Guest Contributor

Charity Is Not Enough by Susan de Gaia

Gift giving is an important focus this time of year, along with reflection, reconciliation, and renewal. This spirit of charity is needed now more than ever. And yet, charity is not enough.

Thousands of women, maybe even millions, re-experienced the trauma of sexual assault when the American public heard and ignored Donald Trump’s admission of grabbing women “by the pussy” and the accusations of forced kissing by numerous women, electing him to office in 2016. This was followed by additional revelations of his immorality and corruption and, in a show of conscience by one political party, his impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Many have wondered how such a man could get elected and remain in office despite the many revelations of illegal activities, and complete lack of honesty, repentance, and conscience. The recent response by Trump and his allies to an editorial in Christianity Today favoring impeachment yields a clue: criticize Trump, and risk losing politically, financially, or worse. Today, one can’t even speak out. How many of Trump’s accusers received death threats? How many of his extramarital liaisons received a bribe to keep quiet?

The waters are muddy in the Trump era: politics divide us into winners and losers, and “our” administration sides with those who praise one man and against those who dare to disagree, aided by conservative religious leaders and institutions. This is a situation that our founders meant to prevent. But it is happening.

Also happening are racial and gender inequality on the rise. To many feminists this seems nightmarish and unexpected. Some of us saw it coming, but the extent of its public acceptance and open justification was something few could foresee.

At the same time, women and men are coming together; I have seen my networks and others expand more than ever. The increasing support and understanding for women’s issues by people of conscience, and the promotion of compassion and activism for all those who suffer, is a form of charity, one that is greatly needed now.

But such charity is not enough. And charity from those who remain quiet about the corruption, immorality, and bullying in and outside of our government is not even welcome.

What we need is acknowledgement. This would be an important first step. And it is that which Trump and his allies push against the hardest, perhaps because they realize it can lead to the next steps, repentance and then change.

Trump’s perfect flawless existence is a thin veneer that most of us can see through. And yet, here we remain, at a standstill that is supported by willful ignoring of his true face by those with something to gain.

Acknowledgement, not charity, is needed now. No one is perfect, least of all one who claims that he is.

Susan de Gaia teaches Religion and Philosophy online for Central Michigan University and is General Editor of Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions: Faith and Culture across History (ABC-CLIO, 2018/2019). Susan lives in California and is active in social and environmental justice, peace, and women’s spirituality movements. She works locally to promote environmental sustainability, cultural diversity, and political action. She holds a Ph.D. in Religion-Social Ethics with a Graduate Certificate in the Study of Women and Men in Society (USC), and B.A. in Women’s Studies (UCSB).

The Cuisine Cards by Laurie Goodhart

With every wonderful, heart-wrenching, deeply researched, and inspiring post I read on F.A.R., I feel less inclined to share my own somewhat out-of-step contributions to this world. Nevertheless, I keep reminding myself that they are the things that I do, and I do them because I feel compelled, and have consistently been compelled in those two specific directions — art and agriculture/wildcrafting — since childhood. Also, the paintings and prints are a product of my always thinking about and feeling into both feminism and spirituality, and the fruits of the intersection of the two. So here is another offering.

I’ve always had a fondness for the visual aspect of playing cards, and collect books on them. One image of an uncut sheet of cards printed in 1585 in Frankfurt, where the black and white cards were jammed in every which way on large sheets of paper, inspired the look of these four prints, The Cuisine Cards.

They are conceived as celebrating food and cultures from various parts of the world. The face cards are non-hierarchical in terms of rank and gender. The 10 is a Table of the suit’s food, then there are the Shaper, Mover, and Taster, who, although usually carrying on in a certain sequential order, each contribute equal value to the whole experience of eating food. Two suits have all female face cards and two all male.

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A Predator by Sheree La Puma

Feminism and Religion Project Art work designed by Jaysen Waller – http://www.jaysenwaller.com/

“Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

Now I tell myself that I’m street smart. I did the Jack Kerouac “On the Road” trip when I was 18, driving cross country in the fall, even sleeping in my car. I’ve volunteered in the projects, been a motivational speaker in correctional camps. I’ve shooed away drug dealers south of Marrakech, been lost in the woods in Michigan, and lived in L.A., N.Y. and London. Despite the occasional bump and an oft damaged psyche, to this day I trust when I shouldn’t. There is some small part of me that longs to see good in everyone…believes there is something redeemable in the worst of men.

The problem is I need to remember that I am not the one with the power to heal the broken. That job belongs to God. My magical thinking has brought me to the edge of a precipice and as my partner of 13 years tells me “I worry about you because there is EVIL out there and you don’t see it.” I used to scoff at that idea. After all, what does evil look like? I’d surely recognize it. But as I look back at past behaviors…picking up hitchhikers on the side of the road at 16, driving homeless drug addicts to recovery, meeting strangers posing as “men of God,” and “writers,” to help them get their careers going, I realize I’m exposing myself to harm on a daily basis.

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The Caves Beneath My Roots or Psychological Spelunking by Darla Graves Palmer

I’ve spent much of the past four years – since returning to the state of my birth after more than forty years’ intentional absence – trying to understand and make peace with a particular slice of southern culture that I avoided most of my adult life. Part of that process was a deep dive into my family roots which led me to also consider the caverns further below those roots. If landscape contributes to shaping our human nature, what might that mean for my family?

Here in the Missouri Ozarks, my roots extend a hundred and fifty years deep; my ancestors on both sides of my family are buried in the karst of the Ozark Plateau, and their bones have leached into the thousands of caves that honeycomb the area, mixing with the limestone and other minerals through the abundance of flowing water. I grew up being cautioned to watch out for sinkholes, often a sign that there was a cave system below.

