Seventeen essays explore how the biblical Miriam, Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary of Bethany, and Mary Magdalene were portrayed in the early Christian era, also touching on Jewish and Muslim interpretations.
KEEP READINGJunia, A Woman, An Apostle by David Williams is a thorough examination of Romans 16:7. The book is intended to introduce general readership to the technical arguments for the conclusion that the person spoken of in this verse was a woman apostle.
KEEP READINGMen are from Israel, Women are from Moab: Insights about the Sexes from the Book of Ruth, written by Dr. Norm Wakefield and Jody Brolsma, takes a quick look at our gender stereotypes and discards them. Instead, they focus on how we can build one another up and nurture healthy relationships.
KEEP READINGBen Witherington III’s story of Priscilla provides extensive insight into the lives of the earliest Christian women.
KEEP READINGShe Preached the Word explores data around who supports women’s ordination in the United States, why, and the effects of women in ministry on those in the pew. The book serves as a tool to understand congregants' views on women's ordination and offers some discussion on how those views are formed, including the influence of politics on theological convictions. It is a starting point for advocates who want to find the most effective strategies to change opinions around women ministers.
KEEP READINGNicola Creegan and Christine Pohl—a theologian and theological ethicist respectively, and both professors at evangelical institutions—belong to roughly the same cohort of academic women: they pursued seminary then doctoral training in the 1980s, encouraged by the success of the third wave of feminism and its (albeit fainter) reverberations in the evangelical subculture. Living on the Boundaries is their attempt to track what happened to almost one hundred scholars like themselves: women with advanced theological training who have self-identified as evangelicals and feminists, though not always simultaneously.
KEEP READINGVan Leeuwen calls upon the church as the family of God to help individual families discover how their unique constellation of gifts can best serve God.
KEEP READINGSlaves, Women and Homosexuals is a hermeneutical tour de force. Webb severs ties with traditional hermeneutical textbooks by offering intra-scriptural and extrascriptural criteria and a case study approach (akin to W. M. Swartley's Slavery, Sabbath, War & Women) rather than a step-by-step methodology.
KEEP READINGPaula Gooder presents an imaginative telling of the life and ministry of Phoebe. She states that her purpose in writing this story is not simply to provide an entertaining novel, but also to inform readers of the reality behind the NT text.
KEEP READINGThe book lives up to its subtitle, A Provocative Guide. . . . Though it has some value, I do not recommend it without reservation, given her methods of interpretation noted above.
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