BOOK REVIEWS
MARY MAGDALENE
Jesus’ leading female follower gets a starring role in this winsome illustrated children’s book.
Ring, a psychologist, former radio host, and Episcopal priest, recaps Gospel stories that foreground Mary Magdalene’s close relationship with Jesus…
Women Who Knew Jesus
Reviewed by Lisa Brown-Gilbert
A work that intelligently sparks divine inspiration and soul-searching with a feminist bent, Rev. Dr. Bonnie Ring’s Women Who Knew Jesus addresses the necessity for self-love and the spiritual expansion of the feminine soul through examining the biblically documented encounters Jesus had with women during his life and ministry….
Women Who Knew Jesus
Reviewed by Kristine Morris
Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5
Episcopal priest Bonnie Ring’s probing study of sixteen biblical women, Women Who Knew Jesus, focuses on their taboo-breaking interactions with Jesus as a source of inspiration for challenging contemporary patriarchal biases…
Women Who Knew Jesus
book review by Barbara Bamberger Scott
After years of working as a psychologist and as an ordained minister, Ring presents a manual for the study of women whom Jesus of Nazareth encountered in the course of his life, beginning before his birth and continuing after his death and resurrection. Ring’s study of these women began with a focus on five subjects, but later she was encouraged to expand the circle. The many women included here range from the well-known, such as Mary the mother of Jesus, to a crippled woman healed in a synagogue, a poor widow contributing her “mite,” Simon Peter’s mother, and even the wife of Pontius Pilate. In each case study Ring is not merely recounting a Biblical story, but, in a sense, composing a vibrant sermonette…
Women Who Knew Jesus
“The life of Jesus cannot be told without the women who interacted with him,” writes Bonnie Ring in her provocative Women Who Knew Jesus. Based on retreats the author—a psychotherapist, feminist and Episcopal priest—has conducted over the years, this book looks at the many instances Jesus’s life intersected with women in the Gospels…
Women Who Knew Jesus
A debut book offers a reconsideration of the role of women in Jesus’ life and ministry.
One could argue that Jesus’ interactions with women recorded throughout the Gospels are either unduly neglected or misinterpreted through a historically hypermasculine worldview. Ring, a psychotherapist and Episcopal priest, challenges this diminishment of women in the Bible by reassessing some of the stories involving Jesus’ various encounters with them…
Women Who Knew Jesus
Reviewed by Divine Zape for Readers’ Favorite
In Women Who Knew Jesus, Dr. Bonnie Ring writes: “When the women of today are introduced to the stories of the encounters of Jesus with women, they often recognize their similarity to those women, feel the impact of that similarity and suddenly regard those women as significant role models and companions for their own journeys of faith and witness.” In this revolutionary work and in a world that is filled with masculinity, the author reads the Gospels again with readers, highlighting the revolutionary spirit of Jesus who willingly went out of his way to encounter women, and not only to commune with them, but inviting them to be partakers of the Kingdom. From the Samaritan woman at the well, to the healing experience of the mother-in-law of Simon Peter whom Jesus healed, to the controversial encounter with the prostitute Mary Magdalene, and a lot more, this book explores a new form of spirituality that invested women with the power to follow the path of the Gospel without fear…