In collaboration with the AAR/SBL Women's Caucus, this panel asks what kinds of religious futures become possible when women’s voices, bodies, and experiences are taken as central to theological reflection. The papers from emerging scholars examine how gendered systems—shaped by patriarchy, colonial legacies, and institutional norms—have regulated authority and silenced participation across diverse contexts, from Malagasy ritual discourse to Catholic sacramental theology and Christian diaconal practice. Rather than treating these structures as fixed, each contribution identifies sites of disruption and reimagining. By centering women’s lived and embodied knowledge, the panel explores how ritual, sacrament, and ministry can be reinterpreted as spaces of both critique and reconstruction. These interventions do not merely recover marginalized voices; they actively recast theological discourse toward futures marked by accountability, mutuality, and expanded forms of participation.
Drawing on my embodied experience as a young woman survivor of clerical abuse, this paper critiques the limited embodied scope of victims of the clerical abuse crisis in the Catholic church as children, highlighting young adult women among the victims/survivors of clerical abuse. In this paper, I argue that the almost exclusive focus on abuse victims as children has prevented young women from seeing themselves in such dialogue, and that theologically reimagining the Eucharist can offer victims/survivors of clerical abuse a critical approach to a relationship with the Catholic tradition once more. In this sacrament, both trauma/abuse and healing/reconciliation are present, representing the need to denounce and critique unjust ecclesial structures and the need to find ecclesial space to open victims to God’s healing and reconciling love. This engagement is essential for the discourse to be expanded, for without this bodies will continue to be harmed and marginalized.
This paper advances an intersectional feminist theological analysis of men’s ritual discourse in Malagasy communal life, examining patriarchy, postcolonial legacies, and culturally entrenched structures of silencing, including self-censorship and a culture of silence. Women’s absence in public speech is interpreted not as tradition, but as the outcome of interlocking systems that regulate authority, leadership, and communal decision-making, constraining spiritual, social, and political agency.
Drawing on intersectional feminist theory, the study situates male-dominated ritual speech in dialogue with the lived experiences of Malagasy women. Methodologically, it employs a qualitative and decolonizing approach, centering women’s voices as legitimate sites of knowledge and critical reflection.
By highlighting collective interpretation, leadership formation, and mutuality, the paper explores pathways through which women reclaim voice, agency, and authority, contributing to gender-just communal and spiritual futures, where women participate fully as agents of change and co-creators of shared decision-making.
Is diakonia a “women’s ministry”? And if so, how and when is that helpful, limiting, or problematic? This paper examines the historical and present relationships between gender and diakonia within Christian history and practice. As gender is constructed and shifting, so is Diakonia [diaconal ministry, deacons, deaconesses, and the diaconate]. It matters how and when we tell stories of women in ministry and in diakonia; the words we choose to justify, rationalize, describe, relate, and humanize such ministries. Practices of diakonia have been shaped by gender and likewise have shaped concepts of gender itself within Christian communities. Framed as gender-defined, gender-restrictive, gender-“blind”/-less, and gender-conscious, this paper identifies the historical gifts and limitations of coupling diakonia and gender. Understanding these can offer wisdom as we discern how to conceptualize and articulate the relationship between modern expressions of diakonia and gender in the 21st century, in North America and globally.
“The boke is not yet performed.” Fourteenth-century anchorite Julian of Norwich ends her Long Text with this admission. By the standards of modern academic religious discourse, this admission might be read as evidence for failure. And yet, Denys Turner’s 2011 reading of Julian takes up this admission as key to Julian’s theological systematicity, albeit a systematicity expanded to mean the alignment of form with content. In this paper, I read Julian’s Long Text alongside those of her modern readers, like Turner, whose refusal to mine this text for its argument serves as a crucial example of the stakes of reading for what a text does, or performs, as it unfolds before its reader. I argue for renewed readerly attention to textual form as a constitutive of the text and trace a lineage of women's theological writing that uses form as an intervention into normative conceptions of knowledge as argument.