Coronavirus is revealing many truths to this world – a world grounded in the patriarchal consciousness of domination and separation for millennia. Though still on the fringes of social awareness, the ancient wisdom of community and connection remains alive and growing.
Continue reading “The Truth Revealed by Coronavirus – It’s All Connected by Judith Shaw”
Our commitment should be to the wellbeing of all; our own wellbeing is dependent upon it. This virus does not recognize borders or walls, nor racial or religious divides. Oppressive structures have caused our communities to crumble; and yet, it is only through a collaborative community effort that we can hope to “flatten the curve.”
We are in the midst of a global crisis unlike anything we’ve seen during our lifetime. Admittedly, I gave the situation little attention, even when relatives were under forced quarantine in Italy and cases were piling up in California where many of my family and friends live. It’s typical; we often don’t realize the seriousness of a particular issue until it is one we experience ourselves — we can empathize, but can’t fully understand something that hasn’t hit home.
I wasn’t afraid when the NBA suspended its season, or when March Madness was canceled. When I received an email that a child at my daughter’s school had been quarantined, I told myself it was precautionary. Still, when a neighbor who is a nurse in an ER had provided care to a patient who tested positive for COVID-19, I thought how scary it must be for her — but assumed that nurses of all people know how to protect themselves from getting sick.
Once school was suspended in my state and people started to panic, buying up every last roll of toilet paper and hand sanitizer pump, my concern was not COVID-19, but instead what I deemed overreaction. Nonetheless, I jumped on the bandwagon and stocked my pantry just in case…although I was too late for the toilet paper. Continue reading “Community and Social Distancing by Gina Messina”
The last few weeks have been difficult for me. I was already feeling raw from the treatment of refugees in Greece, the upheaval of impending Brexit in the UK, the fires devasting Australia and the Amazon, and so many other tragedies going on in the world. Then on Christmas Day I was thrown completely off balance by someone shouting abuse inches from my face, in a space where I had believed myself safe.Continue reading “Trauma Healing through Communal Dance by Laura Shannon”
Scientist Susan Simard is a professor of forest ecology at the University in Vancouver, British Columbia, who has been studying the below-ground fungal networks that connect trees and facilitate underground inter-tree communication and interaction. Over a period of more than thirty years this field scientist and her students have learned how fungi networks move water, carbon and nutrients such as nitrogen between and among trees as well as across species. Her research has demonstrated that these complex, symbiotic networks in our forests — at the hub of which stand what she calls the “mother trees” — mimic our own neural and social networks. This groundbreaking work on symbiotic plant communication has far-reaching implications that include developing sustainable ways to ‘manage’ forests, and to improve tree and plant resistance to pathogens. Although much of Simard’s research occurs in forests, she has also studied the underground systems of grasslands, wetlands, tundra and alpine ecosystems.
Under our feet there is a whole world of biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate and share resources and information. Other scientists who study these networks (like Dr. Merlin Sheldrake) agree with Susan who suggests that the forest behaves as though it’s a single cohesive organism. Continue reading “Tree Talk: Dr. Susan Simard by Sara Wright”
Who knows when each of us first learns that sensation—the sensation of being misunderstood. My hunch is that it comes early on in our lives, maybe even before our brains are making narrative memory, maybe even before we have begun to understand much of anything about ourselves or the world. But it doesn’t take much for the seed to be planted in us that the world won’t always understand us.
My mom has long told me a story about me as a frustrated toddler trying to be understood. I was sitting in my high chair, the story goes, and I started saying “puppy touw.” My mom was not sure what I wanted, but I became more and more adamant, saying “puppy touw” over and over again.
She brought the dog over thinking I might mean I wanted the dog. She showed me all kinds of toys and nearby objects in an effort to understand and respond to my increasingly urgent request. I became more and more frustrated, kicking the high chair, moving my body in the chair, saying “puppy touw” louder and louder through tears. Continue reading “Mis(sing)Understanding: Kobe, Pompeo, and a Paper Towel by Marcia Mount Shoop”
Here we are at the fourth now annual Women’s March. I have done a photo essay of the March every year for Feminism and Religion (FAR), the first two from the Los Angeles March, and the last two from Orange County.
