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This paper focuses on the life of Liu Shu (1520–1657), a woman warrior who lived through the social and political turmoil of the violent dynastic transition from the Ming (1368–1644) dynasty to the Qing (1636–1911) dynasty. Drawing on the writings of Liu Shu and on different versions of accounts of her life written by male literati in different time periods, this paper intends to reveal the multiplicity and complexity of how a woman could exert her agency and interact with the dominant structure. Commonly, women's agency has been understood as resistance against the male-dominant patriarchal system. However, recently, scholars such as Saba Mahmood have problematized universalizing overtly resistant acts against the patriarchal society to bring radical changes as demonstrations of women's agency. These scholars argue that this approach fails to recognize that through their autonomy and while living a life of self-fulfillment, women have the capacity to reproduce, sustain, or subtly change the social norms and views of values that justify and support the patriarchal structure. In light of these scholars' studies, this paper explores Liu Shu's engagement in political and military activities and her Buddhist practices to analyze how she transgressed established gender norms in order to uphold rather than reject the virtues promoted by patriarchal ideology. The paper also discusses how conflicting demands on women by a male-centered society in the drastic dynastic transition enabled her to negotiate with or challenge the dominant structure. It also considers how her disobedient acts were accepted and applauded by some male literati to address their own agenda in different cultural, historical, and political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women experience abuse both physically and psychologically in a war, and, marginalized women's voices are rarely heard. Yan Geling's The Flowers of War 金 陵十三 钗 [Jinling shisan chai] is based on a true story of vulnerable parochial schoolgirls whose lives intersect in a Catholic cathedral with the lives of a local cadre of prostitutes. The two groups became trapped in the cathedral during the sudden and brutal occupation during the 1938 Nanking Massacre. This paper analyses the fate of two disparate women's groups by showing how cultural, religious, and social chastity norms were used as a weapon of abuse and oppression by the chaste group against the prostitutes. This oppression in turn caused the fragmentation of the female identity of both groups of isolated women and led to tragic results. Using the fragmentation theory as a framework, this paper investigates how oppressive tactics caused women who otherwise should have been mutually supportive in their common need for survival, to oppose and oppress each other, fragmenting individually and as a group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I analyse the influence of drama-based learning activities in an education encounter exploring an instance of gendered violence. I use data stories to chart the multiple material, social, and historical influences that emanated within a role-played act of violence by a father upon his daughter following her transgression of the standards of pre-marital sexual purity held within a strongly religious community. I call upon Butler's argument, that to understand an act of violence, one must engage with the conditions which permit the act, rather than just the act itself. I use the construct of the assemblage as offered by Deleuze and Guattari to trace the affective forces produced within the learning activities used to examine this enactment. I find that the drama-based activities were productive in opening conditions of possibility when they shifted the genre rules that had limited what it was permissible to feel, say and do as a recognisable masculine subject, and when they offered alternative modalities through which to articulate the multiplicity of possible desires, beliefs, fears and hopes at work within the Father-Daughter relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper attempts to discuss the image of women in the Acts of Thomas against the wider theoretical background of temporality as it was perceived and construed through the text. More specifically, I will focus on how notions of time that emerged in the early centuries of the Christian era proved to be a key factor in shaping women's agency as this is reflected in the apocryphal Acts. The nexus between time and the construction of the feminine in the Acts of Thomas emerges as being particularly interesting because it sheds light on many relevant questions in early Christianity, such as chastity, asceticism, reconfiguration of family ties, social norms, and roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the life of Liu Shu (1520–1657), a woman warrior who lived through the social and political turmoil of the violent dynastic transition from the Ming (1368–1644) dynasty to the Qing (1636–1911) dynasty. Drawing on the writings of Liu Shu and on different versions of accounts of her life written by male literati in different time periods, this paper intends to reveal the multiplicity and complexity of how a woman could exert her agency and interact with the dominant structure. Commonly, women’s agency has been understood as resistance against the male-dominant patriarchal system. However, recently, scholars such as Saba Mahmood have problematized universalizing overtly resistant acts against the patriarchal society to bring radical changes as demonstrations of women’s agency. These scholars argue that this approach fails to recognize that through their autonomy and while living a life of self-fulfillment, women have the capacity to reproduce, sustain, or subtly change the social norms and views of values that justify and support the patriarchal structure. In light of these scholars’ studies, this paper explores Liu Shu’s engagement in political and military activities and her Buddhist practices to analyze how she transgressed established gender norms in order to uphold rather than reject the virtues promoted by patriarchal ideology. The paper also discusses how conflicting demands on women by a male-centered society in the drastic dynastic transition enabled her to negotiate with or challenge the dominant structure. It also considers how her disobedient acts were accepted and applauded by some male literati to address their own agenda in different cultural, historical, and political contexts.

