A monumental and pioneering study on women and Buddhism.

Eshinni (1182–1268?), a Buddhist nun and the wife of Shinran (1173–1262), the celebrated founder of the True Pure Land, or Shin, school of Buddhism, was largely unknown until the discovery of a collection of her letters in 1921. In this study, James C. Dobbins, a leading scholar of Pure Land Buddhism, has made creative use of these letters to shed new light on life and religion in medieval Japan. He provides a complete translation of the letters and an explication of them that reveals the character and flavor of early Shin Buddhism. Readers will come away with a new perspective on Pure Land scholarship and a vivid image of Eshinni and the world in which she lived. After situating the ideas and practices of Pure Land Buddhism in the context of the actual living conditions of thirteenth-century Japan, Dobbins examines the portrayal of women in Pure Land Buddhism, the great range of lifestyles found among medieval women and nuns, and how they constructed a meaningful religious life amid negative stereotypes. He goes on to analyze aspects of medieval religion that have been omitted in our modern-day account of Pure Land and tries to reconstruct the religious assumptions of Eshinni and Shinran in their own day. A prevailing theme that runs throughout the book is the need to look beyond idealized images of Buddhism found in doctrine to discover the religion as it was lived and practiced. Scholars and students of Buddhism, Japanese history, women’s studies, and religious studies will find much in this engaging work that is thought-provoking and insightful.

James Montgomery Boice provides an overview of Christian theology and doctrine in one systematic volume.

Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism inherited many negative doctrines around women’s bodies, which in some early Buddhist texts were presented as an obstacle to rebirth, and a hindrance to awakening in general. Beginning with an examination of these doctrines, the book explores Shin teachings and texts, as well as the Japanese context in which they developed, with a focus on women and rebirth in Amida’s Pure Land. These doctrines are then compared to similar doctrines in Christianity and used to suggestion fruitful avenues of Christian theological reflection.

How can curriculum history be re-envisioned from a feminist, poststructuralist perspective? Engendering Curriculum History disrupts dominant notions of history as linear, as inevitable progress, and as embedded in the individual. This conversation requires a history that seeks re-memberance not representation, reflexivity not linearity, and responsibility not truth. Rejecting a compensatory approach to rewriting history, which leaves dominant historical categories and periodization intact, Hendry examines how the narrative structures of curriculum histories are implicated in the construction of gendered subjects. Five central chapters take up a particular discourse (wisdom, the body, colonization, progressivism and pragmatism) to excavate the subject identities made possible across time and space. Curriculum history is understood as an emergent, not a finished, process – as an unending dialogue that creates spaces for conversation in which multiple, conflicting, paradoxical and contradictory interpretations can be generated as a means to stimulate more questions, not grand narratives.

Asserts the religious equality of men and women woven throughout both the Jewish and Christian traditions