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"This book concentrates on women's experience, but it should nevertheless be a cogent summary of the major events within the history of Christianity. It does not present women and women's experience as marginal or peripheral to the main narrative of Christianity but as significant actors within it. It aims to introduce students and the more general reader to figures who are well known within specialized academic discourse but often ignored in broad-brush narratives. It attempts to synthesize often diffuse areas of scholarship into a single, easily accessible volume, and to act as a resource for teachers and clergy who are looking for an introduction to the material but do not know how to begin. Finally, it attempts to avoid over-simplified or triumphalist confessional approaches to this history. A Women's History of Christianity is an overarching, synthetic narrative of the major figures, movements, and events within the history of Christianity from its origins through the Reformation, paying particular attention to the contributions of women, their relationship with the church, and the forms their spirituality has taken. It is a balanced assessment of how women have engaged with the church, and it with them, with a particular view to showing the complexity of discourses regarding women and gender that exist within Christianity. It grounds these discourses in an analysis of broader, structural and environmental factors that have shaped women's experience of Christianity"--

Christianity and the values it espoused were antithetical to traditional Iroquoian and Cherokee values. Women experienced similar social, economic, political, and religious authority within their respective societies. Their experiences in regard to Christianity, however, differed, although acceptance of missionaries in both societies was more for political and economic reasons rather than a genuine interest in Christianity. Iroquois women were profoundly suspicious of missionaries and consistently rejected Christianity. Huron and Algonquian adoptees with prior experience in established missions warned their new brethren that the presence of missionaries served as a prelude to European expansion, disease, and war. Cherokee women perceived Christianity and the civilization mission it carried with it as a validation of the work in which they already engaged. They remained outwardly more receptive but maintained aspects of their traditional spirituality. Both societies combatted Christianity's attempt to subjugate women and struggled to maintain the gender balance so central to their cultures. These traditional powers held by women, and their resistance to a forced transition to patriarchy, are exemplified by two Native women: Degonwadonti, or Molly Brant (Mohawk), and Nanyehi, or Nancy Ward (Cherokee).

'Blessed Anastacia: Women, Race, and Christianity in Brazil' by John Burdick is reviewed. Blessed Anastacia: Women, Race, and Christianity in Brazil by John Burdick is reviewed.

Blessed Anastácia: Women, Race, and Popular Christianity in Brazil. John Burdick. New York: Routledge. 1998. 246 pp.

The weakness of Brazil's black consciousness movement is commonly attributed to the fragility of Afro-Brazilian ethnic identity. In a major account, John Burdick challenges this view by revealing the many-layered reality of popular black consciousness and identity in an arena that is usually overlooked: that of popular Christianity.Blessed Anastacia describes how popular Christianity confronts everyday racism and contributes to the formation of racial identity. The author concludes that if organizers of the black consciousness movement were to recognize the profound racial meaning inherent in

Combining insider and outsider perspectives, Women in Lebanon looks at Christian and Muslim women living together in a multicultural society and facing modernity. While the Arab Spring has begun to draw attention to issues of change, modernity, and women's subjectivity, this manuscript takes a unique approach to examining and describing the Lebanese "alternative modernities" thesis and how it has shaped thinking about the meaning of terms like evolution, progress, development, history, and politics in contemporary Arab thought. The author draws on extensive ethnographic research, as well as her own personal experience