Christianity – Page 51 – Feminism and Religion

Love Divine, All Loves Excelling By Carol P. Christ

A founding mother of the study of women and religion and feminist thealogy, Carol has been active in social justice, anti-war, feminist, anti-nuclear, and environmental causes for many years. Her books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely used anthologiesWomanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions.

In my last blog I wrote that the image of God as a dominating other who enforces his will through violence–found in the Bible and in the Christian tradition up to the present day–is one of the reasons I do not choose to work within the Christian tradition. To be fair, there is another image of God in Christian tradition that I continue to embrace. “Love divine, all loves excelling” is the opening line of a well-known hymn by Charles Wesley. Charles Hartshorne invoked these words and by implication the melody with which they are sung as expressing the feelings at the heart of the understanding of God that he wrote about in The Divine Relativity.

Love divine, all loves excelling also expresses my understanding of Goddess or as I sometimes write Goddess/God. Though I am no longer a Christian, but rather an earth-based Goddess feminist, I freely admit that I learned about the love of God while singing in Christian churches. Hartshorne wrote that he knew the love of God best through the love of his own mother, and I can say that this is true for me as well. My mother was not perfect, and she did not understand why I wanted to go to graduate school, my feminism, or my adult political views, but I never doubted her love or my grandmothers’ love for me. (I count myself lucky. I know others did not have this experience.) Like Hartshorne, I also learned about the love of God through the world that I always understood to be God’s body. Running in fields and hills, swimming in the sea, standing under redwood trees, and encountering peacocks in my grandmother’s garden, I felt connected to a power greater than myself. Continue reading “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling By Carol P. Christ”

Women Created in the Image of God By Karen Torjesen

The following is a guest post written by Karen Torjesen, Ph.D., Margo L. Goldsmith Professor of Women’s Studies in Religion at Claremont Graduate University where she has helped establish graduate programs in Women’s Studies in Religion and Applied Women’s Studies. For ten years she served as Dean of the School of Religion, partnering with religious communities to create programs in comparative religion. She has published extensively on women, gender and sexuality within Christianity.

Originally posted at Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karen-torjesen/torjesen-women-image-of-god_b_893367.html

Last month I preached — in South Africa — in Johannesburg — in a township — in a Pentecostal church. In Pentecostal worship, preaching is giving your testimony. So how do I translate my life into a testimony, find the threads that connect to their experience, speak in a spiritual vocabulary to these human needs, and be honest about the depths of my unknowing? I am an American academic, a historian of the early church, a professor of Women’s Studies. Where would I find the points of connection?

I could speak of my own struggling with what it meant to be a woman — inferior, valued less, silenced, excluded, constrained, exhorted to be submissive–and my discovery of the American women’s movement. However, for the context of African Christianities, where traditional tribal patriarchies merged with colonial European patriarchies, there would be little resonance. I would need an alternate framework to human rights feminism. Western notions of equality, individualism, and rights have little resonance in cultures with a strong sense of kinship and communal identity and of responsibilities based on age and gender rather than rights based on citizenship. Continue reading “Women Created in the Image of God By Karen Torjesen”

Be-ing in the Church By Xochitl Alvizo

Sometimes it is difficult to make sense of the peculiar paths our religious lives take, much more so to make sense of one another’s paths which can be so different from our own.

I was raised in a Mexican American family and grew up in Los Angeles, California(my parents say I was “made in Mexico, assembled in the U.S.”). And I grew up going to Spanish-speaking Catholic mass. I have often said that the God I know in Spanish is so different from the God I came to know in English when I began to roam Protestant circles in undergrad. Growing up, the Spanish speaking God I knew was as assumed and as basic as the air that kept us alive: always available and always with us in the good, the bad, and the ugly. God was a constant without which we could not exist. But in undergrad, my Protestant friends seemed to have a completely different understanding of God than the one I had grown up with. Theirs was a God that required obedience, a God of very specific expectations, and a jealous God at that! It was a very confusing time for me and my engagement with Christianity wavered.

