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Dori Grinenko Baker, Doing Girlfriend Theology: God-Talk with Young Women, Cleveland (Pilgrim Press) 2005, 224 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0829816167, US$ 20.00.
Dori Baker proposes a four-step method for entering with young women into the stories of their lives in order to seek profound theological insight. Part autobiography, part feminist ethnography, part reflection on an emerging educational model that she has utilized in multiple settings, this book contains a rich mixture of Baker's own deft theological work and that of her adolescent co-conspirators in their shared practice of God-talk. This work of girlfriend theology advocates for the practice of religious education as theological reflection with vivid freshness and lyrical prose.
Baker describes engaging with young women in a form of testimony quite distinctive from the highly structured mode of traditional forms of the practice. Rather, Baker envisions creating intentional spaces where young women engage in the radical act of seeing the stuff of their own lives as sacred, lively evidence of a living God, a fifth gospel. Her book demonstrates both a profound confidence in and advocacy for the capacity of young women to enlarge the canon with their own works of constructive feminist theology by drawing on the authoritative sources of their own embodied experiences and "fragments of usable past" to speak to the work of God in contemporary contexts. Baker trusts that this saving work of theological reflection...