Category: Activism

The Holy of Holies and the Umbilical Cord: The Evolution of a Ritual Object by Jill Hammer

In the Jewish calendar, we’re just past the holiday season—the High Holidays, the harvest festival of Sukkot, and the concluding festival of Simchat Torah when the last verses of the Torah are read and the first verses are started again. The Torah readings for these holidays speak often of the offerings once made on the altar in the Tabernacle in celebration of these festivals.  Particularly on Yom Kippur, the readings mention the kodesh kodashim: the holy of holies. This enclosed sacred space contained, according to legend: the tablets of the Commandments inside an ark, topped by two cherubim that held up an empty space between them—an empty space understood to be the amplified presence of an invisible God.  As I think back over my powerful summer, which was largely spent with Jewish priestesses on various retreats and adventures (in Connecticut, Mississippi, California, Costa Rica, England and Scotland), I am thinking about a unique ritual object we use, and realizing that in its own way, it is a kind of Holy of Holies.

Continue reading “The Holy of Holies and the Umbilical Cord: The Evolution of a Ritual Object by Jill Hammer”

The Pomegranate by Sara Wright

It is mid November and shiny crimson Pomegranates catch the discerning eye in food markets; even Walmart carries them!

Why do these beautiful and very ancient fruits appear during this dark time of the year?

One answer to this question is that in the northern hemisphere the fruit of this deciduous shrub ripens anywhere from September to February. The reverse is true in the southern hemisphere when the fruits ripen during March, April and May. It is important to remember that in the southern hemisphere the seasons are reversed, so in both northern and southern parts of the globe these fruits appear in the fall, during the darkest months of the year.

Pomegranates are native from Iran to northern India and have been cultivated throughout the Middle East, Asia and the Mediterranean region for millennia. (Today they are also grown in California and Arizona, so they no longer need to be imported). The shrub was domesticated as early as the 5th millennium BC. Pomegranates were the first trees to be domesticated in the Mediterranean.

Continue reading “The Pomegranate by Sara Wright”

Susan B. Anthony’s Bargain with the Devil by Carol P. Christ

Matilda Joslyn Gage

 

[T]he most grievous wrong ever inflicted on woman has been in the Christian teaching that she was not created equal to man, and the consequent denial of her rightful place in Church and State. –Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church, and State, 1893, page 1

I do not approve of their [referring to Gage and Stanton] system of fighting the religious dogmas of people I am trying to convert to my doctrine of equal rights to women. –Susan B. Anthony to Olympia Brown, following the disputed merger of the radical National Women’s Suffrage Association with the conservative American Women’s Suffrage Association in 1889

Most readers of Feminism and Religion know that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were leaders in the nineteenth century struggle for women’s rights. Fewer will know that Matilda Joslyn Gage was widely understood to be Stanton’s equal as a theorist and Anthony’s equal as an organizer. The fact that Gage’s contributions have been lost to history can be attributed to Susan B. Anthony’s bargain with the devil.

If Anthony’s bargain had affected only the reputation of Matilda Joslyn Gage, that would be bad enough. But Anthony’s decision to merge the NWSA with the AWSA signaled that the women’s rights movement would cease and desist from its policy of naming and indicting Christian dogma as the source and cause of women’s subordination in the law in Christian countries. This decision meant that feminists would no longer have a clear understanding of the forces they were reckoning with. Continue reading “Susan B. Anthony’s Bargain with the Devil by Carol P. Christ”

Poem: She Works Hard for the Money and a Working Class Dream by Marie Cartier

My neighbor gets up at 2 a.m. and is at work by 3:30 a.m.
Six days a week.
She works hard for the money*

She works at a grocery store. She has two dogs and I have two dogs.
Our dogs like each other and we talk about going to the dog beach
together, but who can plan that? We’re lucky to run into each other in our own neighborhood.
“Hey, how are you?” “Tired. You know.”
So hard for the money

I do know. I teach six classes at two universities. My wife works freelance for an overseas company
in artificial Intelligence designing for humans to be obsolescent.
In the meantime, she has no time to sleep.
My neighborhood is all plumbing trucks, gardening trucks and vehicles that go to work.
People leave in the morning to make the world turn. And they come home late at night.

So hard for it honey. Continue reading “Poem: She Works Hard for the Money and a Working Class Dream by Marie Cartier”

ERA—Equal Rights for Women—in the US: Has Our Time Finally Come? by Carol P. Christ

On August 26, 1970, I borrowed an old VW bug from my mentor and summer employer Michael Novak to drive from Oyster Bay, Long Island to New York City to take part in the Women’s Strike for Equality march down Fifth Avenue. Some 50,000 women attended the march and another 50,000 took part in sister actions around the United States. The march celebrated the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Women’s Suffrage Amendment that gave women the right to vote. The ERA was on our minds, but it was not the only issue on the feminist agenda. We believed that all the walls created by patriachy would come tumbling down, and soon! Continue reading “ERA—Equal Rights for Women—in the US: Has Our Time Finally Come? by Carol P. Christ”

Reimagining the Classroom: Embodied Ecofeminism and the Arts Course on Hawai’i Island by Angela Yarber

