Presenting a fresh look at the contemporary issue of women's place in the Catholic church, Tina Beattie explores controversial, yet topical subjects, such as sex and homosexuality in the Church; women's rights in Catholicism and the future of the Church. Setting up a dramatic encounter between the orthodox Catholic establishment and contemporary critical theory, including feminist theology and philosophy, queer theory, and French psycholinguistics, Tina Beattie examines fundamental questions about human identity, personhood and gender. From the naked bodies of Eden to the 'gay nuptials' of liturgy, she argues that the strange and volatile world of Catholic sexual symbolism cannot be 'tamed' to meet the ideological agendas of either feminist theology or conservative Catholicism. Only through a radical re-evaluation of the sacramental significance of the sexed human body might the Catholic Church provide a redemptive response to the sexual politics of contemporary society.

"Beattie explores our humanity in its beauty and brokenness through women's voices. Fictional voices of the marginalised have been inserted in the recorded history of the country, not to create an alternative history but to add to its rich, multi-faceted texture." (Chiedza Musengezi, Zimbabwean poet and author) "Msasa trees provided dappled shade for Jenny's tea party. April sunshine dribbled through the leaves onto suntanned arms. The frangipanis were in bloom ..." This is the scene that greets Scottish doctor Morag soon after her arrival in Salisbury in the 1950s. Jenny is an English wife and mother trapped in an increasingly violent marriage and secretly in love with another man. Soon, Beatrice will come to work as Jenny's maid and nanny to her children. Over the next twenty years these three women will form deep bonds of affection, but can their loyalty to one another survive as the facade of white suburban life is shattered by war? In a novel that moves from the Firth of Clyde in Scotland to pre-independence Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), from the illusory idyll of colonial privilege to the traumas of guerrilla war, Beattie explores the hidden lives and untold stories of those caught up in the dying years of white rule in Africa. "Rhodesia is sleep-walking towards its devastating civil war. Three women become entangled in that war and in relationships that harbour the seeds of tragedy. With great sensitivity and insight, Tina Beattie tells a haunting story of love and war that will long linger in the mind." (Kay Powell, author of Then a Wind Blew). "A compelling and captivating read. The story is a fascinating weave of black and white characters. I loved it despite scenes that deeply disturbed me, having been through those times. Tina Beattie has captured an essence of the time with precise and knowledgeable detail." (Angus Shaw, Zimbabwean writer and war correspondent)

To understand the cult of the Virgin Mary is to understand the Christian religion. The Virgin Mary is a ubiquitous but enigmatic presence in Christian history and culture. The tradition about Mary forms a vast and multi-layered aspect of Western history, culture and spirituality. It is not just in the Catholic tradition that Mary has become a particular focus of study and interest. Mary has also become a crucial interest for Christians outside this tradition (Protestant, Anglican) as a path to ecumenical understanding. This book is intended as a reference book for the student or scholar seeking knowledge of the history and contemporary practice of the cult of the Virgin Mary. It provides new essays which give overviews of particular areas of study - both historical and thematic - together with texts from primary sources and important scholarly articles, some of which appear in English for the first time. The volume is designed to be suitable for use as a course book at undergraduate and Masters levels. The result is astonishing and will open up whole new avenues for theological and spiritual enquiry. "The Virgin Mary": A resource book for study will be essential for anyone who has a strong theological or devotional interest in Mary. But it will open the eyes of those who do not.

From its gradual decline during the latter part of the twentieth century, religion has been catapulted back into public consciousness, not least by acts of violence, extremism and various forms of fundamentalism.In this lively and surprising contribution to the debate the leading feminist theologian, Tina Beattie, argues that the threat of religious fanaticism is mirrored by a no less virulent and ignorant secular fanaticism which has taken hold of the intellectual classes. Its High Priest is Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion", but its disciples and acolytes include significant opinion formers and commentators such as A C Grayling and Christopher Hitchens, the journalist Polly Toynbee and the novelists Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. "The New Atheists" calls for a more reasoned and creative dialogue between believers and non-believers about questions which impinge deeply on all our lives, and will intrigue every open-minded reader, believer or non-believer.

