Book Reviews: Paula M. Cooey, Sharon A. Farmer, and Mary Ellen Ross, Editors, Embodied Love, Sensuality and Relationship as Feminist Values. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. Pp x + 241. Paper, $14.95
Abstract
78 Book ReviewsPaula M. Cooey, Sharon A. Farmer, and Mary Ellen Ross, Editors, Embodied Love, Sensuality and Relationship as Feminist Values. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. Pp x + 241. Paper, $14.95 SAGE Publications, Inc.1991DOI: 10.1177/014610799102100209 E. Jane Via San Diego, California This collection of 13 articles, by women scholars of diverse religious (including agnostic) commitments, may be alternately tedious and ponderous or engrossing and readable according to the reader's interests. In Farmer's excellent introduction, she argues that despite the diversity of the essays, there is "startling thematic unity" in their attention to and affirmation of "the embodied side of human nature and the relational side of community, divinity and ethics." The essays include philosophical, theological, sociological, literary, and historical analyses, or combinations thereof. Cooey's article explores touch as a form of communication, never uninterpreted but escaping total translation; a symbol of the individual, cultural and social values underlying relationships ; and a powerful potential tool for personal and social freedom and change. Cooey explores touch briefly in the context of feminist theory, but elaborates in a fascinating analysis of women characters of several, contemporary women writers. Schüssler Fiorenza begins with a theoretical discussion of her method