Wising Up

Wising Up provides rituals and guidance for women as they age. It helps them make the often difficult life transitions wisely and in the context of their faith communities. Instead of focusing exclusively on time-worn thresholds such as menopause, marriage and divorce, and dying, the book contains affirming rituals on: coming to terms with the changes in one's body; learning to live with and depend on an item like a walker or a hearing aid; giving up one's driver's license; deciding how to give away one's household contents; and being orphaned. In addition to the rituals--and guidelines on how to create one's own rituals--the book contains a number of short stories, hymns, prayers, quotations, and poems to help ease women through the aging process.

Contributors: Susan Beehler, Teresa Berger, Kathy Black, Ruth Duck, Heather Murray Elkins, Brigitte Enzner-Probst, Martha Whitmore Hickman, Martha Ann Kirk, Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore, Susan Roll, Deborah Sokolove, Linda J. Vogel, and Janet Walton.

""Wising Up is a wise book. Black and Elkins gather together a wonderful treasure of wisdom on women's experiences of vulnerability, illness, aging, and dying. They provide useable liturgies to guide support communities in sustaining one another in these processes of transition in older life.""
--Rosemary Radford Ruether, Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology at Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California

""Wising Up is both refreshing and timely. The rituals invite women and their communities to age with wisdom and grace, challenge them to pay attention to the joys and sorrows of growing older, and show how to craft ceremonies that mark transitions in the journey of aging and to honor Wisdom's ways.""
--Diann L. Neu, co-founder and co-director of WATER: The Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual in Silver Springs, Maryland

Kathy Black holds the Gerald Kennedy Chair of Homiletics and Liturgics at the Claremont School of Theology and is the author of A Healing Homiletic, Worship Across Cultures, and Culturally--Conscious Worship.

Heather Murray Elkins is Professor of Worship and Liturgical Studies at Drew University Theological School in Madison, New Jersey. She is the author of Worshiping Women.