Father John is the parish priest of Our Lady of Sorrows in Westonville, but when the ordered tranquillity of his life is shattered by a stranger walking into the confessional on Ash Wednesday, he finds himself on a Lenten journey of increasing dread and horror. And when he is confronted with memories of his historic abuse, John discovers that what he thought to be forgiven and forgotten still lurks deep in his memory. A pattern of murders unveils terrifying associations between the stranger's appearances, John's own past, and the murders. Could the stranger be the cardinal who abused him during his time in Rome, and who is rumoured to have died in the 9/11 attacks? Is he a ghost emanating from the same world as Sarah, the ghost of a little girl whose benign appearances are a protective presence in John's life? Or is the man in the confessional not really dead? Through the increasing traumas of Lent, John struggles with the temptations and fears that begin to assail him wherever he turns. The Good Priest is a story of faith and doubt, of real and imagined hauntings, of the epic dramas that lurk beneath the surface of an ordinary Catholic parish, and of the devastating power of violence and terror to rip apart relationships, friendships and loyalties. At once a thriller and a theological exploration, the book takes the reader into a world of altered realities where nothing is quite what it seems...

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. Is it possible that the Church might become a life-giving and inclusive community capable of responding to the challenges that women pose to religion and society at the beginning of the third millennium, or is it, as some feminists suggest, an anachronistic and irredeemably patriarchal institution? Tina Beattie concludes that woman is not a form of being but a way of becoming, a dynamic and unfolding discovery of self in relation to God, humanity and nature, which is always in process, never completed. From a Christian perspective, this project of becoming a sexed human being - man or woman - needs to be understood as part of a larger and more encompassing human vocation to become divine according to the orthodox concept of "theosis", through the ongoing incarnation of God in Christ, the Church and the world.

In this original book, the author journies through Rome, following biblical events and themes in works of art: from Genesis in the Sistine Chapel, through Incarnation in the Pantheon and Resurrection in Michaelangelo's Last Judgement.She touches on many themes in her journey, including violence and power (at the Colloseum), social injustice (at St. Mary Major) and motherhood (at the icon of Our Lady in Perpetual Succour).Writing as an intelligent Christian feminist, Beattie doesn't resort to clichTs, and has a clear, elegant style which makes this a very readable book.

It is hard to over-estimate the challenge that feminism poses to Roman Catholicism. Pope John Paul II's call for a 'new feminism' has led to the development of a Catholic theological response to the so-called 'old feminism'. The New Catholic Feminism sets up a dramatic encounter between the orthodox Catholic establishment and contemporary critical theory, including feminist theology and philosophy, queer theory, and French psycholinguistics, in order to explore fundamental questions about human identity, personhood and gender. From the naked bodies of Eden to the 'gay nuptials' of liturgy, it argues that the strange and volatile world of Catholic sexual symbolism cannot be 'tamed' to meet the ideological agendas of either feminist theology or conservative Catholicism. Only through a radical re-evaluation of the sacramental significance of the sexed human body might the Catholic Church provide a redemptive response to the sexual politics of contemporary society.

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 between power and knowledge, the authority of religious texts and institutions, and the involvement and responsibility of the researcher undertaking such studies as a gendered subject. This book is the outcome of an international collaboration between a wide range of researchers from different countries and fields of religious studies. The range and diversity of their contributions is the very strength of this book, for it shows how gendering works in studying different religious materials, whether foundational texts from the Bible or Koran, philosophical ideas about truth, essentialism, history or symbolism, the impact of French feminist thinkers such as Irigaray or Kristeva, or again critical perspectives dealing with the impact of race, gender, and class on religion, or by deconstructing religious data from a postcolonial critical standpoint or examining the impact of imperialism and orientalism on religion and gender.

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 depart from the best Patristic tradition of Marian theology with disastrous effect. Nor does she offer any solace to the Marina Warners of this world in a book which is strong in defence of classical Marian theology.She defends with passion and theological insight not only the Virgin Birth, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption but also the perpetual virginity of Mary.Virginal desire, according to Beattie, need not be seen negatively but as an affirmation of the integrity of women's desire before God, in a way not dependent on the phallus nor reducible to geniality.