Women and U.S. Liberation Theologies

Catalog description

This course examines major theological themes in Christianity, and the role that critical theoretical and religious analyses of gender, race, class, sexuality, ecology, culture, and nationality play in re-articulating those themes within women's liberation theologies in the United States. More specifically, this course explores criticisms and reconstructions of conventional Christian beliefs and practices regarding the divine, salvation, the human person, and ritual. To do so, we will engage in a critical and comparative study of major works in U.S. white feminist, African-American womanist, Latina feminist or mujerista, and Asian American feminist theologies. Through our study of women's multicultural theologies within U.S. Christianity, we will consider what distinguishes and what is shared by them, as well as interrogate our own understandings and those of the theologians about the relationships between religion and women's oppression as well as liberation.