Feminist Books - Page 4

The divine feminine: The biblical imagery of God as female

Virginia R Mollenkott

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Where are the Range and Depth in the Divine Feminine? 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Since I've recently been studying the relationship between gender and God, I was excited when I found out there was a book that examined the "feminine" imagery and language found in Scripture and dealt with the traditional issues regarding God's father/motherhood. Sad to say, I was disappointed to find that the author's exegesis was not thorough or profound. Furthermore, the research in this book is lacking in depth and range since it looks like the author depends on a few sources for her conclusions and fails to document a number of assertions that she makes about Augustine, Anselm and Gregory Palamas. While I have no problem applying maternal imagery to God, Mollenkott, unlike writers such as John W. Cooper or Marianne M. Thompson fails to make carefully needed distinctions and the result is an unnuanced discussion about the divine feminine. The book does contain insights and Mollenkott frequently appeals to Scripture in order to support the case she is arguing. But she does not devote enough time to seriously wrestling with the original languages of the biblical text. I thus would not recommend buying this book, but borrowing it from a friend. There is better feminist literature at our disposal.

Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Religion and Postmodernism Series)

Mustapha Cherif

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Editorial Review:

In the spring of 2003, Jacques Derrida sat down for a public debate in Paris with Algerian intellectual Mustapha Chérif. The eminent philosopher arrived at the event directly from the hospital where he had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the illness that would take his life just over a year later. That he still participated in the exchange testifies to the magnitude of the subject at hand: the increasingly distressed relationship between Islam and the West, and the questions of freedom, justice, and democracy that surround it. As Chérif relates in this account of their dialogue, the topic of Islam held special resonance for Derrida—perhaps it is to be expected that near the end of his life his thoughts would return to Algeria, the country where he was born in 1930. Indeed, these roots served as the impetus for their conversation, which first centers on the ways in which Derrida’s Algerian-Jewish identity has shaped his thinking. From there, the two men move to broader questions of secularism and democracy; to politics and religion and how the former manipulates the latter; and to the parallels between xenophobia in the West and fanaticism among Islamists. Ultimately, the discussion is an attempt to tear down the notion that Islam and the West are two civilizations locked in a bitter struggle for supremacy and to reconsider them as the two shores of the Mediterranean—two halves of the same geographical, religious, and cultural sphere. Islam and the West is a crucial opportunity to further our understanding of Derrida’s views on the key political and religious divisions of our time and an often moving testament to the power of friendship and solidarity to surmount them.

Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, Third and Updated Edition: The Place of Meaning in a Global Civilization

Huston Smith

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A good book if you're interested in alternative worldviews. 4 out of 5 stars.
46 of 56 people found this review helpful.

The book is a collection of speeches and journal articles written by Huston Smith over the last few decades. From previous experience, I know that Professor Smith has a penchant for presenting complex topics in a readily accessible form. While I like this about his writing, I feel that he does not describe these terms in all of their complexity. The essays are polemical in nature and focus on Professor Smith's desire to revive metaphysics especially ontology and redirect modern epistemology away from control and towards awareness. As important as these topics are, I felt that Professor Smith avoided the social and political nature of any type of knowledge. Since I believe that this is one of post-modernism's thorniest critiques, time and space must be given to the real-time consequences of imposition of his hierarchic ontology. On the other hand, as a person of faith, this collect of essays challenges my worldview and forces me to consider how I have made space for a transcendent reality within the West's naturalistic worldview.

Editorial Review:

This new edition of critically acclaimed essays explores possible breakthroughs in the direction of reaching a liberated and enlightened consciousness. With a new preface and new final chapter. An invaluable collection of essays by the foremost religious writer in America today.

