Abuse of Power – Page 18 – Feminism and Religion

“What Would Happen If One Woman Told the Truth about Her Life?” by Carol P. Christ

According to poet Muriel Rukeyser, “the world would split open.”

This poem accurately describes what many women experienced in consciousness raising in the 1970s and what many women experience today in the #MeToo movement.

For many of us the world did split open. We began to take ourselves and our experiences seriously. To do so we had to question received wisdom encoded in such questions as: “What was she doing there in the first place?” “Was she drinking too?” “Why didn’t she change out of her bathing suit?” Underlying these questions is the assumption that: “whatever happened, she must have asked for it.”

A lot of people are wondering why congressmen and voters who claim to uphold Christian principles are not more outraged about credible allegations of sexual assault against a child whose name was Christine Blasey. Continue reading ““What Would Happen If One Woman Told the Truth about Her Life?” by Carol P. Christ”

Kingdom of Women BOOK REVIEW by Katie M. Deaver

In her novel, Kingdom of Women, Rosalie Morales Kearns imagines a reality that is post-patriarchy, and post male violence while showing us what near-future women had to go through in order to get to that reality. Morales Kearns weaves this story through the voices of multiple characters. One of these characters is Averil Parnell, a female Catholic priest. Part I of the book opens with a woman visiting Averil to seek her counsel in regards to taking revenge on her male college professor who has been harassing her ever since she refused to sleep with him.

While Averil seems to be of little help with this particular conversation, we learn that Averil was one of the twenty three original female priests that were to be ordained by the Catholic Church. On the day of their joint ordination however, the Cathedral Massacre took place and twenty two of the female seminarians were killed in cold blood. Averil then, is most definitely a woman who understands the yearning for revenge, the feeling of survivors guilt, and the expectation to be a wonderful priest for her dear friends who had that chance ripped away from them.

At the same time this conversation is taking place it has become clear that small groups of vigilante women are popping up around the world and punishing men for acts of violence against women. The male dominated government of course sees all these punishing acts as coincidental, explaining them away in one way or another, or ignoring them completely, never imagining that it is in fact the beginning of women rising up to truly end male dominance and violence.

Continue reading “Kingdom of Women BOOK REVIEW by Katie M. Deaver”

Open Letter to the Pope and all the King’s Men by Natalie Weaver

Dear Sirs,

It breaks me down. My anger, my revulsion, my powerlessness. I have been searching for the way since I was a child old enough to remember my mind. For a time, I thought Jesus was a white guy knocking on my door after having seen a religious pamphlet placed under our windshield wiper. I’m not sure he has blond hair anymore, but I still feel him knocking. I have been in love with him for as long as I have been a self, so much so that I baptized myself as a little girl.

Somewhere along the way, I figured my little, lonely way wasn’t good enough, and I wanted a church home. I finished a doctoral dissertation trying to find some place I could hang my hat. I picked the Roman Catholic Church, despite what I knew of it and what I had to defend about its patriarchy and history to family and friends. I loved the conversation, the so-called “Catholic Intellectual Tradition.” I always felt myself to be a covert, a conversa, a definitive outsider, and someone not to be trusted entirely as a cradle Catholic might be trusted, yet I tried to be family. I’ve been bringing up my kids in the Church, volunteering, working in Catholic education, paying the boys’ tuition. I do work-arounds, making excuses for the exclusion of women, defying the Church’s stance on sexuality with a critical repertoire of cross-disciplinary scholarship. Lord, I even had to help my Seventh-Day Adventist mom with a hostile annulment process that was dropped on her unsuspecting by a horrendously insensitive marriage tribunal. It wounded us all. Yet, here I have sat, until this.

Continue reading “Open Letter to the Pope and all the King’s Men by Natalie Weaver”

I Was Brainwashed to Believe I Wasn’t Human. Now I’m on a Mission Against that Cult – Part 1 by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

Trigger warning: child sexual abuse, domestic abuse

I was so thoroughly brainwashed that my voice changed without me realizing it. My appearance changed so much that close family members did not recognize me. Multiple therapists told me that I had undergone such sustained brainwashing and abuse that I was like a POW or a sex trafficking victim. Here is my story.

I will never forget the first time I came across the famous quote, “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” Reading that phrase rocked me back on my heels as few things have done. Suddenly, with that simple summary, so much of my experience, so much of life, so much of the world made perfect sense. Clarity struck, bringing both pain and relief: in my society, females are not considered human.

Continue reading “I Was Brainwashed to Believe I Wasn’t Human. Now I’m on a Mission Against that Cult – Part 1 by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir”

Will Donald Trump Go to Heaven? by Gina Messina

Having seen the image of a toddler crying while law enforcement questioned her mother, my daughter was filled with fear, anxiety, and confusion. After tearfully asking if she would be taken away from me, my nine year old followed up with the question, “Will Donald Trump go to heaven?”

It is true that the young girl was not a child who was being separated from her mother. Nonetheless, she has become the face of this time in history where American values no longer include “family values,” protecting children, or respecting human dignity.

The business mogul who claims a Christian identity with a room full of bibles to prove it, has made oppression, injustice, and the general devaluing of life the core of his administration. While Jesus calls us to embrace the stranger, walk with the least of these, to be a loving neighbor, and work for the liberation of every person, Trump’s actions and policies violate every teaching. And so, my daughter’s question was not out of line. Continue reading “Will Donald Trump Go to Heaven? by Gina Messina”

God, Gender Violence and The Male Ego by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente

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We live in a world in which women are the preferred target of different types of violence: physical, sexual, psychological, economic, symbolic and structural, among others. A type of violence we are not talking so much about is spiritual violence. This can be defined as using a person’s spiritual beliefs to harm, manipulate, dominate or control the person.

