Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood

Rating: 2 stars of 5

I wanted to like Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood but I ended up having two main issues with it.

First: it reads like a book report about a bunch of other authors' books and repeats a lot of the same information found in other books in this genre. Second: whilst other authors??? ideas presented therein are well laid out and plausible, Aimee???s own thoughts and conclusions are sometimes insupportable. There are instances when she uses a certain text to try to support a claim she makes that the text doesn???t actually seem to support. The ideas presented that have the most merit are either cited or quoted as being someone else's work.

I will say that this book is well cited, which I very much appreciated. However, there is so much in this book that is not the author's work that I found myself feeling like I should just read the cited authors' works instead; their ideas made much more sense and seemed much more valid than Aimee's did.

Somewhere around the middle of the book, I stopped on a random page and counted the sentences so I could have a sample to share of just how prevalent other authors' work is in this book. On said sample page, I counted 11 sentences. Six of them were cited (i.e. not the authors' original ideas), six of them were direct quotes (again, not the author's original ideas; there was a little bit of overlap between cited and directly quoted sentences), and two of them were neither cited nor direct quotes. So two of the 11 sentences were the author's own words, and they did not add much to the conversation. This was not unusual throughout the rest of the book. It was a pretty typical sample page.

Unfortunately, I would not recommend this book as one of the better ones on this topic. So many people love it that I may come back and give it another chance in the future. However, right now, I recommend reading The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr, and perhaps Women Rising by Meghan Tschanz, instead.

If you want to skip this one and go straight to her source material, Bauckham's Gospel Women and James' The Gospel of Ruth and Finding God in the Margins were some of the oft-cited works that seemed worth reading.