In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editors’ Introduction
  • Judith Plaskow (bio) and Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre

With this issue, Judith Plaskow is back in the saddle as coeditor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion after an interval of seventeen years. She finds, with pleasure, that the Journal has a much more developed infrastructure than the one in place when she stepped down after its tenth anniversary—a testimony to the extraordinary leadership of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and the group of wonderful coeditors with whom she has worked. The fact that the JFSR is no longer self-published but has moved to Indiana University Press means that some of the functions formerly carried out in-house have been taken over by the press. Thanks to the ongoing support of Drew University Theological School, we now have a submissions editor who corresponds with authors and reviewers. With the development of the FSR, Inc., website (www.fsrinc.org), we now have open journal software that allows us to process submissions and reviews electronically. Members of the editorial board function as poetry and religion and politics editors. We have established and regularized the Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholar Awards to encourage the next generation of feminist scholarship. And despite the fact that we publish only semiannually, we have attempted to make its content more timely and more connected to current feminist struggles by including editorials and more articles on religion and politics. All this frees the editors to spend more time thinking about substance rather than constantly having to focus on the details of getting out each issue. Although we face the pressures common to all print media at this historic moment, Elisabeth becomes Senior Editor at a time when the Journal is in excellent shape internally. And Judith returns temporarily as coeditor to help lay the groundwork for a strong future for JFSR.

The current issue illustrates very well the ability of the Journal to respond to current events and initiatives and also to bring new feminist critical questions to historical texts and materials. The first two articles, “Mary Baker Eddy, the Woman Question, and Christian Salvation” and “Sexism in Practice” are joint first-place winners of the Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholar Award (NSA). Essays eligible for the award go through the normal review process and then, if accepted, are sent to a subcommittee of the board that evaluates and ranks them. Thanks to Zayn Kassam, Karen Pechilis, and Ellen Umansky for serving on the NSA committee this year, and congratulations to co-winners [End Page 1] Amy Voorhees and Conor Kelly for their excellent and very different essays that together capture some of the range of topics found in the JFSR. Voorhees suggests a new direction for feminist historiography on Mary Baker Eddy. She points out that much of the feminist scholarship on Eddy depicts her as an “ambiguous” feminist—an important role model for other women but one with a complicated and shifting relationship to women’s rights. Questioning the value of moving Eddy back and forth on an anachronistically defined feminist spectrum, Voorhees places Eddy’s gendered work within her larger religious project. She argues that Eddy’s relationship to the Woman Question “is emphatic and radical, yet qualified and ultimately subsumed by her soteriology” (5). Kelly’s article takes as “text” not a historical figure or body of literature but the “hookup culture” that is a common feature of contemporary college life. After carefully laying out the central characteristics of this culture, Kelly shows how each of them is problematic from a feminist perspective. The last section of the article presents important tools from feminist theology and ethics that might help college students become more aware and critical of the sexism of hookup culture so they might begin to find ways of relating to each other that are more conducive to human flourishing.

The articles by Eunice Karanja Kamaara, Elisabeth T. Vasko, and Jeanine Viau and by Gail Labovitz mirror those of our award winners in that the first focuses on a contemporary issue and the second on a historical text. In “Listening and Speaking as Two Sides of the Same Coin,” Kamaara, Vasko, and Viau explore the complexities of...

pdf

Share