Patterns of Women&#39;s Leadership in Early Christianity

This authoritative volume brings together the latest thinking on women’s leadership in early Christianity. Featuring contributors from key scholars in the fields of Christian history, the volume considers the evidence for ways in which women exercised leadership in churches from the first to the ninth centuries CE. This rich and diverse collection breaks new ground in the study of women in early Christianity. This is not about working with one method, based on one type of feminist theory, but overall there is nevertheless a feminist or egalitarian agenda in considering the full equality of women with men in religious spheres a positive goal, with the assumption that this full equality has yet to be attained. The chapters revisit both older studies and offer new and unpublished research, exploring the many ways in which ancient Christian women’s leadership could function.

Introduction

Patterns of Women's Leadership in Early Christianity ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198867067.003.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-10

Author(s):

Joan E. Taylor ◽

Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

Keyword(s):

Feminist Theory ◽

Early Christianity ◽

Women's Leadership ◽

Positive Goal ◽

The Many ◽

Unpublished Research ◽

This authoritative volume brings together the latest thinking on women’s leadership in early Christianity. Featuring contributions from key thinkers in the fields of Christian history, the volume considers the evidence for ways in which women exercised leadership in churches from the first to the ninth centuries CE. This rich and diverse collection breaks new ground in the study of women in early Christianity. This is not about working with one method, based on one type of feminist theory, but overall there is nevertheless a feminist or egalitarian agenda in considering the full equality of women with men in religious spheres a positive goal, with the assumption that this full equality has yet to be attained. The chapters revisit both older studies and offer new and unpublished research, exploring the many ways in which ancient Christian women’s leadership could function.

(Re)writing, (Re)righting, (Re)riteing Hupa Womanhood

Bulletin for the Study of Religion ◽

10.1558/bsor.37432 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 47 (3-4) ◽

pp. 28-30

Author(s):

Abel Gomez

Keyword(s):

North America ◽

Feminist Theory ◽

Young Women ◽

Coming Of Age ◽

Boarding Schools ◽

Women's Leadership ◽

Indigenous Women ◽

Northern California ◽

Native Women

In We Are Dancing For You, Risling Baldy explores the meaning and process of the revival of the Ch'ilwa:l, the Flower Dance, a coming-of-age ceremony for women of her tribe. The text opens with an epigraph from Lois Risling, a Hupa medicine woman and the author's mother, "The Flower Dance is a dance that I wish all young women could have. . . .[This dance] does heal. That kind of intensive trauma where women have been abused and mutilated both spiritually and emotionally and physically." (ix). These words offer a sense of what is at stake in this text. As Risling Baldy explains, Native women in what is now known as California were targets of strategic attacks of genocide by settler colonial governments through rape, murder, missionization, boarding schools, and assimilation. Such attacks worked to erase Native women's leadership, power, and ceremonial traditions. We can see the legacy of similar acts of violence in the ongoing epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two spirits across North America. This work is personal, too, as Risling Baldy is a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe in northern California.1 She reflects on her own relationship as scholar and participant of the revitalization of this dance. Risling Baldy's text is particularly interesting in the nuanced ways she links the revival of this ceremony to Hupa cosmology, feminist theory, critiques of menstrual "taboos," embodiment, and decolonial futurity.

ΓΝΩΜΑΙ ΔΙΑΦΟΡΟΙ.: The Origin and Nature of Diversification in the History of Early Christianity

Harvard Theological Review ◽

10.1017/s0017816000031400 ◽

1965 ◽

Vol 58 (3) ◽

pp. 279-318 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Helmut Koester

Keyword(s):

Early Christianity ◽

Upper Egypt ◽

Nag Hammadi ◽

Early Christian ◽

History Of ◽

I. The Crisis of the Historical and Theological Criteria.Already Walter Bauer, well known as a lexicographer, but unfortunately little known as a historian of the Ancient Church, in his ingenious monograph Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum (1934), had demonstrated convincingly that such Christian groups which were later labelled “heretical,” actually dominated in the first two or three centuries, both geographically and theologically. Recent discoveries, especially those of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, have made it definitely clear that Walter Bauer was essentially right and that a thorough and extensive re-evaluation of early Christian history is called for.

