Rosemary Radford Ruether

"A stirring manifesto for progressive Catholics and denunciation of Vatican politics from pioneering feminist Catholic Rosemary Ruether"--Publisher's description.

"From the earliest interactions of Christians with the Roman Empire to today's debates about the separation of church and state, the Christian churches have been in complex relationships with various economic and political system for centuries. Renowned theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether analyzes the ways Christian churches historically interacted with powerful systems such as patriarchy, racism, slavery and environmentalism, while looking critically at how the church shapes these systems today. This book is neither an attack on the relationship between Christianity and these systems nor an apology bur rather a nuanced examination of the interactions between them. By understanding how these interactions have shaped history, we can more fully understand how to make ethical decisions about the role of Christianity in some of today's most pressing social issues."--Jacket.

The author traces the evolving Christian concepts of marriage from the early church's rejection of marriage up to today's conservative "Family Values" understanding of marriage.

"Beginning with the Jewish and Roman families of antiquity, Ruether shows that the anti-family traditions of the Gospels and early Christianity can be understood as a critique of oppressive forms of family. But as the eschatological fervor of early Christianity waned, and the church grew into a stable social force, it came to rely upon family life, and soon sought to shape it. As Ruether traces the conjunctions between Christian theologies of family and political and economic change through patristic and medieval Christianity, the Reformation, and up to the present day, we see how religious and philosophical ideals have functioned again and again to prescribe, rather than describe, family roles. In particular, we see how these ideals have sought to tell women how to behave in relation to men."--BOOK JACKET.

In Women Healing Earth noted theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether brings together illuminating writings of fourteen Latin American, Asian, and African women on the meaning of eco-theological issues in their own contexts - and the implications they have for women in the first world. Ruether has spent the last several years exploring the environmental crisis, the roles of religion and feminists, and what third-world women have to say. Ecofeminists in the North must listen carefully to women in the South since common problems can only be solved by understanding cultural and historical differences. When women of the South reflect on ecological themes, these questions are rooted in life and death matters, not in theory, nor statistics. As Ruether writes, "Deforestation means women walking twice as far each day to gather wood .... Pollution means children in shantytowns dying of dehydration from unclean water." Impoverishment of the environment equals literal impoverishment for the vast majority of people on the planet. In addressing the intertwining issues of ecology, of class and race, of religion and its liberative elements, Women Healing Earth offers profound insights for all women and men involved in the struggles to overcome violence against women and nature, and to ensure ecological preservation and social justice.

In her most significant work to date, Rosemary Radford Ruether sifts through the legacy of the Christian and Western cultural heritage - the beliefs and stories that have influenced our relationships with each other and with the earth - to illuminate future models for earth healing. "Ecological healing is a theological and psychic-spiritual process," writes Ruether. Although she examines the Western patriarchal tradition from an ecofeminist perspective, Ruether insists. That "classical traditions did not only sacralize patriarchal hierarchy over women, workers, and the earth. They also struggled with what they perceived to be injustice and sin and sought to create just and loving relations between people in their relation to the earth and to the divine. Some of this effort to name evil and struggle against it reinforced relations of domination and created victim-blaming spiritualities and ethics. But there are also glimpses in this. Heritage of transformative, biophilic relationships. These glimpses are a precious legacy that needs to be separated from the toxic waste of sacralized domination." Ruether sees the work of eco-justice and the work of spirituality as interrelated, the inner and outer aspects of one process of conversion and transformation. In juxtaposing the terms Gaia and God in the title of this book, she explores crucial issues surrounding the relationship between the living planet. Earth, and our Western religious traditions. Gaia is the Greek earth goddess, and a term adopted by biologists such as James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in reference to their thesis that the entire planet is a living system behaving as a unified organism. Growing numbers of people have begun to see the Jewish and Christian male monotheistic God as a destructive concept that rationalizes alienation from and neglect of the earth, while Gaia, as an immanent divinity, is seen. As the all-nurturing earth mother goddess. Ruether points out that merely replacing a transcendent male deity with a female one does not answer the "god-problem." What we need, in her view, is a vision of a much more abundant and creative source of life. "A healed relation to each other and to the earth calls for a new consciousness, a new symbolic culture and spirituality." writes Ruether. "We need to transform our inner psyches and the way we symbolize the. Interrelations of men and women, humans and earth, humans and the divine, the divine and the earth." Gaia and God is a major critical work by an internationally acclaimed writer and teacher. It is a sweeping ecofeminist theology that argues for healing relationships between men and women, classes and nations, and humans and the earth.