The Origins of Postmodernity

Perry Anderson

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Editorial Review:

Trenchant and panoramic, The Origins of Postmodernity traces the genesis, consolidation and consequences of the notion of the postmodern. Beginning its exhilarating intellectual tour in the Hispanic world of the 1930s, it follows the changes in the meanings and usage of the concept through to the late 1970s, when its adoption by Jean-Franois Lyotard and Jrgen Habermas first gave the idea of postmodernism wider currency. Central attention then falls on Fredric Jameson, whose work today represents the most outstanding general theory of the postmodern. Reconstructing the intellectual and political background of Jameson's interpretation of the present, The Origins of Postmodernity looks at its aftereffects in the debates of the 1990s. Anderson enriches his much-cited analysis of modernism by placing postmodernism in the force field of a dclass bourgeoisie, the growth of mediatised technology and the historic global defeat of the left symbolised by the end of the Cold War. Rigorously pursuing his interpretation of postmodernism as the cultural logic of a multinational capitalism 'complacent beyond precedent', Anderson ends with a set of historical reflections on the fading of modernism, shifts in the system of the arts, the rise of the spectacular, debates on the 'end of art', and on the fate of politics in the postmodern world.

Postmodernism Rightly Understood

Peter Augustine Lawler

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Brilliant -- and quirky in the best sense 5 out of 5 stars.
34 of 36 people found this review helpful.

Peter Augustine Lawler is a rare find, and may be the most original and insightful political philosopher writing in America today. This book takes seriously the possibility that our age can meaningfully be understood as "post-modern," but concludes ultimately that what are taken to be indicators of the post-modern condition are actually artifacts of, as it were, hyper-modernity. An authentically POST-modern philosophical position would look very different from what is commonly believed. Lawler here begins to mark out a path which would lead us truly beyond modernity.

He does so, moreover, in a prose style that is direct -- readers who have slogged through the ponderous obscurity of continental European theorists will give thanks! -- but also seriously ironical. There is humor, playfulness here, but it is playfulness with a purpose.

For those enamored of Foucault, Derrida, and company, not least of interest in this book is that Lawler reveals the genuinely philosophical dimension of American thinkers. The book takes aim at Richard Rorty and ultimately finds our best philosophical guide in the reflections of the Southern novelist Walker Percy.

With surprising formulations on almost every page, a reader with an interest in things post-modern may at first be tempted to dismiss an author who says such unheard-of things. But give this book a chance. You just might have to conclude that Lawler has it right after all.

Editorial Review:

Postmodernism Rightly Understood is a dramatic return to realism--a poetic attempt to attain a true understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the postmodern predicament. Prominent political theorist Peter Augustine Lawler reflects on the flaws of postmodern thought, the futility of pragmatism, and the spiritual emptiness of existentialism.

Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy: Two Paths of Liberation from the Representational Mode of Thinking

Carl Olson

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Editorial Review:

This book examines and compares the philosophical positions of various postmodern thinkers and Zen Buddhist philosophers on: language and play; modes of thinking; skepticism and doubt; self and other; time and death; nihilism and metaphysics; and the conception of the end of philosophy. The Zen thinkers dealt with are Dogen and Nishitani, and the Western thinkers are Derrida, Lacan, Heidegger, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze and Guatarri, Kristeva, and Levinas. Although each share similar notions concerning the shortcomings of representational thinking, major differences still exist. By clarifying these differences, Olson counters the tendency to overtly assert or covertly imply that postmodern and Zen philosophies are moving in the same direction. Some postmodern thinkers and Zen Buddhist philosophers share common philosophical ground with regard to a mutual philosophical attack and attempt to overcome the perceived shortcomings of the representational mode of thinking that conceives of the mind like a mirror and assumes a correspondence between appearance and reality that is supported by a metaphysical structure.

Anglo-american Postmodernity: Philosophical Perspectives On Science, Religion, And Ethics

Nancey Murphy

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Deft Overview 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 8 people found this review helpful.

This is an account not of mathematical specificity, rather a general backdrop to many current themes in the philosophy of science, religion, and ethics that is abundantly illuminating. For an individual acclimating to the world of postmodernism, specifically with regard to Christianity and the Anglo-American cultural paradigm, Murphy is an excellent source of information and she should be commended for her ability to articulately integrate often thought disparate fields.