I’m taking a break this month from the series “In These United States” poems I have been delivering to FAR (back with more poems next month) to showcase some of the activism, commitment, humor, and courage that showed up at the March I attended in Santa Ana in Orange County, California, January 18, 2020.
In this part of these United States the marchers chanted, danced, laughed, and were very serious. Santa Ana is a densely populated city where almost 62% of the population is Mexican. This evidenced itself in the March where for the first time I saw ballet folkloric by a company dressed in traditional folkloric costumes, in suffrage colors. Continue reading “2020 Women’s March by Marie Cartier”
Welcome to the New Year.
One year ago, on New Year’s eve, I buried my father’s ashes. It was an incredible experience to orchestrate the funeral and burial of the man who begat me. He was nowhere near a Hallmark greeting card kind of father. He was complicated and difficult in ways both minor and severe. Yet, this was the man I called “Dad,” and I was left to deal with the baggage of his life. I cried in a way I had not cried before and felt a kind of sadness that, when given over to, seemed fathomless. There is no real answer to grief like that. I decided that one must just confront it or become it or traverse it. And, there were things to do, practical things, such as repurposing clothes and rehoming cats, for which no one, I believe, could ever be totally prepared. I did not resent what I had to do; I just did it. These things were hard for me.
Yet, despite the pain, something in that loss was deeply freeing. There was no progenitor in the person of my father to come before me now, so there was suddenly no sense (however falsely constructed it may have been to begin with) that someone stood between me and whatever it is that was and is coming at me. There is no longer even the false perception of a windbreaker, no frontline, no wise man, no one to shield, no guide. There is just a naked sense of myself in the world, and though others surely came before me and stand around me now, on an existential level, I am not answering to him any longer.
Continue reading “Welcome to the New Year by Natalie Weaver”
Last year I attended a bonfire on the night of the winter solstice at a friend’s house. As my companion and I walked towards the ledge where the fire had been the year before we were both astonished. Where was everybody? We stood in the dark confused. Minutes passed.
After suggesting we leave, my companion remarked with annoyance, “What the hell is going on here?” A Rhetorical question. I sure didn’t know.
Sudden hooting split the night and some dissonant musical sounds seemed to be coming from out of the bushes below us.
Following the sounds we descended the steep hill and discovered that the fire was at the river’s edge, and that a few people were already gathered there.
Unbeknownst to either of us the location had changed, and from our vantage point on the hill we couldn’t see the fire or hear any sounds. I had been looking forward to this celebratory turning, and liked the idea of sharing it with friends. Yet, now I felt uneasy.
For over a year and a half, I’ve worked at an organization in San Francisco called, St. Anthony’s. At first, I was a full time employee and now, part-time.
A well-known entity in the City, St Anthony’s is most recognized for providing meals to those who are hungry – every day, 365 days a year. I work as Volunteer Coordinator on the dining room floor, where I assist in moving approximately 45 volunteers (needed every day), through the dining room in the 3.5 hours we are open, feeding as many people as possible. On average, we provide 2300 meals every day.
Reverend Fred Rogers tells a story about an ongoing conversation he had with his mother, where, she reminds us that there would always be Helpers, on the sidelines, waiting. “Always look for the Helpers,” she’d say. “If you look for the helpers, you’ll know that there’s hope.
I wrote about my experience working at St. Anthony’s when I first started back in 2018. I still feel the exact same way, but with even more love and appreciation of the work we do, as well as absolute admiration for the dedication of my colleagues, who work endlessly as Helpers.
Continue reading “Love Actually Is All Around by Karen Leslie Hernandez”
This morning I went up to the village plaza in Abiquiu to watch the dancers parade around the church with their saint who is also honored at this village festival held every year at the end of November.
This is one of the two Native American festivals that is honored each year by the genizaros who are mixed Spanish and American Indian people who embrace and practice the Catholicism that was once forced upon them.
This eclectic community is made up of descendants of Native American slaves. Those captured in warfare were brought here, converted to Catholicism, taught Spanish and held in servitude by New Mexican families. The young women and female children endured the usual atrocities perpetuated on captive females including rape at the hands of their captors. Some New Mexican male genizaros gained their freedom by serving as soldiers to defend frontier villages like Abiquiu from Indian raids. By the late 1700s, genizaros comprised one-third of the population of New Mexico. Ultimately these non – tribal peoples were assimilated into New Mexican culture.
