Feminist Review Issue 97: Religion and Spirituality

For the first time in its thirty year history Feminist Review devotes a special issue to religion and spirituality. This issue of Feminist Review, edited by Lyn Thomas and Avtar Brah, explores a range of religious and spiritual practices through the lens of gender, and encompasses both theoretical and empirical approaches. Recent work on the gendering of secularisation theories and on women’s practice of faith and spirituality has complicated and nuanced feminist approaches to religion; this issue addresses these questions, while attempting to broaden the debate beyond the binary oppositions and alignments of religion (and most notably Islam) with tradition and ‘backwardness’, and of feminisms with modernity and secularism. Highlights of the issue are Nira Yuval-Davies on her travels and troubles with religion and Pragna Patel on the impact on women’s organisations of the contemporary focus on faith in the public sphere.