Then in graduate school, eight years after undergrad, something happened that revolutionized my life – I discovered radical feminists! As ironic as this might seem, radical feminists provided me with a way to make sense of Christianity. They gave me a language and the tools to both critique and engage Christianity and the church. I have often said that if it wasn’t for Mary Daly, I wouldn’t be able to call myself a Christian(!). Continue reading “Be-ing in the Church By Xochitl Alvizo”

Presiding: Its History Within My Marriage By Caroline Kline

Mormon feminists struggle with patriarchy on (at least) two levels. First, since women are excluded from priesthood ordination, women have very few opportunities to rise in Mormon leadership. They can participate as leaders (under the male bishop’s jurisdiction) on a congregational level, but beyond that, the opportunities are very slim. Second, Mormon feminists struggle with patriarchy on the home front. Because all Mormon men are ordained as priests, Mormon wives have not just a husband in the home, but also a priesthood leader. They are instructed to support and sustain their husbands in the home, as he presides over them and the family.

In the world of Mormon feminism, the shorthand term we use to designate this issue of patriarchy in the home is ‘presiding.’ The oft discussed debate among Mormons is how this concept of ‘presiding’ can be compatible with other injunctions by our leaders to act as ‘equal partners’ with our spouses. It was only recently that I realized that this debate is not only alive and well in the Mormon community, but also in the Christian community at large, though the terms they often use are ‘male headship’ vs. ‘equal regard.’ Continue reading “Presiding: Its History Within My Marriage By Caroline Kline”

In Search of My Religious Identity By Gina Messina-Dysert

I try to avoid watching too much television – it feels like there are so many other things I should be focused on; but I was quite engrossed in the show Big Love during its run on HBO. Its concluding season was by far my favorite because of its focus on women and faith. In one of the final episodes the character Barbara Hendrickson struggled with whether or not to be baptized into a new church and it was a struggle I identified with greatly. Although her faith had changed and she no longer felt connected to the doctrine of her previous church, moving on to a new community that fit her beliefs meant abandoning her family.

I was raised in a very traditional Italian/Sicilian Roman Catholic household, attended Catholic schools, and was married in the Catholic Church. As a child, being Catholic offered me a sense of pride; however growing up I began to question the Church as I recognized the many ways it is abusive to women. Becoming a graduate student of religion led me on a roller coaster journey that allowed me to further explore my religious identity. Continue reading “In Search of My Religious Identity By Gina Messina-Dysert”

The Dark Night of a Theological Education By Cynthia Garrity-Bond

Yesterday I decided I would attend Sunday Mass. I have been involved in some fairly weighty theological conversations with my friend, bringing to the surface awareness that I am restless and in a state of holy longing for the Absolute One. I do not usually attend conventional Mass. The exclusive language of the liturgy is like a cacophony of painful sounds, each one more abusive than the next. But this morning I thought it would be different because I was different. The hole in my heart was larger, more pronounced and in need for that which I could not name.

I should say that my academic studies have lifted me far from a loving encounter with Jesus or for that matter, any part of Christian orthodoxy, which is why my decision to attend mass is confusing. In fact, through my initiation into theology as a discipline, I have become a paradox to myself. On the one hand, I am informed on enough theological matters that I might be able to swoop a Jeopardy category of say, “Anything having to do with Christianity.” But when it comes to articulating my beliefs with regard to such doctrines as the Virgin birth, divinity, miracles, prayer or, (gasp) the validity of the Bible, I’m stalled. Even more than that, I’m inclined to suspend most confessional statements about the Divine because, in spite of my education and degrees, I do not know what I think I should know. Continue reading “The Dark Night of a Theological Education By Cynthia Garrity-Bond”

Immortality: Distinctions and Confluences Between Feminist Theology and Mormonism By Caroline Kline

On the whole, I like the Mormon concept of immortality. I like the idea of being with my family forever. I like the idea of being able to love and live with a child or spouse or parent that might have died too young. I like the idea of being eternally engaged in learning and working with others. I do fully admit, I am put off by the idea that I as woman might be eternally giving birth to spirit babies, and the status of Heavenly Mother – my immortal role model – is angst inducing if I sit down and think about it for very long. But in my positive moments, I have some hope that my husband and I would actually be equals in the next life – that the patriarchy of our Church and of our world is just a natural consequence of the fall and of human fallibility.

So I initially found it a bit jarring to read about Rosemary Radford Ruether’s take on immortality. Continue reading “Immortality: Distinctions and Confluences Between Feminist Theology and Mormonism By Caroline Kline”

A Christian Theologian’s Perspective on Feminism By David Buhrow

The following is a guest post written by David Buhrow,MA, Theology Instructor at Notre Dame College.

