scholarly journals A voice from the margins: Investigating the African Adventist rationale on the quest for female ordination

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca J. Lagat
Keyword(s):  
Church Leadership ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Cultural Bias ◽  
African Women ◽  
Missio Dei ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Research Committee ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Church Structures

Discussions surrounding women�s ordination reached a peak with the 60th General Conference Session (GCS 2015) of the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church. A report compiled by a section of delegates from the East-Central Africa Division � Biblical Research Committee indicated that this continent was not yet ready to ordain women as pastors. In light of the report, this article aims to investigate the rationale of such a stark decision. Firstly, the report shows that African Adventist women theologians were omitted from the discussions � a lack of good will from the church leadership towards the females as the majority of the membership. Secondly, the decision against ordination of women is suspect and biblically inconclusive. Through an overview of literature on a biblical missional design, the article postulates: Contextualisation and theologising are necessary for Africa, but the SDA Church must remember that globally both theology and culture are subject to the biblical guidelines, and thus to God�s missio Dei as well.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article balances cultural contextualism and gender relations � challenging a cultural bias through a missional hermeneutic. This can lead to fairer representation of African women in Adventist church structures and reroute the equality discourse in light of the missio Dei. The study intersects with cultural theory, social analysis and biblical hermeneutics.�

THE SINS OF THE FATHER: GENDER- BASED VIOLENCE IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyn Snodgrass
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Black Women ◽  
South African ◽  
African Women ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
South African Women

This article explores the complexities of gender-based violence in post-apartheid South Africa and interrogates the socio-political issues at the intersection of class, ‘race’ and gender, which impact South African women. Gender equality is up against a powerful enemy in societies with strong patriarchal traditions such as South Africa, where women of all ‘races’ and cultures have been oppressed, exploited and kept in positions of subservience for generations. In South Africa, where sexism and racism intersect, black women as a group have suffered the major brunt of this discrimination and are at the receiving end of extreme violence. South Africa’s gender-based violence is fuelled historically by the ideologies of apartheid (racism) and patriarchy (sexism), which are symbiotically premised on systemic humiliation that devalues and debases whole groups of people and renders them inferior. It is further argued that the current neo-patriarchal backlash in South Africa foments and sustains the subjugation of women and casts them as both victims and perpetuators of pervasive patriarchal values.

Reading from Worlds under the Text: Oceanic Women in the missio Dei

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-51
Author(s):  
Rosemary Dewerse ◽  
Cathy Hine
Keyword(s):  
Global South ◽  
Missio Dei ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Women

Abstract Missional hermeneutics is a relatively recent development in the field of biblical hermeneutics, emerging from several decades of scholarly engagement with the concept and frame of missio Dei. In a key recent publication in the field, Reading the Bible Missionally, edited by Michael Goheen, the voices of the Global South and of women – and certainly of women from Oceania – do not feature. In this article the authors, both Oceanic women, interrupt the discourse to read biblical text from their twice-under perspective. The Beatitudes provide the frame and the lens for a spiralling discussion of the missio Dei as, to borrow from Letty M. Russell, “calculated inefficiency.” Stories of faithful Oceanic women interweave with those of God and of biblical women, offering their complexities to challenge assumptions and simplicities.

scholarly journals A missional study of Ghanaian Pentecostal churches’ leadership and leadership formation

2015 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter White
Keyword(s):  
Theological Education ◽  
Church Leadership ◽  
System Structure ◽  
Missio Dei ◽  
Leadership Formation ◽  
Pentecostal Churches ◽  
Missional Communities ◽  
Ultimate Purpose

Church leadership plays an important and irreplaceable role in the planting and the configuration of the missional congregation. The key to the formation of missional communities is their leadership. In that regard, this article explores Classical Ghanaian Pentecostal Churches’ leadership and leadership formation from a missiological perspective. This was done through an exposition on their leadership system (structure). It was argued that Classical Ghanaian Pentecostal Churches’ leadership is based on the Fivefold Ministry (Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Pastor and Teacher). These leadership functions were therefore discussed in the light of their missiological implication. The conclusion arrived at is that it is not enough to discover one’s spiritual gift or calling; these gifts should be developed and nurtured through mentoring and proper theological education, with the ultimate purpose being to participate in the Missio Dei.

