Lists

100 Must Read Books About Women & Religion

Michelle Anne Schingler Sep 28, 2016

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Michelle Anne Schingler

Staff Writer

Michelle Anne Schingler, a former librarian and Hebrew school teacher, is the managing editor at Foreword Reviews. Her days are books, books, books; she knows how lucky that makes her. Twitter: @mschingler

View All posts by Michelle Anne Schingler

In Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” a young woman–capable, brilliant, and an outsider in her Southern community by virtue of these and other traits–feels pity toward a traveling Bible salesman, a fellow obviously of inferior cerebral stock, and lures him to the loft for a bit of sexual/intellectual healing.

The encounter doesn’t go quite as she plans. Her aha moment within it, one of recognition, indignation, and humiliation—“‘Give me my leg,’ she said,”—looms as one my favorite moments in women’s religious literature. The young woman, a hopeful reformer, discovers that, despite her own hard-earned insights, she has remained blind to how little her knowledge impacts the perspectives of those never inclined to respect her in the first place. Good country people may carry booze in hollowed out Bibles, but that trick works best if you’re a man. Double-speak, too. And religious men, confronted with their own shortcomings and hypocrisies, are not necessarily poised to extend a hand and help a gal out.

Such is the nature of women’s relationships to religions. Or: that’s part of the story. Traditions tend to be patriarchal; we must either conform or make our own way within them. Or must move outside of them. And women, when we claim religious space as our own, have adapted to, or demolished, constraints in awesome ways.

Below, you’ll find 100 titles in which women take creative, inquisitive, constructive, and critical postures toward religious traditions: those of their birth; those that belong to others, and which they encounter with an open spirit; those that they work to reform; those that they adopt. No two books are the same. All are vibrant; all hold the potential to illumine. Soil ignored, as it turns out, is poised to produce rich fruits, like these diverse women’s spiritual works, a great gift of having had to make our own way.

This celebration of women and religion is, owing to my own background, somewhat heavy on monotheistic perspectives; I would love to hear from those well-read in Eastern traditions as well. What titles would you add?
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NONFICTION

Judaism

1. Miriam’s Kitchen, Elizabeth Ehrlich

2. Women Who Would Be Rabbis, Pamela Susan Nadell

3. Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books, Ilana M. Blumberg

4. House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood, Adina Hoffman

5. The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt, Ruth Andrew Ellenson

6. Flying Couch, Amy Kurzweil

7. Black, White, and Jewish, Rebecca Walker

8. Standing Again at Sinai, Judith Plaskow

9. Surprised By God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion, Danya Ruttenberg

Hinduism