Academy – Feminism and Religion

BOOK REVIEW: Religion is Not Done With You by Esther Nelson

Goodwin, Megan and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, Religion Is Not Done With You: Or, The Hidden Power of Religion on Race, Maps, Bodies, and Law. Boston, Massachusetts, Beacon Press, 2024, 165 pages.

If I were still teaching university classes in Religious Studies, I would certainly choose Goodwin and Fuerst’s book as an introduction to this broad, often misunderstood, subject we call religion. Their writing style has a youthful familiarity—probably purposively done—to broaden their reach to all audiences. The theme running throughout their work is religion is what people do.” “Religion isn’t just feelings or beliefs—it’s systems and assumptions…that shape our lives every day.”

Both authors have master’s degrees and doctorates in religion. Goodwin focuses on gender, sexuality, and American religions. Fuerst puts her attention on Islam, race and racialization, and South Asia. Both women claim to be religious people who “care about justice and repairing our broken world.” They understand that “religion is a force for change—not always bad, not inherently good, but always changed and changing.” It’s important, they assert, “to call out bullshit takes on religion: takes that insist religion is always and everywhere good and takes that want to write religion off as irrelevant, irrational, or regressive.”

The Journal Gender a výzkum/ Gender and Research

I would like to introduce this community to Gender a výzkum (in Czech) or Gender and Research (in English), a transdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal founded in the year 2000 and dedicated to research in Feminist and Gender Studies in the Czech Republic. While the journal’s main focus is work pertaining to Central and Eastern Europe, it is open to a wide range of geographical locations and topics. The journal, which publishes articles in Czech and English, often puts out calls for individuals or groups of people to edit monothematic issues. Past monothematic issues include feminist reflections on Covid, an issue on the use of language concerning sex and gender, gender in popular culture, children, adolescence and sexuality, feminist interpretations of Islam, and postcolonial and decolonial thinking in feminist theory to name just some. If you would like to read them, the journal is available online as well as in print.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Let Us Give Thanks for Feminism and Religion Dot Com

This was originally posted January 6, 2014

Feminism and Religion was founded in the late spring of 2011. Throughout the summer Gina Messina-Dysert hounded me about submitting a blog while I ignored her emails because I didn’t think I wanted to take on a new project. Gina was persistent nonetheless. Finally I decided that it would be easier to take an excerpt from a book review I had recently written than to explain why I didn’t want to write something for the blog, and so “Exciting New Research on Matriarchal Societies” became my first contribution.

The Pleasure of Education and New Beginnings

BUT GOD/DESS—it is also enjoyable, passionate, and fun. Learning and teaching is fun; and I love having fun with my students. Even when the topics are hard and when the lessons hurt, it is the pleasure of relatedness to them, to text, to new understanding that facilitates the process. And without that pleasure, the work is unsustainable.

In graduate school, I fell in love with the book Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks. My memory of what I specifically loved about that book has blurred over time, particularly as I read more and more of her work. But what remains is a sense of how challenging and how real the writing was—how inclusive of whole experiences and truths, comfortable and uncomfortable.

hooks doesn’t shy away from the pain or pleasure of education, indicating how learning and those we learn from can induce passion: Audre Lorde’s erotic, which is so hard to distinguish from the sexual because, as Lorde explains, we are taught to limit our sense of the erotic to the sexual or pornographic.

From the Archives: The Three Mothers: Feminine Elements and the Early Kabbalah by Jill Hammer

This was originally posted May 22, 2108

For over ten years, I’ve been teaching a work of early Jewish mysticism known as Sefer Yetzirah, or the Book of Creation. There are widely differing opinions on the book’s origin and dating, but many scholars date it to the sixth century. Its core concept can be described simply: the Divine used the Hebrew letters as metaphysical channels to create the different aspects of reality: the directions, the elements, the planets, the months of the year, and so forth. Each letter is a channel by which God creates a unique form or entity, and meditating on the letters provides us with a connection to divine creative power. In its discussion of the letters, Sefer Yetzirah shows a strong connection to feminine imagery, and thus helps the later kabbalah develop its own link to the feminine.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: “God is Not a Man, God Is Not a White Man”

