Ethics – Page 7 – Feminism and Religion

Woman Is Not Anonymous by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente

Vanessa Rivera Virginia Woolf

Lately I have been reflecting on this quote of Virginia Woolf: “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” Here she points out the deliberate invisibilization of women’s contribution in all areas of human endeavors.

Patriarchy always takes these contributions for granted. For centuries, domestic labor has been invisible and not considered work. It has put beauty over intelligence, even with women of outstanding intelligence. And in terms of knowledge and intellectual production, patriarchy has appropriated women’s ideas and in presenting them as “anonymous,” presents them as it’s own.

Thanks to the feminist reclaiming of history, and proving the accuracy of the premise that “Anonymous is woman,” we have learned of the long list of inventions that were made possible due to women’s ideas who were kept invisible, unnamed, unquoted, and erased; after all, she was “just” a “woman.” Continue reading “Woman Is Not Anonymous by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente”

A Complicated History by Elise M. Edwards

In my previous post, I wrote about my participation in planning a memorial event for the lynching of a man named Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas one hundred years ago. It prompted me to reflect on the challenge of faithfully remembering a conflicted past. It’s important that we don’t just remember past events, but that we remember them appropriately.

I’m convinced that when we remember the past, we must avoid oversimplifying the stories of what occurred to suit our present day agendas and sensibilities. We have to acknowledge the complexity, tension and conflict in what occurred, and perhaps even our own guilt and complicity in what is still occurring. As a black feminist Christian ethicist, I face this challenge when one aspect of my identity seeks to address a particular issue through a narrative that implicates or denigrates another aspect of my identity. Uncomfortable as it is, I recognize Christianity’s complicity in its defenses of chattel slavery. I recognize women’s support of patriarchy.

I went to a lecture a few weeks ago by Walter Brueggemann, a well-respected Old Testament theologian, titled “The Risks of Nostalgia.” Brueggemann warned us of the dangers of mis-remembering the past. Pointing to texts from the prophets and Psalms, he demonstrated how the people of Israel remembered a past before exile without remembering the difficulties, the exploitative conditions, and the tensions of that time. Excluding these harsher realities allowed them to gloss over the differences among them to unite in hatred and distrust in a common enemy—the one responsible of their present situation. By misremembering, they lamented a version of past that didn’t belong to all of them because it didn’t include their diverse histories. But the singular narrative served a purpose—it furthered their cause, their yearning and motivation to return to the way things were before. Did this cause really serve all those who were yearning for it? It’s a question that comes to mind when I hear women yearn for a pre-feminist era or Christians yearn for an era of Christendom.

Like the Old Testament people of exile, we are in moral danger when we remember the past with a nostalgia that sweeps over the real stories of what happened in the past. We risk buying into a narrative that harms us in its oversimplifcation. A simple solution will suffice if we believe we have a simple problem.

Lynching was not a simplistic problem and the Waco Horror is not a simplistic story. A black man was lynched for raping and murdering a white woman named Lucy Fryer. I’ll admit it. The realities of the story make me uneasy. Jesse Washington confessed to a crime and was found guilty in the court proceedings that preceded his murder. It makes sense to question whether the criminal proceedings were biased and whether his confession was coerced or illegitimate in some other manner. But even if we question his confession or conviction, we shouldn’t gloss over them as if they never occurred. To present him as a purely innocent victim would be to distort the past to serve a cause – and even a cause as noble as community unity or racial justice should not be attained through lies. People of integrity must guard against distorting the past for “the good” because the distortions themselves cause pain and harm.

Fryer’s family is still experiencing pain over her murder which precipitated the lynching. Sadly, their pain is made worse by the remembrances of Jesse Washington. Their pain does not mean we should not remember, but it does mean we cannot, as people of good conscience, romanticize violence or idealize its victims. Some people might make Washington out to be a hero or a martyr, but the organizers of the memorial service didn’t remember him that way. We didn’t cast him as a blameless victim. But we remembered him as a victim, nonetheless.

We didn’t romanticize the lynching crowds and their pursuit of justice, either. Washington was brutally tortured and killed before a crowd of thousands. If Christians are a people who embrace the love and mercy of a God who forgives the worst of sinners, they have to condemn even those crimes committed in the name of justice; crimes committed against criminals.

Noble causes, if they are just, must stand in the truth – the messy, complicated truth that resists casting all our heroes as saints, all our villains as irredeemable sinners. Real humans aren’t characters who wear the white hats and black hats of the old Westerns (or even the white hats of Olivia Pope & Associates on ABC’s Scandal).

When we resist remembering simplistic, nostalgic stories, we can begin to grapple with the reality of how difficult it really is to achieve justice. We can see humankind for who we really are. And maybe then we can ask for help.

