Reinterpreting the Eucharist (Gender, Theology and Spirituality)

This book explores the understanding of Eucharist in contemporary religious traditions, bringing the unique focus of scholars from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Given the multiple interdisciplinary engagements of these scholars in Christian and post-Christian biblical studies and theology, this book offers a significant opportunity to reconsider the meaning of Eucharist today. While the Eucharist is central to Christian life, the role of women remains equivocal and ambiguous in many religious traditions. This play of centrality and marginality provides women scholars with a unique position vis a vis a reimagining and reshaping of traditional understandings of Eucharist, allowing particular authors to interpret Eucharist through such diverse areas of engagement as indigenous culture, medieval and contemporary art, social history, and environmental ethics. No single text currently takes up this question of women and Eucharist from an interdisciplinary perspective as a site for theological and ethical engagement, yet the question of women's relationship to sacraments continues to trouble mainstream religious, and especially Roman Catholic, discourse. Therefore the aim of this book would be firstly to fill a gap by providing a text that engages with the question of women and Eucharist in a dynamic manner, sympathetic to, but going well beyond the discourse of women's non-ordination; secondly to make an on-going contribution to the discourse of (Christian feminist) theology and ethics; and thirdly, to make an original and constructive contribution to the theology of Eucharist itself.