The idea and ideal of "beauty" has been used to oppress women of different ages, body types, skin color, and physical ability. The theoretical discussion of aesthetics has also been conditioned by these same dynamics of power and oppression. In She Who Imagines, a diverse set of scholars challenges the exclusion and false definitions while constructing capacious ideas that discover beauty in unexpected places.
In these essays, the authors draw on a variety of arts media-painting, photography, portraiture, craftwork, poetry, and hip-hop music-thereby joining beauty to truth and, in a richly defining way, to the practice of justice. In a variety of ways all the essays link women's definitions of beauty with experiences of suffering and hence with the yearning for justice. All clearly prize resistance to degradation as an essential element of thought.
Arvustused
Calling into question the overlooked reality of women as creators and interpreters of beauty, [ this book] opens new dimensions in the developing area of theological aesthetics as well as the traditional field of theological anthropology.. Its contribution to theology lies in the way it knocks on the door of theological aesthetics, showing the enrichment that could ensue if it opened to include women, their imaginative work of critique and their constructive work of interpretation. More broadly, it takes its place in the growing body of work that contributes to the struggle for human dignity and spiritual self-determination for women that is a hallmark of our time. Read it with anticipation of bracing critique and constructive ideas, especially regarding the linkage of beauty with justice. From the Foreword by Elizabeth A. Johnson, author of Quest for the Living God
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vii | |
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| Introduction |
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ix | |
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| Acknowledgments |
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xix | |
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For the Beauty of the Earth: Women, Sacramentality and Justice |
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3 | (14) |
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Theological Aesthetics and the Encounter with Tonantzin Guadalupe |
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17 | (20) |
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Kollwitz: The Beauty and Brutality of the Pieta |
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37 | (16) |
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Contemplating the Landscapes of Motherhood: The Discovery of Beauty in a Place We Thought We Knew |
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53 | (20) |
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Part 2 She Who Is Imagined |
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The Critical Aesthetics of Race |
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73 | (14) |
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The Jennifer Effect: Race, Religion, and the Body |
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87 | (16) |
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Picturing Suffering: The Moral Dilemmas in Gazing at Photographs of Human Anguish |
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103 | (22) |
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AIDS, Accountability, and Activism: The Beauty of Sue Williamson's Resistance Art |
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125 | (20) |
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Picturing Paradise: Imagination, Beauty, and Women's Lives in a Peruvian Shanty town |
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145 | (16) |
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A Harsh and Dreadful Beauty: The Aesthetic Dimension of Dorothy Day's Ethics |
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161 | (20) |
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Being Immaculate: Images of Oppression and Emancipation |
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181 | (24) |
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The Feminine Face of God Is My Face: On the Empowerment of Female Self-Portraiture |
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205 | (20) |
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| List of Contributors |
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225 | |
Laurie Cassidy, PhD, is a theologian and spiritual director currently teaching in the Christian Spirituality Program at Creighton University. An award-winning author and editor, her books include InterruptingWhite Privilege: Catholic Theologians Break the Silence, edited with Alex Mikulich. Her latest book, The Scandal of White Complicity in US Hyper-Incarceration: A Non-Violent Spirituality of White Resistance, is co-authored Alex Mikulich and Margaret Pfeil. As well as being an anti-racist activist, she has ministered in the area of spirituality for the past thirty years and provided spiritual direction, retreats, and workshops across the United States. Her research and writing explore the political and cultural impact of Christian mysticism in personal and social transformation. Maureen H. O'Connell is associate professor of theology at Fordham University. She is the author of If These Walls Could Talk: Community Muralism and the Beauty of Justice (Liturgical Press, 2012) and Compassion: Loving Our Neighbor in an Age of Globalization(Orbis, 2009).
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