Love, Sex and Gender in the World Religions Edited by Joseph Runzo and Nancy Martin.
I realised I needed more general discussions on gender relations and religion for my essay and this books seemed fairly appropriate. I only read a couple of the essays but they seemed to contain what I was looking for.
The first, Toward a General Theory of Women and Religion by Arvind Sharma was both a bit irritating but also quite good and insightful. The article was written in a very familiar style, discussions of having dinner with her friends, but also contained some rather interesting viewpoints on how to view religion in relation to it's treatment of women. She basically divided up the problem into two issues, what she called "Religion and Women" which took the idea that women, as part of the humanity that religion addresses, were able to abstain salvation through religion , and therefore it was inclusive to them, against the idea of "Women and Religion" which treated women as inferior to men. The difference was summed up very well in her sentence, "as human beings, religion offers women salvation, but as women it offers them subordination". While not necessarily ground breaking, her ideas did sum up nicely the difficulties encountered with studying the two, and gave me quite a bit of useful fodder.
The Real Trouble With Confucianism by Vivian Lee-Nyitray
Looks at the gender relations in Confucianism. It is interesting as in the article she describes Confucianism as a religion, but in her regard to gender relations, she mentions little in the way of any "religious" activities. She makes a deliberate point of saying that Confucianism is not simply the cultural view of China, but in her arguments, many of the points she makes, are exactly that, particularly as she stresses the changes over time.
She gives a historical overview of views on women throughout Chinese history, starting with earliest examples from the book of odes and the book or rites, which were less than favourable. But she points out that women were seen as moral beings. Mothers were seen as being responsible for educating their sons, particularly in morality. Mencius mother being the ultimate example of this, my favourite story being how their first house was near the graveyard and Mencius started playing games of conducting funerals with his friends, So his mother moved them to a more appropriate dwelling, they ended up by a school, so he played at being a scholar.
The author writes that Confucianism is not termed a religion in Chinese, (zong jiao), but she states that it has functioned as one in Chinese culture. It is interesting to note that the word for religion is a relatively new word that was borrowed from the Japanese, and was first used to discuss Western religions. Traditionally in China the words used was either dao or jiao, (way or teaching) both of these words were used to describe what we call "Confucianism" as well as Taoism and Buddhism. It is odd that the author of the essay does not mention this at all.
When I first read through the essay it seemed to be quite interesting and useful, however going back and rereading my notes and looking a little closer it seems that there was not much new that she was able to add to the discussion. It seemed more to be aimed at people who were not familiar with the issue.
Politicising Gender and Religion: Love for women, Love for Islam by Zayn Kassam, seemed to have little to do with her subtitle. There was little talk of love in her work, rather she gave a fairly good overview of the different gender relations in Islam. I thought it was interesting that she tended to focus almost entirely on the social differences between men and women, secluding women, women's inferior position etc, and totally ignored the spiritual side of the role of women, what they were allowed to do, how they were allowed to participate in the religion etc. Personally I would have liked to have seen that. The history that she gave on the formation of the ideas and how they are viewed today were quite interesting. She gave examples from modern Islamic states and how they have interpreted these laws into the rights, or lack of rights, of the women citizens. I have to say for me Islam is the hardest religion for me to understand, particularly from the standpoint of how women are viewed, I just can't understand what it is that makes women want to be Muslim. Of course I have a hard time understanding religion in general which is why I find it so fascinating.
