Routledge Ritual Making Women: Shaping Rites for Changing Lives (Gender, Theology and Spirituality)

Ritual Making Women looks at the way in which women's making of ritual has emerged from the rapidly developing field of women's spirituality and theology. The author uses ethnographic material to explore how the construction of ritual uses story-making and embodied action to empower women. Ritual, far from being a timeless and universal practice, is shown to be a contextual and gendered performance in which women subvert conventional distinctions of private and public. The book combines narrative and case study material and draws on feminist theology and theory, social anthropology and gender studies. Review "Berry pursues a wide-ranging discussion of issues involved in the construction and enactment of ritual and the effects of such ritual making. The interweaving of detailed descriptions of these case studies with discussion of theory related to ritualizing makes for a fresh and stimulating contribution to this field of study." – Practical Theology About the Author Jan Berry is a tutor in Practical Theology at Luther King House, Manchester, where she teaches pastoral studies, liturgy and worship, and feminist theology and spirituality on an MA and undergraduate programme in contextual theology. She is a minister of the United Reformed Church, and has considerable experience in creating and writing material for worship, particularly with women's groups. She has previously worked in local church ministry and university chaplaincy.