In January 2015, I presented at the LGBT Faith Leaders of African Descent‘s third annual forum in Harlem, NYC. As an ally, I was honored to be invited. The theme of the forum was “Ain’t No Hurt Like Church Hurt.” I spoke about becoming an ally as wekk as about sexuality in Islam and among Muslims. However, what I learned while listening to other speakers and audience members will stay with me for life.
I have Christian family members who are gay and have dealt with church hurt because of it. Yet, it is not something I ever witnessed up close or spoke in depth about with them. Being Muslim, heterosexual and cisgender at the conference made me feel like an outsider yet everyone treated me as an insider. I felt as if I were witnessing pain I had no business seeing yet I felt obliged to witness and testify to it. So many people stood up to talk about their church hurt. There were so many tears of great pain and rejection shed during the conference. Everyone there was a great example of resilience. Throughout the day, I just kept thinking how blessed I was to be in the company of such wonderful, embattled, yet humble and loving people. Continue reading “LGBT Faith Leaders of African Descent by Jameelah X. Medina”
Last week I was touring the capital of my country, Chile, for conferences and workshops on Islam, Gender and Human Rights. One of the issues I address there was the tyranny of stereotypes Muslim women carry with us and the difficulties we women in general face in order to embrace our spirituality, and to accept ourselves and each other just as we are. It was a nice weekend and a great joy to meet people and make new friends. I learned a lot from colleagues and attendees. One of the happiest moments in my life is talking about Islam outside of religious spaces with non-Muslims – especially with women.
After the event on Queer Spiritualities, I was approached by a young woman who told me:
I attended one of your lectures on women in Islam last year. I came from my town (two hours away) just to listen to you today and thank you. Last year, I left your conference with a lot of motivation for finding my spiritual path, my head free of prejudices and my heart full of joy. I did what you said: To read by myself and reflect in my heart. Today I came to tell you that two weeks ago I CONVERTED TO ISLAM. I AM NOW A MUSLIM. Thank you for introducing Islam in such a beautiful way, thank you for your words that gave me confidence, thank you for your passion and honesty. Thank you. Blessed you always be.
Something similar happened the next day, at the end of the workshop on ¨Muslim Women and Stereotypes.¨ Several of the female attendees approached me to ask: ¨Where can I learn more? Can you recommend books on Islam?¨ And, ¨Is there a Mosque I can visit? – I see you so happy, so free, your smile comes from the heart, I want this joy for me too.¨ ¨I am in my spiritual search, that’s why I came…¨ Continue reading “Islam Is Out There, Among Women by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente”
It has been over a year now that I haven’t been actively a part of my interfaith community. I find that especially odd since I graduated last May from the Claremont School of Theology with a Masters in Religious Leadership. I had hopes that I would be empowered by new education to go out and do more for my community, be invited to be a guest speaker at local houses of worship, or sit on panels; all the things I used to do more frequently and now have all stopped.
I am mostly to blame. Although my personal life has definitely changed with the birth of my son, two new businesses for my husband and me, and the ongoing pressure I put on myself to study for the bar exam any free moment I get (I really don’t have any leisure time to study, but thinking about it takes a lot of energy!), and now expecting my second child, I stopped attending my monthly meetings– whether it be with the Interfaith Youth Council of Orange County, the Muslim-Jewish forum of Los Angeles, or my own beloved organization “I Am Jerusalem.”
Carol Adams in her article “Ecofeminism and the Eating of Animals,” argues that ecofeminists should be vegetarians, since ecofeminism is, among other things, action-based and “one’s actions reveal one’s beliefs,” (129). According to ecofeminism, the patriarchal domination of animals and nature is linked to the oppression of women. For her and many ecofeminists, the survival of our planet rests on two foundations: first, fixing the conditions of women and other oppressed groups and, second, envisioning differently our relationship to the natural world. In other words, a better arrangement of human relationships requires better human relationships with the environment. Vegetarianism and veganism are two ways in which ecofeminists opt out of the patriarchal system of domination and exploitation and help create a better world.
