In Motherhood as Metaphor, Jeannine Hill Fletcher identifies three historical and contemporary case studies of women's lived religious experiences with interfaith interactions in different social locations as a starting point for fresh insights into feminist theological anthropology. Christian theological reflection on the meaning of being human also requires theological reflection on God, creation, sin/grace, Christology, eschatology, and so forth. Thus, this book makes important contributions to a wide array of theological themes even as it focuses mainly on feminist approaches to interreligious dialogue and anthropology.
Hill Fletcher engages each case for insights into feminist theological reconstructions of Christian anthropology: “Relationality precedes the individual, constraint challenges our freedom, and interreligious knowing is recognized as a new form of sacred knowledge” (6; see also 196–97). The archives of the Maryknoll Missionary Sisters in early twentieth-century China (chapter 1) demonstrate that the Catholic sisters established friendships with Chinese women as a mission tactic. Yet, these friendships contested and changed the sisters’ traditional notions of catechesis as well as divine presence. Consequently, encounters between these women illuminate the relationality or the multiplicity of the human condition, which Hill Fletcher further interprets through feminist theological claims (chapter 2) about God as an infinite horizon of love enabling multiple types of human love, and about Christ's life and ministry as “embedded in relationships, called in care for the least, shaped across the divides of difference, and fulfilling a vision of human being and becoming together” (65).
Leading women in the first, second, and third waves of feminist movements in the United States and worldwide (chapter 3) pursued interreligious encounters and alliances across differences. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Native American, and many more women created “interreligious solidarity in the secular movement of women's rights,” which in turn “transform[ed] their religious traditions” (96). Feminist and womanist theologies enhanced women's consciousness about patriarchal injustices at the intersections of race, sex, class, sexuality, and culture as well as about religion as a means to sociopolitical change. By analyzing religion as both oppressive and liberating, transreligious alliances in feminist movements highlight “constraint as constitutive of our human existence [in which] we find courage to employ our human creativity” (109). Here, Hill Fletcher offers interreligious readings of Eve and mothers in the Jesus movement as examples of such creativity.
Finally, ethnographic studies of the Philadelphia Area Women's Interfaith Group (chapter 5) showcase women's practices of interfaith dialogue for peace through spiritual autobiographies. Practices of personal storytelling underscore alternative ways and sites for encountering the sacred and ways of knowing or “economies of knowledge” (167–68). These dialogical practices do not feature religious officials or academic experts discussing doctrines and texts but rather forefront lived religion within everyday lives and events, whether for good (“interfaith healing”) or ill (“interfaith hurt”).
Hill Fletcher situates these insights within her main argument for motherhood “as a metaphor for our human condition in its multiplicity of relationality” (45). Pressing beyond biological, gender, and sexual norms, for Hill Fletcher “motherhood speaks of the many, diverse, intersecting, conflicting, and complicated relationships that characterize the experience of being human” (47), relationships that are conditioned and problematized by inequality relative to race, class, sexuality, religion, culture, nationality, and so on, but through which we nonetheless sustain and sacrifice for one another in search of solidarity. Innovatively, Hill Fletcher draws on historical studies of medieval devotions to the lactating Christ as a metaphor for this sustaining and self-giving love, which expands beyond family to advocate for justice on political, national, and global levels.
Throughout the book, Hill Fletcher both builds upon and challenges Karl Rahner's theological understandings of the human person rooted in knowledge, freedom, and love. Rather than the modern autonomous, free, and self-made individual foundationally in relation to God, which underwrites Rahnerian theology, being human—or becoming human, eschatologically speaking—entails being embedded in and constituted by multiple dynamic relationships that we forge, navigate, and negotiate via creativity under the constraints or the limits on human freedom imposed by material, social, and religious norms of bodiliness, sex, gender, sexuality, and race (chapter 4).
I highly recommend this book for undergraduate courses in feminist theology and in religious studies focused on women and religion or comparative/interfaith studies.
