An in-depth history of selected New Religions that highlights the roles of women in their founding and continual practice Women in New Religions offers an engaging look at women’s evolving place in the birth and development of new religious movements. It focuses on four disparate new religions—Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, The Family International, and Wicca—to illuminate their implications for gender socialization, religious leadership and participation, sexuality, and family ideals. Religious worldviews and gender roles interact with one another in complicated ways. This is especially true within new religions, which frequently set roles for women in ways that help the movements to define their boundaries in relation to the wider society. As new religious movements emerge, they often position themselves in opposition to dominant society and concomitantly assert alternative roles for women. But these religions are not monolithic: rather than defining gender in rigid and repressive terms, new religions sometimes offer possibilities to women that are not otherwise available. Vance traces expectations for women as the religions emerge, and transformation of possibilities and responsibilities for women as they mature. Weaving theory with examination of each movement’s origins, history, and beliefs and practices, this text contextualizes and situates ideals for women in new religions. The book offers an accessible analysis of the complex factors that influence gender ideology and its evolution in new religious movements, including the movements’ origins, charismatic leadership and routinization, theology and doctrine, and socio-historical contexts. It shows how religions shape definitions of women’s place in a way that is informed by response to social context, group boundaries, and identity.

The fifth issue of the Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society (J-RaT) centers on the topic of religion, transformation and sex/gender. The focal point will be on religious and cultural transformation processes and their repercussions on gender roles, constructs and representations on the one hand, and on sex and/or gender transformations which are embedded in the context of specific religious traditions on the other. Transformation is understood here as change, alteration and reformatting. The multifaceted connections between religion, transformation and sex/gender are concretized in an abundance of material and symbolic phenomena and are examined starting from different subject-specific and methodical approaches.

The fifth issue of the Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society (J-RaT) centers on the topic of religion, transformation and sex/gender. The focal point will be on religious and cultural transformation processes and their repercussions on gender roles, constructs and representations on the one hand, and on sex and/or gender transformations which are embedded in the context of specific religious traditions on the other. Transformation is understood here as change, alteration and reformatting. The multifaceted connections between religion, transformation and sex/gender are concretized in an abundance of material and symbolic phenomena and are examined starting from different subject-specific and methodical approaches.

Reframing Ideas about Feminist Theory and Theology for the 21st Century In Congress of Wo/men: Religion, Gender, and Kyriarchal Power, leading feminist scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza challenges the tendency in feminist theory to leave behind religion—a space of struggle, resistance, and social transformation—as a place for feminist politics. She also confronts the tendency of religious feminists to view women as if they are all the same, or to limit them to complementary roles with men. Presenting an alternative vision for global justice within the landscape of neoliberal kyriarchy, Schüssler Fiorenza calls upon religious and non-religious feminists to engage in transformation through struggle, friendship, and community. Further, this groundbreaking book’s final chapter opens up the discussion for future feminist work, drawing the reader into an imagined community of feminist readers with whom the reader can agree or disagree, but nevertheless struggle alongside to imagine a more just world.

Conversions is the first collection to explicitly address the intersections between sexed identity and religious change in the two centuries following the Reformation. Chapters deal with topics as diverse as convent architecture and missionary enterprise, the replicability of print and the representation of race. Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history and art history, Conversions offers new insights into the varied experiences of, and responses to, conversion across and beyond Europe. A lively Afterword by Professor Matthew Dimmock (University of Sussex) drives home the contemporary urgency of these themes and the lasting legacies of the Reformations.

An introduction to the study of women in diverse religious cultures While women have made gains in equality over the past two centuries, equality for women in many religious traditions remains contested throughout the world. In the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints women are not ordained as priests. In areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan under Taliban occupation girls and women students and their teachers risk their lives to go to school. And in Sri Lanka, fully ordained Buddhist nuns are denied the government identity cards that recognize them as citizens. Is it possible to create families, societies, and religions in which women and men are equal? And if so, what are the factors that promote equality? Theory of Women in Religions offers an economic model to shed light on the forces that have impacted the respective statuses of women and men from the earliest developmental stages of society through the present day. Catherine Wessinger integrates data and theories from anthropology, archaeology, sociology, history, gender studies, and psychology into a concise history of religions introduction to the complex relationships between gender and religion. She argues that socio-economic factors that support specific gender roles, in conjunction with religious norms and ideals, have created a gendered division of labor that both directly and indirectly reinforces gender inequality. Yet she also highlights how as the socio-economic situation is changing religion is being utilized to support the transition toward women’s equality, noting the ways in which many religious representations of gender change over time.

With the emergence of Hindu nationalism, the conversion of Indians to Christianity has become a volatile issue, erupting in violence against converts and missionaries. At the height of British colonialism, however, conversion was a path to upward mobility for low-castes and untouchables, especially in the Tamil-speaking south of India. In this book, Eliza F. Kent takes a fresh look at these conversions, focusing especially on the experience of women converts and the ways in which conversion transformed gender roles and expectations. Kent argues that the creation of a new, "respectable" community identity was central to the conversion process for the agricultural laborers and artisans who embraced Protestant Christianity under British rule. At the same time, she shows, this new identity was informed as much by elite Sanskritic customs and ideologies as by Western Christian discourse. Stigmatized by the dominant castes for their ritually polluting occupations and relaxed rules governing kinship and marriage, low-caste converts sought to validate their new higher-status identity in part by the reform of gender relations. These reforms affected ideals of femininity and masculinity in the areas of marriage, domesticity, and dress. By the creation of a "discourse of respectability," says Kent, Tamil Christians hoped to counter the cultural justifications for their social, economic, and sexual exploitation at the hands of high-caste landowners and village elites. Kent's focus on the interactions between Western women missionaries and the Indian Christian women not only adds depth to our understanding of colonial and patriarchal power dynamics, but to the intricacies of conversion itself. Posing an important challenge to normative notions of conversion as a privatized, individual moment in time, Kent's study takes into consideration the ways that public behavior, social status, and the transformation of everyday life inform religious conversion.