Elvey, Anne F.

Dr. Anne Elvey teaches in the School of Theology (Vic) at Australian Catholic University and the Trinity College Theological School, Trinity College, Melbourne, Australia. She is an honorary research associate in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, and adjunct member of the Golding Centre for Women’s History, Theology and Spirituality at Australian Catholic University.

An Ecological Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Luke

2005 0-7734-5974-X
In the context of environmental destruction, this book takes a call to turn toward Earth as a starting point for an ecological feminist hermeneutics focused in the notion of the “material given”. Like Earth, the pregnant body is a material given, a necessity for human species being Within the Gospel of Luke, the pregnant body is site of a divine necessity underwriting the narrative. A focus on the pregnant body brings into dialogue the Lukan divine necessity and the everyday necessity of the material given. As a particular site of sociality between self and other, the pregnant body represents a gestational paradigm. Within the Lukan narrative a gestational paradigm appears not only in the pregnancy of Mary of Nazareth, but also in her activity of keeping (2: 19, 51). The gestational paradigm exhibited in keeping also informs the narrative tropes of serving, journeying to Jerusalem, compassion, and expectation. In each case, a gestational logic interweaves with and calls into question the ostensibly colonizing logic of divine necessity. In the reign (or kingdom, Gk. Basileia) of God, the interrelationship of these Lukan logics issues in a paradigm of hospitality, having implications for human responses to an ecological call.