Feminism and Religion

The Grandmother Way by Sara Wright

The last day of August is upon us. It’s so cool here in the hollow that I decide to winnow the second batch of my elderberries sitting outdoors where Coalie can keep a sharp eye on me from her dog bed on the porch. I note that hummingbirds are thinning out. As I begin this separation of berry from stem, I imagine that I am connected to all women everywhere through what is often called (pejoratively) ‘woman’s work’. Women who were the first seed keepers and berry winnowers like today’s Indigenous peoples that still follow the old ways. Oh, I am grateful to be sitting among them in my imagination. Still, I yearn. I wish I could share this task with just one other woman, and for a moment sink into that familiar loneliness. As I look at my purple stained fingers reflecting on how exquisite a natural dye this must make, I think I might try to collect another batch of berries to experiment with.

I am not sure just when all thought ceased but every year, I experience this phenomenon while plucking purple elderberries with my fingers… and then? Two hours later the winnowing is done, just as I begin to lose the sun. Returning to the house I finish my tinctures in minutes, pouring amethyst berries into jars and covering them with alcohol. After steeping for six weeks this medicine will help me ward off colds and flu. Covid too. I am mindful that elderberries are a gift from nature that I receive each year. Gratitude overflows at this time of the ‘Gathering In’.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Death with Dignity

This was originally posted on 11/3/14

In the summer of 1960 when I was 14 years old my much loved grandmother Mae Inglis Christ died of a cancer that affected her brain. The last time I saw my Nannie was shortly after her diagnosis in the early spring. While we were visiting, the cancer affected her back, and she took to her bed. In those days children were not allowed in hospitals. I never saw my grandmother alive again, but my mother told us that our grandmother was hooked up to tubes much longer than she should have been. Mother vowed, “This will never happen to me.” I was driven to the funeral in a limousine with my grandmother’s girlfriends. They spoke about my grandmother’s last days, describing how (because her mind was affected by cancer) my little grandmother had screamed and screamed at them for not visiting–even though they were with her every day. They found my grandmother’s outbursts so traumatic that they said they were relieved to see her looking so peaceful in her coffin.

Who Turns the Wheel? Gender in the Modern Pagan Year, part 2 by Myriapath

Part 1, yesterday traced how the eight-festival Wheel of the Year was assembled in the middle of the twentieth century from older ingredients, some surviving only in a line or two of medieval writing. It began with a blessing. Writing for this site in July 2017, Carol P. Christ closed a post with words that name no gender at all: “As we bless the Source of Life, so we are blessed.” We return to it at the end.”

The divine couple, and who was told no

The gendering was there from the beginning. Hutton describes Gardner’s earliest seasonal rites as pairing a god and a goddess, “a divine couple who were intrinsically linked to the annual cycle of winter and summer”, the god predominating in the cold-season festivals and the goddess in the warm-season pair.

The seasonal love story that many readers first meet as something ancient is a modern liturgical pattern, not a preserved pre-Christian myth. That does not make it less meaningful to those who keep it; it makes it datable.

The pattern also carried an exclusion. The World Religions and Spirituality Project, in its profile of the Minoan Brotherhood, describes Gardner’s Wicca as a “fertility religion” organized around male-female polarity, God and Goddess, high priest and high priestess, and records that “Gardner was homophobic and refused initiation to anyone whom he thought was homosexual”, noting that Alex Sanders and Doreen Valiente rejected that exclusion. A framework built on a heterosexual pair puts pressure on those it does not fit, and some people built elsewhere.

Who Turns the Wheel? Gender in the Modern Pagan Year, part 1 by Myriapath

A blessing, and a calendar younger than it sounds

Pick up almost any introduction to the modern Pagan festival year and you will meet a couple: a goddess of the growing season and a god born, crowned and cut down at harvest. Writing for this site in July 2017, Carol P. Christ described Lammas as the point at which “the young male God identified with the harvest … is sacrificed.” She closed the same post with a blessing that names no gender at all: “As we bless the Source of Life, so we are blessed.”

The eight-festival Wheel of the Year and its divine-couple story were assembled in the middle of the twentieth century by people whose names, meetings and dates are known. That recency is exactly why the wording has been open to revision, and revised it has been, in public and on the record. What follows traces that rewriting rather than judging it.

How the eight festivals came together

In a 2008 study in Folklore, the historian Ronald Hutton traces the eight festivals to two separate modern sources. The solstice and equinox feasts descend from Edward Williams, better known as Iolo Morganwg, who invented four Druidic solar festivals between 1792 and 1826. The quarter days come from Margaret Murray’s now rejected account of witch festivals.

God Is a Woman by Michael Aaron Cody

Why does calling God a woman sound more outrageous than calling God a man? For thousands of years, we’ve said it without questioning it: The Father, the Lord, the Almighty. We assigned a masculine identity to the supposed creator of existence, reflected in Matthew 6:9. But look at the biology of human reproduction and the answer gets uncomfortable fast. If God is responsible for life, why assign that responsibility to a male when bringing human life into the world is overwhelmingly feminine? Who decided God was a man in the first place?