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In the Beginning…by Lori Stewart

In the beginning
the very beginning, not the
patriarchal, colonial beginning

In the beginning
was the Word
which may have been
a grunt, a vibration, a thought, a feeling
a woman or man or a non-binary being

In the beginning was the Word
And the Word was with God
beside, above, below, inside
and God was perhaps a woman, a man or non-binary
a thought, a vibration, a feeling
or…pure unadulterated love Continue reading “In the Beginning…by Lori Stewart”

Wealth In Imagination by Laurie Goodhart

Artwork and sustainable agriculture are the two threads of my professional life. They mingle fruitfully beneath the surface as I sift through remaining evidence of ancient worlds, trying to sense how people of lost cultures met basic survival needs and also how they responded to the very human hunger for beauty, meaning, and story.

In revisiting the remnants with empathy and wonder, scavenging for resonant clues and forks in the road that we didn’t take, some subtle but significant things continually resurface. For one, various ancient Greek writers (males, e.g., Plato, Strabo, Euripides) noted that it is “the women” who keep things sacred and maintain spiritually oriented rituals; that without the impetus of women, men would not bother to honor the sacred in everyday life, carrying on without much concern beyond themselves. Continue reading “Wealth In Imagination by Laurie Goodhart”

It’s Time for Nuns on the Bus to take to the Road Again: Getting Beyond Being “Pro-Birth” to Protecting all at the Margins by Dawn Webster

Author and daughter, Dr. Sheela Jane Menon, Assistant Professor at Dickinson College, PA

The country desperately needs to see the Nuns on the Bus on the road again. I just watched Radical Grace, nearly three years after my daughter and son-in-law gave it to me as a Christmas gift. My tardiness made me feel guilty, but despite the passage of time, the film still feels very timely. Three years after the cancer that is 45 entered the White House; three years after the corruption and cruelty he unleashed has metastasized into key branches of government; three years after Catholics have witnessed the heart of the Gospels ripped out the way children have been ripped from the arms of their parents at the southern border, this documentary about how a few nuns risked their place in the church to fight for justice tells me we need the leadership of the nuns more than ever.

Catholic voters from the heartland gave 45 the keys to the White House.—60 percent of them voted for him. Many justified voting for a man with Donald Trump’s appalling sexual, business, and racist history by pointing to his supposedly “pro-life” stance. Continue reading “It’s Time for Nuns on the Bus to take to the Road Again: Getting Beyond Being “Pro-Birth” to Protecting all at the Margins by Dawn Webster”

A Letter to the Editor: Hagar Has Her Say by Marilyn Batchelor

Dear Editor:

I just want to set the record straight. I’ve heard stories about me being an ungrateful slave girl who was disrespectful to my master and mistress. I hear folks saying I went in and slept with my mistress’ husband, as if I had a choice. I didn’t. My body was not my own.

Now, I am a free woman, but not without a price. I was an Egyptian hand maid to the Pharaoh. He gave me as a gift to a wealthy Hebrew couple, Sarai and Abram. Prior to this, I was respected amongst the other hand maids. I was still a virgin and that was worth something. As a servant, I already had no rights, nor control over my life. But at least I had my pride.

I thought my new mistress would keep me safe from losing my virginity until I found a husband. Instead, out of impatience, she sent me in to her husband to have a baby. You see, Abram and Sarai had been trying to have children for many years. God had already promised Abram that he would be a father of many nations. Sarai, being barren, was no proof of this.

They called me “slave-girl.” I was nameless – meant only to serve her and later to produce a child – something she couldn’t do. Why was it my fault that Sarai was barren? After I was forced to have sex with her husband, it was clear I was nothing but property. Continue reading “A Letter to the Editor: Hagar Has Her Say by Marilyn Batchelor”

Joan of Arc from The Goddess Project: Made in Her Image by Colette Numajiri

“I’m not afraid. I was born to do this.” -Joan of Arc

Women are inherently valiant. In extreme situations we armor up and lead others through whatever we are battling at the time.

Joan of Arc was a human woman with otherworldly faith who, as a young teenager, listened to Divine voices and lead an army that eventually ended the 100 Years War. “The real Joan of Arc is an uncomfortable fit as an icon of female solidarity or democratic rights. She achieved what should have been impossible for someone of her gender and class in 15th-century France.” wrote Helen Castor in her book Joan of Arc: A History. She was so respected and revered that 20 years AFTER Her death, 115 people testified on behalf of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) and overturned the ruling.

Enbodying the Divine Feminine on Earth, women look to Joan as an inspiring example of a brave and active woman. Joan inspired the Suffragettes, they held her banner and wore white (as Joan chose to wear white for purity when She was taken to the stake to be burned for the crime of cross-dressing) as they marched for women’s right to vote. Just as, a few months ago our newly elected Congresswomen all wore white in solidarity.

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Adoring God in Labor by K Kriesel

The day before the 2019 Nevertheless She Preached conference at First Baptist Church of Austin, TX my own Catholic church’s young adult ministry hosted Eucharistic Adoration. Although I’ve enjoyed Adoration dozens of times, several factors made this evening different. I was preparing for cervical surgery for one. My Hebrew Bible class at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary was grappling with Rebekah, Rachel, Leah, and the voiceless Dinah. The call to write the history of 20th century Catholic women theologians had been at my ear all day. The catalyst was when two men at the Adoration began leading a song about God the Father.

Maybe it was just the incense but I swear I saw something. An image of the baby crowning from the womb, God gasping in labor, as the Eucharist wore the gold of the monstrance as a crown before the tabernacle. God was pushing the Body of Christ into creation while I prayed for my own sick body. God was crying out with the voices of these thousands of unheard women. We were all there. I snuck out my phone and took a picture, determined to put the scene to paper.

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