In a lucid and intuitive enquiry, contributors develop these themes both philosophically and within the contexts of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Contributors come together in groundbreaking ways to illuminate the intersections between women and the divine.

This title was first published in 2002: The premise of the text is that there is a continuing need for biblical hermeneutic propsals and frameworks which emerge from the fields of both feminism and Christian theology. Feminism, the author asserts, demands not only the plotting of new routes but the restructuring of entire landscapes. As such this project, since it seeks to develop a feminist theological frame for meaning, impinges on and is impacted by innumerable inter-relating questions. In consequence, the scope of the book is necessarily both broad and interdisiplinary. The author, J'annine Jobling, uses particular texts and has articulated her own positions in response. In this way the embodied practice of thinking-in-relation is mirrored in the texts produced. This has determined the macro-structure of the thesis, which is based on an analysis of two feminist biblical scholars: Elisabeth Schussler Fionenza and Phyllis Trible. From this analysis Jobling identifies two primary principles for interpretation: rememberance and destabilization. This is a strategy which allows both materialist and post-structuralist perspectives to be set into play, each of which has vital contributions to make to feminist enterprises. The "Bible" is understood as matrix, as a set of discourses which are permeable to and intersect with other cultural discourses. The task of feminist interpretation is then to reconstitute the heterogenous biblical matrix in feminist horizons. A fundamental tenet of the book is that hermeneutics inhabits particular metaphysical constructs. Therefore, the argument extends from an interpretation of the Bible to an epistemological framework in which an eschatological hereneutic is recommended, to a metaphysical framework which takes eschatology as its structuring principle. The author argues that it is eschatology which can provide the resources for an ontological model radically disruptive of a metaphysics of presence, and in which it is possible to discern the traces of God. From this outermost limit of the author's hermeneutic investigations, the text returns to the centre: the feminist discursive community and develops a construct that the ekklesia, as a feminist deliberative space set oppositionally to structures, worldviews and idealogies operates on patriarchal logics. The relationship of this "imagined community" is compared to the Christian Church and scripture, ethics and gendered identity within a logic of equity.

This title was first published in 2002: The premise of the text is that there is a continuing need for biblical hermeneutic propsals and frameworks which emerge from the fields of both feminism and Christian theology. Feminism, the author asserts, demands not only the plotting of new routes but the restructuring of entire landscapes. As such this project, since it seeks to develop a feminist theological frame for meaning, impinges on and is impacted by innumerable inter-relating questions. In consequence, the scope of the book is necessarily both broad and interdisiplinary. The author, J'annine Jobling, uses particular texts and has articulated her own positions in response. In this way the embodied practice of thinking-in-relation is mirrored in the texts produced. This has determined the macro-structure of the thesis, which is based on an analysis of two feminist biblical scholars: Elisabeth Schussler Fionenza and Phyllis Trible. From this analysis Jobling identifies two primary principles for interpretation: rememberance and destabilization. This is a strategy which allows both materialist and post-structuralist perspectives to be set into play, each of which has vital contributions to make to feminist enterprises. The "Bible" is understood as matrix, as a set of discourses which are permeable to and intersect with other cultural discourses. The task of feminist interpretation is then to reconstitute the heterogenous biblical matrix in feminist horizons. A fundamental tenet of the book is that hermeneutics inhabits particular metaphysical constructs. Therefore, the argument extends from an interpretation of the Bible to an epistemological framework in which an eschatological hereneutic is recommended, to a metaphysical framework which takes eschatology as its structuring principle. The author argues that it is eschatology which can provide the resources for an ontological model radically disruptive of a metaphysics of presence, and in which it is possible to discern the traces of God. From this outermost limit of the author's hermeneutic investigations, the text returns to the centre: the feminist discursive community and develops a construct that the ekklesia, as a feminist deliberative space set oppositionally to structures, worldviews and idealogies operates on patriarchal logics. The relationship of this "imagined community" is compared to the Christian Church and scripture, ethics and gendered identity within a logic of equity.

In this work Jobling argues that religious sensibility in the Western world is in a process of transformation, but that we see here change, not decline, and that the production and consumption of the fantastic in popular culture offers an illuminating window onto spiritual trends and conditions. She examines four major examples of the fantastic genre: the "Harry Potter" series (Rowling), "His Dark Materials" (Pullman), "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (Whedon) and the "Earthsea cycle" (Le Guin), demonstrating that the spiritual universes of these four iconic examples of the fantastic are actually marked by profoundly modernistic assumptions, raising the question of just how contemporary spiritualities (often deemed postmodern) navigate philosophically the waters of truth, morality, authority, selfhood and the divine. Jobling tackles what she sees as a misplaced disregard for the significance of the fantasy genre as a worthy object for academic investigation by offering a full-length, thematic, comparative and cross-disciplinary study of the four case-studies proposed, chosen because of their significance to the field and because these books have all been posited as exemplars of a 'postmodern' religious sensibility. This work shows how attentiveness to spiritual themes in cultural icons can offer the student of theology and religions insight into the framing of the moral and religious imagination in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and how this can prompt traditional religions to reflect on whether their own narratives are culturally framed in a way resonating with the 'signs of the times'.