Reviewed by: Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership by Ally Kateusz Elizabeth Ursic (bio) Kateusz, Ally. 2019, Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 295. $31.00 In her compelling book, Mary and Early Christian Women, Ally Kateusz presents a multidisciplinary analysis of literary texts, church art, and church correspondence to show that women religious leaders preached, baptized, led communities, and served Eucharist in the early Christian church. She supports her literary and iconographic claims with official church commissions, directives, and commentaries, sometimes made by popes. She also shows how Mary, the mother of Jesus, was initially remembered and honored as a dynamic religious leader. Her thesis is that Mary’s recharacterization as submissive and demure as well as the absence of women religious leaders in later church text and art was the result of intentional church efforts after the sixth century to constrain women’s religious leadership and to create a “false imagination about the past.” Kateusz’s work on a discipleship of equals builds upon that of Harvard professor Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and she adds new discoveries and current scholarship to the conversation. Kateusz points out that today’s leading scholars are nearly unanimous in their belief that firstand second-century followers of Jesus gathered in small meal groups with rotating, informal leaders, and she presents historical proof that some of these Jesus groups had female leaders. It is interesting to learn that a fourth-century Christian community justifies women’s religious leadership with Galatians 3:28, the same scripture passage often cited by Christian communities today. She includes a quote from a text written by Bishop Epihaneus of Salamis (ca. 310–403 C.E.): “They have women bishops, presbyters and the rest; they say that none of this makes any difference because ‘In Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female.’” She also provides iconographic evidence of women and men officiating at the altar from the beginning of the Christian era. [End Page 107] The same fourth-century bishop also complained that a large geographic region of Eastern Christianity was breaking bread to the name of Mary. Kateusz frames these practices in the larger context of how Mary, the mother of Jesus, was remembered and honored in text and art. The Life of the Virgin is a biography of Mary’s life, and this narrative sheds light on how women participated in the ministry of Jesus. While the Gospel of Mark only depicts male disciples with Jesus as he heals Peter’s mother-in-law, the author of The Life of the Virgin remembers female disciples being there: “When the Lord entered Peter’s house and healed his mother-in-law, who was confined because of a fever, his all-holy and blessed mother, the Virgin Mary, was with him as well as the women who were disciples of the Lord.” In this text, women baptize and are present at the Last Supper. There is also gender parity of religious leadership. “She was always inseparable from the Lord and king her son, and as the Lord had authority over the twelve apostles and then the seventy, so the holy mother had over other women who accompanied him.” Significantly, after Jesus dies, in this account Mary teaches both male and female apostles and sends them forth to evangelize. So, how can it be that so few canonical textual references show this discipleship of equals occurring in the early church? Kateusz documents how scribes participated in erasure of evidence by destroying texts as well as obscuring evidence through translation. Examples include Chapter 18 of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, where the apostle Junia’s name was changed to Junius in certain translations. Excising female authority while male authority was left intact was also accomplished when words for male and female disciples were translated as male disciples and women. Narratives about women were also redacted, including multiple versions of the “Dormition of Mary,” about the death and ascension of Mary. The longest and most complete manuscript describes her as a liturgical leader who preaches the gospel, leads prayers, heals with her hands, exorcises, baptizes, and gives female evangelists books and writings to...

Holocaust Memory and Restorative JusticeCompetition, Friction, and Convergences Björn Krondorfer (bio) Keywords Holocaust, transitional justice, memory, restorative justice, Jewish and Christian responses, trauma, uniqueness, reconciliation, politics of difference, national entrenchment, dialogical engagement In Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Michael Rothberg argues for the value of overlapping and intersecting Holocaust memory with other collective memories. He traces how the history and memory of the Holocaust have been evoked, adopted, and employed as a way of making sense of political struggles and group identity in various colonial and postcolonial contexts. For Rothberg, the concept of multidirectional memory recognizes that remembrances of cataclysmic events do not cancel each other out but are venues through which meaningful moral and political decisions can be formed in the present. In a time when momentous collective (and often traumatic) memories flow freely and rapidly across national borders, they are often pitted against each other competitively. But, Rothberg argues, the idea of "competitive memory" must be abandoned since it assumes a public sphere that cannot hold "different collective memories"—as if it were "a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources."1 While Rothberg's study largely focuses on how the Holocaust has figured as a political, cultural, and moral trope in negotiating the meaning of the Algerian War (in which Algeria eventually won independence from France), it transcends any specific cultural location. His frame is global in perspective and rests on an ethical foundation that pursues the "notion of transnational, comparative justice."2 Consequently, Rothberg disagrees with claims that view the Holocaust (or any other calamity, for that matter) as a unique and incomparable event. [End Page 373] In this essay, I use Rothberg's critical intervention—multidirectional memory—and its application as a "shared moral and political project"3 to probe the dichotomizing language of uniqueness/universality when applied to memorable events of great harm. By eschewing competition among collective memories, I seek new pathways of justice-oriented, dialogical engagement. I do so by tracing, on the one hand, the rhetorical weight of Holocaust uniqueness claims (particularly in American and occasionally German contexts) and, on the other, the