Angela Coco | |
---|---|
Nationality | Australian |
Occupation(s) | Sociologist and academic |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Thesis | Catholics’ meaning-making in critical situations (1998) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Sociology |
Sub-discipline | Sociology of religion |
Institutions | Southern Cross University |
Main interests | Sociology of religion,new religious movements,Catholicism,Paganism |
Website | researchportal |
Angela Coco is an Australian sociologist and academic whose primary research interests have been in the area of the sociology of religion,new religious movements,Catholicism,and Paganism.
Coco completed a Bachelor of Arts degree with Honours in 1991 at the University of Queensland,in Brisbane,Australia. Her honours thesis,Women and the Australian Church:Project or Proclamation? provides the only record of the early history of the Christian feminist group,Women and the Australian Church (WATAC).
Coco went on to complete a Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in 1998,also at the University of Queensland,in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology. [1] [2] Her doctoral thesis was titled Catholics’meaning-making in critical situations, [3] [4] and this research provided a foundation for the later publication,Catholics,conflicts and choices an exploration of power relations in the Catholic Church.
Coco was a Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University in Lismore,NSW from 2004 to 2018. [1] [2]
Her research and publication history has focused on the areas of Catholics experiences of conflict with the church,the Catholic social movement called 'Women and the Australian Church',Pagan organising and communicating in online/offline spaces,and Universal Medicine (New Religious Movement) [1]
Coco was a member of the executive that established the Women Scholars of Religion and Theology association. [5] She was also on the editorial collective for the official peer-reviewed journal of the association Seachanges. [6]
Coco's book Catholics,conflicts and choices an exploration of power relations in the Catholic Church was published in Routledge's Gender,Theology and Spirituality series. [7] One reviewer stated that Coco's "…analysis is an important contribution to feminist scholarship documenting the complicated,differentiated realities of individuals’everyday/everynight experiences. As such,her findings may help readers appreciate why religious institutions face decline if their institutional narratives,including their social doctrines and pastoral guidelines,pay little attention to lived experiences." [8]
Following the publication of the book Coco was interviewed by John Cleary on ABC Radio National to discuss some of the wider issues behind the clergy sex abuse crisis. [9]
In 2016,the Women’s Caucus of the Australian Association for the Study of Religion invited Coco to give the Penny Magee Memorial Lecture and she spoke on Touching taboos:sex,gender and Universal Medicine [10]
Dianic Wicca, also known as Dianic Witchcraft, is a modern pagan goddess tradition focused on female experience and empowerment. Leadership is by women, who may be ordained as priestesses, or in less formal groups that function as collectives. While some adherents identify as Wiccan, it differs from most traditions of Wicca in that only goddesses are honored.
Feminist theology is a movement found in several religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Neopaganism, Baháʼí Faith, Judaism, Christianity and New Thought, to reconsider the traditions, practices, scriptures, and theologies of those religions from a feminist perspective. Some of the goals of feminist theology include increasing the role of women among clergy and religious authorities, reinterpreting patriarchal (male-dominated) imagery and language about God, determining women's place in relation to career and motherhood, studying images of women in the religions' sacred texts, and matriarchal religion.
Thealogy views divine matters through feminine perspectives including but not limited to feminism. Valerie Saiving, Isaac Bonewits (1976) and Naomi Goldenberg (1979) introduced the concept as a neologism. Its use then widened to mean all feminine ideas of the sacred, which Charlotte Caron usefully explained in 1993: "reflection on the divine in feminine or feminist terms". By 1996, when Melissa Raphael published Thealogy and Embodiment, the term was well established.
