Christianity – Page 31 – Feminism and Religion

5 Interesting Facts about Religion and Modern Society by Kile Jones

Following up on an older (and my most popular) post, 5 Interesting Facts about Women and Religion, I am going to draw your attention to 5 other telling facts.

1: Women clergy are blowing up in the Anglican Church!

In U.K. Church Statistics, 2005-2015, Dr. Peter Brierly shows that out of 9,615 Anglican ministers, 1,928 are women. This is a radical spike since 2005. That is 20.05% of all Anglican ministers. This is about double compared to lead pastoral roles in U.S. Protestant Churches (see here). The year of 2010 showed the first time women outnumbered men in Anglican ordination, and it continues to rise up to the present day. And although they are growing as ministers, they are still blocked from becoming Bishops. The vote for allowing female bishops at a General Synod in 2012 failed to get the 2/3 support BY 6 VOTES! Continue reading “5 Interesting Facts about Religion and Modern Society by Kile Jones”

Awakening to Life: Hildegard’s Cure for Seasonal Depression by Mary Sharratt

In midwinter 2002, I moved from the sun-drenched San Francisco Bay Area to Lancashire, in northern England, further north than I had ever lived. In bleak December, it was as though someone had switched off the lights. The sun barely managed to rise at 8:45 am. By 4:00 pm, it was pitch black. Even during the daylight hours, the sky remained muffled in oppressive clouds. There was no glittering white snow, either, just lashing, relentless rain. It was so oppressively dark, I felt as though I were trapped inside some claustrophobic gothic novel. For the first time in my life I began to suffer what they call winter depression. It didn’t help that it was Christmas and that I was new to the country and didn’t know anybody.

Every religious tradition that evolved in the northern reaches of the Northern Hemisphere honored the great mystery of the birth of the Divine Light from teeming midwinter darkness. As well as formal religious observances, countless folkways, carols, and mumming plays helped bring meaning and radiance to cold midwinter nights. Continue reading “Awakening to Life: Hildegard’s Cure for Seasonal Depression by Mary Sharratt”

Blessed is the Womb By Dawn DiPrince

As a Catholic, a feminist, and the grown-up version of my third grade self who dreamed of being a priest (and eventually Pope), I am simultaneously elated and deflated by the promise of Pope Francis. His bold criticisms of capitalism and inequality are breathtaking.

Yet, much like the eager waiting that marks the season of Advent, I (naively) hold my breath awaiting the papal inclusion of women on the altar — not merely as servants — but as leaders and interpreters of scripture.

Whenever women’s ordination is raised, the Church trots out the dusty and inadequate argument that men are priests because Jesus was a man. This seemingly irrefutable based-on-biology conclusion is really a simple argument based on a difference of body parts. This ideal — something I’ve labeled the St. Peter Principle — suggests that our penislessness means that women (by natural law, of course) are to be denied priesthood. Continue reading “Blessed is the Womb By Dawn DiPrince”

Yes, You’re a Homophobe by John Erickson

Jesus loved sinners and Jesus would rather be dancing with me in West Hollywood on a Friday night than lugging through a swamp luring ducks into a trap with a duck caller made by a clan who think that my sexual actions are similar to that of an individual having sex with an animal.

To be able to walk down the street holding the hand of the one you love is a great feeling and an action that some of us aren’t able to perform without fear.