We can ask victims to help us heal the wounds that persist. We need their help to understand their pain and the underlying causes we seek to solve.

We can ask for the help of those who study the various aspects of our world and culture—the economists, the sociologists, the historians, the artists, the theologians and ethicists, the criminologists, and the scientists. We can be humble enough to learn what we don’t know about what’s really going on.

And I hope we also ask for divine assistance. Despite their own complicated histories, wrongs, and imperfections, our faith traditions can enable us to do more than merely rightly remember, consider, and observe the problems in the world. They can embolden us with the courage of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett to speak a complicated truth and yet still dare to fight to make this a better world.

Elise M. Edwards, PhD is a Lecturer in Christian Ethics at Baylor University and a graduate of Claremont Graduate University. She is also a registered architect in the State of Florida. Her interdisciplinary work examines issues of civic engagement and how beliefs and commitments are expressed publicly. As a black feminist, she primarily focuses on cultural expressions by, for, and about women and marginalized communities. Follow her on twitter, google+ or academia.edu.

To Work and to Pray in Remembrance by Elise M. Edwards

One hundred years ago, Jesse Washington was lynched downtown in Waco, Texas. Next week, on March 20th, some of my colleagues and I are organizing a memorial service to remember this horrific event and pray for a better future for our city.

We invited submissions of original prayers, poems, spoken-word pieces, music, drama, and other pieces of liturgy for this ecumenical memorial event. We received a number of thoughtful, heartfelt submissions, but we also a question:

“Why in the world do we need a memorial for one person who was lynched?!?! In the reality of things, Jesse Washington was one of thousands of Blacks that were lynched in America during the time period.”

I thought the answer was so obvious that I initially brushed off the question. But as our group proceeded with the plans, I thought about the question and wondered whether our university community would understand why we are doing this. And honestly, in moments of exhaustion when I put off responding to emails, I wondered, too. Why am I doing this?

To remember. We memorialize one person who was lynched to remind us that every single one of the thousands who were lynched was a human being who was killed unjustly.

In the speech “Lynch Law in America,” from 1900, Ida B. Wells-Barnett describes the injustice: “Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an “unwritten law” that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal.”

Wells-Barnett was an African-American journalist and activist for civil rights and women’s suffrage. Her writings and activism advanced anti-lynching campaigns adopted by Black women’s clubs and the NAACP. Unsurprisingly, her work was controversial, even among women’s groups. Wells-Barnett argued that lynching began after the emancipation of slaves to repress “race riots.” When a constitutional amendment permitted black men to vote, lynching was used to violently prevent their participation in state and national elections. When fraud, intimidation, and local policy succeeded in suppressing the black vote, the brutality continued in the name of avenging or preventing rape and assault of white women.[1] For this argument, lawmakers, ministers, and women’s groups accused Wells-Barnett of defending rapists and subverting “justice” for their alleged victims.

She did not defend rapists. (Neither do I.) She condemned a system that used allegations of rape of white women to legitimate hanging, burning alive, shooting, drowning, dismembering, dragging, and displaying black men’s bodies. Some allegations may have been true. Many were false. Despite the veracity of the allegations, the vigilantes tortured and killed men, women, and children in brutal, public ways, and we must not mistake that for any form of justice. Lynching apologists explicitly valued white lives over others. Lynching was, and remains a crime against humanity.

In our own age of campaigns against the impartiality of law and law enforcement, we should remember the lynching victims and the tensions within earlier waves of feminism and the temperance movement over anti-lynching campaigns. We do not have to condone criminal behavior to call for humane law enforcement or prison reform. We can affirm the humanity of accused and convicted criminals in the pursuit of justice. So we remember Jesse Washington and the other lynching victims to engage more consciously in the activism of our time. We remember so that we don’t lose sight of the complexities of our work. We work in remembrance of the many victims of injustice.

We also gather to pray. For some people, prayer is about making requests to the divine. But in a more expansive sense, prayer is communication with the divine. In prayer, we set time aside to connect to something greater than ourselves. It’s our hope that gathering as a community to pray for the future of our city prompts us to see beyond individual concerns. In a liberation ethics framework, as explained by Miguel De La Torre[2], prayer is not limited to individual, private conversations with God in hopes of gaining wisdom and guidance. De La Torre presents prayer as a communal activity that brings together different members of the spiritual body. It involves the critical application of the biblical text to the situation at hand. This involves critical analysis of the social context that gave rise to the text or its common interpretation. So we pray to give us time to come together, to read scripture, to seek God and hear God through other members of our community.

