Guest Contributor

Sing Anyway by Dr. Jamie Marich

I often find myself sitting in conservative Catholic spaces. My brother is a Roman Catholic priest in the Dominican order and I remain in support of his vocation. Every time, before a Mass officially starts, I’m overcome with a sense of: “You belong here…and you don’t.”

The part of me that has always felt at home in a Catholic setting is that love of the ritual and ceremony, the smell of the incense, the familiarity of the chants and songs. It was a Catholic priest, the late Fr. Ciaran O’Donnell, who taught me how to play the guitar and got me started with the healing practice of songwriting. When I sink into these associations, I feel connected to my Croatian ancestors and our Catholic faith. And there’s the other part of me—the queer feminist and an advocate for other queer and transgender people to live the fullest, most open expressions of themselves in all spaces of life, especially faith-based spaces. As a survivor of several forms of sexual assault and as a trauma specialist who has guided countless other survivors in their healing process over the years, I can’t sit in a Catholic Church and not feel uneasy about the legacy of abuse and silencing survivors within the church. Between my queer identity and dedication to supporting survivors, I feel that I don’t belong.

Cerridwen’s Cauldron; Stealing from Old Mother Universe by Kelle ban Dea

Catherine Kay Greenup, blue well
Unsplash stock

The story of how Cerridwen, the witch goddess, brews a magic potion full of awen (inspiration) which is then accidentally imbibed by the boy Gwion Bach, is well loved across the Western world, especially by neo-Druids. Gwion Bach is then reborn as Taliesin, the greatest bard in Britain. It is a typical heroes tale, with Cerridwen as the muse and initiatrix.

Or is it? This tale has always left a funny taste in my mouth, and when I recently read The Broken Cauldron by Lorna Smithers, I understood why. In the oldest version we have of this tale, Gwion Bach doesn’t accidentally taste the awen. He steals it.

She in Archetypes, Images, Energy… Emerging by Dale Allen

If it weren’t for my mother, I wouldn’t have gone to church on Saturday evening at 5pm. It was a special trip made by me, my daughter and my 89-year-old mother who is visiting here in Connecticut from Ohio. We are met at Holy Name of Jesus Church in Stamford, CT by one of my aunts, some cousins, one of my sisters, a brother-in-law, nieces and nephews – part of our big family.

Holy Name of Jesus Church is in walking distance from the house where my mother grew up: the house where her Polish-immigrant parents raised 8 children. My mother and her siblings attended Holy Name of Jesus Catholic School next to the church from 1^st through 9^th grade. The school is still there and now houses a daycare and learning center.

The Connection between Matilda Joslyn Gage’s Woman, Church and State and L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Mark I. West

My introduction to Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898) goes back to my long-standing interest in her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum. I regularly teach Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in my children’s literature courses, and I always point out the book’s feminist qualities. I mention, for example, that Dorothy Gale, the central character in the novel, is one of the first female characters in American literature to go on a bona fide quest. When I first started teaching this book, I wondered what caused Baum, a male writing in the late nineteenth century, to write such a feminist book. One day, while preparing for class, I came across a reference to Gage. This reference stated that Gage was a leading suffragette during the second half of the nineteenth century and that she lived with Baum and his family in Chicago when Baum was launching his career as a children’s author. After reading more about Baum’s life, I realized that Gage played a major role in shaping his nontraditional views on gender roles. However, I was still not sure what role she played in the development of women’s rights.

How the Nineteenth-Century Spiritualist Movement Gave Voice to American Women -Part 2 by Theresa Dintino

Moderator’s Note: This post is presented as part of FAR’s co-operation with The Nasty Women Writers Project, a site dedicated to highlighting and amplifying the voices and visions of powerful women. The site was founded by sisters Theresa and Maria Dintino. Part 1 was posted yesterday

Spiritualism began with two young girls, the Fox sisters, hearing knocking sounds in their home near Rochester, N.Y . They determined the knocking to be coming from a man who was murdered and buried under their home. The knocking was soon categorized into an alphabet out of which seances began. In seances groups of people gathered and put their hands on a table while asking questions of ancestors who made themselves known by rapping and knocking in response. Next, mediums in the form of young women speaking the answers of the dead as the bereaved asked them questions, emerged. Instructions were disseminated on how to be a medium and how to run a seance. The movement took off.

The movement was largely white, northern Protestants but other ethnicities were involved. The Black population may have influenced the arising of these practices with traditions brought with them from West Africa.

How the Nineteenth-Century Spiritualist Movement Gave Voice to American Women -Part One by Theresa Dintino

Throughout history women have found power and position in spiritual communities. They have acted as leaders, priestesses, oracles, mediums, disciples, saints, preachers and more. And yet these roles and positions of power are often overlooked in the story of women, and the general story of humans.

