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X vii X Acknowledgments Substantial portions of this book were written with the support of a postdoctoral fellowship from the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. I thank Tom Banchoff, the center’s director , for the gift of time to think and write, and the faculty at Georgetown, who welcomed me warmly into their community during my fellowship year. Writing was also supported by faculty excellence grants from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and by my colleagues in the department of religious studies who have become invaluable mentors and close friends during the last three years. The research I conducted in Iran would not have been possible without the generous support provided by the Human Rights Program of the University of Chicago, which funded my travel to Iran in the summer of 2004, and the Institute of Women’s Studies and Research in Tehran, which graciously hosted me during my stay and was invaluable in facilitating meetings with key leaders of the Iranian women’s movement. To the women who agreed to meet with me in Iran, despite political pressure not to, I owe a debt I can never repay. I also want to thank Roja Fazaeli and Ezzat Goushegir, who helped me with the task of cultural and linguistic translation during the early stages of my research and without whom my fieldwork would not have been nearly as productive. Portions of the preface, introduction, and epilogue appeared in “Dianomy : Understanding Religious Women’s Moral Agency as Creative Conformity ,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78, no. 3, (2010): 662–86. Oxford University Press has granted permission to publish them here. The method used in this book and discussed in the introduction draws on two of my earlier publications: “Speaking of Motherhood: The Epideictic Rhetoric of John Paul II and Ayatollah Khomeini,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 26, no. 2 (2006): 93–123, and “Methodological Invention as a Constructive Project: Exploring the Production of Ethical Knowledge through the Interaction of Discursive Logics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 36, no. 3 (2008): 355–73. Georgetown University Press and John Wiley and Sons, respectively, have granted permission for portions of these essays to be reproduced here. This book has benefited from numerous conversations with colleagues. Particular thanks goes to William Schweiker, Aaron Stalnaker, Jonathan viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Schofer, Tulasi Srinivas, Abdulaziz Sachedina, and Jean Bethke Elshatin, all of whom read large portions of this manuscript at various stages and pushed me to deepen my analysis. My primary debt is to my partner Alexis Zubrow, who helped me to keep balance throughout this process and to remember that scholarship can be fun. ...

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