Margaret Kamitsuka

Religious Studies Scholar, Feminist Theologian

Margaret Kamitsuka is the Francis W. and Lydia L. Davis Professor Emeritus of Religion at Oberlin College, where she taught courses in gender and religion for over 20 years. She received her PhD in religious studies from Yale University and is the author of two books: Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference and the newly published Abortion and the Christian Tradition: A Pro-choice Theological Ethic. She also edited The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity and has published essays in The Oxford Handbook of Theology, Sexuality and Gender and in a variety of scholarly journals including: Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Religion and Gender and Journal of Religion. Her current area of research focuses on theological ethics related to abortion rights and reproductive justice.

Published Fall 2023

Unborn Bodies: Resurrection and Reproductive Agency

The afterlife continues to influence Christian faith and is a concern during fragile moments of reproductive loss. However, a doctrine of resurrection that speaks to death in the womb has yet to be considered.

Ignoring fetal death began early in Christian history. The church has struggled for settled meaning regarding issues of personhood in the womb and whether unbaptized infants are saved. Believers today deserve to know the basis for a Christian hope of heaven. They deserve a nontoxic eschatology that sustains an embodied sense of self, which is fractured by the experience of reproductive loss. They deserve to know whether assenting to the resurrection of the body–including unborn bodies–requires them to sacrifice their reproductive self-determination.

Learn More and Order Now

Abortion and Religion: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives

This volume introduces students to the history of cultural and theological responses to abortion as background for understanding a diversity of ethical positions in contemporary Christian, Jewish, and Muslim writings. Co-editors: Rebecca Todd Peters and Margaret D. Kamitsuka

View Book

Abortion and the Christian Tradition

This book provides an updated and comprehensive discussion of abortion that supplies a counterargument to prolife religious claims, speaks to the burdens of pregnancy, and attempts to alleviate the stigma of abortion that is felt by many women globally who self-identify as Christian.

View Book

The Embrace of Eros

Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity

In this volume, noted scholars and theologians assay the Christian tradition’s classic and contemporary understandings of sex, sexuality, and sexual identity.

View Book

Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference

This book offers proposals on how to address the irreducible diversity of women’s experiences and unmask entrenched forms of privilege in feminist theological discourse.

View Book

Prolife Christian Romance Novels

A Sign that the Abortion-as-Murder Center is Not Holding?

This essay analyzes the use of popular prolife tropes about the psychological and medical harms of abortion in Francine Rivers’s Christian romance novel, The Atonement Child.

View Article

Unwanted Pregnancy, Abortion, and Maternal Authority

A Prochoice Theological Argument

This essay offers a theological answer to the question: How should we speak of a pregnant woman’s identity such that she is recognizable as uniquely entitled to make the gestational choice to end fetal life?

View Article

Sexual Pleasure

This essay presents important representative historical Roman Catholic and Protestant views about sexual pleasure from the New Testament period to the present day.

View Article

The Resurrection and Unborn Beings

The Seeds of a Materialist Emergence Proposal

This article looks at how two apparently unrelated issues—the afterlife and reproductive
loss—turn out to be interrelated in complex theological and ethical ways.

View Article

Disabled Bodies on Earth and in Heaven:

Eschatology and the Ethics of Selective Abortion

This essay critically examines the claim that selective abortion contradicts the principle of Samaritan hospitality and the claim that envisioning disabled people in heaven means that selective abortion is an illegitimate use of women’s moral agency.

View Article