Feminism and Religion – Feminism and Religion

The Four Dragons by Xochitl Alvizo

I’m writing a book, a constructive intersectional ecclesiology theologically grounded in the Gospel According to Mark. In other words, a book about what it means to be church today, in light of the constellation of challenges it faces, that turns to the earliest gospel as a resource.

Early in the book proposal writing process, one of my editors gave me a creative writing assignment; I’m sharing the prompt with you here along with my response. Sit back and enjoy a short story about four evil dragons and a struggling community that lost its way…

THE PROMPT (1/15/26):

I want you to pretend that you are going to tell the story of your book to a 6 year old heading off to bed for the night. This needs to be a kind of mythic story – Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived….. And it has to be short. There needs to be an evil dragon, and a wonderous bi princess who slays the dragon and restores peace to the Kin-dom.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Anne Hutchinson, America’s First Feminist Theologian: 1591-1643

This was originally posted on Oct 20 2014

“She had rather been a husband than a wife; and a preacher than a hearer; and a magistrate than a subject.” Reverend Hugh Peter of Salem

Anne Hutchinson was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for heresy in 1637 and excommunicated from the Puritan Church of Boston in 1638. Her banishment came just three years after she, her husband, and eleven living children arrived in America seeking the freedom to practice their religion as they saw fit. Governor Michael Dukakis pardoned her in 1987. Historian Howard Zinn called her a true American hero.

I managed to get through graduate school in Religious Studies without ever having studied the theology of Anne Hutchinson,* though I vaguely remember references (probably with smirks of disapproval) to the “Antinomian Controversy” which is associated with her name. I recall Anne Hutchinson’s name because of an article published in Feminist Studies in the 1970s, when I had just begun to study women and religion. However it was not until recently that I learned of her place in history through reading American Jezebel by Eve LaPlante.

Hutchinson was accused of theological errors in her trials. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination figured heavily in the accusations. But the real issue at stake was that Anne dared to follow her own inner knowing, to articulate it theologically, and to teach her views against the grain of the Puritan authorities in Boston.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: We Could Have Been Canadians and Other Thoughts about My New England Colonial Heritage

This was originally posted on Sept 1, 2014

My 2x great-grandparents Nathaniel Searing and Louisa Caroline Martin were pioneers who cleared the land and built a log cabin in Lyons, Michigan in 1840. They were descended from English Puritan Colonial settlers in New England. At least two of my ancestors are recognized by the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolutions. Other members of my family who were Quakers proudly refused to take part in the Revolutionary War.

My great-grandfather James Augustus married a woman of German descent, his daughter Lena Marie married a Swede, and my mother married a man who was German, Irish, and Scottish. As the descendants of Nathaniel Searing and Louisa Caroline Martin moved around the United States and married into the families of newer immigrants, the succeeding generations also lost touch with their history. Our family’s connections to the New England Colonists were not even mentioned at Thanksgiving!

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Has the Phaistos Disk Been Cracked?

This was originally posted on November 10, 2014

Recent headlines in the international press announced that the enigmatic language of the ancient Cretan “Phaistos Disk” has been translated—in part—by the Welch-Cretan scholar Gareth Owens. Owens states that the Phaistos Disk records an ancient hymn to a Mother Goddess. More specifically he claims that one side is dedicated to a Pregnant Goddess and the other to a Birth-Giving Goddess.

All of this is very exciting, but is he right?

I have been leading Goddess Pilgrimages to Crete for that past twenty years, in the course of which I have developed an intimate and scholarly knowledge of the religion and culture of ancient Crete. Participants on my tours sent me the news reports about the Phaistos Disk, assuming I would be thrilled to have confirmation of my understanding that the ancient Cretans worshipped the Goddess as the Source of Life, or as Marija Gimbutas says, as the powers of birth, death, and regeneration in all of life.

Reading the news reports, I noted that archaeologist-translator of the disk, Gareth Owens, identified the Goddess of ancient Crete as a “Mother Goddess” and more specifically as a Pregnant Goddess and a Birth Goddess . This raised a red flag for me. The most well-known Goddesses of ancient Crete, the bare-breasted Snake Goddesses, are neither pregnant nor giving birth. Other Goddesses pour liquids from the breasts, but again are not visibly pregnant or giving birth.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: In the Face of Despair, Choose Life

This was originally posted on Sept 8th 2014

Yesterday I had a delightful swim with a friend in the cool Aegean Sea. In in the evening I met two dear friends at an open air restaurant for a delicious meal and good conversation. Last night a beautiful moon rose over the sea and a soft breeze caressed my skin. All of this made me very happy. However, the state of the world does not.