The dances are beautiful to witness with the smallest female children dressed in predominantly white regalia some wearing a rainbow of ribbons, the young girls were dressed in red and white and had red circles of war paint inscribed on their cheeks, some of the older women also wore red, many carried turkey or eagle feathers in their hands. Most wore face paint.
“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.
White supremacy culture is on full display day in and day out in America. You don’t have to strain to see it—the President’s recent comparison of the impeachment proceedings to a lynching is the latest example.
Of course, even such an extreme example is still defended by white people of all shapes and sizes: senators, voters, talking heads, and the offender himself. The grotesquery of such a distorted perspective is emblematic of a sickness in our country to be sure.
But there are even more sinister forms of white supremacy that afflict our collective lives. They are harder for many white people to see. And they are, therefore, harder for us to believe. This kind of whiteness is the whiteness that blinds us. This is the whiteness that creates the conditions for the extremes to be mistaken for the whole problem. But more importantly, this is the kind of whiteness that creates the conditions for whiteness to be even more tenacious in some dangerous and annihilating ways.
Continue reading “Blinded by the White by Marcia Mount Shoop”
Yom 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”
As a woman with Passamaquoddy roots when I first came to Abiquiu I was invited to participate in the six pueblo celebrations along the Rio Grande which made me feel blessed, grateful, included, and at “home.”
My own people’s lives and traditions were destroyed by colonial peoples centuries ago.
Yesterday I was invited to attend a river blessing on what I call Red Willow River a tributary of the Rio Grande by folks of Spanish and Indigenous descent who live here in Abiquiu on the mesa. These people, although local, are of mixed descent and do not follow the seasons and cycles of the year as the surrounding pueblos do. There is a heavy overlay of Spanish colonialism along with a restrictive (to me) Catholicism that sets this village apart from the pueblos.
Still, I was looking forward to this celebration
That was supposed to be led by Tewa Women United from the neighboring pueblos. It was a beautiful day, and of course we were all on “Indian Time” which means practically that ceremonies start when the time was right.
However, this blessing of the river didn’t come together at all. People milled around aimlessly. Some left. The children some of whom were dressed in regalia played for a while and eventually got hungry. Some complained they had to get back to school for a game.
Continue reading “A Place Below the Cattails by Sara Wright”
Have you felt the satisfaction of putting someone in their place? Have you ever felt the rush of power that comes with delivering a cutting set-down? Have you ever felt a glow of pride after making fun of a horrible person or group, and having the people around you laugh appreciatively?
I sure have. In high school, the bully-types in my classes learned not to pick on me to my face, and not to pick on my sister when I was in the room. I got damned good at snide, witty comebacks, and so people stopped messing with me. That kind of success was incredibly rewarding. It was a useful skill I honed over the years, so I could trot it out whenever needed. Rare these days, but my sister still occasionally says, “I’m just glad Trelawney’s in my corner.”
Oh, it feels good to WIN, to experience verbal conquest, and to know I’m justified in using my tongue as a sword, because that person SO deserved it! Ah, the adrenaline, the afterglow, the notch in my belt!
The Torah parshah Ki Teitzei, Deutornomy 21:10 to 25:19, contains 74 of the 613 commandments/mitzvot found in the Torah. These mitzvot cover a wide range of topics and concerns. For example, there are mitzvot about how to sow and harvest your fields and others about aiding those in need, including animals. Some of the mitzvot describe how and why divorces can be decreed, to whom can one charge interest, and the punishments for various crimes. There is a mitzvah concerning the requirement to erect a fence on one’s roof to prevent people from falling off, one about not wearing clothes of the opposite gender, one about returning and/or caring for lost property and another detailing from what type of material one’s clothes can be made.
