Guest Contributor

It is the Best of Times. It is the Worst of Times: An Athlete Looks at Her Life and Title IX By Paula McGee

I expect 2012 to be a great year. Not only do I plan on graduating in May with a Ph.D., but I will also receive one of highest honors in sports. On Sunday, February 19, 2012 in the USC Galen Center during halftime of the USC and UCLA women’s basketball game, USC will retire the jerseys of my twin sister and I. Most people in my women’s studies and theology world do not really know that I have a twin sister, nor do they fully appreciate that about twenty-five years ago, my sister and I played on one of the most prominent teams in women’s basketball and in women’s sports. We won two back-to-back national championships in 1983 and 1984. We were also the first NCAA national champions (previous women’s teams were American Intercollegiate Association for Women (AIAW) championships). My sister and I played with Cynthia Cooper and Cheryl Miller. Our team was one the first women’s teams to get mainstream acceptance in the larger sports world. We were not just “girls” that happened to play a sport; we were “real” athletes. We received the same media attention and acceptance of any sports team during that period.

Most of my feminist friends—the preachers, scholars, and theologians—have no idea of what it means for a university to retire a jersey. In the sports world, retiring an athlete’s jersey means that no other person in that sport will ever wear that number at that university. The retired athletic jersey hangs in the rafters of the sports facility forever. This honor for an athlete is synonymous to a scholar receiving a named endowed chair in the academy. What is exciting for me is that my jersey will not only be hanging with my sister’s—that alone would be enough to celebrate. USC is one of the few institutions in the country in which the majority of the retired jerseys are the jerseys of women: Cheryl Miller, Lisa Leslie, Cynthia Cooper, and now Pam and Paula McGee. Cheryl and Cynthia are also members of the Naismith Hall of Fame, and Lisa is sure to join them with that honor very soon. Continue reading “It is the Best of Times. It is the Worst of Times: An Athlete Looks at Her Life and Title IX By Paula McGee”

Sanctioned Ignorance and the Theological Academy By Egon Cohen

Namsoon Kang writes that dislocation can be a theologically transformative process of self-discovery, using the metaphor of the “homeless traveler . . . leaving home for Home.” Kang also states that one’s identity—one’s location as traveler—is necessarily influenced by one’s position along axes of identity such as race, religion, ethnicity, class, gender, ability, and sexuality. And it is at this interstice that I, and many other liberationist theologians, grapple with issues of privilege. We are committed to traveling with the marginalized, but our luggage is packed with advantages denied to our companions. Indeed, as individuals with the luxury of pursuing advanced theological studies, most academic theologians operate within a space of significant privilege.

In this regard, I have observed four main typologies of response: (1) denial, (2) guilt, (3) cataloguing, and (4) instrumentalizing. It is hard to constructively engage the first type of response within the present discussion—the existence of such institutionalized privileges is one of my implicit operating premises, so I will bracket this analysis for another occasion. Similarly, I believe that the constructive/transformational capacity of guilt for or detailed acknowledgment of privilege is quite limited. So the question becomes, how do white and/or male and/or heterosexual and/or “first world” theologians instrumentalize our privileges for and (more importantly) with our “fellow travelers”? Continue reading “Sanctioned Ignorance and the Theological Academy By Egon Cohen”

A Next Wave of Scholarship By Kwok Pui Lan

I came to the United States in 1984 to begin my doctoral studies at Harvard Divinity School. It was an exciting time to do feminist theology and religious studies. Womanist ethics just began to emerge, as Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon has just completed a dissertation on the subject at Union Theological Seminary in 1983. I count it as a blessing that she was teaching at the Episcopal Divinity School, just on the other side of the Cambridge Common.

The mid-1980s saw the paradigm shifts in feminist studies in religion, as womanist, mujerista/Latina, Asian and Asian American women began to articulate their own theological understanding. If Womanspirit Rising (1979) was a reference text for our field, which contained essays by white women, we had the first reader by radical women of color, This Bridge Called Our Back(1981).