A line has been drawn in the sand between those who support gay rights and those who do not. While some call it being on the “right side of history,” I simply now refer to it as not sounding and looking like a bigot in the halls of history and in the various books, Facebook posts, and Tweets that our children will one day read. Continue reading “Yes, You’re a Homophobe by John Erickson”

Waiting for Jesus… I mean, Superman by Melinda Bielas

I grew up in a white-middleclass-fundamentalist-Protestant community. As a result I learned to think of God as my Father, and Jesus as my savior, similar to the fairytale prince in shinning armor or the ultimate boyfriend. As an undergraduate studying Religious Studies, I learned of other ways to relate to the Divine and discovered how to be a Feminist Christian. However, many women with backgrounds like mine do not have the opportunities that I did to discover different and liberating pictures of God. As a result they must choose between a religious life that enforces patriarchal norms, or life as a “secular” feminist. A recent song by a modern rock band, Daughtry, “Waiting for Superman,” reveals how the dependence on a male savior prevents Christian women from claiming their own personhood, independent of a patriarch. Continue reading “Waiting for Jesus… I mean, Superman by Melinda Bielas”

Ancestor Connection Revisited: Anna M. Christ of Little Germany, Brooklyn by Carol P. Christ

These days I can’t get my 2x great-grandmother Anna Maria Christ off my mind. She may be the independent female ancestor I have been looking for all these years.

My father’s father was transferred from New York to San Francisco during the depression. When I moved to New York City, I felt powerfully connected to its diverse immigrant culture, but I never thought of trying to figure out where and when my ancestors lived there.

Recently I found my Scottish and Irish 2x great-grandparents, James Inglis, the seaman, and Annie Corliss, mother of 9, living in the tenements on Cherry Street near the port of New York. These were my father’s ancestors on his mother’s side. I felt inspired by a photograph of Annie to take her Irish spirit of triumph over adversity into my soul.

Because it has become fashionable to be interested in things Irish, I began my ancestor research there. In fact, I am more German (3/8) than I am Irish (3/16). As I have delved into my German ancestry, I realized that being German became a cause for shame in both the First and Second World Wars. German language newspapers were banned, Germans were interned, people hated Germans, and many Germans changed their names.

As a child I learned to create mock battles against “krauts,” Continue reading “Ancestor Connection Revisited: Anna M. Christ of Little Germany, Brooklyn by Carol P. Christ”

Seeing Death and Resurrection by Linn Marie Tonstad

Yesterday, I visited the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, Sicily. In a grotto about a mile or so from the center of the modern city are found the preserved remains of about 2,000 people who paid the monks to preserve their bodies after death, dress them in their finest clothing, and put them on display. Each of them is placed in its own niche along the wall, held up by iron bands, and has a tag around its neck with its name and date of death. The bodies are not displayed in random order: they are sorted (to some extent) by sex, profession, and familial status. In one large recess, a number of children’s skeletons are on display, many of them in heartbreakingly tiny coffins. In another corridor, friar after friar hangs in his robes, some with cords around their necks signifying their adherence to a Franciscan order. Almost indistinguishable from the cords are the braids still hanging from the heads of some of the women’s bodies. Some families are arranged together; in another corridor doctors and lawyers are segregated and in yet another female virgins are gathered together. The oldest body I saw dated from 1599 – high on a wall hangs the body of a monk whose name was almost illegible but who hailed from the Umbrian hill town of Gubbio.

Some of the skeletons presented death’s heads; others had skin dried to a leathery tightness over remaining bony protuberances. Some of their outfits are well preserved; others have disintegrated under the relentless assault of the years. The practice became illegal around 1880, but until then, people chose – or perhaps their relatives chose for them – to be preserved in this seemingly macabre manner. Continue reading “Seeing Death and Resurrection by Linn Marie Tonstad”

How I Loved Myself through Charismatic Worship by Andreea Nica

Breaking up with your first love can be an excruciating process; especially when it happens to be completely entangled with your being. God was my first love and he stayed for a long while. We had many exhilarating times together, particularly within the branch of Christianity I was raised in: Pentecostalism. I fell in love with God when I uttered his divine language at 13 years of age.

Currently, I’m writing my memoir and narrative nonfiction, Freeligious ™, for which I explore the scientific explanations of my charismatic experiences in the church, which inevitably led to a closer attachment to God. In the Pentecostal church, we were encouraged to connect with God through supernatural phenomena.

