An Anglican Crisis of Comparison: Intersections of Race, Gender, and Religious Authority, with Particular Reference to the Church of Nigeria
Year: 2004
Type: article
Abstract: The 1998 Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion brought into striking relief the two major issues dividing this particular global church: homosexuality and the ordination of women. Debates over these questions tend to split the church into its "conservative" southern dioceses and more "liberal" northern dioceses. With bishops from Africa and Southeast Asia now outnumbering their British and American counterparts, however, this rift had a surprising consequence at "Lambeth '98": church leaders of the northern hemisphere found themselves having to accept the postcolonial South's interpretation of the very Scripture, ecclesiastical traditions, and sexual norms the North had imposed on the South in the first place. This article explores the Anglican Church's internal struggle over women's ordination and homosexuality as a site of internalized and redeployed colonial tactics-as a complex of racial, economic, and historical forces that far exceeds the logic of "reverse colonialism."
Author: M.-J. Rubenstein
Institution: Columbia University
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2048420331