Feminism and Religion

The Legacy of Intergenerational Violence/ Silence, part 2 By Sara Wright

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

I also came to understand the role Intergenerational Silence played in the dance between my mother and father. My mother controlled through silence, a perfect correlate to her husband’s explosive rages. Silence and Rage make grotesque bedmates, and both destroy relationships.

My mother’s story remained veiled. Except on one occasion, my mother never apologized to me for her actions so that bridge remains broken.

Everything I know about my mother’s history (and that isn’t much) I learned from her relatives. I knew she was illegitimate, the daughter of a wealthy and very married senator and my grandmother. She lived a privileged life and was sent to the very best schools/colleges. Once a month she visited with her biological father. By the time my mother was in her twenties she severed this relationship for unknown reasons. I have no idea if she ever met her half – brothers and sisters. She disliked – blamed (?) my grandmother who was banned from the family when she became pregnant. No doubt shame was an issue for all. My mother lived with my grandmother’s sisters, my great aunts and called my grandmother by her first name. She married twice. The first marriage was annulled by the family. No idea why. Secrets and Silence ruled my mother’s family; and she clearly perfected that tendency. Didn’t anyone recognize that secrets leave holes that cannot be bridged once that person is dead?

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Good Theology is Feminist Theology

The was originally posted on July 21, 2014

Judith Plaskow and I are just now completing the draft of the manuscript of the book we have been working on for the past 2 ½ years. It has a new title: Two Views of Goddess and God for Our Time.* I have been thinking of little else for the past few weeks. An editor who is considering our book said that she was hoping we could address our book to an audience larger than the feminist theology community. Thinking about this, a light dawned: if feminist theology is right that traditional theology denies the full humanity of women, then good theology must be feminist theology. Our work is not tangential to the theological mainstream, but is at its center.

We have revised the Introduction and Conclusion to the book with the assumption that our work should appeal not just to other feminists, but to a wide range of intelligent readers and thinkers. The fact that we were asked to participate in a dialogue about the nature of God in Tikkun magazine’s Summer 2014 inspires us to hope that we are right that feminist theology is becoming part of the progressive theological mainstream.

PRESSLER’S PROGENY by Esther Nelson

David French, an Opinion Columnist for the New York Times, wrote an enlightening piece (05/14/2026) titled, “I Don’t Think You Can Even Call This Hypocrisy.” You can read the article here.

In his essay, French refers to a piece by Robert Downen, an investigative journalist, who wrote about Paul Pressler (d. 2024), an architect of the “so-called resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention,” the largest Protestant denomination in the USA. The MAGA movement, filled with loud and often uninformed, conservative Christians, is Pressler’s progeny.

From the early 1990s until 2006, the Southern Baptist Convention (as well as unaffiliated and independent Bible churches) experienced phenomenal growth. Many fundamentalist evangelicals viewed this growth as God’s blessing on the faithful. However, as journalist Downen dug around, he found “there was an overwhelming amount of evidence that Pressler was a morally corrupt and abusive man.” Not only was he a Confederate apologist, he purportedly sexually abused young men and boys and never lost his influence. Many Baptists believed that “…exposing Pressler’s misdeeds would ‘distort’ his public Christian credibility.”

Gay Pride 2026 by Marie Cartier

This past weekend– May 15-17, 2026 was gay pride in Long Beach, California. Long Beach KICKS off pride month in May, and is believed to be the first pride event of the nation– happening before the official pride month of June (commemorating the Stonewall Riot).

Here are some pictures I took from the 13th annual Dyke March, and Dykes After Dark poetry event! Completely community organized and free! And the Pride Parade in Long Beach was– fabulous! You may have heard that the Long Beach Pride festival was cancelled– community organizers worked to create a free event and as our resident drag diva, Jewels said, “Cancelled? I never heard of her!”

Miriam MacGillis and Cosmology Revisited, part 2 by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Part 1 was posted yesterday. Miriam MacGillis’ words from Education for a Small Planet continue:

“And those implications, have been the unspoken assumptions which lie at the heart of the way western civilization evolved, distinctly different from eastern civilization or from tribal civilizations. That’s why we look so different. That’s why in 300 years where I live, our ancestors totally, totally altered the natural world. Their obsession with development is outside themselves.

“So, what has transpired in the unfolding of western civilization has been this extra-ordinary capacity of the human in its rational, linear, analytical mode of knowing, to understand, to probe, to analyze, to uncover, to discover, to alter, to change, to redesign and to bring about a better state of affairs than what was. Whether it was the discovery of fire, or the wheel or the printing press or the computer, always the real issue behind the technology is not the technology itself, it’s the vision of bringing about development, the perfection of.

“Now ironically, it’s because of that very detachment from the world that the western mind was free to do that. “If this is just matter, you can do anything you want with it.” That’s not really where there is any moral dimension. Moral development happens between humans, human/human, human groupings and human/god. That is why the whole unfolding of western civilization, we were able to probe to such a depth of the physical energies of the world that in this century we were able to do what we did.

Miriam MacGillis and Cosmology Revisited, part 1 by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Author’s Note: When my mother died in 2018, I became the custodian of her voluminous files. I found some gems inside them. My mother lived in NJ not too far from a place called Genesis Farms and its founder and proprietress was/is Sister Miriam MacGillis. There was a whole file on the farms.

