Love and Liberation reads the autobiographical and biographical writings of one of the few Tibetan Buddhist women to record the story of her life. Sera Khandro Künzang Dekyong Chönyi Wangmo (also ...called Dewé Dorjé, 1892–1940) was extraordinary not only for achieving religious mastery as a Tibetan Buddhist visionary and guru to many lamas, monastics, and laity in the Golok region of eastern Tibet, but also for her candor. This book listens to Sera Khandro's conversations with land deities, dakinis, bodhisattvas, lamas, and fellow religious community members whose voices interweave with her own to narrate what is a story of both love between Sera Khandro and her guru, Drimé Özer, and spiritual liberation. Sarah H. Jacoby's analysis focuses on the status of the female body in Sera Khandro's texts, the virtue of celibacy versus the expediency of sexuality for religious purposes, and the difference between profane lust and sacred love between male and female tantric partners. Her findings add new dimensions to our understanding of Tibetan Buddhist consort practices, complicating standard scriptural presentations of male subject and female aide. Sera Khandro depicts herself and Drimé Özer as inseparable embodiments of insight and method that together form the Vajrayana Buddhist vision of complete buddhahood. By advancing this complementary sacred partnership, Sera Khandro carved a place for herself as a female virtuoso in the male-dominated sphere of early twentieth-century Tibetan religion.
Amid political innovation and social transformation, Revolutionary America was also fertile ground for religious upheaval, as self-proclaimed visionaries and prophets established new religious sects ...throughout the emerging nation. Among the most influential and controversial of these figures was Jemima Wilkinson. Born in 1752 and raised in a Quaker household in Cumberland, Rhode Island, Wilkinson began her ministry dramatically in 1776 when, in the midst of an illness, she announced her own death and reincarnation as the Public Universal Friend, a heaven-sent prophet who was neither female nor male. InThe Public Universal Friend, Paul B. Moyer tells the story of Wilkinson and her remarkable church, the Society of Universal Friends.
Wilkinson's message was a simple one: humankind stood on the brink of the Apocalypse, but salvation was available to all who accepted God's grace and the authority of his prophet: the Public Universal Friend. Wilkinson preached widely in southern New England and Pennsylvania, attracted hundreds of devoted followers, formed them into a religious sect, and, by the late 1780s, had led her converts to the backcountry of the newly formed United States, where they established a religious community near present-day Penn Yan, New York. Even this remote spot did not provide a safe haven for Wilkinson and her followers as they awaited the Millennium. Disputes from within and without dogged the sect, and many disciples drifted away or turned against the Friend. After Wilkinson's "second" and final death in 1819, the Society rapidly fell into decline and, by the mid-nineteenth century, ceased to exist. The prophet's ministry spanned the American Revolution and shaped the nation's religious landscape during the unquiet interlude between the first and second Great Awakenings.
The life of the Public Universal Friend and the Friend's church offer important insights about changes to religious life, gender, and society during this formative period.The Public Universal Friendis an elegantly written and comprehensive history of an important and too little known figure in the spiritual landscape of early America.
In the last century, in both Islam and Judaism, female religious trailblazers have taken on roles traditionally dominated by men. In this study, I examine parallels between individual Muslim and ...Jewish female religious trailblazers under three rubrics: Exegesis of the Holy Book: Nehama Leibowitz and Aisha Abd al-Rahman; Delving into Oral Law: Judith Hauptman and Kecia Ali; and Crafting Responsa: Suad Saleh and Malka Puterkovsky. Remarkably, although these Muslim and Jewish women functioned in very different societies and within rather different religious traditions, they have much in common. The reasons for this seem to be the similar sociologies of Judaism and Islam, on the one hand, and the increasing globalization of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, on the other. Inevitably, there has been disagreement as to the extent to which these women were themselves feminists or contributed to women's advancement, dealt with the patriarchy of their time and place, or explicitly supported male dominance.
Worship facilitator Donna Dinsmore has organized more than 700 worship events in Canada between 1997 and 2005. Dinsmore is the Pastor of Worship and Music at White Rock Baptist Church in Vancouver. ...She reflects on some key issues regarding worship.
At the abortion clinic Neumark, Heidi
The Christian century (1902),
07/2019, Volume:
136, Issue:
15
Magazine Article
A pastoral encounter I'll never forget AS I HAVE followed the latest round of debate on abortion, provoked by the passage of stricter laws in several states, I've realized again that I don't fit ...easily into any camp: I am both prochoice and pro-life. The rhetoric and positioning on the right on this issue have almost no credibility for me when so many pro-lifers seek the death penalty, feel no compunction about the children dying at our borders, lobby against life-giving health care, objectify women, and promote policies that threaten all life on our planet. Shouldn't she have possibilities beyond sticking a dirty wire into her body or being told to carry the baby to term- an option she refused to consider anyway-only to have it taken away in the hospital because of her drug use? I returned with a list of options and waited to see what she would decide, hoping it was not the hanger.
The quotation in the title is taken from a contemporary, Mark Twain, who is often quoted as a stern critic of Mrs Eddy, but who also held the opinion that `In several ways she is the most interesting ...woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary'. Yet today, less than a hundred years after her death, Eddy has become barely visible in academic discussions relating to women, religion and spirituality, or in discourse concerning Christian and faith-based healing. Eddy produced seminal work in these fields and founded a world-wide religious movement in Christian Science, whose followers are still actively studying and practising the ideas she pro-pounded. As a reformer, Eddy wanted to reinstate `primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing', and she wrote her book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures to inspire the mainstream churches with this message. With the rejection of her ideas, she was impelled to found her own church to take her vision forward.