Celsus in his World

10.1017/9781108957861 ◽

2021 ◽

Keyword(s):

Late Antiquity ◽

Early Christianity ◽

Unique Contribution ◽

Greek Literature ◽

Political World ◽

Ancient Judaism ◽

Greek Thought ◽

Celsus penned the earliest known detailed attack upon Christianity. While his identity is disputed and his anti-Christian treatise, entitled the True Word, has been exclusively transmitted through the hands of the great Christian scholar Origen, he remains an intriguing figure. In this interdisciplinary volume, which brings together ancient philosophers, specialists in Greek literature, and historians of early Christianity and of ancient Judaism, Celsus is situated within the cultural, philosophical, religious and political world from which he emerged. While his work is ostensibly an attack upon Christianity, it is also the defence of a world in which Celsus passionately believed. It is the unique contribution of this volume to give voice to the many dimensions of that world in a way that will engage a variety of scholars interested in late antiquity and the histories of Christianity, Judaism and Greek thought.

Melania

10.1525/california/9780520292086.001.0001 ◽

2016 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Keyword(s):

Early Christianity ◽

Family Members ◽

The Political ◽

Late Antique ◽

Travel Patterns ◽

History Of Christianity ◽

Early Christian ◽

History Of ◽

Political Economic ◽

The lives of Melania the Elder and Melania the Younger span one of the most important periods of Christian history, reaching from the reign of Constantine through the reign of Theodosius II. They and their family members were well known to some of the most influential political and cultural figures of the period; their patronage promoted the work of major Christian thinkers from both before their time and during it. Their property and travels connected the political, economic, and religious worlds of the late antique Mediterranean. This volume examines the history of early Christianity as it was created and imagined through the lives of the two Melanias. The volume overlays the history of Christianity with a set of narratives that explore themes in the lives of the Melanias, such as constructions of gender, asceticism, orthodoxy and heresy, family and wealth, travel, patterns of memory, worship and hagiography. The resulting collaborative portrait of this family, its influence, and its interests offers a new window on to early Christian history, not by portraying Christianity as a timeless entity unfolding over centuries, but by considering in more complex ways the lives, representations, and later reception of two late ancient persons who attempted to be Christian.

The Signification of Mark 10:45 among Gentile Christians

Harvard Theological Review ◽

10.1017/s0017816000030923 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 90 (4) ◽

pp. 371-382 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Adela Yarbro Collins

Keyword(s):

New Testament ◽

Early Christianity ◽

Son Of Man ◽

One of the many contributions that Helmut Koester has made to New Testament scholarship is his attention to the importance of archaeological and epigraphical evidence for the study of early Christianity. I offer this study as a small token of gratitude to him for that contribution. It attempts to show the importance of certain inscriptions for the signification of the saying attributed to Jesus in Mark 10:45: “For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Elite and Popular Religion: The Case of Newman

Studies in Church History ◽

10.1017/s0424208400004083 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 42 ◽

pp. 372-382 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Dermot Fenlon

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Early Christianity ◽

Popular Religion ◽

Fourth Century ◽

Thought Processes ◽

The Many ◽

Personal Importance

Among the signal insights of twentieth-century scholarship was the recognition that early Christianity accorded personal importance to the plebs. First, Eric Auerbach analysed the humble speech forms of early Christianity, contrasting them with the literature of learned pagans. The point was developed by Ramsay MacMullen in an important essay entitled ‘Sermo humilis’. Arnaldo Momigliano applied these insights to the theologians, historians and hagiographers of the fourth and fifth centuries. He showed how Augustine, Jerome, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret of Cyr succeeded, as pagan intellectuals had not succeeded, in ‘abolishing the internal frontiers between the learned and the vulgar’. Finally, Peter Brown, in a series of brilliant works from The Cult of the Saints to his revised biography of Augustine, supplied a means of discerning in the practice of universal baptism the ‘antidote’ to the exaggerations of fourth-century ascetical elitism. Augustine imparted to the Western Middle Ages a confidence in the power of sacramental grace as efficacious not only for the ascetic few, but as communicating to the many a capacity for growth in charity, purity, and prayer. Such a perspective on the religion of the many bids adieu to Gibbon’s story of ‘philosophy’ collapsing into ‘barbarism and religion’; to Hume’s account of the superstitious and the credulous; and to Henry Hart Milman’s Romantic brand of Liberal Anglicanism as marked by ‘condescension’ towards ‘popular religion’ occluding ‘the thought processes of the average man’; a habit of mind to which Peter Brown surprisingly appended the name of Newman.

