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"Modesty Religious aspects Christianity."
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Women and modesty in late antiquity
\"This book offers a fresh approach to some of the most studied documents relating to Christian female asceticism in the Roman era. Focusing on the letters of advice to the women of the noble Anicia family, Kate Wilkinson argues that conventional descriptions of feminine modesty can reveal spaces of agency and self-formation in early Christian women's lives. She uses comparative data from contemporary ethnographic studies of Muslim, Hindu, and indigenous Pakistani women to draw out the possibilities inherent in codes of modesty. Her analysis also draws on performance studies for close readings of Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Pelagius. The book begins by locating itself within the complex terrain of feminist historiography, and then addresses three main modes of modest behavior - dress, domesticity and silence. Finally, it addresses the theme of false modesty and explores women's agency in light of Augustinian and Pelagian conceptions of choice\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Honouring Age
We all age. But how we understand age and aging depends on
cultural context. The early followers of Jesus experienced growing
up and growing old in a world where more than a third of children
never reached adulthood, married women could expect to become
widows, and, above all, elders were to be honoured. In the ancient
Mediterranean, expectations associated with one's age could be a
source of social power, as well as a source of tension within
families and communities, and between generations.
Honouring Age positions age as an essential aspect of
communal identity and familial roles in the early Christian
experience by examining one of the most contentious and perplexing
texts in the New Testament: the first letter to Timothy. First
Timothy reflects a one-sided conversation between an older Paul and
a younger Timothy, in which the author hopes to influence both the
old and young in fulfilling their traditional roles in the
\"household of God.\" It was a time of tumult, and relations were
fraught, with potential consequences for the reputation of the
nascent Christian community: some children were neglecting their
aging parents, which was culturally unacceptable behaviour; older
women who should have been encouraging young widows to remarry were
discouraging them, exposing them to ridicule; young men who should
have been respectful to their elders were shamefully turning on
them. In recognizing the responsibilities of young and old to each
other, and the reputational damage they otherwise risked, this
study demonstrates that age is integral to understanding the
complexities of 1 Timothy.
Drawing on modern ethnographies corroborated by ancient evidence
to interpret social aspects of 1 Timothy, Honouring Age
shows convincingly that, in emerging Christian communities in the
ancient Mediterranean world, age mattered.
eBook
The Female Absorption Coefficient: The Miniskirt Study, Gender, and Latter-day Saint Architectural Acoustics
This article investigates the role the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) played in shaping modern architectural acoustics and, in turn, how architectural acoustics shape bodies and gender. It examines leading acoustician Vern Knudsen's 1969 \"miniskirt experiment,\" which tested the sound absorption properties of several miniskirted secretaries. Knudsen cited LDS acoustic practices-where women were largely responsible for mediating sound-as his inspiration for the experiment. At a time when self-expression threatened sexual modesty, architectural acoustics-driven by a dogma of \"covering up\"-intervened as a systematic tool to socialize bodies, ensure clarity of the male voice, and control \"unwieldy\" sonic experiences. This article contextualizes Knudsen's experiment and underlines the necessity of understanding the overlap of religion, gender, and sound, particularly in the purportedly \"objective\" realm of acoustics. The article demonstrates the inextricable enmeshment of technology and faith, and delineates religious influence on sound development and gender identity in a moment dominated by secular narratives.
Journal Article
Differentiation in the Gender Segregation Rules of Ultra-Orthodox Judaism
The strict modesty standards of the ultra-Orthodox society are observed mainly within the confines of the community; however, Hasidic women are allowed to conduct business and employment connections with men outside the community, and to conduct themselves in accordance with the accepted social norms within these relationships. This differentiation was common in the past, in Eastern European Ashkenazi society. The rationale behind this behavior is that modesty rules are observed in cases of contact with significant men. Men outside the community undergo a process of desexualization as if they were animals, so that gender discipline can be relaxed in their presence. This leads to the seemingly absurd result whereby it is specifically in the presence of men who act in accordance with liberal norms that the stringent modesty rules are not observed. The leniency regarding the rules also stems from the perception that the sexual desires of a woman are weaker than those of a man. They are also not fully obligated to worship God. Therefore, when financial constraints require contact beyond the limits of the community, the women fill the bill.
Journal Article
UNVEILED: A Case for France's Burqa Ban
The ban does not take aim at any specific Koranic obligation, which makes it more difficult to stigmatize it as \"Islamophobic.\" [...] the republic accords its citizens the full and complete right to belong to all cultural, religious, folk, and linguistic associations that they want to, provided that these associations are not seen as superior to the common law and do not become the pretext for one group or another to call for separate rights in the name of their convictions.
Journal Article
“Fashions of Worldly Dames”: Separatist Discourses of Dress in Early Modern London, Amsterdam, and Plymouth Colony
In a separatist congregation in London in 1594 a storm was brewing. The church's pastor, Francis Johnson, imprisoned for his noncon-formist activities, had recently married, and Francis's younger brother George, also incarcerated, was deeply troubled about his new sister-in-law Thomasine. George Johnson feared Francis was “blinded, bewitched, and besotted with the slie [sly] heights of the subtile proud woman,” and he considered it his duty as a good Christian and concerned brother to help “reforme” the situation. George's central grievance against Thomasine, a young widow before her marriage to Francis, was her excessive pride—she was “much noted” for it, he observed, which “became not a Pastor's wife, specially he being under persecution: in Prison: and often looking for death.” For George, as for other nonconforming Protestants who believed that one's outward behavior revealed one's inward moral state, his sister-in-law's pride was so offensive because it was so publicly and extravagantly displayed upon her body, in velvet, lace, whalebone, and gold. George wanted to “shew” Thomasine “that proud apparel and fashions of worldly dames were not decent in a Pastor[']s wife: that the creatures [material things], though lawful to be used, yet [are] not to be abused.”
Journal Article