New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory
Roman
Catholicism exerts a continuing influence on the culture and politics
of the world's nations, and never more so than on issues of gender and
sexuality. If the Catholic church is to continue to be relevant to
modern women, it needs to go beyond its traditional anachronistic sexual
stereotypes and hierarchies, to present the Gospel in a way that is
attentive to the questions, needs and values of the age, without
surrendering the central truths of Christian faith. "New Catholic Feminism" is a radical and dramatic feminist enactment of the Catholic faith. Engaging with feminist theory and postmodern feminist theology, Tina Beattie offers a detailed and often disturbing analysis of Catholic neo-orthodoxy in its representation of gender and sexual difference. Through encounters with thinkers such as Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Martin Heidegger and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Beattie explores Catholicism's gendered imagery and sacramentality in the context of language, sexuality, prayer and the body, questioning the assumptions upon which neo-orthodoxy rests in its resistance to women priests, and its theological models of masculinity and femininity. Having confronted the conflict between feminism and the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI, Beattie proposes a new theological approach to the encounter between feminism and Catholicism, for the twenty-first century.
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