Culture and the Environment in the Pacific Northwest

1997 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 885-897 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Ellis ◽  
Fred Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Cultural Bias ◽  
Environmental Groups ◽  
Environmental Preferences ◽  
New Politics ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Values And Beliefs ◽  
Satisfactory Account

Douglas and Wildavsky argue that environmental activism is rooted in an egalitarian cultural bias. Others, like Paehlke, counter that environmental commitments and concerns are autonomous from redistributive concerns. Students of the “New Politics” agree that environmentalism is autonomous from conventional left-right distributive concerns but also argue that environmental attitudes and beliefs are embedded in “postmaterial” values, such as citizen participation. Still other scholars emphasize a cultural consensus around environmental values and beliefs. What distinguishes environmental activists, in this view, is less what they believe than their willingness to make sacrifices for those values and beliefs. Drawing upon several surveys of environmental groups and the mass public in the Pacific Northwest, we test these four hypotheses and find that the Douglas-Wildavsky “cultural theory,” although not without its limitations, appears to provide the more satisfactory account of environmental preferences.

Disability and the Posthuman

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Murray
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Work Time ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
War And Conflict ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Contemporary Writing

Disability and the Posthuman is the first study to analyse cultural representations and deployments of disability as they interact with posthumanist theories of technology and embodiment. Working across a wide range of texts, many new to critical enquiry, in contemporary writing, film and cultural practice from North America, Europe, the Middle East and Japan, it covers a diverse range of topics, including: contemporary cultural theory and aesthetics; design, engineering and gender; the visualisation of prosthetic technologies in the representation of war and conflict; and depictions of work, time and sleep. While noting the potential limitations of posthumanist assessments of the technologized body, the study argues that there are exciting, productive possibilities and subversive potentials in the dialogue between disability and posthumanism as they generate dissident crossings of cultural spaces. Such intersections cover both fictional/imagined and material/grounded examples of disability and look to a future in which the development of technology and complex embodiment of disability presence align to produce sustainable yet radical creative and critical voices.

Women in Gabon

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire H. Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
Central Africa ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
African Women ◽  
Female Population ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Tropical Woods ◽  
New Research ◽  
Export Revenue

Gabon, a small oil-rich country straddling the equator on the west coast of Africa, is the wealthiest of France’s former colonies. An early period of colonization in the 19th century resulted in disease, famine, and economic failure. The creation of French Equatorial Africa in 1910 marked the beginning of the sustained lucrative exploitation of Gabon’s natural resources. Gabon began off-shore oil production while still a colony of France. Uranium was also discovered in the last decade of the French Equatorial African empire. Coupled with rich reserves in tropical woods, Gabon has achieved, since independence in 1960, a higher level of export revenue per capita of population than any other country in sub-Saharan Africa in the postcolonial era. However, significant inequality has characterized access to wealth through paid employment throughout the recorded history of monetized labor. While fortunes have been amassed by a minute proportion of the female population of Gabon associated with the ruling regime, and a professional female middle-class has emerged, inequalities of opportunity and reward continue to mark women’s experience of life in this little-known country of West Central Africa. The key challenge facing scholars researching the history of women in Gabon remains the relative lack of historical resources. While significant strides have been made over the past decade, research on women’s history in Francophone Africa published in English or French remains embryonic. French research on African women began to make a mark in the last decade of colonization, notably with the work of Denise Paulme, but then remained a neglected area for decades. The publication in 1994 of Les Africaines by French historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch was hailed at the time as a pioneering work in French historiography. But even this new research contained no analysis of and only a passing reference to women in Gabon.