Michael Brown. Trayvon Martin. The Ferguson police. Hold your ground laws. Bombing in Gaza. War in Ukraine. War in Iraq. War in Afghanistan. War in Syria. Wars that are not on my radar. Rape as a part of war. Joe Biden threatening to chase ISIL “to the gates of hell.” Citizens United. A rash of laws restricting voting rights. A rash of laws restricting abortion rights. Police brutality. Police brutality that is racially motivated. Young men being sentenced to prision for minor drug offenses. The brutality of the prison system. A woman with children being paid $8.50 an hour working at McDonalds and not even knowing when she will be called in to work. Open carry laws allowing Americans to walk the streets with loaded weapons. And that’s just off the top of my head this morning.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Facing Depression by Carol P. Christ

This was originally posted on August 25, 2014

The suicide death of Robin Williams prompted me to reflect again on my own experience with depression and to share my story in the hope that it can help others.

In my twenties, thirties, and forties, I suffered severe intermittent depressions. My life in those days was a series of ups and downs. When I feel in love and was having good sex, I was in love with the world and could literally feel energy radiating from my body connecting it to the world. When I was dumped, the energy retreated, and I crawled into a dark hole of despair and self-pity from which there seemed to be no escape. In the in-between times, I carried on my life with neither the highs or the lows.

In recent days, a number of people have tried to describe what depression feels like. Here is what it felt like to me.

It was as if my mind had a single track on which were repeated a few deadly words: “No one loves me. No one will ever love me. I might as well die.” I could not erase the track or jump to another one. The words repeated themselves relentlessly in my mind.

From the Archives: Gift-Economy in a Time of Lack by Elisabeth S.

This was originally posted on May 17, 2019

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.

Earthprayer, by Molly M. Remer

Sometimes I describe my work and writing as “a love song to the Ozarks.” I am deeply embedded, body and soul, in this land that I come from, my bloodland, the place where I belong. Seven generations of my family have called these wooded hillsides and stony ridgetops home. This is my mystery school, where I explore hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the earth.

The Earth is my teacher
I shall always want
I witness her still meadows
She leadeth me to green pastures
She restoreth my soul
On tree covered hills
She reminds me I am home
and, yea, I walk in her valleys
and I fear no suffering
She is with me
Her mountains and rolling rivers
they comfort me joy bubbles through my veins
and enlivens my footsteps
my cup runneth over
truly I stand
in mysterious awareness
all the days of my life
and She holds me
in the palm of her hand
forever.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Anger is Not a Panacea: The “Next Stage” after Rage

This was originally posted August 18, 2104.

In a recent post Xochitl Alvizo cited Beverly Harrison’s much-loved essay “Anger as a Work of Love.” Harrison captured feelings that were in the air at the time of its writing several decades ago. Women were laying claim to the right to be angry at the silencing of our voices, the double standard, the media portrayal of women, income inequality, lack of access to good jobs, failure to prosecute rape and domestic violence, and a host of other injustices.

Most of all we were protesting the cultural stereotype that the “good woman” (understood to be white, Christian, and married or hoping to be) would not protest loudly or at all, would turn the other cheek, and would think about others rather than herself. (Jewish women and black women had to strive doubly hard to “live up” to this standard, as it was assumed that Jewish women were “overly assertive” and that black women were “too strong” and often “angry.”)

In this context Harrison’s essay and Mary Daly’s epithet “rage is not a stage” gave women—especially white women–permission to get in touch with our feelings of anger and to express them. We understood that “good women” had been hiding and repressing their feelings for centuries if not millennia with the result that the structures of injustice remained intact.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: A Radical Conclusion: We Are Our Own Authorities

This was originally posted on August 11, 2014

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza articulated a widely held tenet of feminist theology when she stated that feminism places a question mark over all inherited texts and traditions. This means that feminists cannot and must not accept any teaching or traditional way of performing religious acts simply because “the Bible [or the Koran or the minister or the priest or the rabbi or the imam or the guru] tells me so.”

Instead, feminists must question every text and tradition and the words of every religious leader to see whether or not they promote the full humanity of women. The implication of this is that we must acknowledge and take responsibility for becoming our own authorities—as individuals and in communities.

A tongue –in-cheek letter that began circulating on the internet in 2000 under the title “Why Can’t I Own a Canadian?” makes the point that even those who claim to be adhering to every “jot and tittle” of the Holy Book are in fact choosing to accept some aspects of tradition while rejecting others.

The letter begins:

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

The author of the letter continues:

Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?