So why are we gathering? Why do we memorialize one person when there are so many others who have been harmed, not just in my local community but all of our communities?

To remember past wrongs.

To commemorate.

To honor.

To inspire.

To call attention to persisting injustices.

To make us mindful in our work.

To provoke us to pray.

[1] This argument about the reasons for lynching is found in several of Wells-Barnett’s essays, but is quite developed in The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895).

[2] See Miguel A. De La Torre’s Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins (2^nd Edition, 2014).

Mother Hubbard Speaks Her Mind by Barbara Ardinger

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her poor dog a bone;
But when she came there
The cupboard was bare,
And so the poor dog had none.

hubbard-01

From her lips to our ears.

Ya wanna know why my cupboard’s bare? It’s because we’re poor! Well, not all the time. Mr. Hubbard gets a good job from time to time, and then him ’n’ me an’ the kids an’ the animals have enough to eat. But those jobs never last long enough. And ya wanna know why? It ain’t just the economy (which is, yeah, pretty stupid). It’s on accounta we don’t quite look like everybody else ’round here. On accounta we don’t speak the “normal” language at home. We obviously came from someplace else. An’ the folks ’round here are so worried about themselves they don’t care about us. Some of ’em don’t like us at all. (And, I ask you, where’s the folks who look like me in the schools ’n’ the gov’mint an’ on the police force?)

Now we don’t live way out in the sticks like my friend Mrs. Shoe does with all her children. We live in the outskirts of this big city, and we can grow a lot of our own food. Lotsa times, though, we march into the big city and look around for more food. There’s lotsa food that got thrown away, perfectly good food goin’ to waste every day. That’s how I get bones for the old dog an’ good stuff for the cats, too. An’, of course, for the kids an’ the hubby ’n’ me. An’ for the homeless folks who show up from time to time. Share ’n’ share alike, that’s my motto. We do what we can for who we can.

And we don’t share the “normal” religion of the folks in the big city. Most of them never heard of the Mother Goddess. Or any goddess at all, for that matter. No, they’re all enthralled by that greedy Mammon or by those other old bearded guys who stand up on top o’ that metaphorical mountain and yell down at their favorite men about invadin’ some foreign land ’r other. An’ ya know what? When the folks in the city are havin’ their prayers and we happen to be there, we stand quiet-like and bow our heads (politeness counts, doncha know) and wait till they’re done before we walk away and go lookin’ for more good thrown-away food ’n’ other stuff to take home with us. But would they stand respectful-like if we started prayin’ in the city to our Mother Goddess? (That’s what they call a rhetorical question. Don’t need no answer.)

Continue reading “Mother Hubbard Speaks Her Mind by Barbara Ardinger”

Wisdom Fiction (Part 2) by Elise M. Edwards

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

In my previous two posts, I’ve discussed the wisdom that can be found in black women’s literature. Continuing this series, I’m sharing a statement from the most well-known novel written by Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston was an American novelist, folklorist, anthropologist, and cultural critic whose work was first published in the 1920s-1940s. Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937 and has since been reissued and adapted into film.

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” This quote is one that has circled around my mind every New Year and every birthday for many years. These times of year are when I’m likely to reflect on the previous year and wonder what has come from it.

Continue reading “Wisdom Fiction (Part 2) by Elise M. Edwards”

On Planning: Reflections on Control and Hope by Ivy Helman

We plan so many areas of our lives. We make big complex plans, like family get-togethers, vacations, business trips, conferences, large events, etc. We also plan weekly, daily and monthly smaller tasks. Some examples are doctors appoints, day trips, sports schedules, weekly dinner menus and perhaps even the clothes we are want to wear for a job interview or the first day of school.

Many plans happen without a hitch and then there are those plans that don’t. Usually we attribute a plan falling through to something unexpected like an illness leading to cancelling vacation or because of some mistake on our part like when we burnt dinner because we forgot we had food in the oven (which has never happened to me!). All of this is assuming we have some level of control over our plans, our lives and, even, our destiny. But how much control do we really have, and likewise, how much control do others have over our lives?

I’m not so sure there is any sort of easy answer to this question. However, if I were to offer my view, I would say it’s a mixed bag. There are so many parts of our lives we have no control over even if we’d like to think we do. We can’t control where and when we were born. It is debatable if we have some control or not over the ways in which our lives are affected by patriarchy, capitalism, racism, classism and the like. We can’t control whether others drive drunk. We can’t control thunderstorms, tornados or earthquakes. Continue reading “On Planning: Reflections on Control and Hope by Ivy Helman”

Remembering to Be Thankful by John Erickson

Remembering to be thankful may just be a privileged illusion that individuals in positions of power get to write about in the December of each year to self-congratulate themselves about being actually able to be able to be thankful. It may just seem like people who write about being thankful are complaining or pontificating that being thankful is in itself a chore.