The parshah is literally one mitzvah/commandment/rule after another. Some of the mitzvot seem logical and good for the community. For example, help an animal whose been given a load too heavy for it to carry. Hold onto someone’s property if you find it, so you can give it to them the next time you see them. Build a fence on your roof so that no one falls off. Continue reading “On Ki Teitzei: Rules and the Importance of Religion by Ivy Helman”
I have greatly enjoyed an odd little book I read over the summer. It is Lucy Cooke’s The Truth About Animals (Basic Books, 2018). Cooke takes us through a journey of animal behavior, chronicling the curious narratives that naturalists, philosophers, theologians, and other high-thinking professionals impose on animals to render their behaviors meaningful, moral, and relevant. Cooke shows us how tempting it has been historically for people to seek and discover confirmation of human values in all those other pairs so happily coupled on Noah’s Ark.
It has often been an important tool for feminists, as with other sets of thinkers, to make these connections as well. And, as one familiar with the classical charges that women are more inherently corporeal than their spiritual-intellectual male counterparts, and that therefore women are more animal than the more accurately “human” form that their male counterparts represent, I understand the feminist investment in nature. I appreciate that it involves a sort of ownership and redefinition of the slur; an acceptance of space and place as limited and essentially animal; an awareness of environmental sustainability; a deep sense of connection to the continuum of creaturely being that is the giant ecology of our planet.
It looks like it is time again for me to pack up and drive a few hundred or more miles to a new destination, a place I will finally try to plant roots, this time offering commitment + endurance, hoping to build a life of more balance and authenticity. I assume I will need a constant reminder of gratitude, quelling the entitlement that can bubble up when I think “this should be easier.” I’m not sure when, why, or where I’ve picked up that refrain, but I see it in others and myself and wish for an alternative.
With the help of several people, I’ve secured a full-time college teaching position on a beautiful college campus of a kind of institution I am certain is doing its part to heal the world. At least that is what I feel when I serve at a community college, a place where I feel inspired and challenged by students who have a diversity of needs. I’ve been teaching in such institutions for so long, I’ve fallen in love and know, by experience, that I can help in such spaces.
Continue reading “Movement of Moving and Spiritual Journey by Elisabeth Schilling”
Vanessa Rivera de La Fuente is Muslim, feminist, and a human rights activist
Photo: Personal archive
Background: Journal O ‘Globo, one of the most important newspapers in Brazil, belonging to the transnational media group of the same name, published this interview with Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente on Islamic Feminism. Given its relevance to the discussion on the subject, it was translated by prominent Islamic feminist and scholar Keci Ali to share it with English-speaking readers.
The Muslim women’s movement has different agendas in accordance with the reality of each country. In Latin America, the Muslim Vanessa Rivera fights against prejudice about Islam.
by Isabela Aleixo*
Vanessa Rivera de La Fuente is Chilean and Muslim. Besides being an academic researcher, she’s also an Islamic feminist engaged with questions of gender, human rights, and social development. Vanessa has wide experience in social projects in Latin American countries.
In an interview with CELINA, she discusses the prejudices that Muslim women face in Latin America, explains the movement’s demands, destroys stereotypes, and declares: “I’m a woman and I demand to be treated as a person.”
Do you consider yourself an Islamic feminist? Why?
I consider myself a feminist woman, who lives feminism in all the distinct facets of her life: I’m Muslim; I’m a single mother; I’m a professional woman, an academic; and I’m a women’s rights activist. I’m feminist with all my life experiences. I think being a woman in male-dominated society is itself a political fact, so everything that I am as a woman can be resignified by feminism, including being Muslim. Islam is integrated into my life and my political struggle, which is intersectional. It’s based on the radical idea that all women are people and we deserve equal rights and a world free of violence.
Continue reading ““If All Knowledge Must be Reinterpreted, Why Not Religion?” Says Islamic Feminist”
“Be gentle with yourself.”
It may be some of the most redemptive guidance I have ever received. And I share that invitation daily with people in painful situations.
“Be gentle with yourself.”
In a world seemingly hell bent on self-destruction, being gentle even for a moment is a radical act of resistance. A moment of tenderness. A moment of trust. A moment of attentiveness to need.
