T&T Clark Power for: Feminism and Christ's Self Giving

Product Description Feminist theologians have established that the self-giving doctrines can disempower women and other oppressed persons, teaching passivity and evasion of one's own self-development. Christ's kenosis, or self-emptying on the cross offers a central example of sacrifice for others to the detriment of one's own self-care. And yet, in contrast to previous feminist theologies, this book argues for the power available in self-giving. This feminist christology affirms that we come into ourselves through our own kenosis. Drawing on diverse sources, including traditional voices like Luther or Balthasar, contemporary feminist theologians such as Rosemary Radford Ruether or Marcella Althaus-Reid, and studies of abuse survivors, the book explores passionate self-giving as a power for divine and human revelation, a power for resistance of abuse, and a power for the continued anointing of Christic presence in a postmodern context. Self-giving engages a force that differs from both the power in mutual relation common to feminist theology and the power over of patriarchal thought. Christic self-giving conveys a power for: for God's thriving in the world, and for our own. Review 'In Power For: Feminism and Christ's Self-Giving Anna Mercedes has offered nothing less than a new Christian feminist theology of power. This is a book driven by the prophetic vigour of late twentieth-century second wave feminist theology but offering a contemporary theology that is fully situated in its more nuanced, risky third wave. Mercedes' celebratory negotiation with Christian notions of 'self-emptying' suggests that service and care - even the masochistic courting of pain - should not be dismissed as instances of a merely 'feminine' domestic self-abnegation but can be embraced as forms of public resistance to oppression. Exceptionally readable, but abundantly informed, Power For is a book that no student of erotic, relational theology should be without.' - Melissa Raphael, Professor of Jewish Theology, University of Gloucestershire, UK.--Sanford Lakoff About the Author Anna Mercedes is Assistant Professor of Theology at the College of Saint Benedict, Saint John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota, USA.