“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”-bell hooks

Like many academics, my “in the box” dream was to be a professor. The full-time, tenured kind. Like many queer feminist academics, I know that such dreams are rarely reality. When you’re also an artist and activist with a strong penchant for wanderlust, these dreams are simply unattainable fairytales. Never one for “in the box” living, I left the traditional academy and traditional church years ago, wandering over the garden’s walls with Lilith as my intrepid guide. I’ve told the story before. My wife and I left our jobs, sold our home, traveled full-time with our toddler, and turned the Holy Women Icons Project into a non-profit while building an off-grid tiny house on the television show Tiny House Nation in Hawai’i. It’s become old news. But since we’ve been doing this for several years now, those faraway dreams are finally starting to become reality. The academic classroom, the activist’s platform, the artist’s studio, the feminist’s megaphone, and the farmer’s orchard are fusing into one creative, life-giving, empowering space for teaching. The Holy Women Icons Project’s first academic course, “Embodied Ecofeminism and the Arts,” is actually happening. Seminarians and doctoral students from Berkeley join us in January. They’re soon followed by undergraduates from New York and seminarians from Atlanta. And I’m reaching out to more and more schools interested in creatively, subversively, and sustainably decolonizing the classroom with us for one week on the Big Island.

Continue reading “Reimagining the Classroom: Embodied Ecofeminism and the Arts Course on Hawai’i Island by Angela Yarber”

Metamorphosis and a Press Conference: A Kafkaesque and Shakespearean Fantasy about an Unreal Individual by Barbara Ardinger

Donald wakes up too early. Feeling confused and disoriented, he looks around the room. His bed has disappeared! He seems to be lying on the floor. Why? he asks himself, how’d I fall off my king-size bed? The floor (uncarpeted??) seems to go on around him forever, sans furniture, sans TVs, sans his solid gold toilet, sans even the doors and windows. It’s all a great big blank. All around him. Where am I? he asks himself.

He had disturbing dreams all night, and not just last night, but for…well, awhile. Since the subpoenas. He keeps seeing big, strong, silent men wearing jackets with initials on the back carrying big boxes out of his various offices. All of them. All over the world. In one repeating dream, a man dropped a box. It fell open, scattering papers filled with names and numbers. The men picked everything up, put the papers back in chronological order, and resealed the box. They kept carrying the boxes out to black vans that didn’t have names painted on them.

Continue reading “Metamorphosis and a Press Conference: A Kafkaesque and Shakespearean Fantasy about an Unreal Individual by Barbara Ardinger”

From the Biblical ‘Woman on Fire’ to Female Kurdish Fighters: The Women Who Mama Up by Tallessyn Zawn Grenfell-Lee

I was one of millions inspired by Greta Thunberg’s speech to the United Nations. In her usual courageous fashion, she spoke plain truths all adults need to hear about our failure to assure a future for generations of all creatures. Yet you all come to us young people for hope? How dare you? she rebuked us. How dare you?

The beginning of her speech actually struck me the most. This is all wrong, she said. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Her words echoed the words of the small, simple hobbit Samwise in Lord of the Rings, as he and Frodo journey into the terrifying, almost certain death of Mordor. In the film, Sam says: It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. Continue reading “From the Biblical ‘Woman on Fire’ to Female Kurdish Fighters: The Women Who Mama Up by Tallessyn Zawn Grenfell-Lee”

Untapped Communal Potential and Yom Kippur by Ivy Helman

imageYom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was the 9th of October 2019.  On this day, Jews typically attend shul, offer various prayers, and participate in some form of fasting.  The day is meant to be a reflection on the ways in which we, as individuals and as a community, have not been our best selves.  In this reflection, we speak aloud our objectionable behavior and ask for the Divine’s forgiveness.

In some Jewish communities, the ashamnu prayer, which we use to acknowledge our harmful and destructive behavior, has been the same for centuries.  Its particular form and composition is a stylized, alphabetized list of misdeeds. For example, one can find on the list stealing, lying, being rude, disobeying the Torah, participating in abominations, turning away from G-d and so on.  

That being said, many communities have rewritten the prayer to speak to modern-day failings.  For example, one can find concern for racism and anti-Semitism.  Another ashamnu highlights the need to end war.  I even found an ashmanu that was considerably more personal in its reflection.  It problematized self-doubt and supported self-care. Continue reading “Untapped Communal Potential and Yom Kippur by Ivy Helman”

Ant Hill by Sara Wright

Yesterday I gave a poetry reading at a local library beginning and ending with thoughts about how Climate Change is affecting all living things. I am a naturalist who holds the radical belief that all living things are sentient. I also argue that we must not equate animal intelligence with that of humans.

Almost every poem I read was about my intimate relationship with some aspect of the natural world, for example, the changing seasons, my friendship with sagebrush lizards, steadfast trees, Sandhill cranes, beloved Black bears. Intimacy and inter –relationship are part of every experience I have with nature and by sharing these poems I hoped might draw others in to new ways of perceiving the earth and her creatures.

The whole point of my focusing on non – human species was to raise awareness that these animals and plants desperately need our help. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough about how critical it is to bring animals, plants, trees, mushrooms into the picture in this age of the Anthropocene, that is, the period in which we live where a few men with power rule. Today, it is not an exaggeration to say that humans control every aspect of our fragile planet.

I repeat: Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough or perhaps almost no one was capable of listening? Maybe both. As soon as I concluded my reading one woman did actually bring up an incident involving a very difficult child who became attached to a lizard, so she at least, was on the track I hoped I had laid….

Continue reading “Ant Hill by Sara Wright”