Christian feminism is a school of Christian theology which seeks to advance and understand the equality of men and women morally, socially, spiritually, and in leadership from a Christian perspective. Christian feminists argue that contributions by women, and an acknowledgment of women's value, are necessary for a complete understanding of Christianity. Christian feminists believe that God does not discriminate on the basis of biologically-determined characteristics such as sex and race, but created all humans to exist in harmony and equality, regardless of race or gender. Christian feminists generally advocate for anti-essentialism as a part of their belief system, acknowledging that gender identities do not mandate a certain set of personality traits. Their major issues include the ordination of women, biblical equality in marriage, recognition of equal spiritual and moral abilities, abortion rights, integration of gender neutral pronouns within readings of the Bible, and the search for a feminine or gender-transcendent divine. Christian feminists often draw on the teachings of other religions and ideologies in addition to biblical evidence, and other Christian based texts throughout history that advocate for women's rights.
Rosemary Radford Ruether was an American feminist scholar and Roman Catholic theologian known for her significant contributions to the fields of feminist theology and ecofeminist theology. Her teaching and her writings helped establish these areas of theology as distinct fields of study; she is recognized as one of the first scholars to bring women's perspectives on Christian theology into mainstream academic discourse. She was active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and her own work was influenced by liberation and black theologies. She taught at Howard University for ten years, and later at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Over the course of her career, she wrote on a wide range of topics, including antisemitism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the intersection of feminism and Christianity, and the climate crisis.
Linda Jane Pauline Woodhead is a British academic specialising in the religious studies and sociology of religion at King's College London Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She is best known for her work on religious change since the 1980s, and for initiating public debates about faith. She has been described by Matthew Taylor, head of the Royal Society of Arts, as "one of the world's leading experts on religion".
Ecofeminism is a branch of feminism and political ecology. Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Ecofeminist theory asserts a feminist perspective of Green politics that calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group. Today, there are several branches of ecofeminism, with varying approaches and analyses, including liberal ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism, and social/socialist ecofeminism. Interpretations of ecofeminism and how it might be applied to social thought include ecofeminist art, social justice and political philosophy, religion, contemporary feminism, and poetry.
Ursula King is a German theologian and scholar of religion, who specialises in gender and religion, feminist theology, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Anne Pattel-Gray is an Aboriginal Australian theologian and author who is an expert on Black theology. She is a descendant of the Bidjara people of Queensland and was the first Aboriginal person to earn a PhD at the University of Sydney.
Philomena Njeri Mwaura is a Kenyan theologian who is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Kenyatta University. She has written in the areas of African theology and mission.
Sarojini Nadar is a South African theologian and biblical scholar who is the Desmond Tutu Research Chair in Religion and Social Justice at the University of the Western Cape.
Elaine Stuart Lindsay is an Australian academic. She was instrumental in the development of the Women-Church journal which provided publishing opportunities in feminist theology for Australian women.
Kathleen McPhillips is an Australian sociologist of religion and gender in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia and the current vice-president of the Australian Association for the Study of Religion.
Erin Gabrielle White is a feminist philosopher and theologian. As an author she contributed significantly to feminist scholarship in Australia. She was the founder of the Sydney Women-Church Group and one of the founding editors of Women-Church: an Australian journal of feminist studies in religion.
Kim E. Power is an Australian academic, feminist theologian and church historian, who was a co-founder of the Golding Centre for Women's History, Theology and Spirituality at the Australian Catholic University.
Fatima Seedat is a South African feminist, Islamic scholar and women's rights activist. She is known for her scholarly work on gender and Islamic law, and Islam and feminism.
Glenys Livingstone is an Australian author and teacher who has made significant contributions to the feminist pagan community and is the creator of the earth-based goddess movement known as PaGaian Cosmology.
Anita Monro is an Australian academic, theologian, and Uniting Church in Australia minister. She is the Principal of Grace College, one of the residential colleges of the University of Queensland, located on the St Lucia campus. She is also an Honorary Senior Fellow, in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, at the University of Queensland.
Bernice Moore is an Australian educator and former Sister of the Good Samaritan from Sydney. She is known for her significant contributions to the fields of education, feminist theology and social justice. Moore was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1997.
Women and the Australian Church (WATAC) is an Australian ecumenical religious organisation that was founded in 1984. It was originally a Catholic initiative, being a national project of Australian religious men and women. It is now an ecumenical association, open to different denominations and faiths, with a network of separate groups operating in different Australian states and territories.