Search results for ""Author Beth Allison Barr""

USA Today Bestseller Christianity Today 2022 Book Award Finalist (History & Biography) Foreword INDIES 2021 Finalist for Religion "A powerful work of skillful research and personal insight."--Publishers Weekly Biblical womanhood--the belief that God designed women to be submissive wives, virtuous mothers, and joyful homemakers--pervades North American Christianity. From choices about careers to roles in local churches to relationship dynamics, this belief shapes the everyday lives of evangelical women. Yet biblical womanhood isn't biblical, says Baylor University historian Beth Allison Barr. It arose from a series of clearly definable historical moments. This book moves the conversation about biblical womanhood beyond Greek grammar and into the realm of church history--ancient, medieval, and modern--to show that this belief is not divinely ordained but a product of human civilization that continues to creep into the church. Barr's historical insights provide context for contemporary teachings about women's roles in the church and help move the conversation forward. Interweaving her story as a Baptist pastor's wife, Barr sheds light on the #ChurchToo movement and abuse scandals in Southern Baptist circles and the broader evangelical world, helping readers understand why biblical womanhood is more about human power structures than the message of Christ.

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A close examination of religious texts illuminates the way in which parish priests dealt with their female parishioners in the Middle Ages. The question of how priests were taught to think about and care for female parishioners is the topic of this book. As neither misogynist villains nor saintly heroes, clerical authors of pastoral vernacular literature persisted both in their characterization of women as difficult parishioners and in their attempts to recognize women as ordinary parishioners who deserved ordinary pastoral care. Focusing on the important vernacular writings of John Mirk, his Festial and Instructions for Parish Priests, the author reveals how even a small number of influential sermon compilations, exempla, and pastoral guides could have significantly shaped the perceptions, attitudes, and- perhaps - actions of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century priests. Shedding light on the mental universe of the late medieval parish, this study offers important new insights into the reality of how priests perceived and fulfilled their spiritual obligations to the women they served. BETH ALLISON BARR is Assistant Professor of European Women's History at Baylor University.

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Jesus through Medieval Eyes will take you on an exploration of medieval representations of Jesus in theology and literature.Who is Jesus? What is he like? And who am I, encountering Jesus? These questions were just as important to Christians in the Middle Ages as they are today.And yet—as C.S. Lewis noted—the modern church tends to forget that people of different cultures and times also thought carefully about who Jesus was; and sometimes their ideas and emphases were different.Medievalist scholar Grace Hamman believes that we can deepen our understanding and adoration of Christ by looking to the Christians of the Middle Ages. Medieval Europeans were also suffering through pandemics, dealing with political and ecclesial corruption and instability, and reckoning with gender, money, and power. But their concerns and imaginations are unlike ours. Their ideas, narratives, and art about Jesus open up paradoxically fresh and ancient ways to approach and adore Christ—and to reveal where our own cultural ideals about the Messiah fall short.Medieval representations of Jesus span from the familiar—like Jesus as the Judge at the End of Days, or Jesus as the Lover of the Song of Songs—to the more unusual, like Jesus as Our Mother. Through the words of medieval people like Julian of Norwich, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Margery Kempe, and St. Thomas Aquinas, we meet these faces of Jesus and find renewed ways to love the Savior, in the words of St. Augustine, that "beauty so ancient and so new."

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Fourteenth Century England has quickly established for itself a deserved reputation for its scope and scholarship and for admirably filling a gap in the publication of medieval studies. HISTORY Drawing on a diverse range of documentary, literary and material evidence, the contributors to this volume examine several inter-related topics on political, social and cultural matters in late medieval England. Aspects of both arms production and armigerous society are explored, from the emergence of royal armourers in the early fourteenth century to the social implications of later armour and armorial bearings. Another major focus is the church and religion more broadly. The nature and significance of the ceremonial entry, the adventus, of bishops is explored, as well as the legal impact of provisions in shaping church-state relations in mid-century. Religious constructsof women are considered in a comparative analysis of orthodox and Lollard texts. Finally, a group of papers looks at aspects of politics at the centre, with an examination of the queenship of Isabella of France and the issue of the Mortimer inheritance in the early years of Richard II. J.S. Hamilton is Professor and Chair, Department of History, Baylor University. Contributors: Beth Allison Barr, Philip Caudrey, Katherine Harvey, Mark King, Malcolm Mercer, Shelagh Mitchell, Lisa Benz St John, Charlotte Whatley

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