Exploring the F-word in religion at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and community.
In November 2017 I wrote about pie baking.
And in November 2015 I also wrote about pie baking.
In November 2016, I was destroyed by the “election” and wrote a post in November of that year “For Strong Women” just to help many of us keep going.
Continue reading “And the Pies! Ongoing Grateful Thanks for Tradition by Marie Cartier”
In Rebirth of the Goddess, Carol P Christ offered Nine Touchstones of Goddess Spirituality as an alternative to the Ten Commandments. The Nine Touchstones are intended to inform all our relationships, whether personal, communal, social, or political.[1] In this four-part blog (here are parts 1-3 Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) I am exploring ways in which these Nine Touchstones are inherently embodied in traditional women’s ritual dances of the Balkans, which has been my spiritual practice for over thirty years.
Carol’s Fourth Touchstone is: ‘Speak the truth about conflict, pain, and suffering.’ Many women’s dance songs which allow the women to speak and sing their grief and pain. When we bring that pain into the healing container of the circle, sharing simple steps, Dancers in the circle simultaneously give and receive support for their own and others’ sorrow. Ultimately, the sense of community and solidarity in the circle transforms our grief so that the burden becomes manageable. Many historical songs, too, tell stories of women being abducted or abused, and how they fought back or got away – or not – so that they are remembered and honoured by future generations.
Mauro Drudi’s installation of LEI (SHE/HER/YOU – formal) in the Chiesa de San Cristoforo on the Sicilian island of Ortigia where I usually take a bus to daily has become the shrine of women I’ve been searching for. Each time I cry, I am glad I can feel something: those tears are a mixture of communion, comfort, and recognition.
When one enters the church, there are two converging walls. On either side, a woman’s face is painted in shadow and light, gazing off toward the light, is reproduced over and over so that the number of women looks almost countless. They are the same face, a reproduction of Antonello da Messina’s “Annunziata” in the mode of pop art. The difference is not in expression. They all wear the same thoughtful, complicated, neutral countenance, holding deep thoughts and experiences of suffering and wise knowing, both acceptance and maybe resistance; they have lived and might be any age, although I see in our connection my own. The difference is between glossy, unblemished surfaces of wood vs. surfaces weathered, slightly ragged, sometimes scribbled on with ink. The former, found on the right when one enters supposedly represents the “positive” woman, the “western woman [. . . representing someone] happy, gorgeous, well-kept.” On the left, about these representations, Drudi says, “Which artist can paint the skin of a woman who has been abused, beaten, exploited, captivated or disfigured with acid? In my opinion, nobody, and so I let the material speak: the wall of a beach hut destroyed by a storm; woods and materials used and abused [. . .]; exhausted panels deriving from carrying tons of goods, tables, packagings, production wastes.”
You Can Make Your Own Rose by Andrea Nicki is a collection of poems infused with the spirit of feminist sensibility, social justice and activism. The poems offer more than mere therapeutic comfort while depicting shamanic-inspired healing rituals and magical encounters. They are trauma-free in the sense that Nicki doesn’t ask for our sympathy nor does Nicki simply wish to share traumatic memories. On the contrary, she utilizes somewhat analytical and educational language, interlaced with subtle picturesque and lyrical details alongside a severe social critique, to depict the emotional, intellectual, and social landscape of her reflections on incest and other gender-related forms of abuse.
Continue reading “You Can Make Your Own Rose BOOK REVIEW by Lila Moore”
For about a year and a half, I have been working on a collection of poetry that I feel is worth something. I have been writing poetry since I scribed pages hidden between my math textbook when I was 9, gone through poetry workshops in graduate school where I produced a creative thesis, and continued to write off-and-on after that. I have an extensive cornucopia of poetry, but it was around last October of 2016, perhaps, that I decided to write my experience.
As a pre-teen, I wrote about what I thought my life could be, fantasizing about being an older woman with mottled relationships, missing opportunities to discuss my fragile relationship with my parents as the only-child-golden-child, my passion and doubts as a religious, my shame at not being more experienced. Even when I was in graduate school for poetry in Ohio, I didn’t think my life was worth excavating. I wrote dreamy, dense poetry that was surreal and symbolic but largely incoherent. I could again have written about my evolving religious beliefs, my curiosities and risks I took living outside of my home state of Oklahoma as a young woman for the first time, my declining relationship with my mother, or my insecurities again, but this time as a lesser-prepared graduate student in comparison with my literary and theory-laden colleagues.
On one hand, some might say the culture I come from is narcissistic and navel-gazing. I would agree, but just like I feel women can sometimes be selfish in a quite necessary and liberating way (as opposed to those around her accusingly saying she is “so selfish” for abandoning them/following her own path/needing a room of her own), I feel the confessional and self-reflective can be the healing and helpful side of the coin. For me, at least in my experience, my “finished” collection feels exactly this way.
Continue reading “Death and Re-birth through a Project by Elisabeth Schilling”
Borderless Haiku:
We have forgotten the names of each other underneath the shedding skin those names written in our blood that have danced to tonantzin tonatiuh before they knew they were lovers. (IFHL)
Last week I was fortunate to have attended a poetic reading and performance by a remarkably gifted young Mexican man named Israel Francisco Haros Lopez who was born to immigrant parents in Los Angelos. He is both a visual and performance artist, and his work transcends borderlands of all kinds. Israel believes that it is critical to honor and remember the ancestors so that we may once again become one with the winged ones, all those who crawl or walk on this earth, the Four Directions, Earth Air Fire and Water, Tonanztin and Tonatiuh – the Aztec Earth Goddess and the Sun God – Israel’s expression of unity in divinity, and the universe as a whole. His visual motifs are drawn from Pre – Columbian America and his work is an attempt to search for personal truths within the context of today’s world incorporating Mexican/Indigenous stories into the whole.
