Introducing Womanist Theology & The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology

I am a white, middle-class woman of European descent--Portuguese and Italian--who was raised in the Catholic Church. I have a Ph.D. I tell you this because an awareness of social location is foundational among women engaged in the theological enterprise today. Knowing who is doing the writing is paramount. Knowing a little bit about me will presumably help you in approaching this review.

The articles by Rosemary Radford Ruether, Kwok Pui-Lan, and Rita Gross in the first half of the Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology assert the above notion as pivotal to contemporary feminist theology. Whether you are black, white, Hispanic, Chinese or of another background will affect your theology and what you choose to illuminate in your work. In Introducing Womanist Theology, Stephanie Mitchem passionately asserts the centrality of her identity as a black woman to her construction of theology--she wants us to know that her background distinguishes how she writes and what she writes about.

Susan Frank Parsons says that women are reinventing their own theological language. At stake are not only how we talk about God, sacraments, worship and ritual, among other things, but also how we talk about each other and how we identify ourselves as women engaged in doing theology. What we refer to as "feminist theology" is not simply a challenge to male assumptions about religion and women, and a dismantling of those assumptions. Feminist theology is also about women challenging other women's assumptions about race, ethnicity, economic background and diversity of religious and spiritual experience. The theological task for women requires multicultural awareness, or intercultural awareness, as Pui-lan suggests. According to Rita Gross the task also requires an awareness that feminist theology extends beyond Christianity. She challenges women to open the conversation to other faith traditions.