Feminism and Religion

Notes from the ‘Field’ in August 2026, part 2 by Sara Wright

Part 1 was posted last week. You can read it here.

Choosing Change:

Because of such poor air quality Coalie and I walk in the morning when the air is clear or isn’t as toxic as it will be by afternoon. For the last two years the ozone level has skyrocketed due to unchecked deforestation, and the ever- worsening particulates burn my eyes. Headaches strike as soon as the air begins to thicken. As a result, summers have become another challenging season with me prioritizing clean air over outdoor time. My Coalie has a small set of lungs and mine are aging.

Although making this transition has been hard on the naturalist who thrives in the woodlands, the outcome is that we have adapted. I am grateful (and guilt -ridden) that raging fires are not at my door. I sense that the trees around me know their sisters and brothers are burning. I also note that when the air quality deteriorates Coalie wants to come indoors of her own accord. The lack of bird song on any day that the air is polluted is astonishing. My guess is that poor air quality is very apparent to all non – human beings.

I used to complain about my sensitivity to moderate air quality. Now I am grateful that my body makes it clear that we belong indoors, not even on the porch on ‘bad air days’ which are increasing in severity. It troubles me to watch others running or biking on the roads for fun. Virtually all other outside work is done with air polluting machines contributing mightily to the problem. The exception is a person like me who chooses to do outside chores by hand. But only on days when the air is relatively clear. But I still drive a car.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Are We Living in a Rape Culture?

This was originally posted on November 24, 2014. It is shorter than our guidelines state now but it is too powerful and too pertinent all these years late to ignore.

SheSpeaks! Women of the Bible Have Their Say by Janet Rudolph

Author’s Note: I have been working on this project for about 3 years now. It is based on almost 30 years of research. I have written about some of the vignettes here on FAR before. With each re-telling and each performance the story deepens and comes more alive. On Thursday, Sept. 24th at 11:00 am NY time, the SheSpeaks!Ensemble will be doing a one hour live/zoom, free performance of the arc called EveSpeaks! You can access the zoom link on the 24th through this webpage. (Scroll to the bottom of the page for the link.)

The storyteller holds great power to both reflect the culture and to give it further shape and form. This is especially true for stories of the Bible which are foundational to our world. Whether we see them as mythological, historical, divinely inspired, wisdom teachings or simple folktales, they have shaped our beliefs and values. People see all different faces of God. If we look to the movies, God has looked like George Burns (Oh God, 1977), a vengeful John Huston (The Bible, 1966), Morgan Freeman (Bruce Almighty, 2003) and even Groucho Marks (Skidoo, 1968). There aren’t a lot of women although Alanis Morrisette did play a silent God (Dogma, 1999). If most people were asked to describe God, they would most likely picture a Charlton Heston-like figure (The Ten Commandments, 1956) when he played Moses reflecting the vehemence of God’s anger.

But . . . alas . . .biblical women’s history is most like Alanis – mute. Women’s voices have been diminished and even silenced. Female deities, female voices have either been translated out of reach or turned into purveyors of “evil” or curses.

The Divine Feminine App

Caryn MacGrandle has been doing some wonderful things with the Divine Feminine App and we invite you to take a look at it here. It is chock full of programs, both live and on zoom.

One of her projects is called Wayshowers and she has included FAR among them. Here is what she writes about wayshowers. Read it and then take a look:

Wayshowers show us that there are other ways: paths rooted in the wisdom of the body, the cycles of the moon, the memory of our ancestors, and the power that lives in women’s circles.

A wayshower doesn’t lead you. She lights the way and lets you walk it yourself. She’s the woman who has been somewhere you feel called to go.

The Divine Feminine App has gathered 75 of them here — priestesses, herbalists, mythologists, sound healers, death doulas, poets, drummers, shamanic practitioners — from across the world.

https://thedivinefeminineapp.com/wayshowers/#finder

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Iranian Women Trapped by War, Poverty, and Domestic Abuse by WNCRI

The war and intensifying economic crises in recent months have exerted the greatest and most direct pressure on Iranian women, placing them on the frontline of vulnerability as the psychological resilience of families sharply declines.

The inevitable consequence of these conditions is an unprecedented rise in domestic violence against women, a violence that increasingly manifests in complex psychological, emotional, and economic forms, severely jeopardizing both their physical and mental safety.

The Changing Face of Domestic Abuse Under Economic Stress

Livelihood pressures, severe economic insecurity, and war-induced anxiety have fueled an escalation of abusive behaviors against women within the home. While domestic violence was once primarily recognized through physical assault and battery, women now constantly face emerging and pervasive forms of abuse, such as systematic humiliation, threats, extreme control, deliberate deprivation of financial resources, and continuous psychological distress.

