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1220 l WOMEN-CENTERED THEOLOGY do so is to buy into and reinforce the heterosexual model that privileges couples over single people and confers benefits accordingly. On the matter of children, there is consensus that families can be formed in a range of gender constellations. What provokes more discussion are the ethical matters of multiple partners and the pastoral matters of helping people deal with the pressures of coming out and coping with unwelcoming families . Theologians help to name and clarify issues, in this case, articulating women’s love for one another as blessed despite contrary social messages. Much remains to be done to convince a culture firmly based on heterosexual couples that love comes in a variety of packages . But lesbian, bisexual, and women-identified scholars have laid a strong foundation in the theological world for love that dares speak its holy name. SOURCES: The extensive bibliography in the field includes early Christian work by Sally Miller Gearhart, “A Lesbian Looks at God-the-Father or All the Church Needs Is a Good Lay—On Its Side,” Philadelphia Task Force on Women in Religion , Genesis III 3.1 (May–June 1973), insert; and her volume edited with William R. Johnson, Loving Women/Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church (1974). Women’s love for women in Christian scripture is analyzed by Bernadette J. Brooten, Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (1996). Carter Heyward looked at ethical issues in Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (1989), as did Mary E. Hunt in Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (1991). Kelly Brown Douglas articulated a womanist perspective on sexuality in “Daring to Speak: Womanist Theology and Black Sexuality,” in Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation and Transformation , ed. Emilie M. Townes (1997), 234–246. Jewish sources include Evelyn Torton Beck’s anthology Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (1982) and Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation, ed. Rebecca T. Alpert, Sue Levi Elwell, and Shirley Idelson (2001). Judith Plaskow’s groundbreaking Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (1990) laid out the contours for renewed Jewish understanding of sexuality . Debra Kolodny paved the way on bisexuality in her anthology Blessed Bi Spirit: Bisexual People of Faith (2000), while Virginia Ramey Mollenkott opened the transgender discussion with Omnigender: A Trans-religious Approach (2001). JEWISH FEMINISM Judith Plaskow BECAUSE JEWISHNESS IS more than a religious identity , Jewish feminism is more than a religious movement . A glance through the two Jewish feminist periodicals Lilith and Bridges, or through major anthologies on Jewish feminism, makes clear that the transformation of women’s status and roles within the Jewish religious tradition is just one of the issues on the Jewish feminist agenda. Some of the subjects of major concern to different groups of Jewish feminists are the absence of women’s leadership in Jewish communal institutions, anti-Semitism and homophobia in the culture and the women’s movement, the place of Jews in multiculturalism and the relationship of Jewish feminism to broader struggles for social justice, the roles of women in Israeli society, and the stance of feminists toward the Israeli Occupation. The first two national Jewish women’s conferences , held at the McAlpin Hotel in New York City in 1973 and 1974, each had several sessions on religious issues, but they also looked at such topics as growing up Jewish, women in Jewish education, Jewish women and aging, and being Jewish and poor. In other words, Jewish feminism is a loose, complex, and diverse religious , social, and political movement, as diverse and complex as Jewish identity itself. Beginnings and Beyond That said, however, it is certainly the case that the critique and transformation of Judaism are central to the Jewish feminist project and that religious feminism is a rich and heterogeneous movement in its own right. Although individual women voiced their dissatisfactions with women’s secondary status within Judaism from the beginnings of the modern era, the movement dedicated to protesting and remedying women’s subordination in public Jewish religious life emerged in the early 1970s. It was at that historical moment that some Jewish women involved in the second wave of American feminism applied the insights they had gained in the broader movement to their status and roles within Judaism and began to agitate and organize for change. Two early articles helped to articulate and focus a growing discontent among American Jewish women. In the fall of 1970, Trude...

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