Product details
- ISBN 9781032087573
- Weight: 360g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jun 2021
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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The Orthodox Christian tradition has all too often been sidelined in conversations around contemporary religion. Despite being distinct from Protestantism and Catholicism in both theology and practice, it remains an underused setting for academic inquiry into current lived religious practice. This collection, therefore, seeks to redress this imbalance by investigating modern manifestations of Orthodox Christianity through an explicitly gender-sensitive gaze. By addressing attitudes to gender in this context, it fills major gaps in the literature on both religion and gender.
Starting with the traditional teachings and discourses around gender in the Orthodox Church, the book moves on to demonstrate the diversity of responses to those narratives that can be found among Orthodox populations in Europe and North America. Using case studies from several countries, with both large and small Orthodox populations, contributors use an interdisciplinary approach to address how gender and religion interact in contexts such as, iconography, conversion, social activism and ecumenical relations, among others.
From Greece and Russia to Finland and the USA, this volume sheds new light on the myriad ways in which gender is manifested, performed, and engaged within contemporary Orthodoxy. Furthermore, it also demonstrates that employing the analytical lens of gender enables new insights into Orthodox Christianity as a lived tradition. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of both Religious Studies and Gender Studies.
Helena Kupari is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Cultures, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, Finland. She has published a monograph entitled Lifelong Religion as Habitus: Religious Practice among Displaced Karelian Orthodox Women in Finland (2016) and has contributed chapters and articles on Religious Studies to various publications in the field.
Elina Vuola is Professor of Global Christianity and Dialogue of Religions at the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki, Finland. She has been a visiting scholar at the Women’s Studies in Religion Program of the Harvard Divinity School (2002-2003) and at the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University (2014-2015). She has written multiple chapters and articles and lectured widely on the interaction of gender and Orthodox Christianity. Her most recent monograph is The Virgin Mary across Cultures: Devotion among Costa Rican Catholic and Finnish Orthodox Women (2019).
