Feminism and Religion – Page 65 – Feminism and Religion

Black People Elect Jones, White People Vote for Moore: And What That Means by Carol P. Christ

By now the exit poll statistics from the recent election in the state of Alabama are well known: 98% of black women and 92% of black men voted for Democrat Doug Jones, while 74% of white men and 65% of white women voted for Republican pedophile and child-molester Roy Moore.

These statistics raise two important questions. The first is why white women would vote—some would say against their own interests—for a man whose abusive behavior toward women and girls is a matter of public record. The second, and related question, is whether the Democratic strategy of trying to appeal to racist and sexist white people by downplaying racism and sexism is a winning strategy. Continue reading “Black People Elect Jones, White People Vote for Moore: And What That Means by Carol P. Christ”

Marija Gimbutas Triumphant: Colin Renfrew Concedes by Carol P. Christ

The disdain with which the work of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas has been held in the field of classics and archaeology was shown to me when I stated quietly at a cocktail party at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens that I was interested in her work. This comment, tentatively offered, unleashed a tirade from a young female archaeologist who began shouting at me: “Her work is unscholarly and because it is, it is harder for me and other women scholars in the field to be taken seriously.”

Responding to the backlash against her theories, Gimbutas is said to have told a female colleague that it might take decades, but eventually the value of her work would be recognized. It is now more than twenty years since Marija Gimbutas died in 1994, and the value of her work is beginning to be recognized by (at least some of) her colleagues—including one of her harshest critics. In a lecture titled “Marija Rediviva: DNA and Indo-European Origins,” renowned archaeologist Lord Colin Renfrew (allied with the British Conservative Party**), who had been one of Gimbutas’s most vociferous antagonists and a powerful gate-keeper, concluded the inaugural Marija Gimbutas Lecture at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago with these words: “Marija [Gimbutas]’s Kurgan hypothesis has been magnificently vindicated.” Continue reading “Marija Gimbutas Triumphant: Colin Renfrew Concedes by Carol P. Christ”

Grieving through the Holidays: Painting Holy Women Icons of Grief by Angela Yarber

The holiday season is a particularly difficult time for grief. Whether it is grieving someone who died earlier in the year as you celebrate your first holiday season without them, or the lasting memories of loved ones who are no longer present at family gatherings, this time of year makes grief bubble to the surface. Since this is my first holiday season without my little brother, who died in March, I’ve planned ahead with coping strategies that I’d like to share with other feminists struggling to grieve through the holidays.

Upon the death of a loved one, most people in the West are offered commodified grief, costly funerals, and stifled feelings pre-packaged as dignified tradition. When deathcare became a commercial enterprise at the turn of the twentieth century, there was what mortician and author Caitlin Doughty calls a seismic shift in who was responsible for the dead. “Caring for the corpse went from visceral, primeval work performed by women to a ‘profession,’ an ‘art,’ and even a ‘science,’ performed by well-paid men. The corpse, with all its physical and emotional messiness, was taken from women. It was made neat and clean, and placed in its casket on a pedestal, always just out of our grasp (Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, 136).”

Continue reading “Grieving through the Holidays: Painting Holy Women Icons of Grief by Angela Yarber”

Depicting Mary by Natalie Weaver

In October I had the opportunity to travel to the Louvre Museum on a free day I had from a conference I was attending in Leuven, Belgium. I went predisposed to consider images of the Madonna as I had been thinking about her representations in art for some time. In my own painting, I have been developing a version of the Annunciation that depicts Mary as a teenage girl reading a pregnancy test. Her fear and consternation, coupled by the shock of the event of learning of her pregnancy strikes me as a more accessible telling of the true vulnerability and risk of the unwed child Mary than classic depictions of Mary as a reclining queenly figure quietly receiving the angel’s message. I likewise had been working on a wood burnt figure of a Black Madonna as a study in both icon making and also understanding the tradition of Black Madonnas found throughout Eastern Europe.

I am deeply aware that representing this figure is a culturally laden task because the Madonna speaks both to some of the deepest spiritual needs and inclinations of many faithful Christians world over, just as she is almost shorthand for division among Christian communities. Her presentation is tremendously political as it is received by fans and critics simultaneously as at once championing women (and the divine within women) and also condemning real women whose maternity and bodies can never be as morally or physically pristine as Mary’s. Mary’s skin, clothing, age, gesturing, posture, gaze, and more speak volumes about the social location of her patrons and creators as well as the manner in which the viewer is being invited to receive her.

