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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...
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Woman (Paperback)
Tina Beattie
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R377
R353
Discovery Miles 3 530
Save R24 (6%)
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Out of stock
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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.
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