Revising McPhail’s Feminist Policy Analysis Framework

Advances in Social Work ◽

10.18060/22639 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 19 (1) ◽

pp. 1-22

Author(s):

Heather Kanenberg ◽

Roberta Leal ◽

Stephen "Arch" Erich

Keyword(s):

Social Work ◽

Policy Analysis ◽

Feminist Theory ◽

Social Work Students ◽

Analysis Framework ◽

Political Climate ◽

Practical Model ◽

The Many ◽

Work Education ◽

Made In

In 2003, McPhail published a Feminist Policy Analysis Framework concluding that the many available methods of policy analysis across disciplines, including social work, treated policies as gender-neutral compositions. McPhail (2003) asserted that these methods denied the many ways that institutions and policies of society are organized by the concepts of gender, therefore presenting incomplete products of analysis. This guiding purpose for the development of McPhail’s (2003) Feminist Policy Analysis Framework endures a full fifteen years later. In the years since publication of McPhail’s Framework, advancements have been made in both feminist theory and in policy analysis methods. This conceptual article outlines a much-needed revision moving the framework into a contemporary position with the inclusion of a focus on privilege, oppression, and intersectionality. The revised framework presented herein is a more conceptually comprehensive and practical model for use by all, but particularly social work students and scholars. The revised model represents an update rendering it more effective in today’s polarized political climate as well as with the recently revised social work educational policy (Council on Social Work Education, 2015). A revised framework of Feminist Intersectional Policy Analysis is presented, including guiding questions and conceptual complexities to consider in the work of analysis.

Reflections on the Less Visible and Less Measured: Gender and COVID-19 in India

Gender & Society ◽

10.1177/08912432211001299 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 089124322110012

Author(s):

Bina Agarwal

Keyword(s):

Feminist Theory ◽

Policy Formulation ◽

Gender Effects ◽

Care Work ◽

Gender Inequalities ◽

Sequential Effects ◽

Telephone Surveys ◽

Food Shortages ◽

Evidence Gathering ◽

The gender effects of COVID-19 are complex, and extend much beyond the issues of care work and domestic violence that have captured global attention. Some effects have been immediate, such as job losses, food shortages, and enhanced domestic work burdens; others will emerge in time, such as the depletion of savings and assets and pandemic-related widowhood, which would make recovery difficult. I use examples from India to outline the complexity of such outcomes, the limitations of the many telephone surveys conducted during the pandemic, and the importance of anticipating both the immediate and the sequential effects. We can anticipate these effects by drawing on our knowledge of preexisting gender inequalities and people’s coping strategies under crises, as well as real-time media alerts. Prior conceptualization can help us design better surveys for capturing both the visible and less visible impact of the pandemic, as well as formulate more effective policies for mitigating the adverse effects. I also highlight the advantages of group-based approaches for protecting women’s livelihoods during such crises, and emphasize the need to create a synergy between feminist theory, evidence gathering, and policy formulation.

Identifying suboptimalities with factorial model comparison

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x18001541 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 41 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Wei Ji Ma

Keyword(s):

Experimental Design ◽

Model Comparison ◽

Process Models ◽

Multiple Forms ◽

Factorial Experimental Design ◽

Factorial Model ◽

Multiple Components ◽

AbstractGiven the many types of suboptimality in perception, I ask how one should test for multiple forms of suboptimality at the same time – or, more generally, how one should compare process models that can differ in any or all of the multiple components. In analogy to factorial experimental design, I advocate for factorial model comparison.