Spiritual violence includes, but is not limited to: disallowing the person to follow his or her preferred spiritual or religious tradition; forcing a spiritual or religious path or practice on another; belittling or making fun of a person’s spiritual or religious tradition, beliefs or practices; and, using one’s spiritual or religious position, rituals or practices to manipulate or alienate a person. Continue reading “God, Gender Violence and The Male Ego by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente”

The Wings of the Butterfly by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente

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Shhhhh… good women are quiet.
My mother was a beautiful woman, she never complained.

Denial is a silent violence that aims to make invisible a trauma maybe evident or not, to make it acceptable as normal and allow the victims of this trauma to be exploited from a system of oppression or people in power. Denial is that voice sugarcoated with correctness that asks us to shut up and sit down on our own pain so as to not disturb anyone. Is a silence that yells loudly, because sooner or later it will speak through the different ways we hurt ourselves and others.

It is not a mystery that women all over the world are subjected to a variety of violence and oppression. Women and girls are hijacked, raped, assaulted, murdered, their experiences mocked or banalized and their bodies thrown around like trash. People get outraged asking how this is possible? Well, this is possible because when a girl is born, she is “bestowed” the foundational denial that will allow the normalization of this violence and belittling during all her life: The denial that she is a human being. Continue reading “The Wings of the Butterfly by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente”

Religious Practice and Epistemic Justice by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente

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One of the topics that has captured my deep interest during the last year is Epistemic Justice – and its absence, epistemic injustice – a concept which I reflect on often, since it has become a backbone idea in the approach of my work, my activism, my diagnosis of the situation of women in the global south and my vision of the world in which I would like to live. These reflections that I share with you do not intend to articulate a strictly academic presentation. They are my “thinking aloud” and don´t pretend to be completely right nor to establish a truth; rather they express the progress of a personal searching.

I speak as a Muslim feminist who loves to read and write about Feminism and Islam, but is not an academic nor aspires to be recognized as such in this field, although she writes papers and offers lectures in her own capacity on that matters. I speak as a community educator and social entrepreneur, who believes in feminism and spirituality as liberation tools. Since I accepted Islam, I took the experience gained in my work for the political empowerment of grass roots women to nourish an activism in the field of religion and gender justice. Continue reading “Religious Practice and Epistemic Justice by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente”

Of Snakes, Genocide and Women by Guillermo C. Garcia

On February 23^rd 2018, President Trump addressed CPAC (The Conservative Political Action Conference). He put aside his written remarks again and spoke extemporaneously for seventy-five minutes on other issues, including immigration. During that part of his talk, he once more told the story that has become his recurring parable on immigration, one he used on the campaign trail in 2016.^[1]

Essentially, it tells the tale of a woman who has pity on a snake she finds in distress. She nurses it back to health, shows compassion and even embraces it. During the embrace, it bites her and as she is dying, she asks “Why?” As Trump told it, the snake answers: “Oh, shut up, silly woman,” said the reptile with a grin. “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.” He continued, “And that’s what we’re doing with our country, folks. We’re letting people in. And it is going to be a lot of trouble. It is only getting worse. But we’re giving you protection like never before.”

What is that protection? A wall, to keep “them” out and “us” in? (In this, The Handmaid’s Tale is prophetic.) Deportation of those who were born before their parents brought them to the U.S.? A media that follows the Trump’s lead in stereotyping immigrants and refugees from the Latin America and other places as illegal aliens, drug dealers, rapists, gang members and terrorists?^[2]

Continue reading “Of Snakes, Genocide and Women by Guillermo C. Garcia”

Activism Helps You Heal: #RESIST #NeverAgain by Marie Cartier

Here we are, as I write this, a week after the horrible shooting of 17 students and teachers in Parkland, Florida. And the beginnings of a new student led movement: #NeverAgain—never another school massacre like what happened in Florida.

Today, one week after this horrific event, you had massive student walk-outs all over the country to protest the government’s refusal to do anything substantive about it. Here are images of student protests.

One of the out spoken survivors of the Parkland shootings, Emma Gonazlez, has turned into a spokeswoman/teen, for the movement, fueled by her fiery speech the day after the shootings.

She has continued to speak out as have the other students.

And the movement grows.

I am a college teacher, a college teacher in two public universities. I teach students one to four years older than the students at Parkland. Last week at one of the public schools I teach at there was an active shooter warning that turned into a hoax. I have in the past been on lock down because an active shooter was on campus. This is a very real problem for me.

Today I heard the president of the United States suggest that the solution to the every growing problem of gun violence is to arm teachers or other school officials with weapons. As a black belt in karate, I have had gun training and gun safety as part of my training and it is part of my self-defense resume. I had to learn it. What I can tell you about owning a gun (which I don’t) is that having a gun is not the same as knowing how to us one. I know how to disarm someone, if I am lucky and the fight goes in my favor. Anyone with any experience in self-defense will tell you that the quickest way to escalate a situation is to introduce a gun into the situation.

Continue reading “Activism Helps You Heal: #RESIST #NeverAgain by Marie Cartier”