Continue reading “Depicting Mary by Natalie Weaver”

Gifts from My Father by Carol P. Christ

My father was a very intelligent man who tested “genius” in the army. Drafted into the army at a young age, he decided not to take advantage of the “GI Bill” that would have paid for his college education after the war, because he already had a family to support. My father was lucky not to have served in combat. Scheduled for the invasion of Japan, he served in its occupation. I once asked him if he saw the devastating effects of the atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Japan. Instead of answering directly, he said dismissively, “I suppose you think I was traumatized.” I imagine that on some level he was, because unlike many WW II veterans he never spoke about his time in the army, and most tellingly, he was the only member of his unit not to sign up for the “extra pay” to be earned in the reserves, and thus the only one not to be called up to serve in Korea. Although he never questioned the US government’s right to wage war, he always told me, “war is hell.” Though he was not at all pleased when I became active in the anti-war movement, I found some of the roots of my opposition to war in my father’s refusal to glorify it. Continue reading “Gifts from My Father by Carol P. Christ”

Gas-lighting on Al Franken(stein)’s Street by Elisabeth Schilling

I will add my #metoo, but don’t feel like going into details. I will just say that in light of my past experience and Al Franken’s statement of apology, I’m realizing why some of us don’t tell at an even deeper level.

This is Al Franken’s statement:

“I’ve met tens of thousands of people and taken thousands of photographs, often in crowded and chaotic situations. I’m a warm person; I hug people. I’ve learned from recent stories that in some of those encounters, I crossed a line for some women — and I know that any number is too many. Some women have found my greetings or embraces for a hug or photo inappropriate, and I respect their feelings about that. I’ve thought a lot in recent days about how that could happen, and recognize that I need to be much more careful and sensitive in these situations. I feel terribly that I’ve made some women feel badly and for that I am so sorry, and I want to make sure that never happens again.”

Summary: It’s super hard to be a guy in this society.

Continue reading “Gas-lighting on Al Franken(stein)’s Street by Elisabeth Schilling”

Jewish Folklore and Women’s Clothing: When Things are the Text by Jill Hammer

Two weekends ago, I had the pleasure of visiting the Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The Jewish Museum has long been a favorite museum for me. My wife and I took our daughter to this particular exhibit because we knew she’d like it. The exhibit is entitled “Veiled Meanings: Fashioning Jewish Dress from the Collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.” It consists of many, many garments created and worn by Jews, from Moroccan wedding clothes to German prayer shawls to Yemenite amuletic (meant to protect the wearer) dresses. Accompanying the garments were placards explaining the folk traditions giving rise to the various garments. What I realized (again) after viewing the exhibition was how much I could learn about the culture of Jewish women, and Jewish culture in general, by looking at things, not texts.

The sacred texts and laws central to Jewish life, while they certainly discuss Jewish women, tend not to be created by or for Jewish women. This means many aspects of how Jewish women thought or acted (before the present day) are obscured. However, these garments were created by and often for Jewish women, and their shapes and symbols tell a great deal. For example, the Moroccan Jewish wedding clothes I mentioned were embroidered with spirals, representing (according to the accompanying written material) the spiral of life. These spirals were also found on Jewish tombstones. The spirals resembled, to me, the spirals I’d seen carved on stone at Newgrange and Knowth in Ireland—the ancient symbols of life and journey. I was amazed to see them in a Jewish context. Another dress that mixed Sephardic and Moroccan style also had spirals featured prominently.

Continue reading “Jewish Folklore and Women’s Clothing: When Things are the Text by Jill Hammer”

My Mother’s Appearance in a Healing Dream by Carol P. Christ

My mother spent a good deal of her life defending my father to me and my brother. “Your father didn’t mean it,” she would say. “Your father loves you—he just doesn’t know how to show it.” “Your father never cried when his mother died—that is why he is so angry now.”

Shortly after my mother died, my brother said to me: “I finally realized that the only way I could get along with Dad was if he decided on that particular day that he was going to get along with me.” My brother’s words hit me like a ton of bricks. At the age of forty-six, I was still trying to get along with my father. I had years of therapy to help me understand our relationship. My brother saw the truth without the benefit of therapy.

About six months after my mother’s death, I had the most amazing dream. Though I have alluded to it in my writing, I promised myself not to speak of it directly it while my father was still alive.

