Volumne 5 No. 2
BOOK NOTES
Must-Reads -
Sources of Light On a Dark Winter Night
Fortress Press is blooming with excellent,
even ground-breaking books, on inter-gender justice, sexual pleasure,
and the links between healthy sex and spirituality.Here they are.
The Justice Men Owe to Women: Positive Resources
from World Religions by John C. Raines accosts the fact that
all the world religions are shot through with sexism and patriarchy.
That, however, is not their whole story. They also contain rich theories
of justice which, when applied to women, give grounds for a solid and
compelling feminism. The book grew out of a Consultation project and
is a companion to the volume from SUNY Press,What Men Owe to Women:
Men's Voices from World Religions edited by John C. Raines
and Daniel C.Maguire.
Carey Ellen Walsh gives us Exquisite Desire: Religions,
the Erotic, and the Song of Songs. Churchmen for centuries strained
to get the sex out of the Song of Songs and to reduce it to an allegory
of God's or Christ's sexless love for the world.Nonsense, says Walsh.
These are the words of a feisty ancient woman who could express the
full power of sexually charged love and who somehow saw to it that her
passionate poetry got preserved in the Bible. The book is a study of
erotic desire and its relationship to a healthy spirituality.
Also in the "not to be missed" category
is Patricia H. Davis' Beyond Nice: The Spiritual Wisdom of Adolescent
Girls. Society greets girls with a host of controls calculated
to drive girl's feelings underground. Anger, desire, ambition are not
"nice" in girls. If all this "niceness" prevails,
girls lose a sense of themselves, of their bodies, and of their personal
potential. Fueled by revealing interviews with girls, Davis opens up
the paths of freedom.
Writing out of expertise in clinical psychology, Karen
A. McClintock takes on the neurotic religious taboos that lead to sexual
dysfunction and the closeting and repression of one's
precious sexuality - especially, but not only if that sexuality is gay
or lesbian in expression.Her book, Sexual Shame: An Urgent Call
to Healing, is a kind of homeopathic medicine that looks for
cures in the very religious tradition that housed so many of the noxious
taboos.McClintock gives resources for group and congregational discussions
that attack the shame and lead to the liberating joy of healing.
Selling at a fast clip is the recently released Sacred
Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions
by Daniel C.Maguire. This book shows that the religions of the world
can often plausibly be read as grounding a "no-choice" position
on contraception and abortion.However, the more moderate "pro-choice"
view on family planning, including abortion when needed, is also solidly
grounded in the world's religions. Both the "no choice" and
the "pro-choice" positions are orthodox, faith- based, and
equally deserving of full protection in law. This is a message the US
Supreme Court needs to hear.