Kristina LaCelle-Peterson seeks to assert two points in this work, firstly, to affirm the central place of Scripture in the Christian life, and secondly, to highlight the liberating nature of the gospel for both men and women. To achieve this she first considers the biblical ideal for human beings, and then secondly offers a biblical foundation for each of the topics under discussion, from identity and body image to language for God. LaCelle-Peterson also examines the nature of gender roles in culture and the ways these gender-roles entangle with the ecclesial expectations.

Liberating Tradition provides readers with a clear Christian perspective on the issues that women face in the twenty-first century. The book does not provide a Christian gloss on the field of gender studies as it exists, but rather provides Christian women with a gender-informed, scholarship-based, Christian platform from which to enter into dialogue with the scholars and scholarship that constitute that field.

Contents:

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Peril and Promise: Women’s Experience and the Christian Faith

Part one: Women’s Identity, Human Identity

1. Made in God’s Image
2. Women Characters in Scripture
3. Supermodels for Jesus? Christian Women and Body Image

Part two: We’re in This Thing Together
4. The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Strange: Marriages in the Bible
5. Mistaking the Industrial Revolution for the Garden of Eden: The Myth of the “Traditional” Marriage
6. Two Heads Are Better Than One: Marriage as Partnership

Part Three: Women in the Church and the World or Why Watching TV Is Not Enough.
7. Seeing the Invisible: Women in the Early Church
8. Abbesses, Mystics, and Reformation Women
9. Changing the World: Women in Missions, Social Reform, and Church Working in American Evangelicalism

Part Four: I Said What I Meant, and I meant What I Said
10. Not Counting Women and Children: linguistic Invisibility in the Church
11. The Discarded Images: Reasserting Biblical Language for God

Conclusions: Up and Out
Notes
Scripture Index
Subject Index

Kristina LaCelle-Peterson (PhD, Drew University) is associate professor of religion at Houghton College in Houghton, New York, and is an ordained elder in the Free Methodist Church.