About

Sheila Briggs is an Associate Professor of Religion and Gender Studies at USC Dornsife. Her research focuses on feminist theology, with particular emphasis on nineteenth and twentieth-century German theology, early Christianity, theories of history, and modern liberation movements. Briggs currently studies the relationship between attitudes towards gender and attitudes towards the Jewish Torah in the writings of Paul, the first-century apostle. Her work also explores representations of an ancient past that exists primarily in the imagination of contemporary popular culture, such as in the TV series Xena Warrior Princess.

Research topics

• Food science
• Biology
• Art

Selected publications

• Digital Bodies and the Transformation of the Flesh

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Biology
  • Food science
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• Engaging the Work of Keith Bradley

  Biblical Interpretation · 2013-01-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• What is Feminist Theology?

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2012-01-04 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter attempts to renew and develop under the present conditions of globalization the position that theological insight can be gained from the materiality of human lives, in which physical processes and cultural representations are inextricably bound together. To this end, it explores two areas in which little feminist theological work is currently being done, and which are crucial to the operations of globalization and our understanding of them: science and technology, and popular culture.

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• Introduction

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2012-01-04 · 2 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of the origins of the feminist theology movement, and then explains the notion of globalization from the perspective of feminist theology. The discussion then turns to global poverty and women, new challenges faced by feminist theology, and the status of feminist theology as theology.

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• Gender, Slavery, and Technology: The Shaping of the Early Christian Moral Imagination

  Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks · 2010-01-01 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  We think of sexuality as something natural that all human beings possess. Even when we acknowledge a range of sexual behaviors and attitudes, we tend to assume that these remain stable across time and across cultures. Therefore, when it comes to sexual ethics—our beliefs about the moral principles governing sexuality—we may allow for a wide spectrum of values and opinions, but we also see these as addressing the same issues in every time and place. It is not surprising, then, that when we read the New Testament, we suppose that Jesus and the first Christian leaders faced the same sort of sexual questions that we do today. Christians, who accept the Bible as a moral authority or at least see it as an ethical guide, expect its sexual teachings to be relevant to their lives and their society in the twenty-first century because they think that their sexuality and questions about sex are not really different from those of Christians in the first century. It may be troubling, especially to Christians, that sexuality and our attitudes toward it vary greatly in different historical periods and cultures. The New Testament is a historical document, written at a particular time in a society that held very different assumptions about what was obvious and natural about sex. One crucial element in the sexual lives and thinking of people in the ancient world was the all-pervasive fact of slavery. This is something that most of us would like to ignore, and Christians are likely to insist that New Testament sexual ethics were not founded on the acceptance of slavery.KeywordsSexual ExploitationMoral ImaginationPublic DisplayAncient WorldHuman EqualityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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• The Resistance that District-Level Social Justice Leaders Face

  2008-10-30

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• Digital Bodies and the Transformation of the Flesh

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2007-01-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Digital technology has become a vehicle for the human imagination that has sought a hidden potential under the skin. The convergence of digital and biotechnology opens up the possibility that the expanded visual resources available to our imagination could not only create new forms of the physical representation of the human body but could also translate these images into actual new forms of human corporeality. A human superbody is a new location for physical existence that may allow us to experience the universe in ways unknown before. It can therefore be a location in which we explore our sexuality in ways which we could not previously envisage and may therefore be productive of new sexual desires that are not dominated by the hierarchies of gender, race, and class. This chapter explores new economies of pleasure that emerge in the ongoing transformations of “digital” bodies at once glorious and grotesque.

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• Response: Globalization, Transnational Feminisms, and the Future of Biblical Critique

  Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks · 2005-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Elizabeth Castelli has chosen to explore the theme of the global future of feminist New Testament studies in terms of globalization. Now this may seem obvious but think for a moment of alternative approaches. After all, biblical studies have a global future because they are linked to the spread of Christianity throughout our planet. But how do we describe Christianity as a global phenomenon? What is at stake when we decide between two possible phrases to describe it? Do we want to talk about global Christianity or the Christianity of globalization? These two terms carry very different connotations.

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• Rhetorics of resistance : a colloquy on early Christianity as rhetorical formation

  1997-01-01 · 3 citations

  bookSenior author

• Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents <i>by Jeffrey Stout</i> . Boston, Beacon, 1988. 338 pp. $27.50

  Theology Today · 1989-04-01 · 1 citations

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Frequent coauthors

• Mary McClintock Fulkerson

  Duke University

  2 shared

• George A. Lindbeck

  1 shared

• Lisa M. Black

  1 shared

• Patricia Wilson-Kastner

  1 shared

• Nancey Murphy

  1 shared

• Craig Dykstra

  1 shared

• Anthony John Rosilez

  1 shared

• Jeffrey Stout

  Princeton University

  1 shared