Description
Book Synopsis“How is the reign of God revealed through the suffering experience of women and the marginalized?” That is the question this book seeks to answer. It employs the Lukan image of the “bent-over-woman-standing-up-straight” as the paradigm for all who are marginalized because of gender, sexual orientation, or race. It arises from encounters with individuals and communities who suffer exclusion, negation, diminishment, and violence in relation to a patriarchal church in a still-patriarchal world. Engaging Edward Schillebeeckx’s method of negative contrast experience, Kathleen McManus explores what may be known in the space of encounter between the institutional church and these suffering “others” and draws out latent possibilities for mutual conversion and transformation. This book reflects on the meaning of Schillebeeckx’s insight into “the superior power of God’s defenseless vulnerability” in creation and on the cross, and asks what it might mean for the church to embody the vulnerable rule of God in its own structures, doctrines, symbols, and rituals.
Table of ContentsPart I: Overture to the Bent-Over-Woman-Standing-Up-Straight
1. The Mysticism of Resistance: The Global Suffering of Women as an Ethical Imperative for the Church
Part II: Experience and Revelation: Whose Experience Counts, and Who is Doing the Counting?
Introduction to Part II
2. Women Fermenting Impasse
3. The Spiritual Suffering of LGBTQ+ People and People of Color
4. Race, the Reign of God and the Catholic Church
Part III: Sequela Jesu: Encountering the Vulnerable Rule of God
Introduction to Part III
5. Encounters on the Periphery: Revealing the Reign of God
6. Creation, the Spirit, and the Church’s Ethical Imperative
