Question

talked about the multifaceted roles, significance and issues associated with women in any of the Western (Abrahamic, i.e. Judaism, Christi-anity, or Islam) or Indigenous religions in North America.

please if you can provide the resource as a reference that will be awesome thank you

Answer 1

• The Christian understanding of the dignity of women is based on the biblical presentation of women and their rightful place in society as human persons. Not even a quick reading of the Bible can miss the powerful presence of biblical women who played significant leadership roles in Salvation History. The dignity of women is upheld and celebrated in God’s choices in the Bible. God chose women to participate actively in God’s project for humanity.
• The roles of women in Christianity can vary considerably today as they have varied historically since the third century New Testament church. This is especially true in marriage and in formal ministry positions within certain Christian denominations, churches, and parachurch organizations.
• Many leadership roles in the organized church have been prohibited to women. In the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, only men may serve as priests or deacons; only males serve in senior leadership positions such as pope, patriarch, and bishop. Women may serve as abbesses.
• Christian traditions that officially recognize saints as persons of exceptional holiness of life do list women in that group. Most prominent is Mary, mother of Jesus who is highly revered throughout Christianity, particularly in Roman Catholicism where she is considered the "Mother of God".
• The New Testament only records males being named among the 12 original apostles of Jesus Christ. Women were the first to discover the Resurrection of Christ.
  
• The Jesus of the Bible spoke directly to women and refused to treat them differently from men. The gospels portray them as disciples during Jesus' ministry and the first witnesses of the resurrection. They're mentioned in Paul's letters as the leaders of house churches and missionaries in their own right.
• After the death of Jesus, women continued to play prominent roles in the early movement. Some scholars have even suggested that the majority of Christians in the first century may have been women.
• Paul's letters also offer some important glimpses into the inner workings of ancient Christian churches. These groups did not own church buildings but met in homes, no doubt due in part to the fact that Christianity was not legal in the Roman world of its day and in part because of the enormous expense to such fledgling societies. Such homes were a domain in which women played key roles. It is not surprising then to see women taking leadership roles in house churches.
  
• Women held offices and played significant roles in group worship.As prophets, women's roles would have included not only ecstatic public speech, but preaching, teaching, leading prayer, and perhaps even performing the eucharist meal.
• Women's prominence did not, however, go unchallenged. Every variety of ancient Christianity that advocated the legitimacy of women's leadership was eventually declared heretical, and evidence of women's early leadership roles was erased or suppressed.
• It needs to be emphasized that the formal elimination of women from official roles of institutional leadership did not eliminate women's actual presence and importance to the Christian tradition, although it certainly seriously damaged their capacity to contribute fully. What is remarkable is how much evidence has survived systematic attempts to erase women from history, and with them the warrants and models for women's leadership.
• Today, Christianity has differing attitudes to the roles of men and women within its Church.Christians who hold traditional views believe that men and women are created equal in the sight of God. They believe that whilst being equally important, they are also created to be different with different roles in society and the Christian church. For them, what matters is the authority of the Bible (i.e. ‘We must obey God rather than conform to modern trends’) and, for Catholics, there is also the authority of the teachings of the Catholic Church.
• Under traditional roles, women were expected to:
• Bring up children.
• Run a Christian home.
• Submit to their husbands – though husbands were also instructed to love their wives
• Take no part in Church leadership.
• Christian women were preachers, abolitionists and suffragists. They wrote music and founded churches. Although they didn't always have the support of mainstream churches, they were willing to disturb the status quo to stand up for what they believed was right.