What is it about theology

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 01 June 2006 09:28:48

I have been reading with interest about a range of theologians, particularly interviews with a range of contempory Baptist theologians on Andy Goodliff's blogg. They have been really good, solid, useful descriptions and interviews but I have been getting wound up - why is it all men? I think what got me slightly was the fact that Baptists as a denomination have always, atleast on one level, been v. women friendly in this country and wider afield (in the UK we have allowed women ministers since 1922) and so I figured that there might be atleast one in there somewhere (not as tokenism, but as having got there by now).

Anyway, thinking about this I was taken aback when I turned and looked at the bookshelf which contains my theological and better quality Christian(ish) type books and saw apart from the feminism section all bar a couple of books were by men (the only exception being a book looking, broadly at secularisation, by Grace Davie). I have the feminism section seperate because they are books which are explicityly about Gender Issues in some form or other or are books by theologians who explicitly define themselves as feminist to some degree, or quite often both.

The standard books may have chapters contributed by women, but often these have a gender issue bias (example: Stories of Emergence - 15 contributors, 2 female - 1 explicitly talking about moving out of the femist movement, 1 talking about feeling exiled from her denomination - partly because of their view of women and the church). Those that don't have such a strong gender bias appear to be more sociologically than theologically based.

I don't know if it is just me expecting too much or what, but I thought we were now getting to a place where women didn't have to "do gender issues" to succeed and we'd moved way beyond that, but I'm not too sure. I don't do tokenism, but I just can't believe that all the good work is simply done by men. Apart from the what she's written bit of Maggi Dawn's site any one got any ideas where I might find some more evidence that we are not living on planet zog and in fact are in 21st century earth?