Included in these files was a binder of cassette tapes from a workshop Miriam MacGillis gave in 1986 called “Education for a Small Planet.” There are 4 double-sided cassettes. When I first saw them, I was afraid to even touch them as 40-year-old cassette tapes are not known for their sturdiness. A friend helped me find an agency that agreed to digitize them. Since then, I have had the great honor of transcribing the tapes. It took me several months, but I have now completed the transcription. (They are a little rough as I added punctuation as I went.) I have been in touch with Miriam about them and she agrees that the message from 1986 is still important, in fact, likely more important now and they should have as wide an audience as possible.

Miriam MacGillis is a modern-day prophet who not only holds a broad understanding of cosmology but brilliantly expresses it. She was an early colleague of Thomas Berry, introducing many people to the Story of the Universe.

I believe these tapes need to be studied and shared and I am happy to make them available to anyone who is interested. Below is a taste of their wisdom. It is from Tape #1A (first tape, first side), lightly edited. This is really just an introduction and it will be in two parts.

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THE GODDESSNESS PRAYER by Annie Finch

A SACRED FEMININE VERSION OF THE LORD’S PRAYER BASED ON A TRANSLATION FROM THE ORIGINAL ARAMAIC

Genevieve Vaughan recently posted, on a Maternal Gift Economy group, a link to a new translation of the Lord’s Prayer directly from the original Aramaic. The translation is by Nabu who describes himself by saying he “decodes the hidden knowledge they buried inside religion, history and science.” Nabu recognizes Neil Douglas-Klotz as the foundational scholar of his own translations as well as adding his own notes. Click here for the link to Nabu’s site. I was excited to find the Divine Feminine playing such an important role in this translation.

When I assembled the restored versions of each line together, the resulting poem was not very well-written or easy to say, let alone to memorize. So I translated the translation into a more succinct and concrete version. I hope it will be useful.

Here is the compilation and my own version below, followed by a few notes on reasons for my translation choices.

The Legacy of Intergenerational Violence/ Silence, part 1 By Sara Wright

Patriarchy begins at home.

Author’s Note: One reason I am sharing this story is that I hope that it will ease another round of suffering. However, I would dearly like to believe that others might reflect upon the ways they have been impacted by family violence or silence in their own lives, so we don’t get caught by projecting these patriarchal roots outside of us onto the collective while dismissing them in ourselves. That dark patriarchal seed is present in all of us, and I think that telling our personal stories keeps us attached to the whole with humility – a challenge in this time of monstrous ethical, social, political, ecological breakdown.

I often have dreams that leave me with questions, dreams that provoke deep personal reflection, dreams that stay with me as the following one did. At mid-life I had written tributes for two men that mentored me from a distance who brought ‘good fathering’ into the foreground because each encouraged me to believe in myself, to celebrate my original thinking, to trust my intuition and more.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: JUSTICE AND PREJUDICE IN THE “PROPHETIC TRADITION”

This was originally posted July 14, 2014

Besides being advocates of social justice, the prophets of Israel were advocates of “exclusive monotheism,” exclusively “male monotheism,” “religious othering,” and “religious prejudice.”

Many progressive Jews and Christians find inspiration in prophets because of their insistence that their God cares about the poor and “the widow at the gate.” For progressive Christians, Jesus stands in the prophetic tradition, and the core of his message is “concern for the poor.” For progressive Jews the prophetic tradition is the root of their concern for human rights.

Those who locate their spirituality and concern for social justice in the prophets can point proudly to Martin Luther King and the many priests, ministers, and rabbis, as well as ordinary Christians and Jews who marched with him as exemplars of the prophetic tradition.

But the prophetic tradition also has a nasty underside.

The Golden Book of Wisdom: Ancient Spirituality and Shamanism for Modern Times by Fotoula Adrimi

There comes a moment on the spiritual path, often arriving quietly and unexpectedly, when a woman begins to sense that the life she has been living does not fully belong to her. The roles, expectations, and inherited beliefs that once seemed natural begin to feel like garments that no longer fit. Beneath them, something older and deeper stirs. It is not new knowledge, but an ancient calling.

This call to return to an inner truth has been suppressed in us through centuries of patriarchy, yet it has been carried within us across time. This is a deep exploration that I share throughout The Golden Book of Wisdom – ancient spirituality and shamanism for modern times. In my own journey, this path did not arise as a rejection of the modern world, but as a remembering of something that had always been present. As I share in the book, my early life was marked by intuitive awareness and spiritual connection, which I later suppressed in order to conform to societal expectations. It was only when I returned to spiritual practice through meditation, healing work, and shamanic training, that these gifts reawakened, guiding me back to a path of service and teaching.

At its essence, shamanism is not a belief system but a lived, experiential relationship with spirit, nature, and the unseen worlds. It echoes an ancient role: the healer, the seer, the priestess, the one who walks between the worlds.

In the twenty years I have been practising shamanism professionally, I have come to realise that this movement from disconnection to remembrance, is one that many women recognise. Since 2012 I have been sharing The Priestess of the Moon™ training: a two-year apprenticeship exclusively for women to hold ceremony, rites of passage, and work with the wheel of the year and the moon cycle, reclaiming their inherent mystical power.