About this episode

This episode explores how religious women define liberation and challenge gender inequality within their communities.

In conversations about women’s rights, religion and feminism are often cast as incompatible. But religious women tend to see it differently. In this episode, we’ll explore how religious women around the world are defining what liberation looks like on their own terms, and ask what we can all learn from their efforts, regardless of what we believe. We’ll talk to writer and lawyer Dania Suleman about how women of faith are defending their religious freedom in secular spaces while also challenging gender inequality within their own communities. And we’ll talk to Dr. Dianne Stewart about African heritage religions, where women have often held spiritual authority in ways that challenge familiar assumptions about gender and hierarchy. Dania Suleman is the author of A Different Cloth: Reimagining Faith and Feminism . Dr. Dianne Stewart is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University, and the author of Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa . Learn more about her work, and her many other publications, at her website . Also mentioned this episode: Asma Lamrabet is the author of Women in the Qur’an: An…

People in this episode

Guests: Dania Suleman, Dr. Dianne Stewart

Topics covered

• women's rights
• religion
• feminism
• liberation
• gender inequality
• spiritual authority

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Emory University

Books & works: A Different Cloth: Reimagining Faith and Feminism, Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa, Women in the Qur’an: An Emancipatory Reading

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