I am a Christian. Not a “Catholic” Christian or a “Protestant” Christian, just a Christian. I spent most of my early life thinking we (Christians) were making a fairly good effort doing what Jesus would do. I never thought much about this whole feminism thing until I happily, discovered that my firstborn was a girl. Then, everything changed. This little one, this new life, arrived into our world and our world was not ready for her. At the prospect and the potential of her venturing into the world and being able to discover everything for the first time, I found myself frightened and grieved by the ill-fated history of women and the little that the Church has done to resolve the problem. My once ideal and naive understanding of Christianity as being liberating and freeing was dashed to pieces in the hopes of my daughter finding a place in this world and within my Christian faith.

I cannot understand how we have come so far in “Christendom” just to learn that we have not yet begun to “fight the good fight.” When you read the Gospels, you quickly learn that Jesus was a Liberator. He sought to liberate anyone and everyone to free us from each other and ourselves. Paul quoted in Galatians a primal Christian baptismal creed that cries out for freedom and liberation: “There is no Jew or non-Jew, slave or free, male and female.” In this he saved the best for last. He doesn’t say “male or female” as if we should be identifying the differences within Christianity, but “male and female” identifying the unity within our diversity. Paul later writes a series of epistles and letters that seem to have forgotten the basic principles that he allegedly set forth in the Letter to the Galatians. 1 Corinthians 15 mentions a myriad of “witnesses” to the resurrection of Jesus Christ without ne’er a mention of a female. But, when we look back to the 4 canonical (i.e. chosen by men at the leading of god) Gospels, that are supposed to be foundational to our faith, the women were the first and some of the only witnesses to Jesus’ posthumous physical appearances. The men were gone, scared away from Jerusalem, in abstentia, AWOL, missing. Hence, Jesus in his resurrected condition, after enduring hours of debilitating torture and death, and then a shocking-to-the-system resurrection, had to travel on foot all the way to Galilee to “find” his disciples who were “hiding” some 65 miles away. Continue reading “A Christian Theologian’s Perspective on Feminism By David Buhrow”

My Body Image: Between Perception and Incarnation By Cynthia Garrity-Bond

No matter what shape or size, the words “body image” conjure-up pictures of the self that are like looking into those funny mirrors which distort and expand the body. With few moments of relative slimness in my life, I have struggled with a poor self-image. It started when I was a child, who while deeply wanted, was not the hoped for frail and delicate daughter my parents had imagined. My mother, all 5’ 100 lbs was forever reminding me that I took after my father’s Swedish side of the family, more akin to “peasant stock,” you know, those larger boned women who could birth a baby one day and return to the fields the next—you get the picture. This is the image I came to accept of my own body, which was far from the wispy, delicate girl I longed to be.

And then my baptism into feminism, with all its corrections of the androcentric world to which I belonged. Of the many hopes within feminism, it was the release from my own body image that I longed for. I wanted to feel at home and at one with what I was, not what I hoped to be. Truth be known, it has never happened.

A few years back in my Medieval Theology course we were examining the Catholic doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body through such thinkers as Irenaeus, Aquinas and Bonaventure. In what my instructor thought was an affirmation of the body, she interpreted the doctrine to mean that after death we will take on our bodies as they were in life, meaning, we would look pretty much the same as we did while tromping around on earth. In contemplating her words I sought clarification. “So” I asked, “the body I have now will be the body I carry with me throughout eternity?” “Well, yes” my slight and thin professor responded. Letting her words sink in for a moment I finally responded with a resounding, WTF!” I don’t want this body to haunt me in the next life, I want Ashley Judd’s, or Jennifer Aniston’s, hell, I’ll even consider an anonymous model from the LL Bean catalog, but not THIS body!” Continue reading “My Body Image: Between Perception and Incarnation By Cynthia Garrity-Bond”

The “Marriage Crisis” in the U.S and Around the World By Caroline Kline

The Mormon Church, the tradition in which I was raised, is into protecting marriage. In the United States, that seems to often mean deeply discouraging out of wedlock births and politically lobbying against homosexual unions.

But, according to Stephanie Coontz, who wrote the book Marriage, A History, “the marriage crisis” is a phenomenon taking place all over the world. But fascinatingly, that crisis doesn’t take the same form.

While United States legislators are worried about out of wedlock births, in Germany and Japan, policy makers are far more interested in increasing the birthrate, regardless of whether or not the parents are married. The United Nations recently initiated an enormous campaign to raise the age of marriage for girls in Afghanistan, India, and Africa (where the health of these young women is greatly impaired by early motherhood), whereas in Singapore the government launched a campaign to convince people to marry and have babies at a younger age. Continue reading “The “Marriage Crisis” in the U.S and Around the World By Caroline Kline”