Editors' introduction.(Editorial)

Together with WATER, the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual, Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc., the sponsoring organization of this journal, held its first Summer Forum in June 2008. Thirty-five young feminist scholars, graduate students, and new faculty from the United States, Europe, Africa, and India came together for almost five days of discussions, explorations, and friendship building. The great interest in and need for such work come to the fore in the number of highly qualified applicants, far exceeding the available spaces.

Many participants left with a renewed commitment to and excitement about feminist work in religion. The lively but critical discussions we witnessed at the Summer Forum promise that a new generation of feminist scholars in religion are well on their way to creating exciting intellectual work that will enrich and transform feminist studies in religion.

The editors understand the goal and function of JFSR to be such a forum, a space of reflection, discussion, and imagination, providing a vigorous intellectual context for vibrant feminist work. The journal brings together a range of feminist voices that encompasses a wide array of disciplines, methods of inquiry, religious traditions, and sociopolitical and spiritual struggles. We envision this virtual forum of JFSR as a radical democratic space, within which an assembly of intellectuals explore and debate questions central to diverse feminisms in religion. Our goal is not to create knowledge for knowledge's sake but to generate knowledge for wo/men to live by. In short, JFSR seeks to foster and envision feminist scholarship in religion that engenders religious and sociopolitical change and transformation.

The continuing intellectual vigor and creativity of feminist scholarship in religion is apparent in both issues of volume 24. The variegated methodological discussions in the spring issue (24.1), especially the special section "Feminist Theory and the Study of South Asian Religions" and the roundtable "Religion, Gender, and the Muslimwoman," are joined in this issue (24.2) by a wide array of critical methodological reflections. These theoretical explorations pertain to the problematic role of agency in the reconstruction of the history of Indian wo/men (Chad Bauman, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza New Scholar Award Winner for 2008), the high degree of narrative innovation in the Theravadin Buddhist tradition (Karen Derris), the formulation of feminist studies of the Hebrew Bible (Esther Fuchs), the significance not only of the new feminist activism but also of the theoretical challenge of the brutal ongoing femicides at the Mexican border (Luevano and Meyler and Pena), the construction of gender, money, and power in rabbinic literature (Susan Marks), and, finally, the present Roman Catholic debate between liberal feminism's advocacy of moving into clerical structures and critical liberationist feminism's advocacy of transforming clerical structures (Hellena Moon).

We greatly admire the critical but appreciative reflections of Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, who commemorates the life, struggle, and vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the fortieth anniversary of his assassination. Simmons's feminist perspective sheds new light on this great preacher, intellectual, and visionary with whom she worked as a field secretary in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. We are grateful to editorial board members Katie G. Cannon and Traci C. West for engendering ...