Women in Mozambique

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liazzat J. K. Bonate ◽  
Jonna Katto
Keyword(s):  
Rural Areas ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
African Women ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Subsistence Economy ◽  
The Family ◽  
Party Line ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Portuguese Colonialism

Mozambique is divided into matrilineal north and patrilineal south, while the central part of the country has a mixture of the two. Both types of kinship organization have important implications for the situation of women. Women in matrilineal societies could access land and political and decision-making power. They had their own property and their children belonged to their matrikin. In patrilineal societies, women depended on their husbands and their kin groups in order to access farmland. Children and property belonged to the husband’s clan. During the colonial period (c. 1890–1975), women’s position in Mozambique was affected by the Indigenato regime (1917–1961). The native African population (classified as indígenas) were denied the rights of Portuguese citizenship and placed under the jurisdiction of local “traditional habits and customs” administered by the appointed chiefs. Despite the fact that Portuguese citizenship was extended to all independent of creed and race by the 1961 Overseas Administrative Reform, most rural African areas remained within the Indigenato regime until the end of colonialism in 1974. Portuguese colonialism adopted an assimilationist and “civilizing” stance and tried to domesticate African women and impose a patriarchal Christian model of family and gender relations. Women were active in the independence struggle and liberation war (1964–1974), contributing greatly to ending colonialism in Mozambique. In 1973, Frelimo launched a nationwide women’s organization, Organização da Mulher Moçambicana (Organization of Mozambican Women, OMM). Although women were encouraged to work for wages in the first decade after independence, they remained largely limited to the subsistence economy, especially in rural areas. The OMM upheld the party line describing women as “natural” caregivers. Only with the political and economic liberalizations of the 1990s were many women able to access new opportunities. The merging of various women’s organizations working in the country during this period helped to consolidate decades-long efforts to expand women’s political and legal rights in independent Mozambique. In the early 2000s, these efforts led to the reform of the family law, which was crucial for the improvement of women’s rights and conditions in Mozambique.

Self-Objectification vs. African Conservative Features in the Selfies of Black African Women

2018 ◽  
pp. 103-130
Author(s):  
Endong Floribert Patrick Calvain
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
African Women ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Nigerian Women ◽  
Black African ◽  
Cultural Forces ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Self Objectification

Though popularly construed as a universal phenomenon, selfie taking is gendered and culturally determined. This could be evidenced by the fact that the two socio-cultural forces of conservatism and traditionalism continue to tremendously shape African women's style of taking and sharing selfies on social media. Based on a content analysis of 200 selfies generated and shared by Nigerian women on Facebook and Instagram, this chapter illustrates this reality. It argues that Nigerian women are generally more conservative than liberal in their use of selfies for self-presentation, self-imaging and self-expression in public spaces. Over 59% of their selfies have conservative features. However, despite the prevalence of conservative myths and gender related stereotypes in the Nigerian society, the phenomenon of nude or objectified selfies remains a clearly notable sub-culture among Nigerian women. Over 41% of Nigerian women's selfies contain such objectification features as suggestive postures; suggestive micro-expressions and fair/excessive nudity among others.

Catherine Belsey

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela McCallum
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Country House ◽  
Action Films ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Low Culture ◽  
Distinguished Research ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The University

