The Joy of Honoring Rosemary Radford Ruether by Dirk von der Horst

DirkA cutting-edge voice in many theological conversations, Rosemary Radford Ruether has been an inspiration to many of us over the last few decades.  The tremendous joy of my last couple of years was co-editing a volume of essays in her honor.  Even discovering just how dreary indexing is was a labor of love for a true pioneer in feminist theology.  The result: Voices of Feminist Liberation: Writings in Celebration of Rosemary Radford Ruether, a collection of fourteen essays by Ruether’s doctoral students, put together by Emily Leah Silverman and Whitney Bauman, along with myself.

Voices of Feminist Liberation documents the current state of her impact and legacy.  The richness of her thought is manifest here in the variety of directions her students have taken her insights.  While most of the essays are scholarly works that engage her ideas above all else, some essays have more personal recollections.  Rosemary’s preface recounts her personal experiences of and with us, with descriptions of incidents from her relationships ranging from hearing a live-in student coming down the hall to slip a paper under the door, to seeing a student’s dissertation prospectus enrage a committee member, to switching from same-sex hand-holding in Palestine to male-female hand-holding in Israel as a small gesture of recognizing cultural difference. Continue reading “The Joy of Honoring Rosemary Radford Ruether by Dirk von der Horst”

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