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Wong Wai Ching Angela takes a closer look at the groundbreaking ordinations of the first five Anglican women priests in the Diocese of Hong Kong and Macau, originally a part of the CHSKH. She examines the controversy surrounding the debate of women’s ordination in the province before and after the war, tracing the roles of Bishop R. O. Hall and Bishop Gilbert Baker. This chapter highlights the “Chinese factor” that specially made the four first ordinations of the Anglican Communion possible. Wong argues that this distinctive Chinese contribution to women’s ordination in Hong Kong took place at an ambivalent crossroads, where cultural transition and the transformation from an English to a Chinese church, endowed with a Chinese reformist spirit of the time, met. The Chinese church decided to take the right opportunity at the right place at the right time and so made a distinctive decision in the Anglican Communion.

This chapter presents a cross-cultural study of gender, religion, and culture, using the history of Chinese women and the Anglican Church in China as a case study. Instead of focusing on mission history as previous studies usually have done, it treats the missionary movement as a part of the globalizing modernity, which affected both Western and Chinese societies. The attention shifts from missionaries to local women’s agencies, introducing figures such as Mrs. Zhang Heling, Huang Su’e, and female students in mission schools. It uses a wider comparative frame (beyond China and the West) to contrast women’s work by the Church Missionary Society in China, Iran, India, and Uganda. It also places the ordination for the first woman in the Anglican Communion—Rev. Li Tim Oi—in the development of postcolonial awareness of the church.

This chapter explores the final years of Pauli Murray’s life. Following her partner’s death, Murray resigned from Brandeis to pursue ordination into the Episcopal priesthood. Murray obtained a master’s in theology from General Theological Seminary while campaigning for women’s ordination. Under pressure from Murray and others, in 1976 the Episcopal Church overturned its prohibition on women priests. The following year Murray became the first black woman Episcopal priest. Murray continued to keep her sexual orientation private, but publicly advocated for minority rights, including gay rights, under the aegis of universal human rights. Murray worked as a supply priest in various locations before retiring to Pittsburgh where she died.

Scholars studying the Mormon past have documented the manifold ways in which external pressure—economic, political, and legal—forced Mormons to abandon their isolated quest for purity and their deep hostility toward the outside world. The power of those forces cannot be denied. Yet more subtle eroding influences were also long at work among Mormons themselves. As Mormon students gravitated to the growing universities of the United States, they began to develop extra-ecclesial and transregional loyalties to their schools, their mentors, and their disciplines. Those loyalties, wide-ranging and difficult for theologically conservative authorities to control, became engines for institutional conflict and change. Other Mormon activities—proselytizing, secular business affairs, and increasing contact with non-Mormons in the Intermountain West—encouraged a certain anti-parochialism, but nothing nourished strong, competing loyalties like studying in the American university. Yet the tensions and scars linger from this long struggle for the soul of modern Mormonism. Accordingly, after a century and a half of immersion in American higher education, genuine reconciliation between Mormon scholars and the Mormon hierarchy seems destined to elude the church until the millennium, indefinitely postponed, comes at last.