Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Introduction

Women's history has few celebrations uniquely its own. This work, published to honor the centennial of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Woman's Bible , provides such an occasion for the female academic community. In Fiorenza (Harvard Divinity Sch.), feminist biblical scholars now have a dynamic and erudite leader. She indicates a clear path between totally rejecting Scripture for its patriarchy and simply selecting from the Bible what suits the purposes of feminism. Instead, Fiorenza sets the stage for a hermeneutic of both suspicion and revision, which one hopes will be continued in the forthcoming volume. Her interpretation pulls from Christian history, liberation theology, and ecumenism as she calls on white and nonwhite women to give such issues as racism, native cultures, and economics and religion depth and context. Academic in tone and well footnoted, this work is definitely aimed at a scholarly audience, for whom it is highly recommended. --Sandra Collins, SLIS, Univ. of Pittsburgh

This long-awaited critical feminist introduction to Scripture underlines the political character of biblical interpretation. Yet it does not adopt the conceptual and methodological approach of The Woman's Bible, seeking rather to be inclusive, ecumenical, and multicultural. --From the Publisher