But, does one really? Does adopting a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle really have such an impact on the world? Yes and no. Yes, because it has been shown that raising animals to eat uses exorbitant amounts of fuel, water and land, not to mention, the larger environmental impact of farm run-off in the forms of disease-carrying manure, valuable topsoil and harmful pesticides. Yes, because animals are often inhumanely treated, housed in horrible conditions, genetically and/or hormonally-modified and cruelly killed. Continue reading “Do You Eat Animals? Ecofeminism and Our Food System by Ivy Helman”
Why is it so important to take only what we really need? Because everything we take harms another life. I included this Native American teaching as one of the Nine Touchstones I offered as a counterpoint to the Ten Commandments in Rebirth of the Goddess.
Recently, I have begun to realize that the concept of taking only what you need is the heart* of sustainability ethics, an ethical system that can orient us to living in harmony with others and the natural world. The practice of great generosity is its counterpoint. When you have worked for, received, or accumulated more than you need, you should give it away.
The reason these principles are important is because “taking what you need” is “taking” from the web of life. We “take” other lives (whether plants or animals) in order to eat, to clothe ourselves, to build houses, and in agricultural societies to clear land to plant, to remove unwanted plants (weeds) from cultivated land. In our industrial age, we “take” so much more to fuel our cars and to provide electricity. To take more than we need is to do unnecessary violence to the web of life. When we give away what we don’t need we help others to survive, and we also help to ensure that no more lives than necessary are taken.
On the first Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete, we decided to incorporate the give-away as part of our closing ritual. It is nice to give and receive a gift at the end of an intense two weeks spent with other pilgrims. However, I am coming to realize that in comparison with the deeper meaning and intention of the ritual, our give-away, like the practice of giving presents in our wider culture, is superficial. When we give gifts to friends we try not to give too much or too little. When we give to children we often do so without regard to what they really need. When we receive gifts, we may feel burdened with one more thing we don’t want or need.
Being raised in acquisitive and throw-away cultures, it is not surprising that few of us have any real idea what the principles of taking only what you need and giving away mean. In traditional cultures, there are constraints on accumulation. If women in your family had to weave and sew and embroider all of your clothing, and if this process was time-consuming and involved time taken from other tasks, you would not be likely to have been given or to have learned to demand more clothes than you really need. Similarly, if all of the food for a clan is produced by its own labor, people would be unlikely to grow more than they needed to eat and store for the winter.
I suspect that all of this changed when wars of conquest became integrated into social structures. When other groups were conquered, their precious goods, including ritual items and ritual clothing and jewelry, were appropriated by the victors as “the spoils of war.” Land and people too were “the spoils of war,” and with the introduction of slave labor and the acquisition of lands that belonged to others, an excess of everything could be produced for the benefit of the ruling class, or to be more accurate, the war lords. This is another story, and I have discussed it elsewhere.
To return to the question at hand, I am suggesting that if we wish to live sustainably on planet earth, we must return to the values of our ancestors, distant and not so distant, who practiced taking what you need and sharing what you don’t need. These values are not the exclusive property of Native Americans, but are the values of the ancestors of all of us, if we go back far enough. As I have discussed, these values are still practiced in rural Crete.And they are the foundation of living matriarchal cultures. Many of us who have traveled have met people in rural cultures who have little, yet seem happier than anyone we know at home.
At some level we know that accumulating things does not make us happy. At the same time, prodded by advertising, we continue to shop compulsively and to buy things we don’t need. It will not be an easy task to change our patterns of consumption. If we could do so, our economic system would collapse, because it is based on creating needs for more and more things. This is why chosen or forced “austerity” threatens the capitalist system. You and I may not need all of the things we are used to buying, but if large numbers of us stop spending, the makers and sellers of goods suffer. On the other hand, the world will not survive if we carry on as we are, because we are depleting the world’s resources.
Dream Closet
What would happen if each of us, like the subjects on the popular reality programs on hoarding, went through each of the rooms of our homes and designated the things we really need and gave the rest away? What if we then took a good look at our homes and asked if we really need the space we have. I presume this would be a long term process in which we would continually discover that we don’t need things we have always thought we could not live without.
Hoarder’s Home
What if we stopped buying what we do not need and gave a large portion of our income and savings to others? Would we discover what it means to live in harmony with others and the whole web of life? Could we learn how to flourish with others, not at the expense of others?
