Introducing Feminist Theology

Week 1
Proto-feminist theology

This week focuses on Valerie Saiving Goldstein’s 1960 essay, ‘The Human Situation: a Feminine View’, which first identified the need for a feminist theology. We will use this as the basis for a discussion what feminist theology is, and needs to be.

Week 2
The critical edge

This week, we will be discussing Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father (1973); a landmark piece of early feminist theology that dramatically broke with the Christian tradition. We will be using this to discuss the critical edge of feminist theology, and asking just where critique ends.

Week 3
Particularisation

This week’s text is Jacquelyn Grant’s White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus (1989), which offers a Black critique of feminist theology and a feminist critique of Black theology, and argues that Black women require a theology of their own – a “womanist” theology. We will discuss how this represents a “particularisation” of feminist theology, and consider what it means to be the subject of feminist liberation.

Week 4
Beyond identity

 This week, we will look at Marcella Althaus-Reid’s From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology (2004). Althaus-Reid argues that feminist theology revolves around a vision of womanhood that reproduces norms of sexual “decency”, which are themselves vehicles for colonial patriarchy. She argues for an “indecent theology” that takes the sexual transgression as the basis for its view of sex, gender, and society. We will ask what it means to do feminist theology in a way that is invested in transgression as such - including where this means disrupting the identities around which feminist theology traditionally turns.

Week 5
Feminist theology today

In our final session, we will look at a recent paper in feminist theology which draws from many of the themes discussed in previous sessions: Emma McDonald’s ‘Finding the Maternal Divine in Contextual Realities of Motherhood’ (2023). We will consider how feminist theology can illuminate gendered phenomena such as motherhood and refine the theologies constructed around them, and reflect on what it means to engage the world in a feminist theological register.

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