Editors' Introduction

With this issue of JFSR, the editors again invite you, our readers, to a rich intellectual journey. Its variegated and critical feminist arguments and explorations seek to compel readers to engage in such a feminist journey with the goal of articulating their own insights and sites of further intellectual work.

First of all, we want to thank editorial board member Deborah Whitehead for her reflections on "Feminism, Religion, and the Politics of History." She argues that the Religious Right's claims on Susan B. Anthony as an advocate for their pro-life cause cannot be adequately refuted because feminist historians tend to ignore the role of religion in U.S. history. The assertion that, for Anthony, "religion had no place in politics," Whitehead argues, is problematic because it oversimplifies Anthony's and other early women's rights activists' complex interactions with religion.

Congratulations to Lisa D. Powell, Jill Peterfeso, and Katherine Bain for winning the 2011 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholar Awards. We thank the evaluating committee, consisting of editorial board members Mayra Rivera, Rebecca Alpert, and Miranda Shaw, for their careful work and judgment of the new feminist submissions. The varied topics of this year's winners' contributions—Sor Juana's critique of theological arrogance, the Mormon Vagina Monologues, and the importance of socioeconomic analysis in theorizing gender and religious status in Roman antiquity—document the diverse range of research interests of emerging feminist scholarship in religion.

The remaining articles lead us into quite different areas of scholarship. In her contribution, "A Jewish Reading of The Woman's Bible," Claudia Setzer revisits Elizabeth Cady Stanton's classic The Woman's Bible, and argues that its anti-Jewish statements "are tempered by Elizabeth Cady Stanton's rejection of Christian triumphalism" as well as by her articulation of problems and issues "that would engage feminist interpreters a century later" (71). The article by Ulrich Timme Kragh, entitled "Appropriation and Assertion of the Female Self," invites us not only to explore the historical landscape of Tantric Buddhism but also that of feminist epistemology. Julia Watts Belser and Melanie S. Morrison's Living It Out contribution, which concludes this issue, explores the dangers of anti-Judaism and ableism in New Testament healing narratives.

We are grateful to editorial board member Mary C. Churchill for opening up a new site of inquiry for JFSR with her interview of former Colorado state legislator Dorothy Jensen Rupert, who has worked tirelessly on issues that promote the rights and well-being of women and children. We hope that this interview encourages many of our colleagues and their students to submit similar interviews with leading feminists in religion. We are happy to publish this interview in the year of Rupert's eighty-fifth birthday. We raised the importance of celebrating feminist birthdays in the roundtable "Celebrating Feminist Work by Knowing It," in JFSR 27.1, and the poignant urgency of that need is driven home to us by news of the death of Catharina Halkes (1920-2011), whose ninetieth birthday was the occasion that launched the lead-in for that roundtable discussion.

The roundtable here on the joys and pitfalls of feminist mothering of sons originated in a FSR., Inc., preconference meeting for which members of our different boards gather annually. We are grateful to managing editor Stephanie May for writing the lead-in piece that explores her experience with raising her son as a white single mother and graduate student. The variegated responses confirm and elaborate her conclusion: "At issue are not simply questions of parenting, but also intergenerational issues in teaching feminist principles and practices to another generation of people struggling with the legacies and powers of the structures" of domination (133).

Most important, we owe a great thank you to Stephanie May because she has served very competently as the managing editor of JFSR since 2005. We are grateful to her beyond words for all her work in the past six years. Fortunately, she will not completely leave JFSR; she will continue her work as one of our web editors. Indeed, Stephanie has done tremendous work bringing our website...