This was originally posted February 1, 2016

“The pictures that line the halls speak volumes about the history of racism and sexism and they shape the future in powerful ways.”–Simon Timm

The author of these words recently posted a short video on Youtube entitled “Mirror Mirror on the Wall: The Legacies of Sexism and White Supremacy at Yale Divinity School.”* The video begins with a catchy little ditty with the words, “God is not a man, God is not a white man.” It tracks paintings and photographs of professors and other luminaries in the field of theology on the walls of the Yale Divinity School. By Timm’s count: 99 white males, 6 women, and 3 blacks. The single black woman is counted in both categories.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Curiosity About Everything and the Language of the Goddess

The was originally posted on April 14, 2014

My recent discovery of Marija Gimbutas on Youtube rekindled my admiration for her work. In her slide-lecture “The World of the Goddess” Marija Gimbutas allows us to follow the line of reasoning she used to decipher the “language of the Goddess” in Old Europe.

Careful attention to her lecture shows that Gimbutas did not close her eyes, dream, and then attach her own ideas and intuitions to the artifacts she later discussed. Rather, she catalogued groups of images with similar symbolism and used her knowledge of nature (what does a water bird or an owl look like?) and folklore (she collected thousands of songs connected to the agricultural and life cycles in her native Lithuania in the 1930s) to unlock the meaning of ancient symbols.

Revisiting Our Sisters’ Feminisms by Xochitl Alvizo

This post draws much from a previous post I wrote back in 2013, which generated great discussion in the comments. I came back to it as I was reflecting on our sisters’ revolution in Iran, Women, Life, Freedom, following the death of Mahsa “Zina” Amini while she was in the custody of the “morality police” in Iran. This woman-led movement has been nonstop for seven weeks. I’m in full support of the women and have continued to learn more about their context and history. The movement is powerful and inspiring, heavy and difficult, but its energy is alive and blazing. There is an impromptu song that has come to represent the movement; the song was created by linking real-time tweets and Instagram posts together – you can hear the song, read the lyrics, and see the screenshots in the video below:

Now the post I’m drawing back to from 2013 – a little different from the original – but one intended to invite us to reflect on our engagement with and support of one another across place and difference. And about the relationship between the local and global, and the need to hold a balance of both.

From the Archives: Does the Term “Women of Color” Bother You? By Grace Yia-Hei Kao

Moderator’s note: This marvelous FAR site has been running for 10 years and has had more than 3,600 posts in that time. There are so many treasures that have been posted in this decade that they tend to get lost in the archives. We are beginning this column so that we can all revisit some of these gems. Today’s blogpost was originally posted August 11, 2015. You can visit it here to see the original comments.

I recently came back from a weeklong camping retreat for Christian faculty and their families in beautiful Catalina (an island an hour’s boat ride away from the Southern Californian mainland). This year’s conference theme was “Power Revealed: Gifts, Dangers, and Possibilities.” Not surprisingly, the topics of race, race relations, and institutional racism came-up repeatedly in sessions and informal conversations.

From the Archives: #MeToo and the Idolatry Trap by Tallessyn Zawn Grenfell-Lee

Moderator’s note: This marvelous FAR site has been running for 10 years and has had more than 3,600 posts in that time. There are so many treasures that have been posted in this decade that they tend to get lost in the archives. We are beginning this column so that we can all revisit some of these gems. Today’s blogpost was originally posted January 20, 2018. You can visit it here to see the original comments.

Really – everywhere we look – there are dead white guys. National holiday? Most likely in honor of a dead white guy. Statue on a green? Founder of a major Christian denomination? Dead white guy. Classic literature, painting, play, music ‘everyone’ is supposed to know about? Yup, probably by a dead white guy.

It’s a little exhausting.

It’s easy to develop a pretty negative attitude about all these dead white guys. I mean, some of them were pretty questionable if not downright oppressive people. Enough, already! Am I right?

Yes! Yes. Well… sort of. The thing is, some of them really did say and do wonderful, important things. I suppose we should not dismiss an entire portion of our history just on race and gender alone. And, truth is, I have a confession to make. I kind of really love the insights of some of these folks. I guess it’s easy to complain about all these dead white guys… until you fall in love with one of them.