In her latest book, feminist New Testament studies scholar and the*logian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza makes accessible to English readers some of her selected works in feminist the*logy and studies in religion, either previously published only in Chinese, German, Italian, and Portuguese or presented in global contexts and collections. This first volume in a projected three-volume series examines central themes in her leading writings regarding power, struggle, and vision. Reflecting these themes, the volume is divided into four sections that highlight different sites of the struggle to articulate and live a critical feminist political the*logy of liberation with respect to theory, social movements, religious institutions, and G*d-language.

Critically engaging with the theoretical notions of power in women's, gender, and feminist studies in religion, the introduction provides a feminist theoretical and the*logical framework for the volume by exploring in some depth the term kyriarchy (3–11). Coined by Schüssler Fiorenza, this term problematizes patriarchy's gender binary and associated essentialist claims about men and women and instead demonstrates the mutually intersecting and multiplicative relations of domination and subordination among race, gender, class, sexuality, age, and ability that configure—both constrain and enable in Foucault's terms—wo/men's subjectivities. In the book's first section, Schüssler Fiorenza argues that any adequate feminist explanatory and emancipatory theory, especially in feminist biblical hermeneutics, needs to be sociopolitically situated and to engender wo/men's movements for religious and social change and transformation (chap. 1 and chap. 3), and that a critical feminist the*logy of liberation operates as a kind of political theology articulating a radical democratic religious and social worldview in contrast to kyriarchy (chap. 2). As she states, “The task of feminist studies in religion is to articulate and envision a Spirit Center for a radical democratic citizenry of global dimensions” (77). Feminist theory and the*logy, then, stem from, stay rooted in, and are critically gauged against life-giving praxis, whether in serving global wo/men's liberation movements or in promoting discursive democratic forums (see 41).

Moreover, Schüssler Fiorenza characterizes the antikyriarchal work of the volume as “a vision quest, seeking to articulate the dream of justice as well as searching for transformative theories and practices of well-being in an unjust and violent world” (2). This vision invites four practices: metanoia or a conversion-based turn toward an alternative view of the self and the world; struggle against sociopolitical and religious kyriarchy; creating the ekklēsia of wo/men as the already but not yet fully realized alternative community for sustaining that struggle; and religious worldmaking in which a critical feminist political the*logy of liberation takes hope as the starting point for doing constructive theology and “seeks to imagine the domination- and violence-free world intended by G*d and to envision it anew with the help of religious traditions and language” (19). The book's remaining three sections furnish examples of these practices.

In the book's second section, Schüssler Fiorenza outlines practices of struggle against feminist “ideological entanglement” with Western imperialism and colonialism (chap. 4), with violence against wo/men supported by heterosexual family and gender norms (chap. 5), and with Christian anti-Judaism in which religious, racist, gender, and other antagonisms are reproduced and reinscribed by feminist Christologies and by religious identity politics (chap. 6).

In the book's third section, Schüssler Fiorenza tackles some obstacles to creating the ekklēsia of women, namely, the divides between social and religious wo/men's movements (chap. 7), and the Eurocentric, colonialist, and exclusionary notions of catholicity (chaps. 8 and 9). To promote a more plurivocal feminist movement and church, Schüssler Fiorenza contends that the ekklēsia of women rooted in the imago Dei “presages a world-community in which religious, racial, and class but also heterosexual markers no longer signify and legitimate status differences and relations of kyriarchal domination and subordination” (158). In other words, reclaiming the catholicity of the world church in all its multiplicity depends on cultivating a feminist the*logy and pneumatology in the “radical open space of divine Wisdom-Spirit” (164, 177–78, 180, 186–88, 191–93).

In the book's fourth and final section, Schüssler Fiorenza engages in feminist constructive theology as a kind of religious worldmaking by plumbing the religious and sociopolitical implications of Mariology, G*d-language, and spirituality for realizing the discipleship of equals, an alternative world of justice and love for wo/men and for world religions. Rather than a Marian model of the church and of discipleship, which only perpetuates kyriarchal gender norms, recovering the historical Mary urges contemporary disciples to announce and work for a better world today (chap. 10). Questioning the dualistic religious discourses and practices of domination and violence between monotheisms and other world religions involves, according to Schüssler Fiorenza, a feminist interpretation of the four ways of speaking about the divine—via negativa, positiva, eminentiae, and practica. Collectively, these four ways help reject G*d language that reinforces exclusion, dominance, and control, and instead require multiple images that function not only to enhance our spiritual and liturgical life, but also to enable our solidarity with liberation movements (chap. 11).

With this comprehensive volume, Schüssler Fiorenza clarifies that her critical feminist the*logy of liberation requires “a political Wisdom spirituality” (chap. 12) that provides a foundation for reclaiming a radical democratic society and church. This spirituality resists the elitist-racist-colonialist spirituality of “the White Lady” based on “self-alienation, submission, service, self-abnegation, dependence, manipulating power, backbiting, powerlessness, beauty and body regimen, duplicity, and helplessness” (236) and replaces it with “roads and journeys, public places and open borders, nourishment and celebration…seek[ing] for sustenance in the struggles for justice and cultivat[ing] creation and life in fullness” (237). In her brilliant and groundbreaking lifework, Schüssler Fiorenza has pioneered the biblical, the*logical, and sociopolitical means for walking in the ways of wisdom/Wisdom. Thus, this series promises to present readers, in both undergraduate and graduate classes in feminist the*logies, not only with the epitome of Schüssler Fiorenza's biblical and the*logical creativity, but also with the timely “means to re-imagine feminism as a Spirit/spiritual movement in the open space of Wisdom who calls us out of isolation and invites us to join Her justice movements around the world” (238).