universalist claims of transitional justice as they evolved after 1945. I will read uniqueness claims through and against a transitional justice genealogy, eventually arriving at the concept of restorative justice. I will argue that neither uniqueness nor universality is a helpful mechanism for thwarting the entrenchment of partisan political memory. I propose, instead, to speak of "singularity" with respect to the gravity of each injurious history and collective memory. Creating a framework that averts competition among narratives of suffering will be "inevitably dialogical," as Rothberg suggests.4 It supplants the competitive deployment of political memory with an ethical vision of engaged relationality. UNIVERSAL, UNIQUE, SINGULAR: PRELIMINARY CLARIFICATIONS "The question of the uniqueness and universality of the Holocaust," writes Michael Berenbaum, "is being considered with increasing frequency not only in scholarly quarters with a focus on historiography but also in communities throughout the United States where Holocaust memorials and commemorative services raise a consciousness of the Holocaust."5 Berenbaum wrote those lines before the 1993 opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, at a time when Jewish American and Israeli scholars were debating the place of the Holocaust along the oppositional poles of uniqueness and universality. In his 1981 essay, Berenbaum briefly reviewed the positions of some of the major participants in the debate, including Yehuda Bauer, Lucy Dawidowicz, Emil Fackenheim, Elie Wiesel, Richard Rubenstein, Ismar Schorsch, Eliezer Berkovits, Robert Alter, and Henry Feingold. Berenbaum, who had been a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, sided with a restrained embrace of the uniqueness claim, arguing that neither the perceived threat of a so-called Americanization of the [End Page 374] Holocaust nor the attempt to compare Jewish victims to other victim groups or other genocides would diminish the historical uniqueness for the Jewish community. To Americanize the Holocaust, he suggested, is just a way of telling "the story . . . in such a way that it resonates" with an American audience; to compare the Holocaust to other events, he continued, is no cause for fear since they are "analogous...

Reviewed by: Women, Religion, and Power: Feminist Essays by Ivone Gebara Elaine Nogueira-Godsey Ivone Gebara. 2017, Mulheres, Religião e Poder: Ensaios Feministas [Women, Religion, and Power: Feminist Essays.] São Paulo, Brazil: Edições Terceira Via. Pp. 214. R$ 47,90. (Portuguese). In Mulheres, Religião e Poder: Ensaios Feministas (Women, Religion and Power: Feminist Essays), Ivone Gebara addresses her writing to feminist theologians. She reminds us that "to rethink religion from a feminist theological perspective means to embark upon an arduous, unending path of revision of traditional meanings towards provisory liberationist re-significations adjusted to our time and our bodies" (p. 14).1 Published in 2017, Gebara's book is as timely now as it was four years ago. She argues that if women's bodies are the feminist theological starting point, then poor women's daily forms of suffering—the pain brought by a life lived in spaces of vulnerability—must equally function as sources of feminist wisdom. These forms of suffering are constant reminders of the role that feminist theologians have undertaken—a role they must continue to play in order to promote social justice. Gebara argues that the broader feminist struggle will not effectively destabilize structural inequality if feminist theologians do not continue deconstructing contents, images, guilt, ambiguities, and contradictory teachings in religion. As such, she encourages us to examine old questions, which have reemerged begging for new answers. Gebara offers in her book "new flavors to season our daily food and strengthen our feminist theological trajectory" (p. 14). In this compelling work, Gebara begins with the feminist movement's historical trajectory. In chapter one, "Women's Awakened Consciousness After Centuries of Nightmare," and chapter two, "Dare to Dream, or How to Take Care of One's Own Wounds," she recounts the many victories achieved by historical feminists. Gebara evokes the suffragettes and argues that contrary to popular belief, their struggles are still relevant today. The right to study and to vote was only the start of a bigger fight, says Gebara: the ongoing battle against constructed gender roles relating to sexuality, motherhood, domestic violence, and freedom of sexual choice, the latter of which grew out of alternative feminists' philosophical [End Page 226] understanding of women's bodies. The pursuit of women's freedom is an endless historical process. To leave one's chains requires the daily activity of expanding our energies, opening ourselves to healthy breathing, and letting our voices be heard. It is daring to think and feel the world in a different way. In a similar political context of the Trumpian sexist rhetoric in the United States, Gebara details the patriarchal, chauvinist, and backward- facing aspects of contemporary Brazilian politics under President Jair Bolsonaro. In an analysis analogous to Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique (1963), Gebara analyzes current realities, such as the emergence of the "women's movement," present today in several Brazilian political parties and in associations linked to different Christian churches in Brazil. Gebara concludes that these women's movements are seeking to maintain the idea of a feminine essence as something pre-established by God as "woman's vocation" (p. 10). In chapter 3, "Advances and Setbacks in Women's History," Gebara further elaborates upon the above examples and reveals the co-optation of the feminist novelty: "an attempt to manipulate feminist ideals into the great networks of capitalist production and distribution of ideas" (p. 11). In those cases, she exhorts, the originality and innovation of the feminist struggle is commoditized and trivialized through false devices allegedly created to empower women. By ignoring the intersectionality of people's lives these movements speak as if women no longer need to fight for their dignity, arguing that women have already gained space in the labor market and that freedom will follow. Some women argue that the feminist "disease" needs to be eradicated because it is increasingly necessary to guarantee the order intended by God, family, and morality—emphasizing the pretentious idea of an immutable nature of human beings. Gebara reminds us that historical processes are neither homogeneous nor linear. There are steps that advance on one side and others that seem to go back on the other, both in consciousness...

