Reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff
Smith’s book is an intriguing extended metaphor, using weaving as a central lens of understanding. Weaving is an art, an expression of our time, and Smith uses the components of weaving as illustration, as an organizing image in women’s lives: weaving, loom, warp, weft. Weaving involves interlocking threads to create joyful instances of textures and colours. Loom: keep threads in order and under tension. Warp: binding together differing threads. Weft: the most prominent threads. This is Smith’s extended metaphor for preaching.
Smith believes there is some ‘qualitative distinctiveness surrounding the preaching of feminist women (p 9); there is a distinctive quality to women’s preaching (p11). Women use more images and more stories than men do. ‘The texts women choose are less abstract and more related to everyday life/ (p 12); they are more creative and imaginative in dealing with the text.
Smith has a good section on authority. Religious authority has usually referred to ordination, giving them the ‘right’ to speak. ‘Criteria for effective preaching held by many male homileticians appear to be persuasion and the ability to influence the listener. The criteria for many women preachers appear to be creating the quality of faith connection…. Authority has to do with a quality of content, a mode of communication and an authenticity of message’ (p 46).
Smith looks at issues of gender. She looks at issues of gender. Eg how ‘can a male Jesus of Nazareth be considered a normative model for all humanity/ (p 80). She suggests key areas for this definition that entail much broader understandings of incarnational theology’s ‘power’ in relations, radical activity of love, Jesus as parable of G-d, concepts of salvation, hermeneutics.
It’s a book that looks carefully at the possibilities for preaching as shaped by gender and its social implications. The metaphor of ‘weaving’ may complicate the process.