Women Called To Witness

A collection of essays that examine how foods express American cultural values.

In Women Called to Witness, Nancy A. Hardesty locates the roots of American feminism in the evangelical revivals that emerged during the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century. She thus challenges the conventional wisdom that any movement for women's rights is a secular one because religion is inherently oppressive toward women. First published in 1984 and now revised and updated, this book focuses particularly on the followers of Charles Grandison Finney, an evangelist whose revivals spread from upstate New York eastward to New England and westward to Ohio. The author shows that in Finney's brand of revivalism, personal and social salvation were inseparably linked, and thus the evangelical strategies used in spreading the Christian gospel were readily adapted to various social crusades, including temperance, abolition, and eventually suffrage. Hardesty shows that such leaders as Frances Willard, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton all had links to the Finneyite revivals. All were active in the various reforms the revivals spawned.

"Call to Witness is the true story of one woman's battle with disability, discrimination, and a leading pharmaceutical powerhouse. Jane Gagliardo was a throwaway employee, fired after working nearly a decade for a leading vaccine maker when her disability surfaced. Jane is fearless and impassioned, and her story will leave readers empowered to stand up for themselves, even if it means standing alone. This 2002 landmark case changed the law and challenges the way corporations do business today. This riveting dramatic account sheds fascinating insight into the world of vaccine production, both past and present, that will have every reader searching through their immunization record--this corporation literally runs in the veins of millions of Americans."-- Page [4] of cover.

In Baring Witness, Holly Welker and thirty-six Mormon women write about devotion and love and luck, about the wonder of discovery, and about the journeys, both thorny and magical, to humor, grace, and contentment. They speak to a diversity of life experiences: what happens when one partner rejects Church teachings; marrying outside one's faith; the pain of divorce and widowhood; the horrors of spousal abuse; the hard journey from visions of an idealized marriage to the everyday truth; sexuality within Mormon marriage; how the pressure to find a husband shapes young women's actions and sense of self; and the ways Mormon belief and culture can influence second marriages and same-sex unions. The result is an unflinching look at the earthly realities of an institution central to Mormon life.

Using touchstones of significant moments - slavery and emancipation, the Great Awakening and suffragism, women's clubs and missionary movements, and the great Civil Rights struggles - Can I Get A Witness? documents the crucial links between faith and the struggle for justice that forms the basis of the contemporary womanist movement.

The Gospel of John recounts the story of an encounter between Jesus and a Samaritan woman at the well. After their conversation, she goes out to tell her neighbors about the mysterious stranger, and many of them believed "on the strength of her witness." These essays, drawn from around the world, reflect the many ways that women have reflected on and borne witness to the person, teaching, and praxis of Jesus Christ in light of their own varied contexts. These contexts include their struggles for life amidst wrenching poverty, racism, and violence; their experience of being female in male-dominated structures in the church and society; and their commitment to promote justice in view of the human dignity of women, all done in tandem with their faith relationship with the living God.

Newbery Medalist Karen Hesse emerses readers in a small Vermont town in 1924 with this haunting and harrowing tale. Leanora Sutter. Esther Hirsh. Merlin Van Tornhout. Johnny Reeves . . .These characters are among the unforgettable cast inhabiting a small Vermont town in 1924. A town that turns against its own when the Ku Klux Klan moves in. No one is safe, especially the two youngest, twelve-year-old Leanora, an African-American girl, and six-year-old Esther, who is Jewish.In this story of a community on the brink of disaster, told through the haunting and impassioned voices of its inhabitants, Newbery Award winner Karen Hesse takes readers into the hearts and minds of those who bear witness.

In this comprehensive open access book, written for readers from any or no religious background, Leena El-Ali does something remarkable. Never before has anyone taken on every last claim relating to Islam and women and countered it not just with Qur’anic evidence to the contrary, but with easy-to-use tools available to all. How can a woman’s testimony be worth half of a man’s? How can men divorce their wives unilaterally by uttering three words? And what’s with the obsession with virgins in Paradise? Find the chapter on any of the seventeen topics in this book, and you will quickly learn a) where the myth came from and b) how to bust it. The methodology pursued is simple. First, the Qur’an is given priority over all other literary or “scriptural” sources. Second, the meaning of its verses in the original Arabic is highlighted, in contrast to English translations and/or widespread misunderstanding or misinterpretation.

Saving Women is a much-needed study of women's contributions to the theology of evangelism. Through a careful consideration of the primary sources of six Protestant women ministering in America from 1800-1950, this historical and theological study demonstrates that these women combined verbal proclamation with other historic Christian practices in their roles as preacher, visitor, missionary, educator, activist, and reformer.