There is an increasing demand for the ordination of women as priests within the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican’s primary argument against priestly ordination of women is biblical, appealing to ...certain historical events, specifically Jesus’ (alleged) choice of male apostles only. This article calls for a rethinking and rephrasing of such appeal to history. Due to the nature of our sources, the historically responsible question should not be whom Jesus appointed as apostles, but who were apostles in first-century Christianity. The article points out flaws in the Vatican’s reasoning in this respect and brings attention to evidence from earliest Christianity that does indeed speak in favor of women as priests, if an appeal is to be made to history in the first place. The evidence is Junia, a first-century female apostle, described as “prominent among the apostles” by the apostle Paul in his Letter to the Romans.
The 115,000 priests on French territory in 1789 belonged to an evolving tradition of priesthood. The challenge of making sense of the Christian tradition can be formidable in any era, but this was ...especially true for those priests required at the very beginning of 1791 to take an oath of loyalty to the new government—and thereby accept the religious reforms promoted in a new Civil Constitution of the Clergy. More than half did so at the beginning, and those who were subsequently consecrated bishops became the new official hierarchy of France. In Priests of the French Revolution, Joseph Byrnes shows how these priests and bishops who embraced the Revolution creatively followed or destructively rejected traditional versions of priestly ministry. Their writings, public testimony, and recorded private confidences furnish the story of a national Catholic church. This is a history of the religious attitudes and psychological experiences underpinning the behavior of representative bishops and priests. Byrnes plays individual ideologies against group action, and religious teachings against political action, to produce a balanced story of saints and renegades within a Catholic tradition.
Considering cepstral analysis of voice as a measure of overall severity of dysphonia, we tried to investigate if these measures could be considered as a metric of vocal fatigue as well. Since voice ...quality changes are seen as a result of vocal fatigue, we wanted to find out if there were any correlations between the cepstral measures, vocal fatigue symptoms, and auditory perceptual evaluation of voice in professional voice users.
The pilot study was conducted on 10 temple priests belonging to the Krishna Consciousness Movement. We conducted a pre-post voice evaluation, which included recording voices before the beginning of any temple preaching in the morning and after all the preaching sessions in the evening. The priests also filled in the Vocal Fatigue Index (VFI) questionnaire twice (morning and evening), and all the voice samples were analyzed for GRBAS (Grade, Roughness, Breathiness, Asthenia, and Strain voice quality) rating by speech language pathologists with voice expertise. Correlations were obtained between the acoustic measures, VFI responses, and auditory perceptual evaluations.
The findings of our pilot study didn't show any correlations between the cepstral measures and the questionnaire responses or with the perceptual ratings. However, the cepstral measures were slightly higher for evening recordings than the morning recordings. Our participants did not experience or perceive any voice symptoms or vocal fatigue.
Despite more than 10 hours of voice use per day for over 10 years, our participants did not experience any voice symptoms or vocal fatigue. This finding indicates that there may be diverse reasonings and opinions about the occurrence of voice problems in various professional voice users. This is particularly because the participants’ responses to vocal fatigue symptoms had more of a psychological explanation (faith, self-power, etc.) rather than any physiological changes in the vocal apparatus.
Charting Known Territory Rowe, Mark
Japanese journal of religious studies,
01/2017, Letnik:
44, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article explores issues of temple succession (seshū), soteriology, and priestly identity through the experiences of three Buddhist women to demonstrate that female priests’ experience eludes ...either/or contrasts between submission to male authority or feminist resistance to patriarchy and to argue for an assessment of women priests’ agency on its own terms. Two of these women serve as abbots of temples, while one works as a deputy abbot (fuku jūshoku). They represent temple- and non-temple born (zaike), urban and rural temples, and different regions of the country. They have also each taken different paths to their current roles: one through marriage, and the other two through an unexpected death in the family. Relying on the voices of these priests, this article considers ways in which women navigate the basic pathways of priesthood: how they “choose” to be priests, how they are trained, and how they situate themselves in regard to institutional, doctrinal, and societal expectations. As such, this article also engages the ongoing concern of scholars and activists with politicized, normative approaches to agency in gender studies in non-Western contexts. Eschewing an assessment of what each of these priests offers in the way of resistance, this article instead considers how women priests’ experiences allow us to redefine contemporary temple Buddhism.
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