But really, what good does gentleness do in a world as brutal as ours can be? How does being gentle provide any kind of answer to the assault of being commodified or objectified or betrayed or assaulted or oppressed or erased or abused or discarded or exploited? Continue reading “Gentle Moments in a Violent World by Marcia Mount Shoop”
Since I began writing for FAR in July 2012, I have written about Mary Magdalen, or excerpted a passage from one of my novels, near or on her July 22 Feast Day. For why I made the controversial choice to depict her as a prostitute, see last year’s post. The below excerpt is from The Passion of Mary Magdalen. I made this selection in remembrance of all the refugees in the world today. In this passage, Judith, a Jewish widow whose family was driven from the land by tax collectors, returns to the place where Maeve (my fictional Celtic Magdalen) and her friends have recently founded a Temple to Isis on the outskirts of Magdala. Maeve has just invited Judith to join them. (Edited for brevity.)
She stared at me, her eyes full of anger and longing.
“I will not be a slave and a whore where I was once a wife, the one who made the challah bread, who said the Sabbath prayers over it. This was our place, my husband’s and mine. We brought the best we had to the temple, the finest oil and wine, the unblemished kid—”
“Goats? You kept goats? You know how to make cheese?”
She sat quietly for a moment before she answered. “How can I live here with you?” she wondered. “I don’t understand.”
I remember the first time I killed a living animal for food. I was a college student. I was traveling with other students on a month-long backpacking trip along the Sea of Cortez in Baja, Mexico. It was a very long time ago, yet the experience was so impactful that the memories are etched into my being.
Truth be told, my prey wasn’t all that sexy. It was scallops. There are certain benefits to “hunting” scallops. They have no legs or fins to force someone into a chase, no arms to fight back, and no reproving eyes to haunt dreams. All fairly milquetoast. Or so it appeared to me on the surface.
The way to harvest scallops is straightforward. They are made up of two shells, the lower one is plastered to rocks in the water. The upper one moves up and down by pivoting on a membrane. A diver plunges into the depths of the sea to find them. Then a diver inserts a knife between the two halves of the opened shells in order to cut the membrane at the back. There is delectable meat inside both shell halves. The top shell will come free to be taken to the surface. The meat is cut out of the lower shell, which is immovably attached to the rock.
Continue reading “Facing Life Part 1 by Janet Maika’i Rudolph”
In my two previous posts, I shared my recent experience talking about privilege at a church near me. Today, I will wrap up this short series with a more personal reflection about privilege from a Christian perspective. Last month, I was thinking theologically about what those of us who have privilege should do with it. But, as feminists and womanists, acknowledging our privilege can be complicated. Most of us in this FAR community do possess some forms of privilege while, at the same time, we lack other forms of privilege. Each of us remains the same person wherever we go, yet our status can change when we switch contexts. As a black woman, I do not have white privilege or male privilege. But I am privileged when it comes to education and class and physical ability. I am a Christian who works at a Christian university in a part of Texas that is culturally predominantly Christian. So that’s a form of privilege. Although as a single woman without children, I don’t fit the cultural norm where I live, my sexual orientation and cis-gendered identity afford me some privilege, too.
Continue reading “Coming to Terms with Privilege: A Personal Reflection by Elise M. Edwards”
Bottom line: abortion is healthcare. Nearly a fourth of women in America will have an abortion by age 45. Every day, people across the United States make deeply personal decisions about their pregnancies. Those decisions deserve respect.
Someone once asked me: John, why are you a feminist? It is always a jarring question because I believe all people should be feminists and we should all fight for gender equality no matter what. I’ve been drawn to Martin Niemöller’s prolific quote:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Right now, it seems like a full on frontal assault against all of us. No matter what community you’re in, you can draw back to an instance of discrimination you’ve faced both pre-2016 as well as after the election of President Trump. Continue reading “We Won’t Go Back by John Erickson”
Bear with me.
I know that most Christians accept some version of the idea that Jesus, the person, died, and then ‘rose from the dead’ in a supernatural, miraculous way – probably the most common definition of what Christians celebrate at Easter. I grew up in progressive Christian churches, where I, too, was taught this idea, which I found fascinating and inspiring. Many people (both Christians and others) still find it healing and inspirational; and I want to state clearly that I think that’s well and good.
Okay.
What I would like to suggest, however, is that this approach may miss the main point of Easter, of resurrection, and of these narratives. Here goes.
