Feminine Registers

Jennifer E. Copeland

Description

Women have been adding their voices to the proclamation of the gospel for as long as there has been a gospel to proclaim, but only in the last half-century have these voices become part of the official catalogue of Christian preaching. Diagnosing the distinctiveness of women's voices and exploring the richness they convey about the presence of God requires a detailed look at the meaning-making strategies used by those who preach and those who listen. Register provides a tool for analyzing not only the theological and semantic contributions of women, but also demonstrates how gender impacts the meaning-making possibilities of the sermon. Feminine Registers offers a gendered analysis of preaching that does not rely on essentialist claims about gender and moves the analysis of the preaching beyond sermon content to include the relational dynamics operating between the communicating parties and the medium used to communicate. A critical examination of this constellation of meanings, influenced by gender-related issues of authority and self-disclosure, helps illuminate the production of meaning within the church and expands the homiletical possibilities for the Christian faith.

Sujets

• Christian Theology
• Preaching
• Christian Ministry
• Homiletics
• Minister (Christianity)
• Ethics in religion
• Theology
• Ethics
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Wipf and Stock Publishers
• Date de parution: 16 octobre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781630875220
• Langue: English

Extrait

“In Feminine Registers , Jennifer Copeland manages to transcend essentialist models of gender to create a deeply relational and communicative approach to feminist preaching. Copeland situates gender in the midst of complex relationships and expectations within communities and asks how the ‘field’ (content/context), ‘tone’ (roles and relationships), and ‘mode’ (embodiment, implementation), conspire together to create a distinctively feminist ‘register.’ This promises to become one of a handful of important books on feminist homiletical method.”
—John S. McClure
Charles G. Finney Professor of Preaching and Worship, Vanderbilt Divinity School




“ Feminine Registers is a wake-up call to homiletics. Drawing on feminist theory and the linguistic concept of register, Jennifer Copeland provides a thick analysis of the often-ignored role gender plays in preaching. Along the way, through homiletical reflection and practical examples, Copeland demonstrates the ways in which women’s voices enrich the church’s proclamation. This book is an important contribution to the homiletical literature and a valuable gift to both teachers and preachers.”
—Charles Campbell
Professor of Homiletics, Duke Divinity School





Feminine Registers
The Importance of Women’s Voices for Christian Preaching





Jennifer E. Copeland





















Feminine Registers
The Importance of Women’s Voices for Christian Preaching
Copyright © 2014 Jennifer E. Copeland. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8 th Ave., Suite 3 , Eugene, OR 97401 .
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8 th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
isbn 13 : 978-1-62564-219-6
eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-522-0
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Copeland, Jennifer E.
Feminine registers : the importance of women’s voices for Christian preaching / Jennifer E. Copeland.
xviii + 150 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index(es).
isbn 13 : 978-1-62564-219-6
1 . Feminist theology. 2 . Preaching. 3 . Women in Christianity—United States. I. Title.
BV4211.3 .C59 2014
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version, copyright © 1989 , Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of the Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
For my parents, Posey and Sarah Copeland







Acknowledgments
B ooks are only as good as all the people who help write them. Richard Lischer helped the most with this book, reading the manuscript so many times he might know more about it than I do. Coffee and cobbler enhanced the process. Teresa Berger and Mary McClintock Fulkerson further spiced up the book while we spiced our palates with good food and good wine. There were students along the way who read sections and commented on them, colleagues who heard ideas and improved upon them, friends who took long walks and listened to the latest challenge, and family members who offered a different kind of encouragement without ever reading a word. Special thanks to my parents, who have always believed I could do what I said I would do, even when neither they nor I could see how it would all work out. I hope I have passed along that same hopeful vision to my children, Nathan and Hannah, as they stand on the cusp of becoming adults.