Editorial Review:

The term postmodern is generally used to refer to current work in philosophy, literary criticism, and feminist thought inspired by Continental thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida. In this book, Nancey Murphy appropriates the term to describe emerging patterns in Anglo-American thought and to indicate their radical break from the thought patterns of Enlightened modernity.The book examines the shift from modern to postmodern in three areas: epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. Murphy contends that whole clusters of terms in each of these disciplines have taken on new uses in the past fifty years and that these changes have radical consequences for all areas of academia, especially in philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and ethics.

God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion)

John D. Caputo, Apology for the Impossible: Religion, Postmodernism John

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Editorial Review:

Pushing past the constraints of postmodernism which cast "reason" and "religion" in opposition, "God, the Gift, and Postmodernism" seizes the opportunity to question the authority of "the modern" and opens the limits of possible experience, including the call to religious experience, as a new millennium approaches. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, engages with Jean-Luc Marion and other religious philosophers to entertain questions about intention, givenness, and possibility which reveal the extent to which deconstruction is structured like religion. New interpretations of Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, and Derrida emerge from essays and discussions with distinguished philosophers and theologians from the United States and Europe. The result is that "God, the Gift, and Postmodernism" elaborates a radical phenomenology that stretches the limits of its possibility and explores areas where philosophy and religion have become increasingly and surprisingly convergent. The contributors include: John D. Caputo, John Dominic Crossan, Jacques Derrida, Robert Dodaro, Richard Kearney, Jean-Luc Marion, Frangoise Meltzer, Michael J. Scanlon, Mark C. Taylor, David Tracy, Merold Westphal, and Edith Wyschogrod.

The Reality Overload: The Modern World's Assault on the Imaginal Realm

Annie Le Brun

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Editorial Review:

A powerful critique of the increasing mechanization and homogenization of modern life

• Shows how the constant force-feeding of too much information dispossesses us of our deepest connections

• Describes a link between the destruction of the environment with the assault on our individuality, creativity, and ability to think for ourselves

What underlies the many problems of the modern world--from accelerating rates of extinction and desertification to the increased alienation of the individual--is a reality overload, an increasingly invasive mechanization and homogenization of modern life that glorifies consumption and conformity. This overload has been created from the constant force-feeding of too much information, a phenomenon that dispossesses us of our deepest connections to time, our physical world, and each other.

Annie Le Brun explains that the degradation of the environment mirrors the devastation going on in our minds revealing a link between genetically modified foods and the transformation and decay of our language and communication. There is a direct relationship between the rupture of the great biological balances that govern the planet and the equally devastating rupture in our imaginal realm. The imaginal realm is the home of our dreams and the perceptions that feed our thoughts, individuality, and creativity. Without its influence we are forced to live a drab, alienated lifestyle based on consumption alone. If, as Shakespeare claims, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on,” this theft of our imagination by the reality overload threatens the very foundations of our existence.

Religion and Culture

Michel Foucault

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Editorial Review:

Postmodern theorist Michel Foucault is best known for his work on "power/ knowledge", and on the regulation of sexuality in modern society. Yet throughout his life, Foucault was continually concerned with Christianity, other spiritual movements and religious traditions, and the death of God, and these themes and materials scattered are throughout his many writings. Religion and Culture collects for the first time this important thinker's work on religion, religious experience, and society. Here are classic essays such as The Battle for Chastity, alongside those that have been less widely read in English or in French. Selections are arranged in three groupings: Madness, Religion and the Avant-Garde; Religions, Politics and the East; and Christianity, Sexuality and the Self: Fragments of an Unpublished Volume. Ranging from Foucault's earliest studies of madness to Confessions of the Flesh, the unpublished fourth volume of his History of Sexuality, his final thoughts on early Christianity, Religion and Culture makes Foucault's work an indispensable part of contemporary religious thought, while also making an important link between religious studies and cultural studies.