*I am not saying these are the only ethical touchstones we need to build an ethics of sustainability, but I do believe they are at its center.
This past week, I have discussed with college students the time I was wrongly arrested and harassed by an Islamophobic Sheriff Deputy several years ago, which led to a successful court case against my county spearheaded by the ACLU. I opened up the discussion with the following religiously feminist spoken word piece I wrote:
Mr. Big Man
You told me what to write, word for word for word for word in my statement,
To get me caught up in your trickery is what you meant,
Acting like you were my friend,
Just so that you could win,
Many of the young women I meet tell me that they think feminism is not what they are about, that they prefer to work for the good of all. I understand that and certainly we can all choose where we wish to place our focus. However, it does make me wonder how effective we can be with our focus placed on so broad a scope. Certainly, we want equal rights for all and some call that “feminism” these days but is it?
In my 73 years, I have lived through quite a few years of women working for equal rights. I have seen many successes as well as the failures. I am incredibly proud of those successes. When I was in the early stages of my career and had just entered management, I was able to implement leadership methods, which now have become models for employers such as team building and servant leadership. Then however, there were no names for them. I led my teams based simply on how I wished my employers to treat me. Continue reading “It is a Matter of Focus by Deanne Quarrie”
In my dance workshop last Sunday in Somerset, England, we lit candles to the exquisite voice of the great Armenian soprano Lusine Zakarian, and danced beautiful Armenian dances in a ritual of solidarity with this occasion.
I have been encouraging all my students to dance Armenian dances with their groups this week, most especially on Friday, to align with the commemorations happening around the world. Even if you do not dance, you could simply light a candle and listen to some Armenian music (see my list of recommendations at the end of this post). I feel that every act of compassionate witnessing, however small, helps heal the wounds of history.
Consider a gay woman (myself) being asked by a straight attempting to understand the “right” for gay marriage, “What does it matter if I know you’re ‘gay’ if I’m not attracted to you?”[1]
Then consider that another right of “marriage” –or being known as “gay”—is the right to be admitted into the hospital room of a loved one, who is considered one’s primary partner, or “spouse.” Yes, one wants to say to the questioning woman in the above scenario, the rights for marriage include the crucial family relationships which allow one person to be able to take sick leave to care for a partner, or a partner’s child; being able to make critical medical decisions, and the right to be together in crisis situations (such as a hospital emergency room).[2]
Last year a friend of mine who is also a professor, a professor of Philosophy, initiated an email conversation with me to casually dialogue and ask some questions about feminism, a topic about which he had only limited knowledge. During this conversation, he asked a particularly pointed question which I will paraphrase here:
“Sara, do you think that ‘popular feminism’ or the kind of feminism we see in social media, particular political organizations or popular culture ends up getting to define feminism for larger society (and isn’t this representation a bit limited or behind what feminism has actually become)?”
His question stayed with me for quite some time and was echoed by members of the Women’s Caucus at the 2014 meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Western Religion (AAR/WR). Who defines feminism for society today? Who is defining what feminism is becoming? Who wants to be a feminist? Who ‘gets’ to be a feminist now?
Reflecting on these questions personally last year, I found myself a little lost… My daily exposure to feminism via social media sometimes felt like I was watching a constant battle between those who identified as feminists and those who found feminism wanting, inadequate, harmful or even hateful. Yet, much of my professional experience working with feminism, at the same time, also involved the opposite: purposeful coalition building, training and discussions about allied relationships, and efforts to create inclusive, if agonistic community.
Teaming up to address this issue of representation, power, naming and justice-making, the Queer Caucus and the Women’s Caucus of the AAR/WR co-hosted a panel and groups discussion at the 2015 regional conference this year in March. We asked the panelists to consider the question: “Who ‘gets’ to be a feminist,” encouraging each panelist to directly engage her, his or their own social location, institution and activism when addressing the workshop theme.
It has been over a year now that I haven’t been actively a part of my interfaith community. I find that especially odd since I graduated last May from the Claremont School of Theology with a Masters in Religious Leadership. I had hopes that I would be empowered by new education to go out and do more for my community, be invited to be a guest speaker at local houses of worship, or sit on panels; all the things I used to do more frequently and now have all stopped.
Feminism and Religion 