Mixed Messages and Hopeful Journeys Gail Bienstock “That’s a BAD word.” “Don’t EVER let me hear you saying that.” Our four‐letter words were Mick (Irish) and Dago (Italian), but there were also five‐letter ones—Spick (Spanish), Chink (Chinese), and that most horrid six‐letter one, Nigger (Colored, Black, and African American). But in my neighborhood, the one that could bring the adults to a full apoplectic fit was Kike (Jewish). To my 3‐year‐old ear, they were all just different sounds. But by the age of nine or ten, they had become a double‐edged sword. I could cringe when they were directed at my neighbors all while indulging in righteous horror when the African American folks who came once a week to clean homes in the neighborhood were called Shvartzes. “Oh, Honey, that’s just the Yiddish for Black,” my Beaufort, SC born and raised mother assured me when I raged, but I recognized derogatory when I heard it. I grew up during the McCarthy era when all the adults were looking over their shoulder; Rosie the Riveter, replaced by returning military men, had been sent back to cook, spruce up the house and take care of the children; and a house in the suburbs was the Middle Class dream. Joe McCarthy, a Wisconsin Senator, was terrifying everybody by conducting hearings to determine whether people were Communists, ergo traitors, to be labeled and severely punished. (There was no “or not” to that “whether.”) Because the Chicago I grew up in involved a two‐hour drive to get from its Northern to its Southern edges and an hour to get from Lake Michigan to its Western boundary, there was plenty of room for segregation to survive without trespass or challenge. I’m not talking about Racism. Not really, although what I’m about to explain helps make sense of why we were convinced that we were too evolved for prejudice and bigotry. Chicago was large enough to accommodate the incredibly diverse nationalities and ethnicities within her borders. Each neighborhood had clear boundaries, to be invaded on peril of life and limb. Within the neighborhood lived the members of a specific nationality, ethnicity or religion. They had their own schools, restaurants, grocery stores…whatever they needed to remain totally isolated and “content” within those boundaries. In fact, when I first heard about Native American Reservations, I didn’t understand what the big deal was, since that was basically a description of our neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were a source of pride in our diversity. Anyone who knew Chicago at all would know that my point of reference was the North Side, for the farther South you went, the more obviously delusional this description became to the inhabitants. To better understand that piece of the puzzle, it is very helpful to give oneself the gift of listening to Michelle Obama read Becoming, her amazing autobiography, which is filled with references to what it was (is?) like growing up as a “person of color” on the South Side of Chicago. As for me, my only reference points for racial diversity were Willie who came to clean my house each Friday and the Chinese family who ran the local Chinese restaurant where we kids spent our weekly allowance on a nickel bag of amazing french fries. It never occurred to us that people “smelled different” because they had taken on the scent of the chemicals they cleaned with or the lard and spices they fried with every day. We just knew that they were different, and we were to “stick to our own kind.” As I moved into adolescence, and out to the suburbs where my school was totally integrated, I was deeply confused by and conflicted about the politics of race and religion. Shunned and debased by White Anglo‐Saxon Protestant Society (WASP was an acceptable four‐letter condemnation somehow), Jews, Catholics, and “Colored Folks” embraced and formed a community. It seemed reasonable to get to know each other since, according to the WASPs, we were all going to hell for one reason or another. Yet it could turn in an instant, even before the days of our...