With Passion and Compassion : Third World Women Doing Theology: Reflections from the Women's Commission of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians

An outstanding collection of original essays, most published here for the first time, With Passion and Compassion provides the outlines of the common struggle of Third World women to forge their own, liberative theology. Protestant and Catholic, these women from Asia, Africa, and Latin America explore the question of what it means to be a Christian, and a woman, in the Third World. The contributors to With Passion and Compassion address traditional theological topics: christology, spirituality, the Bible. But they do so from the perspective that comes out of a struggle to overcome social and economic oppression. Their reflections constitute a powerful statement of faith as well as a challenge to existing structures and thinking, political and patriarchal. The publication of With Passion and Compassion is cause for celebration. The strong voices of Third World Christian women must be heard, loudly and clearly, by First World white feminists and by any who are serious about human liberation in our time. --Beverly W. Harrison Union Theological Seminary A vivid testimony to the 'irruption within the irruption' of Third World feminist theology, arising from within the liberation theologies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Only with the voicing of the Third World woman's perspective does it become possible to know what it really means to make a preferential option for the poor. For the poor Third World woman is the poorest of the world's poor. --Rosemary Radford Ruether Professor Emerita Pacific School of Religion Throughout the world women have begun to redefine religion and spirituality in light of their everyday experience. Written from Third World Christian women's perspectives these essays are a very significant contribution toward a global feminist theology of liberation--must reading for anyone engaged in church and theology. --Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity Harvard Divinity School This collective work by women from Asia, Africa, and Latin America is a prophetic voice that untangles the webs of multi-layered oppressions and offers a vision of a new human community. Their methodology and context represents a powerful challenge to traditional theologies. --James H. Cone Briggs Distinguished Professor Union Theological Seminary Virginia Fabella, a Maryknoll sister from the Philippines, is editor of Asia's Struggle for Full Humanity and coeditor of Asian Spirituality. Mercy Amba Oduyoye, a Ghanaian, is the coeditor of One Gospel, Many Cultures (2003) and author of Introducing African Women's Theology.