WEHO CA (June 7, 2015)©2015 Rebecca Dru Photography All Rights Reserved www.rebeccadru.com — WEHO CA (June 7, 2015)©2015 Rebecca Dru Photography All Rights Reserved
http://www.rebeccadru.com

With the holidays just around the corner and the frazzled, crisp ping of anxiety, rush, and panic take over the air around us, it is easy to forget to stop and “smell the roses.” In times where teaching positions continue to shrink and more universities switch to adjunct labor, fees and class costs continue to rise, or just simply life becomes a little more complicated, due to the nature of balancing life, activism, work, friendships, or relationships, remembering to remind myself to be thankful is another task, I find adding to the never-ending list of stuff I always seem I have to do.

However, remembering to be thankful, scheduling it into one’s daily schedule are vital to our success as new and emerging faculty or activists or just in general because being thankful reminds us that we have aspects of our lives that are worth being thankful for. Remembering to be thankful proves that we are in some way, connected to a larger sense of life that, at times, grants our wishes, wants, or desires, brings us despair, and then allows us to get through it, or even makes us feel alive.

As I sit back and look at the personal and professional landscape around me I understand that I have a lot to be thankful for both consciously and unconsciously. Most recently at AAR, I participated on a panel in response to Bernadette Barton’s Pray the Gay Away. During the course of our panel, the conversation of chosen vs. biological families came up. Most recently, my mentor and panel moderator, Dr. Marie Cartier, talked about the same topic here on FAR and the difficulties many of us experience in regards to our chosen families vs. our biological families. With the holiday season all around us, and regardless of what or if, you celebrate it or not, it is quite hard to get away from it all without realizing who your “family” is and whether or not you’re close or connected with them can be traumatizing during these times where we’re taught or expected to be with them.

After our discussion on the panel and then at the hotel bar, people discussed the pains and traumas in relation to not having a biological family to go home to during the holidays. Sitting there and listening to the conversations, I realized that, for once in my life, I had nothing to say. Continue reading “Remembering to Be Thankful by John Erickson”

Truth in Storytelling by Elise M. Edwards

“[Shakespeare] was an alright writer. I did not always understand him, but some things he said were beautiful and he made some things so clear the way he explained people. But one thing he was wrong about. That ‘To be or not to be?’ is not the first question. ‘What is the truth?’ – that is the question! Then ‘To be or not to be?’ is the second question.”

-from “Feeling for Life “ in Some Soul to Keep by J. California Cooper

This past weekend, I taught a lesson for an adult church group about Christian imagination in the short stories of J. California Cooper. The quote above comes from one of her stories. I was invited to teach a lesson as part of a series on exploring God through literature. It was a delight to participate for several reasons.

Continue reading “Truth in Storytelling by Elise M. Edwards”

CROSSING THE SEA OF DEATH by Carol P. Christ

I am washing wet clothes cast off by refugees who crossed the Sea of Death, the new name for the channel only 4 nautical miles wide that separates Turkey and Lesbos. A tiny pink long-sleeved shirt with a boat neck, for a girl, size 3 months. The channel was relatively safe in the spring and summer, even though people were pushed into black rubber dinghies wearing illegal life jackets that would not float. A pair of leggings with feet, grey with pink, orange, brown, white, and blue polka-dots, to be worn over diapers. North winds have made the journey treacherous.

I am not on the front lines, pulling wet children alive and dead from the sea. I think my heart would break. Tiny black stretch pants with nylon sequined bows at the knees, size 2 years. My friends were in the harbor when an overcrowded fishing boat collapsed, throwing 300 people into the sea. Two pairs of children’s underpants, one navy blue, the other turquoise. They pulled babies from the waves and tried to revive them. Small stone-washed blue jeans decorated with rhinestones, for a little girl. They were wet and cold. Their clothing was removed. They were wrapped in blankets. Red knitted leggings with black hearts and white reindeer. Some survived after spitting out the sea’s water. Blue leggings with feet, blue with white and beige stripes, for a boy. The newly donated ambulances do not carry oxygen. Continue reading “CROSSING THE SEA OF DEATH by Carol P. Christ”

MORE WAR=MORE REFUGEES: OBAMA IN AFGHANISTAN by Carol P. Christ

President Barack Obama recently decided NOT to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan before his term of office ends in 2016, as he had earlier promised to do. California Congresswoman Barbara Lee—the only member of Congress to vote against the Afghanistan war 14 years ago in 2001—issued a statement against this open checkbook for an endless war, and introduced measures to stop it from continuing.