Violence Against Women in Contemporary World Religion: Roots and Cures

Violence Against Women in Contemporary World Religion: Roots and Cures. Edited by Daniel C. Macquire and Sa’diyya Shaikh. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2007. 248 p. Hardcover. ISBN: 9780829817676. $60.00

Cover of Violence against women in contemporary world religions : roots and curesA companion volume to Heterosexism in Contemporary World Religion, reviewed in our Summer 2008 issue. Both of Macquire and Shaikh’s collections were prepared by the Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health, and Ethics and declare the same goal: to identify elements within the world’s religious traditions which will help overcome their inherent tendencies toward heterosexism and violence against women, respectively. All of these faiths originated in deeply patriarchal cultures, which are often reflected in their sacred writings and subsequent religious practices, but each also contains teachings, conceptual symbols, or interpretive traditions which renounce violence and support the full equality of women and GLBT persons.

The contributors to both volumes are a diverse set of theologians and religious scholars who write primarily from within the tradition being discussed. Attention is given to a variety of traditions: essays in the present volume address Buddhism, Hinduism, traditional Chinese teachings, and African traditional beliefs, as well as the three Abrahamic faiths.

Unfortunately, Violence Against Women is an uneven collection compared to the previous volume, which treats all faiths with sensitivity and insight. The three chapters on Christianity are rightly critical of the long history of misogyny in the Christian tradition, but disappointingly offer few suggestions on using life-affirming elements of Christian theology to counter it. Given that the central goal of the project is to show how religions “contain the cures for the misogyny they have caused and abetted,” these are serious flaws.

Reviewed by Ruth Ann Jones
Special Collections Cataloger
Michigan State University Libraries

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