Examples include: speaking in tongues (glossolalia), healings, trances (drunk in the holy spirit), visions (hallucinations), prophetic messages (delusions), rebuking evil spirits (paranoia), and many more god-friendly activities. While some of my church peers and most outsiders found the charismatic ordeal to be phantasmical and plain ol’ crazy, I became enchanted by the initiation. The initiation process was quite simple really. As believers in Christ, we must receive the baptism of the holy spirit which usually took the form of speaking in tongues, clinically known as glossolalia. Continue reading “How I Loved Myself through Charismatic Worship by Andreea Nica”

On the Transmission of Life by Natalie Weaver

Among the more controversial Roman Catholic documents is Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical of Pope Paul VI on birth control. This encyclical famously instructs against the use of artificial contraception methods in the regulation of birth. This position is based on the theological warrant that the natural law of God’s reproductive design requires human sexuality, if it is to be moral, to be always nuptial, companionable, and open to new life. The encyclical anticipates a number of reasons why people will object to this teaching, including: population problems, family and personal limitations, economic concerns, and so on. It also anticipates that some will suggest procreative and unitive ends must be seen diachronically in the context of the fullness of nuptial sexuality, such that sexuality would be understood holistically rather than as a series of individual sexual acts. Despite its acknowledgement of these concerns as legitimate, the encyclical argues that grave harm flows from the distortion of natural law and leads inevitably to the degradation of sexual dignity and nuptial integrity (for example, in making free sex more available to young people outside of marriage or cheapening male regard for women on account of women’s sexual objectification). The encyclical thus opts for an approach that evaluates sexual morality in terms of individual sexual acts.

The perspective of the document has been critically unpacked for decades, and its instruction is in the very least unconvincing to many Catholic couples. I find in my teaching that Catholic college students today are unfamiliar with the document’s language and rationale, even though they may know the basic instruction that Catholics aren’t supposed to use birth control. Since this issue is both topical currently due to the healthcare legislation and since birth regulation is a requisite discussion in my course on sexual ethics, I have the students read the encyclical itself. Now, this is a hard task because I know by and large what the student reactions will be. Their most favorable reaction is generally that the document has no instructional or binding value for them. Their least favorable reaction is that the document makes poor sense of the human situation today, especially because human sexual expression reaches well beyond the Church’s vision of normative, heterosexual, marital union. Continue reading “On the Transmission of Life by Natalie Weaver”

Thanksgiving and Service by Sara Frykenberg

Growing up in an evangelical Christian church, I was taught that human beings should serve one another and put others before themselves. These two different teachings, paired with patriarchal misogyny, have sometimes been very problematic for me. I tend(ed) to give too much. Too many demands with which I complied were self-negating (which after all, helped me to make other people more important than myself). It took me a long time to learn how to appropriately prioritize my own needs, to stop mistaking self-esteem for the”‘sin of pride,” and how to say no when I needed to… Actually, I am still learning some of these lessons.

Conversely, my ritualized service to the church was sometimes confusing, awkward or embarrassing. I clearly remember having the opportunity to serve as something like an usher during Thanksgiving at our family’s church as a child. This involved wearing a pilgrim costume, which for me meant finding a Puritan style costume in the church’s closet that fit my overweight childhood frame. This was not an easy task and left me feeling ashamed. Later as an adolescent, my youth group asked us to wash one another’s feet as Jesus did for his disciples. Now, don’t misunderstand me here— I do believe that this ritual has the potential to be very powerful and meaningful for those involved. However, my teenage self could not identify with the symbolic gesture beyond realizing that:

1) I thought touching other people’s feet was gross, as was having my dirty feet touched and,
2) I knew I ‘should’ get something out of the ritual but did not, so I felt spiritually guilty or inadequate.

Overall, I often associated Christian service with guilt, inadequacy, my role as a daughter or woman or my sacrificial duty. Continue reading “Thanksgiving and Service by Sara Frykenberg”