Anne Phillips

Nicola Slee

Fran Porter

Identifying, illuminating and enhancing understanding of key aspects of women and girls' faith lives, The Faith Lives of Women and Girls represents a significant body of original qualitative research from practitioners and researchers across the UK. Contributors include new and upcoming researchers as well as more established feminist practical theologians. Chapters provide perspectives on different ages and stages of faith across the life cycle, from a range of different cultural and religious contexts. Diverse spiritual practices, beliefs and attachments are explored, including a variety of experiences of liminality in women’s faith lives. A range of approaches - ethnographic, oral history, action research, interview studies, case studies and documentary analysis - combine to offer a deeper understanding of women’s and girls' faith lives. As well as being of interest to researchers, this book presents resources to enhance ministry to and with women and girls in a variety of settings.

Qualitative Research Perspectives

The Faith Lives of Women and Girls

Andrew P. Rogers

Practical theology has become a well-established academic discipline in Britain and Ireland over the past half century, evidenced in its chairs, journals, books, conferences, and contribution to transformed practices. The British and Irish Association for Practical Theology (BIAPT) and its journal, Practical Theology, has had a significant role to play in the story of the discipline. This volume is a celebration of practical theology in Britain and Ireland in all its inventiveness and variety on the occasion of BIAPT’s twenty-fifth birthday. It offers an account of its roots in its emergence from the Scottish Pastoral Association in the 1960s, its trajectories established in the journal Contact/Practical Theology and how human experience has been a constant companion on the journey. The book considers a range of methodologies including engagement with popular culture, public theology, the arts, and the importance of conversation. It explores new shoots in the discipline that consider how sexuality, ethnicity, and different religious traditions may be addressed within practical theology. It concludes by asking how it may be fruitful in the future, by reflecting on the challenges ahead, not least the ubiquity of ignorance. This is a landmark text in the unfolding of British and Irish practical theology in all its glorious distinctiveness, which promises to be a major contribution to international debate in the discipline. The chapters in this book were first published in Practical Theology.

Roots, Shoots and Fruits

Celebrating the Past, Present and Future of British and Irish Practical Theology

The figure of the feminine side of Christ is widely present in art and in feminist theology, but the risen Christa has not so far been explored. In this ground-breaking book, Nicola Slee, writing in a mixture of reflection, poetry and images, revisits many of the central narratives of the gospels and key Christological themes, re-imagining them through the eyes and voice of the Christa, offering original and creative perspectives as a resource for theology and spirituality. This book is in quest of a risen Christa who invites women and men to leave behind a clinging, dependent relationship with God and to discover a wider, freer Christ.

Seeking the Risen Christa

The ideal introduction to feminist theology, giving an overview of the most significant feminist theologians and texts.

An Introduction to Christian Feminist Theology

Faith and Feminism

The Lord’s Prayer unites Christians of all traditions. It is the first and perhaps only prayer that people learn by heart. However, its patriarchal and kingdom imagery do not resonate universally today. How do we pray the prayer Jesus taught us in ways which are authentic and life-giving? This volume, emerging from years of praying the Lord’s Prayer, offers a series of prayers and poems written in response to it. They wrestle with its central images and bring our own stories and relationships into dialogue with it. Each prayer uses the address Abba or Amma: Aramaic terms of intimate address to God as father or mother which reflect Jesus’ usage, drawing on the abbas and ammas of the Desert Tradition as well as our own parental relationships. It aims to integrate our whole human journey into the vocation of being a follower of Jesus. An extended introduction explores why praying the Lord’s Prayer is significant, how it is problematic, and how contemporary theological reinterpretations offer fresh perspective on it.

Improvisations on the Lord’s Prayer

Abba Amma

Acclaimed poet theologian Nicola Slee reflects on and wrestles with questions of how to practice the scriptural principle of Sabbath in a church and world that have become compulsively driven, competitive and workaholic, obsessively activist and outcome-oriented. Slee's rich and inspiring exploration is rooted in her own poetry and that of Wendell Berry, in particular his profound Sabbath poems. Ideal reflective reading for Christians wishing to resist the materialistic pressures of the world. Chapters include: An introduction to Sabbaths; The invitation 'into the woods'; The invitation to cessation; The invitation to encounter; The invitation to fear; The recovery of vocation; 'Coming out of the woods'.

The Hidden Heartbeat of Our Lives

Sabbath

Imaginative and passionate, these prayers bring the full range of women's experience before God. Blessings, laments, celebrations and creeds, they use a variety of forms and can be used by individuals and in a liturgical setting.

Praying Like a Woman

“Of all the women in the Bible,” writes Nicola Slee, “Mary has been for me the most ambivalent, the most alien and yet, at some level, the most alluring. I’ve taken a long time to come to her—or for her to come to me. I grew up in a religious tradition—low church Methodism—in which Mary hardly featured, other than in the nativity story. Yet it is hardly possible to exist as an inhabitant of the western world, with even half an eye open to the visual and cultural heritage of Christendom, and not to have been in some way affected by this woman, the woman of the Christian tradition.” With a collection of prayers and liturgical material focused around the figure of Mary, and the themes of motherhood, sisterhood, and female faith, this book projects a strong, contemporary attitude. It is clearly feminist, affirming the significance of Mary in the faith journey of contemporary Christian (and other) women, plus it challenges and critiques traditional stereotypes of Mary. The author explores the sorrows of Mary, her defiance and resistance, sexuality, sensuality, aloneness, independence and freedom, companionship, sisterhood, friendship, ministry, priesthood, contemplation, prayer and silence, wisdom, authority, faith, risk, and daring.

The Book of Mary

﻿If ever a period of time felt ‘fractured’ it is now. Whichever way we turn, we witness the dismembering and fracturing of many previously taken for granted realities, with maps and borders – physical and metaphorical – being redrawn before our eyes. What place for the feminist practical theologian in such a climate? “In Fragments for Fractured Times”, one of the world’s leading feminist practical theologians, Nicola Slee, brings together 15 years of papers, articles, talks and sermons, many of them previously unpublished. Collected from diverse times, places, settings and occasions, Slee offers an introduction to each fragment, “holding it up to the light and examining its size, shape, texture and pattern”. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of her writing, Slee demonstrates the richness and variety of feminist practical theological writing. What feminist theology brings to the table of scholarly thinking and embodied practice is, she suggests, something creative, artful, prophetic as well as playful – a resource for Christian living and thinking in fractured times.

What Feminist Practical Theology Brings to the Table

Fragments for Fractured Times

Aston Training Scheme

A Celebration of the Aston Training Scheme in Its 18th Year

Testimony to Transformation

Religious and spiritual engagement has undergone multiple significant changes in recent decades. Researching Female Faith is a collection of essays based on recent and original field research conducted by the contributors, and informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives, into the faith lives of women and girls – broadly from within a Christian context. Essays describe and recount original qualitative research that identifies, illuminates and enhances our understanding of key aspects of women’s and girls’ faith lives. Offered as a contribution to feminist practical and pastoral theology, the essays arise out of and feed back into a range of mainly UK pastoral and practical contexts. While the essays in this volume will contribute to an enhanced appreciation and analysis of female faith, the core focus is on feminist qualitative research methods and methodology. Thus, they demystify and illuminate the process of research, including features of research which are frequently under-examined. The book is a first in bringing together a specific focus on feminist qualitative research methodology with the study of female faith lives. It will therefore be of great interest to students, academics and practitioners with interests in faith and gender in theology, religious studies and sociology.

Nicola Slee

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