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WOMEN’S RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION l 45 include Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (1993); Ada Marı́a Isasi-Dı́az, En la Lucha (In the Struggle): A Hispanic Women’s Liberation Theology (1993); and Kwok Pui-Lan, Discovering the Bible in a Non-Biblical World (1995). The growing contributions of women from Asia, Africa, and Latin America can be seen in Virginia Fabella and Mercy Oduyoye, eds., With Passion and Compassion: Third World Women Doing Theology (1988); Mercy Oduyoye and Musimbi R. A. Kanyoro, eds., The Will to Arise: Women, Tradition, and the Church in Africa (1992); and Elsa Tamez, ed., Through Her Eyes: Women’s Theology from Latin America (1989). WOMEN’S RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION Mary Farrell Bednarowski WHATEVER ELSE IT may be, religion, like politics, science , art, or economics, is a vast and dynamic arena of human creativity. As the instigator, nurturer, and negotiator of this creativity, the religious imagination has produced many and complex fruits: worldviews, rituals, beliefs, moral codes, narratives, institutions, spiritualities , roles and always-further-unfolding questions about the nature and meaning of life. Just as the artistic imagination draws upon color, form, and perspective, so does the religious imagination find its inspiration in the stuff of life experience and in the substance and symbols of religious traditions. Until recently, there has been almost no attention paid to how the exercise of religious imagination is related to gender and not much notice of the fact that the fruits of the religious imagination we know most about have been cultivated primarily by men. What is it, we now need to ask, about being a woman that inhibits the religious imagination or awakens it and encourages it along one path or another? One of the most powerful stimulants to the religious imagination of American women has been the historical persistence of their insider/outsider status. Women have been insiders in their religious traditions in terms of numerical presence and indirect influence since the middle of the seventeenth century. At the same time, they have been outsiders in terms of public presence and authority. Possessed of intimate knowledge of their communities through participation in rituals and service and fellowship groups, women nonetheless have been deprived of access to centers of power. Accustomed to hearing the preacher or teacher speak to them and about them, women traditionally have not been encouraged to discover that they have voices of their own and distinctive experiences to contribute to their communities. When this conflicting reality of women’s experience of religion becomes acute, as it has particularly over the last forty years, women begin to tell stories about coming to see themselves as outsiders in communities where they have been involved for a lifetime. But women tell stories, as well, about what they have received from their traditions by way of histories and rituals, spiritual companions , and ways of looking at the world. Lutheran theologian Gail Ramshaw speaks for many women when she describes herself as “paradoxically richly nurtured by a church that constrained me” (Ramshaw, vii). Out of this dual and often volatile experience, women’s religious imagination has blossomed, an imagination that is both critical of religion and involved in its ongoing construction. This gendered imagination looks to see whether there is still living water in the well, blessings yet to be found. It pushes hard at boundaries by rede- fining them, extending them, and often, ignoring them. In undertaking these multiple and demanding enterprises , women’s religious imagination historically has taken an immense variety of forms and continues to do so into the present. Three of the most prominent are the strategic imagination, the imagination that expresses itself in flashes of insight, and the elaborative imagination that opens up religious themes inspired by women’s experiences of their lives and their religious communities . All three forms demonstrate different configurations of women’s insider/outsider status. The Strategic Imagination: Subversion and Indirection At any given moment in North American religious history, there is evidence that women use the strategic imagination to overcome restrictions on full participation in their communities. The women who devise these strategies may ultimately demand, “How do we change the entire system?” But for the short term they are more likely to ask, “How do we gain more access to participation and public authority?” There are innumerable contemporary examples, but it is even more compelling to look to history as a reminder of how long women have needed...

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