Continue reading “What If Jesus Is Dead (And It’s A Good Thing)? by Tallessyn Zawn Grenfell-Lee”
In my previous post, I talked about discussing the concept of privilege (male privilege, white privilege, and class privilege) with nuance. Earlier that week, I had led a workshop at a local church on “Fine-tuning Privilege,” using Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” as a resource. (If you are unfamiliar with it, take a few minutes to read it and reflect upon it.) Part of my talk was about naming and understanding privilege. Discussion and comprehension are not enough, though. We must counter it.
One strategy for fighting privilege is making it visible. The recipients of privilege are often unaware that they have to systemic advantage over others. Privilege, used in the context of racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and religious dominance, is not something earned on merit alone. In the essay linked above, McIntosh describes it like this: “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was meant to remain oblivious.” These are conditions built into our culture that some groups receive which benefit them to the detriment of others. Making privilege visible means naming it and calling it out. Wage gaps, digital divides, and racial profiling practices exist; ignoring them perpetrates the problems.
Continue reading “What Can We Do to Weaken Privilege? by Elise M. Edwards”
More than one hundred years ago, a small group of women joined together and decided to create their own village, one rooted in relationship and guided by spirit. They weren’t the first such women-led town in the country – there was a web of sister villages throughout America, some formed as early as the seventeenth century – but Chantilly Lace was unique. Rising out of the dust of an abandoned Gold Rush era in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, a time when many women were abandoned by men seeking further adventures or widowed when husbands lost their lives in the mines, this mostly female community determined its own fate. Now the modern women (and a minority of men) faced new challenges in the twenty-first century: how would they adapt and thrive?
If this had been true, how might things be different now for all of us?
The above sets the stage for a fictional series of books I’ve been writing (the first book is complete). The locale was always going to be a small town in the Rockies (because I’ve lived there), but the broader ideas about the town’s development have been evolving steadily, especially since the last presidential election. I keep asking myself how a culture based upon principles of peace and values of belonging, established firmly upon a spiritual core, might function in our capitalist patriarchy.
How can change happen in real life if we can’t imagine it in fiction? I’m challenging myself to make it happen.
Continue reading “How Can Change Happen If We Can’t Imagine It First? by Darla Graves Palmer”
Continue reading “Photo Essay–Long Beach, California by Marie Cartier”
Carol Christ wrote about gift economy on this blog in 2013, and I am taken by her story of the woman who brought raisins or cracked nuts to the group even though she had very little. In beginning to encounter the literature on gift economy myself, I am wondering how it all works, especially wondering, perhaps outside of such a conversation if it doesn’t relate or misses the point, what someone who feels they have nothing to give can give.
When Genevieve Vaughan wrote about gift economy in Ms. Magazine in 1991, she wrote, “where there is enough, we can abundantly nurture others. The problem is that scarcity is usually the case, artificially created in order to maintain control, so that other-orientation becomes difficult and self-depleting.”
I think we start to look for other ways of existing when we experience the brokenness of a current existence. The exchange economy under mindless capitalism does not honor equal, fair exchanges. If we could keep from manipulating and being deceptive about what a product is worth, if we could more generously assess the contribution of workers, then some of us might not be bothered. Of course, for that work which is never compensated by money, mostly women’s work, that is the other issue that might not be solved by more equal exchange, and probably more the point of Vaughn’s.
Continue reading “Gift-Economy in a Time of Lack by Elisabeth Schilling”
Yesterday evening, I led a seminar at a local church as part of their series on “Unpacking Privilege.” Once before, I’d been invited to this church, Lake Shore Baptist Church, to speak about intersectional feminism with one of my colleagues, so I expected them to be open-minded and welcoming. They were. Although the attendees were overwhelmingly white and older than me, they were attentive and engaged. We had an enriching time together diving into topics like male privilege, white privilege, and class privilege with Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” as a resource. (If you are unfamiliar with it, I recommend taking a few minutes to read it and reflect.)
In the essay, McIntosh writes about becoming critical of male privilege and men’s obliviousness to it through her work in Women’s Studies, which then led her to see her own race privilege (as a white woman) and her obliviousness to it. The essay does not offer a precise definition of white privilege, but the entire piece is a reflection about it. She explains:
“I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.”
Continue reading “Talking about Privilege with Nuance by Elise M. Edwards”
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