“When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens.” –Maya Angelou Renowned visionary bell hooks explored the meaning of love in American culture with the critically acclaimed bestseller All About Love: New Visions. She continued her national dialogue with the bestselling Salvation: Black People and Love. Now hooks culminates her triumphant trilogy of love with Communion: The Female Search for Love. Intimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every woman to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey we must all choose to be truly free. In her trademark commanding and lucid language, hooks explores the ways ideas about women and love were changed by the feminist movement, by women's full participation in the workforce, and by the culture of self-help, and reveals how women of all ages can bring love into every aspect of their lives, for all the years of their lives. Communion is the heart-to-heart talk every woman -- mother, daughter, friend, and lover -- needs to have.

The book investigates three situations in the Catholic Church that point to Catholicism's weak spot: the role of women in the Church. Zagano sheds light on the Catholic Church's hierarchically-imposed laws that keep women at a distance from the holy, whether as liturgical ministers, as wives of priests, or as priests themselves.

Elizabeth Prevost examines the massive Protestant campaign of female missionary expansion between the 1860s and 1930s, through a comparison of Anglican women's experience in Uganda and Madagascar.

The culmination of a lifetime's scholarly work, this pioneering study by Sister Prudence Allen traces the concept of woman in relation to man in Western thought from ancient times to the present. Volume I uncovers four general categories of questions asked by philosophers for two thousand years. These are the categories of opposites, of generation, of wisdom, and of virtue. Sister Prudence Allen traces several recurring strands of sexual and gender identity within this period. Ultimately, she shows the paradoxical influence of Aristotle on the question of woman and on a philosophical understanding of sexual coomplemenarity. Supplemented throughout with helpful charts, diagrams, and illustrations, this volume will be an important resource for scholars and students in the fields of women's studies, philosophy, history, theology, literary studies, and political science. In Volume 2, Sister Prudence Allen explores claims about sex and gender identity in the works of over fifty philosophers (both men and women) in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. Touching on the thought of every philosopher who considered sex or gender identity between A.D. 1250 and 1500, The Concept of Woman provides the analytical categories necessary for situating contemporary discussion of women in relation to men. Adding to the accessibility of this fine discussion are informative illustrations, helpful summary charts, and extracts of original source material (some not previously available in English). In her third and final volume Allen covers the years 1500--2015, continuing her chronological approach to individual authors and also offering systematic arguments to defend certain philosophical positions over against others.

A Woman Through and Through In a culture that can belittle womanhood on the one hand—making it irrelevant—and glorify it on the other—making it everything—it’s hard to know what it really means to be a woman. But when we understand womanhood through the lens of Scripture, we see that we need a bigger category for what God has called “woman.” This book breathes fresh air into our womanhood, reminding us what life in Christ—as a woman—looks like. When we see that we are women in all we do, we can be at peace with how God has created us, recognizing womanhood as an essential part of Christ’s mission and work.

Catholic women are some of the most maligned, most caricatured, and most intriguing people in American society. America is flirting with the idea that being a Catholic female means saying "yes" to the faith as a private source of comfort, but "no" to living out its more countercultural moral and social teachings. Catholic women are facing unprecedented questions about sex, money, marriage, work, children and the church itself -- questions with innumerable personal and societal repercussions. Is it even possible that the teachings of a 2,000 year old religion are still relevant for today's toughest issues? A quick tour of leading cultural indicators seems to say "no." But this is far from the whole story. Many women, courageously facing questions their mothers and grandmothers would never have encountered, are finding intellectually and spiritually satisfying answers within the framework of their Catholic faith. Nine such Catholic women -- varying widely in age, occupation and experience -- share personal stories of how they struggled toward the realization that the demands of their faith actually set them free. Their stories -- full of honesty, but ultimately hope -- shed new light and new clarity on women's continued attraction to the Catholic faith. Topics include: Navigating dating and sexpectations Feminism, freedom and contraception Children versus a "better me" Being Catholic in light of the sexual abuse scandal Faith, psychology and same-sex attraction

In the past several decades, the issues of women’s ordination and of homosexuality have unleashed intense debates on the nature and mission of the Church, authority and the future of the Anglican Communion. Amid such momentous debates, theological voices of women in the Anglican Communion have not been clearly heard, until now. This book invites the reader to reconsider the theological basis of the Church and its call to mission in the 21st century, paying special attention to the colonial legacy of the Anglican Church and the shift of Christian demographics to the Global South. In addition to essays by the volume editors, this 12-essay collection includes contributions by Jane Shaw, Ellen Wondra and Beverley Haddad, among others.