Continue reading “Israel Francisco Haros Lopez by Sara Wright”
Last month I blogged about Three Herstorical Divas to Die For. But since herstory is teeming with heroines whose praise needs to be sung and whose legacies deserve to be remembered, I now present three more Herstorical Divas to inspire us.
The Urban Dictionary defines a diva as a woman who exudes great style and confidence and expresses her unique personality without letting others define who she should be. In my mind, a diva is a woman who stands in her sovereignty and blazes a trail for other women. We all need to claim our inner diva to truly dance in our power.
Continue reading “Three More Herstorical Divas to Die For by Mary Sharratt”
A couple of weeks ago I went to see the new Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! movie. In addition to being a fan of movies inspired by musicals I also loved the emphasis that was placed on the mother/daughter relationship in the first Mamma Mia and had heard that this new installment would continue to focus on that relationship. It definitely didn’t disappoint!
This second movie takes place five years after the original Mamma Mia, and roughly a year after the death of Donna Sheridan, with Donna’s daughter Sophie preparing for the grand reopening of the Hotel Bella Donna. This second movie also features lots of flashbacks where we are able to see a young Donna arrive at the island of Kalokairi as well as see how she first meets Sam, Bill, and Harry, her daughter Sophie’s three possible fathers.
As one might imagine, even if you aren’t familiar with the movie there is a lot going on, but the part that I found most intriguing was the very end of the movie. At this point Sophie has given birth to her own baby and is bringing the child to the church to be baptized. During the ceremony Donna’s spirit is there at the font with her daughter and new grandchild and you could feel this amazing sense of connection and love between not only three generations but across the lines of physical and spiritual presence and space.
Continue reading “Mamma Mia and the Mother-Daughter Connection by Katie M. Deaver”
Candide, ou l’Optimisme (in English, Candide, or Optimism) is a satirical, picaresque novel published in 1759 by François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, who was possibly the smartest author of the Age of Enlightenment…but he annoyed so many courtiers and public officials that he was forever traveling around Europe to get away from their threats of arrest and bodily harm. A picaresque novel is an adventure novel with a clever, 
tricky hero who somehow survives and makes us like him. Voltaire wrote his novel primarily to criticize the optimism of the German writer Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who said that because God is always benevolent, everything that happens is always for the best. This presumably includes the bloody Seven Years War (Protestant vs. Catholic, fought mostly in Germany and France) and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which occurs both in Lisbon and in the novel. Even though Voltaire was accused of blasphemy and heresy, among his other sins and crimes, Candide was enormously popular throughout Europe, a popularity that continues to this day.
In 1956, playwright and screenwriter Lillian Hellman (who had been persecuted by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and HUAC) proposed to composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein that they turn Voltaire’s novel into a Broadway musical. Bernstein composed some of the most beautiful music ever written for this show, which has been produced as an opera, an operetta, and a musical comedy. Hellman’s libretto turned out to be weak, so Bernstein turned to the poet Richard Wilbur and Stephen Sondheim, among others for new libretto and lyrics. It’s been through numerous revisions, and every time it’s staged, it’s different. I have four or five versions on DVD. My favorite is the New York Philharmonic staged concert written and directed by Lonny Price and broadcast on PBS in 2004. Continue reading “Lessons from Candide by Barbara Ardinger”
While Frida Kahlo is arguably the world’s most famous woman artist, most women in the surrealist movement have been overlooked. But Frida’s sister surrealists now seem to be experiencing a long overdue resurgence, with recent international exhibitions showcasing Leonora Carrington, Meret Oppenheim, and Dora Maar. The 2017 documentary film, Out of the Shadows, focuses on Penny Slinger. (For more on Slinger and her work, check out her spookily accurate Dakini Oracle.) American art photographer Lee Miller is the subject of The Age of Light, Whitney Scharer’s boldly feminist debut novel which sold to Little Brown and Company for seven figures, following a fierce bidding war.
Though I was familiar with these artists, Rupert Thomson’s novel, Never Anyone But You, reveals two extraordinary women I’d never heard of—Lucie Schwob aka Claude Cahun (1894 – 1954) and Suzanne Malherbe aka Marcel Moore (1892 – 1972). They met as teenagers and fell irrevocably in love, beginning a passionate relationship which would endure until Cahun’s death. In a twist of fate no novelist could invent, Moore’s widowed mother married Cahun’s divorced father and the two secret lovers became stepsisters, enabling them to live together without suspicion in an age when lesbian relationships were taboo. Moving to Paris in the 1920s, they adopted androgynous pseudonyms and became involved in the newly fledged surrealist movement. In 1937 they left Paris for Jersey. Later, when the Germans occupied the island, the women created an anti-Nazi propaganda campaign. They were arrested and sentenced to death, but the war ended before their executions could be carried out. Continue reading “Forgotten Female Surrealists by Mary Sharratt”
Feminism and Religion 