Deeply into the Bone

Sample

Lisa Sowle Cahill

This book endorses feminist critiques of gender, yet upholds the insight of traditional Christianity that sex, commitment and parenthood are fulfilling human relations. Their unity is a positive ideal, though not an absolute norm. Women and men should enjoy equal personal respect and social power. In reply to feminist critics of oppressive gender and sex norms and to communitarian proponents of Christian morality, Cahill argues that effective intercultural criticism of injustice requires a modest defence of moral objectivity. She thus adopts a critical realism as its moral foundation, drawing on Aristotle and Aquinas. Moral judgment should be based on reasonable, practical, prudent and cross-culturally nuanced reflection on human experience. This is combined with a New Testament model of community, centred on solidarity, compassion and inclusion of the economically or socially marginalised. (Source: Cambridge University Press)

Sample

Helen LaKelly Hunt

"Why do so many women of faith have such a strong aversion to feminism? And why do so many feminists have an ardent mistrust of religion? These questions are at the heart of Helen LaKelly Hunt's look at the alliance between spiritual conviction and social action. Faith and Feminism offers a look at the lives of five women who combined their faith with feminist beliefs and who made the world a better place by doing so."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

Molly H. Bassett

"Following their first contact in 1519, accounts of Aztecs identifying Spaniards as gods proliferated. But what exactly did the Aztecs mean by a 'god' (teotl), and how could human beings become gods or take on godlike properties? This sophisticated, interdisciplinary study analyzes three concepts that are foundational to Aztec religion--teotl (god), teixiptla (localized embodiment of a god), and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundles containing precious objects)--to shed new light on the Aztec understanding of how spiritual beings take on form and agency in the material world. In The fate of earthly things, Molly Bassett draws on ethnographic fieldwork, linguistic analyses, visual culture, and ritual studies to explore what ritual practices such as human sacrifice and the manufacture of deity embodiments (including humans who became gods), material effigies, and sacred bundles meant to the Aztecs. She analyzes the Aztec belief that wearing the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim during a sacred rite could transform a priest into an embodiment of a god or goddess, as well as how figurines and sacred bundles could become localized embodiments of gods. Without arguing for unbroken continuity between the Aztecs and modern speakers of Nahuatl, Bassett also describes contemporary rituals in which indigenous Mexicans who preserve costumbres (traditions) incorporate totiotzin (gods) made from paper into their daily lives. This research allows us to understand a religious imagination that found life in death and believed that deity embodiments became animate through the ritual binding of blood, skin, and bone"--

Sample

Maurice Boyd

Presents Kiowa stories against the historical background of the tribe's life in the Yellowstone, their migration onto the northern Plains with its horse-buffalo culture, and their entry into the southern Plains where they and their Comanche allies dominated Indian life.