Are We Talking About the Same Mary? by Dr. Christena Cleveland

Though we often assume that Christianity was introduced to Africans after colonial enslavement, groundbreaking work by historians such as David Daniels unveils the truth that many African communities practiced a version of Christianity while still living on their ancestral lands Prior to the transatlantic slave trade, the Portuguese established Catholicism in the Kongo, and many Kongolese made magic by integrating the most life-giving aspects of Catholicism with their Indigenous spiritualities. Specifically, many Kongolese Catholics nurtured a deep devotion to the Virgin Mary, elevating her beyond her diminished status as an unassuming and relatively powerless “servant of God” to co-chief of Christ and a goddess in her own right. Despite the patriarchal teachings of the Catholic Church, the Kongolese drew upon an Indigenous cosmology that affirmed the divine power of women and embraced the Virgin Mary as an emboldened Christ figure who possessed all the powers and grace that Jesus and the Father possessed. They implicitly understood what Black Madonna devotee Mirabai Starr would teach over 250 years later: She is “. . . the quintessential Mother, the feminine face of the Holy One, fierce protector and gentle consoler . . . She refuses to be defined as the passive, obedient handmaid of the Father. She is the radical, powerful, engaged Mother of the World.”

Slippery tongued Witches by Claire Bullion

“It is still Eve the temptress that we must beware in any woman” St Augustine (354-430 CE)

I’ve been annoyed recently by suggestions that the ‘feminization’ of institutions involves increased deceit and manipulation because of an inherent deviousness to be found in women. Why is the idea of the manipulative woman still so powerful in our culture? When 165 of the 193 countries with UN membership are led by men and the top 10 richest people in the world are all men, why are these manipulative women doing so badly? Are men manipulating women to think they are manipulative? Both Helen Andrews (2025) and J. Stone (2019) in their essays, which insist that the increase representation of women in institutions is ruining the world, quote the work of Harvard Lecturer Joyce Benenson as evidence of this inherent feminine deviousness that needs to protected against.

“Woman, by her nature, is the instrument of the devil. A woman’s voice is the hissing of the serpent” Pope Urban II (c.1035-1099CE)

GoddessCircle 2: How You Can Have a Goddessful Mind (and Why You Need One!) by Annie Finch

In the first post in this series, I paid homage to Carol Christ’s 1978 clarion call “Why Women Need the Goddess,” which explains how the Goddess helps women overcome the profound wounds of patriarchy. And I began laying out my view of the five ways Goddessness can help ALL of us—not only women—to navigate the death-throes of patriarchy we are currently enduring.

My thoughts in these posts are based in Five Directions, a Goddess-centered approach to living that has been refined through my lifetime of writing and research, healing work, teaching, and witchy ritual practice. Whether used in ceremony or as a template for thought, the GoddessCircle starts in the South, direction of the Will, and turns counterclockwise (widdershins), in the feminine direction. Like Sacred Circles in traditional cultures worldwide, the GoddessCircle involves correspondences with many aspects of the world— including the potent ceremonial tool of poetic meters. The GoddessCircle’s Five Directions (South, East, North, West, and Center) and Five Elements (Fire, Air, Earth, Water, and Matrix) hold space for Will, Mind, Body, Heart, and Spirit—honoring all these parts of us equally and guiding us to cultivate the parts we have overlooked or forgotten.

The Five Directions. Art by Ailee Turcotte. Copyright Annie Finch

Notes from the ‘Field’ in August 2026, part 1 by Sara Wright

I thought that I would tell a few personal animal stories because they are for the most part uplifting and demonstrate how easy it is to develop relationships with just about any non – human being you meet.

Heron – A Visitation

Imagine my astonishment when I walked by the window and saw a heron striding through tall grasses. A sword -like slivery beak and sinewy neck. One glassy eye. Grey blue body. Long splayed feet firmly planted on the ground with each determined step. My dog Coalie barked once and poof – heron was gone. Oh, I was so disappointed.

Baffled, I immediately walked outside trying to imagine what a heron could be doing walking by the house. Illumination struck when I noted a slight depression that led into wild summer greenery. Thick lush ferns hid the ‘pond’, a sunken barrel ringed with stone. Heron must have been on his way to fish there, a place where frogs often hunted from a partially waterlogged, moss-covered log. I parted the greenery as one green frog dove into murky waters. No doubt there were others close by.

Historically herons could be found hunting at the brook. l sometimes glimpsed one flying out of the gorge – a prehistoric being flapping his great, syncopated wings. With worsening drought conditions, the waters were low. Yet, frogs and toads were still abundant the last time I had been down there a few days before – enough to keep mink and weasels around all year. Tell -tale footprints were often visible in the mud.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Dance of the Bees: Reading the Language of the Goddess

This was originally posted on Dec 1, 2014 and then reposted on July 11, 2022

The image from an ancient Cretan bowl (c.1700 BCE) from the Sacred Center of Phaistos pictured here has often been interpreted as an early depiction of Persephone’s descent or rising. But are clues from later Greek mythology pointing in the right direction in this case?

Recently, my colleague Mika Scott posted the Phaistos bowl image on our Goddess Pilgrimage Facebook site in conjunction with the bee pendant from Mallia. This juxtaposition led me to think again about the importance of bees and pollination in agricultural societies and to offer an alternative reading of the symbolism on the bowl.

In her important work The Language of the Goddess, Marjia Gimbutas taught us to “read” the language of the Goddess in the artifacts of Old Europe through a process of careful comparison of imagery and motifs, making use of what she called the archaeo-mythological method. This method finds that clues in later mythology and folklore can unlock the symbolism of ancient artifacts. Another possibly more important part of the method involves careful attention to plants and animals and their cycles of birth, death, and regeneration, which are portrayed on the artifacts.