We began to discuss multiple oppressions and multiple identities, and the need to integrate race, class, and gender into our analyses. We challenged white women who have universalized their middle-class, white experience as if women were all the same. Continue reading “A Next Wave of Scholarship By Kwok Pui Lan”

A Horrific Bible Story – and Why I Read It By Dirk von der Horst

There are smart, and there are polemical, ways to think about religiously-motivated violence. As someone who spent his seminary years thinking about Christian anti-Semitism, I was taken aback by the simplistic account of religious violence offered by Sam Harris some years back:

“Religion is the one area of our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand to give good evidence and valid arguments in defense of their strongly held beliefs. And yet these beliefs regularly determine what they live for, what they will die for and—all too often—what they will kill for. Consequently, we are living in a world in which millions of grown men and women can rationalize the violent sacrifice of their own children by recourse to fairy tales” (The Case Against Faith). In response, I’d like to explore some reasons I continue to engage with violent biblical stories, taking Judges 11:29-40, the story of Jephthah, who sacrifices his daughter in fulfillment of a vow, as an example. Continue reading “A Horrific Bible Story – and Why I Read It By Dirk von der Horst”

A Church With No Walls By Sheila E. McGinn, Ph.D.

Last year about this time, I spent a month in Malaysia, at the invitation of Alpha Omega International College, a school in Petaling Jaya, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur. I was rather surprised at the initial invitation, since AOIC is sponsored by the Assemblies of God and I myself am a feminist Roman Catholic. To put it mildly, the two denominations tend not to be “on the same page” on various aspects of the Christian tradition, so I wanted to ensure that the college administrators knew what they would be getting if I were to come. Happily, the AOIC president who had proffered the invitation confirmed that indeed they did want me to come for the guest lectureship, so the beginning of October saw me making my way almost exactly to the opposite side of the globe, to run my New Testament ethics seminar at the college and to spend time learning from Malaysian Christian and Muslim leaders about interreligious dialogue and inter-ethnic relationships in their country.

Malaysian hospitality was faultless—generous, thoughtful, inviting—and everyone made time to tell me about their cross-cultural experiences and their concerns for the religious climate in Malaysia. I continually was impressed by the sincere convictions of these religious leaders and their constituencies, and by the political and cultural difficulties they faced in any kind of collaborative endeavor or even attempts at dialogue. Wherever I looked, will or nil, boundary issues continued to arise. Although other ethnic groups had the right to choose their religious affiliation, the Malay ethnic group was legally defined as Muslim. Within the Christian tradition, certain denominations traditionally were connected with one ethnic group or another. Continue reading “A Church With No Walls By Sheila E. McGinn, Ph.D.”

Pushing Boundaries: Learning to be a Reformer By Jared Vázquez

When I consider the role of women in the social reforms of the late 19th century and early 20th century, I am struck by the boldness of those women in a society that is often essentialized as a quintessential model of patriarchy where all the women were too busy swooning under the pressure of corsets into the hands of handsome gentleman callers. But if we take the time to read closely about what activist women did during the late 19th century I believe that it becomes apparent that they developed much of the model by which we not only operate but also judge social reform; those reforming women set the standard by which we measure change. The reforming women of the 19th and 20th centuries altered the landscape of theU.S.in the way that they challenged the status quo of acceptability for the roles that women could play, both in the home and in public, and in the way that they challenged normative gender roles. In these we not only see the impact that was affected on their own societies, but also the legacy that has guided and continues to guide women and men who work for social reform today.

The women of that era challenged gender roles in various ways, in both public and less public ways. Utopian orders, for instance, that began to form in the mid 19th century were not only founded by women, like the Shakers, but were also directed by them and women enjoyed equal status with men in all affairs. The Salvation Army is another group in which women reinterpreted ‘womanly’ behavior in order to advance what they saw as their call to mission and evangelizing and took to the streets, going into areas that were “unsuitable” for women. The reforming women of the second half of the 19th century were boldly questioning and challenging the notions of social ordering that dictated the ways in which women were “allowed” to behave. Reading the contemporary responses of non-Protestant faiths in the ways that they sought to “properly feminize” their own female membership gives clues to the level to which the challenge on gender roles had reached. Continue reading “Pushing Boundaries: Learning to be a Reformer By Jared Vázquez”