The reception of the Decree Perfectae caritatis in Latin America can be understood in connection with the emergence of the preferential option for the poor and the call for consecrated religious life to the insertion since the 1960s. As part of the existing link between conciliar texts and renewal movements, it is worth highlighting the testimony of religious life lived in solidarity with the poor as a way of practicing chastity and incorporating sexuality. This topic is explored through the life stories of two individuals, Alice Domon in Argentina (1937–1977) and José Aldunate Lyon in Chile (1917–2019), within the framework of related studies on ethnographic ecclesiology and the theology of renewed religious life. Amidst military governments, institutional violence, abuses of power, and human rights violations, the lives of these two consecrated individuals showcase an alternative path marked by self-emptying, unwavering fidelity, non-violent action, and prophetic denunciation. The pursuit of integration between contemplative and apostolic aspects in the love for God and the poor, along with the defense of human rights in solidarity with the victims and their families, are some of the keys that define an adapted understanding of religious life in the Latin American context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ancient thinking conceived Temperance as the enemy of pleasures and excesses, mainly bodily pleasures. This idea was the source of Temperance's depictions in the Middle Ages. Attributes such as the torch and jug, castle, tower, bit, salamander, ermine, or the presence of Cupid accompany Temperance's personification as controlling elements of bodily pleasures. The combinations of attributes relative to chastity give rise to two different iconographic types. These iconographic types translate theoretical considerations about this virtue visually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shah Wali Allah Dehlavi was an outstanding religious scholar of the 18th-century Muslim India who responded to the major religious issues of his time from an Islamic perspective. His proponents among the traditional Hanafite Muslims see his contribution simply as a conservative restatement of the Hanafite School. According to them, with a slight deviation from the existing positive law (furu/fiqh) of the school, he is as much a Hanafite scholar as were the medieval Hanafite jurists such as Ibn al-Humam and Ibn Ameer al-Hajj. Some others, relying upon the ijtihad principles and methods adopted by Shah Wali Allah, held that he reached the level of limited-mujtahid within the school of Shafite, but only theoretically. Practically, they say, he never departed from the dominant Hanafite School in the sub-continent because of the prevailing socio-religious and cultural impediments. Contrary to them, a few others consider him 'the founder of Muslim Modernism'. This paper attempts to evaluate the opinions of some notable traditional Islamic scholars.

A literary criticism of the book "Much Ado About Nothing" by William Shakespeare is presented. Topics include examines various aspects of the practice of female bed-sharing have been overlooked and among them, the most important may be connected to procreation and the legitimacy of offspring emphasizing the significance of chastity.

This article deals with the Vestals, virgin priestesses consecrated to the goddess Vesta, and their purity and impurity. These virgins, endowed with a specific legal and religious status, carried out rites of purification of the city. Moreover, through their main mission, the maintenance of the sacred fire, they ensured the continuance of Rome. They represent the perfect example of Roman feminine virtues: chastity (castitas) and pudicity (pudicitia). So, these priestesses embodied both moral and religious purity. However, they can also symbolize impurity. Indeed, two crimes could be committed by the Vestal, fire-extinguishing and the most serious of them, the incestum, the loss of virginity. The Vestal then became impure: she had been corrupted (corrupta), polluted. The punishment of this crime was death and the context, in which it takes place, expresses the danger associated with this incestum. Thus, the aim of this paper is to emphasize the importance of the pure-impure dichotomy in the construction and representation of the cult of Vesta and especially of its priestesses.

There is an ignored, misunderstood, and complex reality within the broader clergy sexual abuse scandal within the Roman Catholic Church (RCC)—that of clergy sexual misconduct against adults (CSMAA). Estimates and calculations of numbers of victims/survivors over the last half-century reach into the early millions. Furthermore, evidence reveals that CSMAA does produce many serious personal, relational, and practical harms. This article presents and discusses the many expressions of such harms. However, even with the evidence of such harms CSMAA events are, for the most part, still generally perceived as consensual affairs. Such a perception is challenged when CSMAA is contextualised within a professional misconduct framework, and even more so, when survivors thereof participate in the research. Furthermore, CSMAA is clearly not just one type of event. Accordingly, this article also presents a continuum of expressions of CSMAA to assist with perceptual accuracy of this issue along with an unambiguous definition of CSMAA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I present the hegemonic concept of childhood in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries among the Polish community of West Prussia. The subject of the analyses was the content of articles dealing with children's issues, published in the local Polish press. The essential feature of the hegemonic discourse of childhood for the Polish community in the analysed region was that it was clearly based on the Catholic religion and national ideas, as well as on a strong relationship with the conservative and post-feudal image of family relations. The conducted research made possible the identification of seven basic categories of the hegemonic understanding of childhood in the Polish environment of West Prussia, which are: Polish and Catholic childhood, childhood sensitive to the needs of others, heroic childhood, tidy and pupil childhood, neat and orderly childhood, childhood based on obedience and subordination, sexual purity childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about the Catholic community in South Africa and a suitable pastoral tool of the Local Catholic Church. It exposes numerous issues that the community faces, such as a lack of cohesiveness, absenteeism, hostility, and gossip which permeate it. These are human-made problems that harm or impede the progress of the community. They are the result of human disregard for God's original plan. Despite these issues, the article explores and identifies the community as a significant instrument used by the "local Catholic church in South Africa" to enhance pastoral care in the church. The community is preferred over the family since it is larger. There should not be any divisions inside the Church or community body. As members of the body of Christ, either collectively as a congregation or individually, the members should be equally concerned about one another and love one another. Because when one portion of the body suffers, the entire body suffers along with it, and when one component is honored, the entire body rejoices. Each one of the church communities makes up the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:15-17). The article's technique is based upon a critical assessment of the social predicament of the people in South Africa in Catholic parishes. It is essential for all members in any community to serve one another as best they can. The Community must promote the Church's mission to live and communicate the agape and values of Christ in the world. It must share in the accountability of the ongoing life and development of the Catholic faith, and must therefore work together with parishioners to deliver support for their endeavors to live as true followers of Jesus Christ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virginity is an invisible status and thus something that individuals typically must decide whether to disclose. The purpose of this study was to investigate the disclosure of virginity status (DVS), which refers to the extent an individual has revealed or concealed whether they subjectively identify as being a virgin or not to selected individuals or groups. Young adults (N = 760) completed an online survey about sexuality. DVS appears to conform to a structure of disclosure to family, to peers, and to religious figures; lying about virginity status to family/peers and to religious figures emerged as distinct factors. Differences in DVS by gender and virginity status suggest that DVS may be dependent upon gendered sexual scripts of the group the target of disclosure belongs to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]