While the Wisdom volume in the first Feminist Companion series investigated multiple aspects of characterizations of women found in Wisdom literature, the 13 essays in this volume move beyond the study of the characterization of females that formed one of the first steps of modern feminist criticism-the recovery of what had been ignored or trivialized by androcentric readings dominant through the centuries. This second volume takes up questions of voice, exclusion and construction as well as the reinforcement of world views that, while perhaps necessary to the survival of the postexilic community as a whole, nevertheless left a legacy of continued gender asymmetry in Judaism and Christianity.

This valuable resource both presents and demonstrates the numerous developments in feminist criticsm of the Bible and the enormous rage of influence that feminist criticism has come to have in biblical studies. The purpose of the book is to raise issues of method that are largely glossed over or merely implied in most non-feminist works on the Bible. The editors have included broadly theoretical essays on feminist methods and the various roles they may play in research and pedagogy, as well as non-feminist essays that have direct bearing on the methods or subject matter that feminists use, as well as reading that illustrate the variety of methodological strategies adopted by feminist scholars. Some 30 scholars, from North America and Europe, have contributed to this Companion.

Biblical studies and the teaching of biblical studies are clearly changing, though it is less clear what the changes mean and how we should evaluate them. Susanne Scholz casts a feminist eye on the politics of pedagogy, higher education, and wider society, decrypting important developments in "the architecture of educational power." She also examines how the increasingly intercultural, interreligious, and diasporic dynamics in society inform the hermeneutical and methodological possibilities for biblical exegesis. Taken as a whole, the fourteen chapters demonstrate that the foregrounding of gender, placed into its intersectional contexts, offers intriguing and valuable alternative ways of seeing the world and the Bible‘s place in it.

This volume critically engages with the problems traditional Christology raises for feminist theology. It also explores the creative engagements of feminist theologians with the person of Jesus.

This book introduces feminist perspectives in pastoral theology. It is concerned both with pastoral care and practice and also with pastoral theology and theory. It seeks to explore why the inclusion of women's experiences and of feminist perspectives is of vital importance to Christian pastoral practice and to a Christian understanding of God. The book is designed for concerned practitioners and also has specifically in mind the needs of students of pastoral theology. It begins with the lived experience of violence in Church and society, moving through to the implications of this for our understanding of the human community and the divine.

This final volume in the Feminist Companion to the Bible Second series is a sparkling collection. These essays revisit the figure of the Goddess, redefine female prophet-(esse)s, consider Yahweh as a violent husband, explore various aspects or eroticism in prophetic literature and discuss how to say no to a prophet. In the section on Daniel the Obtuse Foreign Ruler is viewed from the perspective of both feminism and humor, while Belshazzar's mother is proposed as another wise queen. Contributors include Judith Hadley, Esther Fuchs, Renate Jost, Rainer Kessler, Gerlinde Baumann, Mary Shields, Erin Runions, Tamar Kamlonkowski, Ulrike Sals, Julia M. O'Brien, Mayer Gruber, H. von Deventer, and Emily Sampson.

The second series of Feminist Companions moves beyond the confines of sex- and gender-specific issues and studies of biblical women. Biblical feminist critics now address contemporary life situations, marginalization and a range of questions once not thought accessible to such critique. Feminist theory has also continued a rapid evolution. Among the topics included in this volume are composition, Torah, Ruth-the-Cat, female networking-together with much else to inform and stimulate female (and male) biblical scholars and non-scholars.