I have believed for many years that God, if such a being exists, is female. Because of biology, every human being who ever lived developed inside a woman. Every king, scientist, philosopher, pope, rabbi, imam, and religious authority owes his existence to the female reproductive system. Yet somehow, the ultimate creator is male? Human embryos begin with sexually undifferentiated reproductive structures. In typical male development, the SRY gene activates a pathway involving SOX9, initiating testicular formation. Female development involves WNT4 and RSPO1. Both sexes develop reproductive anatomy from common embryonic structures, indicating no universal masculine starting point, no biological throne reserved for men.

Gloria Naylor: Redirecting the Spotlight, American Woman Writer (1950-2016), part 2 by Maria Dintino

part 1 was posted yesterday

Mama Day

By the time Gloria Naylor wrote her the third novel, Mama Day (1988), she was a master, able to infuse the story with such richness, connection and love that the reader is enveloped in a state of amazement while reading. This spell involves the “spiritual vision, or more accurately, third sight, that empowers Mama Day” (51).

The manifestation of the matriarchal lineage in Mama Day creates a dizzying suspension in time, with dubious connections to the past, tied to current happenings, along with the struggle and hope for the future. Sometimes it is hard to decipher exactly what is going on and you are left to decide for yourself what you see, hear, understand and believe. As the narrator says, “Truth is never fixed”(38).

This novel is set on Willow Springs, a fictional rendition of one of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, “a uniquely maternal island paradise that defies geographic limits”(38).

Gloria Naylor: Redirecting the Spotlight, American Woman Writer (1950-2016), part 1 by Maria Dintino

The Gloria Naylor Archive

I am beyond thrilled to learn of The Gloria Naylor Archive!

This extensive repository of Naylor’s work has been a joint labor of love, respect, and honor between Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut (where Naylor was awarded an honorary degree in 1994) and Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Suzanne Edwards, associate professor of English and director of the Humanities Center at Lehigh, explains:

“It’s this incredible resource, but it was also a resource that I didn’t see people engaging with in scholarship on Naylor. The materials weren’t easily accessible, and Sacred Heart didn’t have the staff or resources to digitize it.”

As a result, Edwards recommended a partnership that would “make the archive more accessible to fans of Naylor’s work, to teachers who are teaching her novels at the college level, on the secondary level, and to scholars who might find it difficult to make a trip to Fairfield”(Hochbein).

The results: a rich and expanding digital archive, as well as an invite to those doing research involving Naylor to schedule an appointment if they would like to engage with materials in person. (Before scheduling a trip, know that the physical materials belonging to the archive are back at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut as of 2023.)

Tortured Turtle by Sara Wright

Yesterday I attended a community event where someone from a rescue organization was holding up the biggest painted turtle that I have ever seen. More than a foot in length. An equally large snapper was lying on the grass surrounded by people.

The point this woman was trying to make is that turtles grow up into large turtles that can end up in rescue organizations. I froze in horror as I took the pictures, tried to get details but the woman was occupied with someone else while she held this creature in the air.

This morning I gazed into a forest that is dripping with dew. Astonishing golden autumn light is gilding the trees as tears fall through the leaves. Achingly beautiful until I see an image of the turtle in my mind. Remembering times when I was young and didn’t pay attention to what a sensitive child KNEW.

All creatures are sentient; all feel pain and fear. The image of yesterday’s turtle highlights everything that is wrong in a world when most people believe that only humans are sentient. Once I thought I believed that too, although the child in me did not. I couldn’t deal with the terrorized child, so I left her behind as soon as I could. As a young adolescent my second (rejecting the child was the first) crisis of faith occurred when the religion I adhered to created no space for the rest of nature or geological time.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: The Greek Elections and the 1%

This was originally posted on January 26, 2015

Alexis Tsipras of Greece & Pablo Iglesias of Spain hope to change Europe for the 99%

On January 1, 2016, 1% of the world’s population will own 50% of the world’s wealth, according to Oxfam.

On January 26, 2015 Alexis Tsipras will be in the process of forming a new anti-austerity government in Greece. Some believe this will be a new beginning not only for Greece, but for the world–if others follow the Greeks in resisting the domination of their economies by the international monetary interests that represent the 1%.

The bondholders and the international press tend to portray the Greek economic crisis as a morality play in which foolish Greeks borrowed too much and must suffer the consequences to pay back their loans. If Greece were a lazy teenager appearing on Judge Judy, tough love might be the answer.

But this simplistic equation cannot be made to work for a country of 10 million people, only some of whom colluded in taking out loans they could not pay back.

From the Archives: Why are We Drawn to the Black Madonna? by Judith Shaw

This was originally posted on Oct 25, 2012

Once the opportunity came my way to spend two weeks with my sister in Paris, I knew I had to visit the Black Madonnas at Chartres. I had been to Chartres many years ago, before I knew about the Black Madonnas scattered throughout Europe. I felt the power of the site at that time, but had little understanding of where that power came from.

History of the Black Madonna

The indigenous goddess worship of Europe, was influenced by Phoenician traders who introduced statues of dark skinned African and Middle Eastern goddesses such as Isis, Inanna, and others to the European continent from 1550BC to about 300BCE. The worship of these goddesses continued with The Roman invasion of Gaul (France) and other parts of Europe.

Once Christianity took hold in Europe, churches were built on top of sacred pagan sites. But old ways die hard; many of these dark skinned goddesses were incorporated into the newly built Christian churches. Today there are more than 500 known Black Madonna statues and paintings throughout the world, the majority in France.