Christian Women in Indonesia: A Narrative Study of Gender and Religion

Christian Women in Indonesia is a ground breaking book. The author tells the story of Indonesian Christian women who go against significant cultural patterns to enter graduate school in theology to train for leadership positions in the Indonesian Christian churches. In order to sustain themselves in this culturally unpopular endeavor, the women develop spiritual practices in everyday life that enable them to go the distance. In significant ways, Adeney shows, it is from these everyday practices that the womens’ theologies grow.

After telling these stories Adeney then discusses the methodological implications of her study, focussing especially on the tension between universal values and culturally specific values. Her ethnographic study shows that the ethnographer, even if Western, does not have to choose between universal values and culturally specific ones, but can apply a middle hermenetic that accounts for both. Her study demonstrates this in its implicit argument for the universality of women’s rights without arguing for strictly Western–or Indonesian–views of women. Rather than either/or, or neither, she shows how method can include both. A thought provoking book.