Introduction
T he voices of feminist theory have been increasingly acknowledged in the fields of theology and ethics, historical studies, and biblical hermeneutics. Paradoxically, those voices are not as clearly heard in the homiletical arena, the area of the church most heavily invested in speaking out loud. The dimensions of feminist theory that have been examined within homiletics focus primarily on physical or social differences between male and female preachers with an emphasis on their advantages and disadvantages. 1 For instance, men have lower voices that carry better in a crowded room or women have nurturing personalities that are more relational, both assumptions that rely more on gender stereotypes than they do on reality. Likewise, the role of biblical interpretation for authorizing conventional traditions and the use of theological grammar to perpetuate an androcentric climate have received more attention in recent years. Attempts to redress each of these matters are valuable and necessary conversations toward a fuller appreciation of God’s word.
What has yet to be critically examined, however, is the constellation of meanings influenced by gender-related issues of authority and self-disclosure in the act of preaching. Implied subject positions are locked into implied meanings, but when the roles change the meanings begin to shift. The challenge, then, is to offer a gender analysis of preaching without reverting to essentialist claims about those who self-identify as men or women. 2 Establishing this difference involves understanding gender roles as they are both adopted by us and projected upon us. In doing so we can begin to claim the distinctiveness of women’s voices for Christian preaching.
It should be noted that over the past few decades a great deal of scholarship in the field of gender studies has focused on the inadequacy of sexual dimorphism when thinking about gender and human sexuality. Researchers point out that our views about sexuality, ranging from physical appearance to brain function to biological hormones, have largely been shaped by cultural beliefs that present only two choices. Sex categories and sexual behavior, first under the purview of religious and civil authorities, moved to the arena of the scientific and medical communities without any noticeable shift away from a dichotomous view of human sexuality. Indeed, the recommendation by the American Association of Pediatricians for infants born with ambiguous genitalia remains, “all individuals should receive a gender assignment.” 3 Recognizing that several scholars now challenge the assumptions of sexual dimorphism and provide more accurate definitions of human sexuality along a spectrum, it remains the case that most people continue to think of sexual differentiation as male and female. While acknowledging these categories are inadequate, for the purposes of this study, I will employ the terms man and woman , male and female to indicate persons who “self-identify” as such and who are identified by others as such.
Likewise, the preachers and the homiletical systems examined here are only a small slice of the rich diversity possible for proclaiming the word of God. No attempt is being made to include the myriad of preaching styles that might be differentiated by race, class, or denomination. Instead, this analysis relies on those traditions—largely white, middle-class, and mainline—that have produced a substantial body of homiletical literature in the hope a close study of this literature and the genre of preaching associated with it might inform those who teach and preach in other settings.
While the definition of “preaching” has been expanded by some feminist scholars to include the work and witness of women outside the typical boundaries of the church and the testimony of women outside the conventional borders of a worshiping congregation, this book will concentrate on the articulated voices of women in the congregation gathered for worship. Within this setting, issues of gender affect the content of the sermon at several levels. To begin with, the assumptions in the community about women will shape the meaning-making possibilities for the content of her sermon. Subsequently, the preacher may selectively tailor her words to meet the gendered assumptions and expectations of the congregation.
Even though most preaching implies one person speaking to a congregation of listeners, preaching is not a one-directional flow of information from the pulpit to the pew. The preacher does not dispense the meaning of a text from the pulpit, even if the sermon seems to start from that location. Meaning comes through the relationship of the text with a particular community of listeners whose hearing is determined by their historical and cultural conditions. The word of God may still be constant, but the significance of that word for the lives of those who receive it will have as many different possibilities as there are recipients. Individuals listening to a sermon participate in the production of that sermon through the discursive processes forming their existence—that is, their political, economic, societal, cultural, and, perhaps most importantly, religious surroundings.
Besides the obvious ingredient of content, the meaning-making possibilities for a sermon also include the relationship between the communicating parties—congregation and preacher—and the medium of the communication. Each of these variables must be considered in order to provide a thicker analysis of gender issues within the church and gender roles for preachers. By utilizing the linguistic concept of register, 4 this book will suggest an analysis of preaching that recognizes the theological and semanti