Dr. Seuss, Multiple Hats, and Advocacy: Reading Broadly By Corinna Guerrero

The ten students in my fall 2011 class at ABSW, Reading OT Biblical Characters, are currently being instructed to read broadly. I tell them to develop their sensibilities as a reader so that they have a greater capacity to serve the needs of their communities. I challenge them with a question like-How do you liberate a biblical character that is not in a biblical story because they/he/she are/is never directly mentioned, given voice, or described? Or,what is the value of investigating the tensions between the story and the discourse exhibited through minor and major biblical characters? I ask them these questions because half of the students are advocating on behalf of a group that is socially, politically, economically, and/or spiritually underserved. The other half is training to develop themselves as scholars and educators of biblical literature. In the class room, regardless of path, everyone is required to be both scholar and servant.

Each student is asked to develop her or his final project with an ideal audience in mind. To whom do you see yourself presenting this semester-long project? The larger question behind that is whom do you serve? Continue reading “Dr. Seuss, Multiple Hats, and Advocacy: Reading Broadly By Corinna Guerrero”

Advent 2011 By Barbara Marian

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

Romans 8:22 (NIV)

Advent 2011

Ancestral midwives kneel in shadows

bringing aid and comfort

witness giving

to the pains and crying out and pushing,

Sister-mothers,

prepare the way,

For birthing

in a gushing

mess with cries of gratitude and joy,

As water holy turned

to blood in breaking open paths and sacks

that spill out life

and milk and bread

from deepest springs of hope ferocious. Continue reading “Advent 2011 By Barbara Marian”

Progressive Religion to the Rescue By Mary E. Hunt

The happy hoopla surrounding the lifting of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell had a shadow side. Close inspection revealed a lot of partners and spouses of LGBTIQ military people who had been cloaked in secrecy and euphemism (“Meet my cousin”) for years. Now they, too, can come out. But they remain second-class citizens whose marriages don’t count because of the Defense of Marriage Act. They are not eligible for health care and other benefits routinely provided for dependents of military members. This injustice is a new and important front in the struggle for full human rights, one that has a unique religious twist that bears watching.

In late September, I attended a moving celebration hosted by the Military Partners and Families Coalition called “Beyond 61.” It was a celebration of the new lease on life that these folks experienced after the 60-day waiting period following the repeal of DADT. It took place at Arlington Cemetery, fittingly at the Women in Military Service Memorial, since women have a long history of unequal treatment in the military, as well.

Unaccustomed as I am to military anything (I continue to serve my country in the peace movement), I was impressed by the diversity among the participants and their singular commitment to justice. I was alarmed by the fact that, after decades of struggle, today’s young people are still subject to indignities due to their sexuality even when they enlist for military service. Given the current economic situation, their options for education and other kinds of work are limited. This only makes discrimination against the queer ones nastier. Continue reading “Progressive Religion to the Rescue By Mary E. Hunt”

Running for the President of the American Academy of Religion By Kwok Pui Lan

Dr. Kwok Pui-Lan is an internationally recognized scholar and pioneer in Asian feminist and postcolonial theology. She teaches at the Episcopal Divinity School and is the 2011 president of the American Academy of Religion. Dr. Kwok has published extensively and is the co-editor of two volumes Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology (Westminster) and Empire and the Christian Tradition: New Readings of Classical Theologians (Fortress). Her other publications include Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Westminster), Discovering the Bible in the Non-Biblical World (Orbis), and Introducing Asian Feminist Theology (Pilgrim).

“Pui Lan, would you be willing to run for the Vice-President of AAR?” the chair of the Nominations Committee of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) called and asked me back in April 2008.

The AAR, with 10,000 members, is the world’s largest professional organization of scholars in religion. The majority of its members are from the U.S., but approximately 17 percent are international scholars from over 70 countries.

It was a great honor to have been nominated—for the Vice-President would be in line to become the President in 2011. The problem was that there would be an election and I would have to compete with another candidate, who happened to be a professor at Harvard University.

I thought, “If I win, that’s good. But what happens if I lose?” Continue reading “Running for the President of the American Academy of Religion By Kwok Pui Lan”