I had accompanied friends to the Greek Saturday night Easter service in their village. At the stroke of midnight we lit candles saying “Christ is risen, he truly is,” before embracing and kissing each other on the cheeks. I was sleeping in a guest room in my friends’ house. The dream occurred shortly before dawn. Though I rarely remember my dreams, I awoke with a clear memory of this one.

In it my mother spoke to me in Greek. She told me that now that she was no longer living, she had a clearer perspective on the way our father treated me and my brother. She explained that she had loved my father so much that she had not wanted to see that he had been cruel to us and to recognize the ways he had harmed us. She said she was very sorry that she had not protected us. Her final words before the dream ended were: “Don’t ever love anyone so much that you become blind.”

To this day I do not know why my mother spoke to me in Greek–perhaps it was a way of distancing herself from my father and indicating that she was on my side now. It seemed deeply appropriate that she appeared to me at the time when the Greeks were celebrating the resurrection of “life from the grave.” My mother’s words were a healing balm: healing the breach that her siding with my father a crucial junctures in our relationship had created in my relationship with her, and healing an even deeper would in my psyche.

About that time I was reading Alice Miller’s discussion of the poisonous pedagogy of control. Miller says that the most important words abused children need to hear are: What happened to you was wrong. This should not happen to you or to any child. In the dream my mother spoke the words she had been unable to speak while she was alive. She told me that she finally understood that there was no excuse for the way my father treated me and my brother.

I came to realize that the words my mother spoke when she was living, words intended to absolve my father and assuage my pain, had confused me about the nature of love. From my mother, I learned to imagine that people–especially men–who treated me badly loved me deep down but could not show it. No wonder I always ended up feeling hurt and abandoned.

My mother’s ability to acknowledge the truth about my father when she came to me in my dream was a revelation. The blinders that had clouded all my relationships fell away. I could now begin to see all of my relationships more clearly and to recognize which relationships were healing me and which were harming me. Before the dream I literally did not have a clue, because my mother had taught me love is a magical feeling that has no relationship to actual behavior. After the dream I learned that love manifests in both word and deed. My life has been different from that day to this.

Though I never doubted the healing power of this dream, I had some difficulty in squaring it with my belief that death is the end of individual life. If my mother was not living heaven or somewhere else, then how could she speak to me after she had died? In the ensuing years I have come to understand that the ancestors live in us. The words my mother spoke to me when she was alive became part of my cellular memory. The mother-daughter relationship is so profound that there are times when the mother-daughter boundary is blurred. As I recognize how deeply this is true, it no longer seems important to know if “my mother” appeared to me in my dream or if “my mother as she lives in my me” appeared in my dream. Her appearance transformed my relationship with her and my relationship with my self. And that is what matters.

In memory of Janet Claire Bergman Christ, August 11, 1919-December 7, 1991.

“Living with ‘a man who expects his will to be law, especially in relation to his wives and daughters’ is unbearable for all the women involved.” Paula Mariedaughter

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Carol’s new book written with Judith Plaskow, is Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology.

FAR Press recently released A Serpentine Path: Mysteries of the Goddess.

Join Carol on the life-transforming and mind-blowing Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete. Sign up now for 2018! It could change your life!

Carol’s photo by Michael Honegger

“We Say the Silence Has Been Broken” by Carol P. Christ

We treat the physical assault and the silencing after as two separate things, but they are the same, both bent on annihilation. Rebecca Solnit

When I was in my twenties and in therapy I had a recurrent dream in which a strange man was chasing me and caught up with me and started to strangle me and I could not scream. I was asked to act this dream out by my therapist, who told me that this time I would scream. I could not. She got up and came over and put her hands around my neck and started to squeeze. I still could not scream.

Two decades later I had a dream in which I was a baby and suffocating in my crib. I asked my current therapist if she thought someone had tried to suffocate me when I was an infant. Her answer was simple: “There is no need to think about this happening when you were an infant. You have been silenced all your life.” Continue reading ““We Say the Silence Has Been Broken” by Carol P. Christ”

“When You Know for Yourselves” by Oxana Poberejnaia

A female friend recently posted an article by a woman writer about motherhood. The article was entitled “Children are NOT life’s flowers” (referring to a famous Russian saying which means that children are what makes life beautiful).

A number of women contributed comments under this post. The discussion revolved around the image of an ideal mother and how we real mothers should relate to it.

It is amazing that in the current atmosphere of bringing out into the open so many issues, motherhood is not much discussed. Sexuality, gender and abuse are OK to speak about and question. At the same time, it is only within medical profession that such issues as “baby blues” or post-partum depression are valid topics.