Catherine Belsey (b. 13 December 1940) is a British scholar distinguished in the areas of literary and cultural theory, Shakespeare studies, early modern studies, and feminism. Educated at the Universities of Oxford, Somerville College (BA), and Warwick (MA, PhD), she taught at the University of Cambridge (New Hall). Moving to University College Cardiff as a Lecturer in English in 1975, she was appointed Professor of English in 1989 and Distinguished Research Professor in 2002, a position she held until 2006. A Research Professor at Swansea University from 2006 to her retirement in 2014, Belsey holds an appointment as Visiting Professor at University of Derby (2014–2020). She is a Fellow of the English Association (2001) and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (2013). Together with Terence Hawkes, Stephen Heath, Terry Eagleton, and others, Belsey became an important voice in the burgeoning interest in French theories in the late 1970s. Her books deploy French structuralist and post-structuralist theories to open up possibilities for innovative analyses of literary and cultural texts. Her achievement lies in producing a body of literary and cultural criticism that acknowledges its rootedness in a present moment and deploys theoretical insights to achieve nuanced readings of texts from earlier historical periods—research that connects her with the British cultural materialist criticism of scholars such as Alan Sinfield, Louis Montrose, and Jonathan Dollimore. For Belsey, “text” has a very broad meaning: art, sculpture, architecture, film, novels, drama, poetry, and other writings can all be read as cultural texts. In these assumptions, Belsey draws on the earlier writings of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, who both questioned an elitist division of high/low culture and extended the meaning of culture to include a whole way of life. The breadth of references in her books is unquestionably impressive: medieval theology, eighteenth-century country house architecture, funerary sculpture, carvings on household furniture, Renaissance paintings, detective novels, contemporary action films, and even cartoons make appearances in her analyses. All of these, and more, offer perceptions into how cultures order themselves into what they assume to be dominant modes and also into to what they understand to be resistant. Her books on Shakespeare, Milton, tragedy, and desire all explore how cultural texts negotiate these pressures, tensions, and anxieties. Feminism and gender figure as important questions throughout her research. Belsey’s commitment to pedagogy and learning is evident in several introductory books accessible to nonspecialists.

Women and Militarization

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Zimmerman
Keyword(s):  
Social Institutions ◽  
African Women ◽  
Agricultural Labor ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
Gendered Roles ◽  
And Gender

African women are profoundly affected by warfare and its consequences in their societies. Militarization describes the violent processes that transform communities’ social, political, economic, and cultural spheres beyond the battlefield. These effects are gendered. Militarization transforms the social institutions that gender and define women’s personhood—marriage, motherhood, daughter, wife, widow, concubine, slave, domestic laborer, etc. Since these institutions are references for social continuity and discontinuity, conflict turns women into symbols of nationalistic significance and centers their procreative power and roles within regimes of morality. Militarization facilitates transformations in gendered roles and sexualities—women became soldiers and auxiliary wartime laborers, as well as the strategic targets of armed violence. Economic, social, and political status were key in determining women’s experiences of conflict and militarization. Elite women are often better-positioned to maintain their personal safety and access leadership roles in their communities during and after conflict. Low-status women were more vulnerable to enslavement, sexual/domestic violence, food insecurity, disease, displacement, and death. Women’s myriad experiences of militarization challenge false assumptions about the incontrovertible linkages between masculinity and belligerence or femininity and pacifism. Militarization alters how women realize optimal futures due to changes in gendered-access to authority, legal accountability, as well as perceptions of moral order and the division between public and domestic life. A handful of ancient and medieval noble women provide legendary exploits of warrior queens, who mobilized armies toward political unification or the defense of their societies. In several centralized African societies, noble women—as queen mothers or reign mates—constrained and bolstered the authority of male leaders. Dahomey fielded female regiments in battle. The warfare affiliated with long-distance slave trades and 19th-century state building created dichotomous experiences for elite and slave women. Elite African women depended on the resources generated from slave export, as well as benefited from the domestic and agricultural labor of captured and enslaved women. European colonization and the spread of monotheistic Abrahamic religions altered African women’s experiences of militarization. The gendered biases of written sources obscure the degree to which women participated in the militarization of their societies within political and/or religious conquest. Colonization normalized gender-restricted access to power and militancy, as well as entrenched patriarchy and gender dichotomies that equated masculinity with martiality and femininity with nonviolence. Anticolonial, revolutionary rhetoric championed African women’s participation in wars of decolonization—as freedom fighters and mothers within new nations. Women experienced great personal and communal violence in the postcolonial military dictatorships that prioritized patriarchal and violent power. During the 1990s, Western industries of humanitarianism and global media propagated stereotypical portrayals of African women as victims of male-perpetrated violence and as innate peacemakers. To the contrary, African women have played myriad roles in societies experiencing secessionist wars, military dictatorships, genocide, warlords, and Salafist militarization.

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