Still today many women function as leaders in a variety of spiritual disciplines, yet they do not receive the attention, respect and clout that men in similar positions do. More often women who hold roles of power in spiritual communities are dismissed or discredited.

If their spiritual community is not considered a formally accepted religion where their position was bestowed to them by a man ranking above them, women spiritual leaders are often ignored. This marginalization goes unquestioned.

FYI: Unruly Catholics Organizing for Kamala/Walz TODAY! by Dawn Morais Webster

With my fellow contributors to the fourth edition of Unruly Catholic Feminists, I recently proposed a ZOOM call and fundraiser/GOTV effort for Kamala/Walz.

This is my effort to rally Unruly Catholics, practicing or recovering, allies and those interested in rallying for care of each other and the community from across the nation. Let’s ensure that the Harris/Walz ticket prevails . Join the virtual rally hosted by MomsRising on Thursday Aug 15 at 2:30 PM Hawaii Time. I’ve signed up to attend. Are you free to join me? We would welcome FAR as a partner. If interested, use this link to sign up: https://mobilize.us/s/VbcImq.

BIO

Dawn Morais Webster was born in Kerala and was raised Catholic in largely Muslim, cosmopolitan Malaysia. Her mother, Gladys Morais, modeled faith as a pragmatic living out of attentiveness to the needs of others. Dawn had her schooling with Franciscan nuns who remain an inspiration. Her blog at https://dawnmorais.com/category/i-blog/ is a small voice–but she believes she is part of a much larger community of faith-filled dissenters. Hawaii has been her home for nearly two decades.

In My End: My Beginning by Margot Van Sluytman

In my end is my beginning.
T. S. Eliot

This year two colleagues of mine died. And my heart roared. Tears aplenty accompanied me. Poet that I am. Word-lover. Image-seeker. Meaning-making-hound-dog. Doggedly seeking a place to plant myself so that the ache of these losses within the crucible in which I find myself grounded, honed, chiselled, challenged, challenging, writing, wording, rewording, sculpting relationship with my students, who are too my teachers, is soothed. By tiny shards. Soothed. And death finds home everywhere. In each nook. Cranny. Crevice. Concreted crenellation or grassy llano, there she be.

What research, I ask myself, can we do when the heart fails to cease its eking, leaking ache, and crushing sorrow? What academic skill need we birth, resurrect, divine in order to erase this over-whelming tsunami of acknowledging our finitude? Where to look? What book? What paper? What journal? To what podcast need we creep, crawl, scurry, bound, fling ourselves in order to quell brutal, blistering despair? Self-immolation cannot work, for too, too many teeming tears douse the flames.

The Case for Women’s Visionary Films by Freia Serafina

Power in the woods.
Creation of artist Jym Davis.

As a film history professor, I am intimately aware that women’s representation on screen is historically lacking. While preparing to teach a new course, I found myself hard-pressed to uncover significant academic discourse that highlights the divine feminine that doesn’t solely live in the realm of a Christian worldview. Indeed, film scholar Tenzen Eaghll points out that much of the existing scholarship from the past 100 years “all tend to equate religion with Christian theology in some manner, and … focus[es] narrowly upon Christian themes such as Jesus, salvation, faith, etc.” He states that scholars of religion and film essentialize all religion as Christianity, and that many scholars of cinema additionally speak of religion as an all-encompassing umbrella organization giving us a condensed notion of a shared theological worldview, devoid of nuance and alternate meaning. Eaghll goes on to argue, as I do, for a more critical approach to the study of film that requires us to pay closer attention to how “representations of religion in film conceal issues of race, class, gender, colonialism, secularism, and capitalism – common themes in ideological critique – as well as notions of origin, authenticity, narrative, violence, and identity.” I believe the solution lays in the inclusion of women’s visionary films.

Who Speaks Into Your Life by Michelle Bodle

An occupational hazard for a woman in a religious setting is having people try to claim authority to speak into my life that they simply do not have. Two recent examples were so blatant that they caused me to pause and reflect on the underlying dynamics that led to these unrealistic expectations.

In the first event, I was out with a friend for coffee, and someone from her congregation approached. They wanted to pray for an upcoming service, but then, during the prayer, he started to pray against the “confusion” at our table. His sudden praying against this “confusion” is notable in that it only arose after my colleague introduced me as the lead pastor at a church (not an associate) in a denomination where this particular gentleman’s church broke off. After the prayer ended, he tried to explain his “prophetic gift” and how he arrived at praying against any confusion, which was tied to his own confusion during the prayer. However, the truth was, there wasn’t any, and he thought he had authority, during prayer, to speak into my life in a way that he did not.