Ten Theology Books to Watch For – August 2023

Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement

Gina Zurlo

(Wiley-Blackwell)

A groundbreaking, comprehensive, and interdisciplinary analysis of women’s experiences in World Christianity

Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement is the first textbook to focus on women’s experiences in the founding, spread, and continuation of the Christian faith. Integrating historical, theological, and social scientific approaches to World Christianity, this innovative volume centers women’s perspectives to illustrate their key role in Christianity becoming a world religion, including how they sustain the faith in the present and their expanding role in the future.

Women in World Christianity features findings from the Women in World Christianity Project, a groundbreaking study that produced the first quantitative dataset on gender in every Christian denomination in every country of the world. Throughout the text, special emphasis is placed on women in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the period of Christianity’s shift from the global North to the global South. Easily accessible chapters – organized by continent, tradition, and select topics – introduce students to the wide variety of Christian belief and practice around the world. The book also discusses issues specifically relevant to women in the church: gender-based violence, ecology, theological education, peacebuilding and more.
 

ADVERTISEMENT:

 

The Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity

Bruce Longenecker and
David Wilhite, Eds.

(Cambridge Univ. Press)

The first three hundred years of the common era witnessed critical developments that would become foundational for Christianity itself, as well as for the societies and later history that emerged thereafter. The concept of ‘ancient Christianity,’ however, along with the content  that the category represents, has raised much debate. This is, in part, because within this category lie multiple forms of devotion to Jesus Christ, multiple phenomena, and multiple permutations in the formative period of Christian history. Within those multiples lie numerous contests, as varieties of Christian identity laid claim to authority and authenticity in different ways. The Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity addresses these contested areas with both nuance and clarity by reviewing, synthesizing, and critically engaging recent scholarly developments. The 27 thematic chapters, specially commissioned for this volume from an international team of scholars, also offer constructive ways forward for future research.

The authors address particularly different aspects of women’s leadership in the Catholic Church, with a special emphasis on the global South. The contributors are lay and religious people from India, Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, the US, Singapore, and the Philippines. The topics explored in this volume include women’s use of Scripture, the ecclesiological basis for women in church leadership, and the leadership roles that women have been exercising already in grassroots church communities, in Marian devotion, in faith-based social movements, and in theological education.

<<<<< PREV. PAGE |
NEXT PAGE >>>>>
PAGE 3 of 5