Buddhist teachings recommend appreciating obstacles because they are helpful to our practice. Without obstacles we would never develop profound understanding or compassion. Buddhists have also frequently claimed that female rebirth is an obstacle. If obstacles are of great benefit, shouldn’t women, who encounter more obstacles than men, rise to the top of the hierarchy of revered Buddhist teachers? But that has not happened. Is this obstacle actually of benefit to women, as teachings on the helpfulness of obstacles would suggest? After practicing Buddhism for almost forty years, I have come to appreciate how much the many obstacles I faced over the years have taught me. For a woman of my generation (born 1943), none has been greater than the limitations placed on me as a woman, both by Western culture and by Buddhism. Continue reading “Working with Obstacles: Is Female Rebirth an Obstacle? by Rita M. Gross”
Category: Feminism
Blessed By Gratitude and Sharing by Xochitl Alvizo
Carol Christ’s post yesterday has gotten me thinking about the differences between Christianity and earth-based spiritualities. Of course, there are many differences, that goes without saying. However, being someone who comfortably stands at the intersection of them both I am usually more aware of the ways in which they seem to intersect in life-changing and inspiring ways for me. Nonetheless, Carol has me thinking…
Over the course of the last year here on Feminism and Religion, Carol has written a lot about the importance of ancestors – how when speaking about embodiment and interdependence it is crucial we acknowledge all the ways in which ancestors make us who we are. Mothers literally give us our bodies and our ancestors’ genes, connecting us to a long line of people both materially/biologically as well as historically. Ancestors give us a sense of connection to places and ground us to lands that were meaningful to them and thus become meaningful to us. And Carol also reminds us that our family and ancestors transmit to us memories that impact us psychically and in powerful ways. These emphases on connection, interdependence, rootedness, and embodiment flow from her earth-based Goddess practice and thealogy. Her spirituality leads her to a greater sense of appreciation and gratitude for the Source of Life and for all the sources of life, and she affirms that because of this deep awareness of interdependence and relationality people who practice earth-based spiritualities are “moved to share what has been given to [them] with others.” Continue reading “Blessed By Gratitude and Sharing by Xochitl Alvizo”
The Joy of Honoring Rosemary Radford Ruether by Dirk von der Horst
A cutting-edge voice in many theological conversations, Rosemary Radford Ruether has been an inspiration to many of us over the last few decades. The tremendous joy of my last couple of years was co-editing a volume of essays in her honor. Even discovering just how dreary indexing is was a labor of love for a true pioneer in feminist theology. The result: Voices of Feminist Liberation: Writings in Celebration of Rosemary Radford Ruether, a collection of fourteen essays by Ruether’s doctoral students, put together by Emily Leah Silverman and Whitney Bauman, along with myself.
Voices of Feminist Liberation documents the current state of her impact and legacy. The richness of her thought is manifest here in the variety of directions her students have taken her insights. While most of the essays are scholarly works that engage her ideas above all else, some essays have more personal recollections. Rosemary’s preface recounts her personal experiences of and with us, with descriptions of incidents from her relationships ranging from hearing a live-in student coming down the hall to slip a paper under the door, to seeing a student’s dissertation prospectus enrage a committee member, to switching from same-sex hand-holding in Palestine to male-female hand-holding in Israel as a small gesture of recognizing cultural difference. Continue reading “The Joy of Honoring Rosemary Radford Ruether by Dirk von der Horst”
Sustaining Feminist Spiritualities in the Seeming Absence of Community by Elisabeth Schilling
The spirituality I cultivated during my teens through evangelistic Pentecostal Christianity was based on possession, hierarchy, and exclusivity, although I would not have said that at the time.
As I gradually moved away from that faith community in my mid-20s, no longer wanting to equate a rewarded closeness to God with being set apart from others, I began finding myself participating in quiet conversations with the readings of Thomas Merton, Elaine Pagels, and with poetry by writers such as Olga Broumas. The words I was drawn to might not have been expressly or consistently religious, but they offered spiritual nourishment in their eroticism, earthiness, and sacred metaphor.
It was also around that time when I decided that feminist theologies were healing in their questions and re-visions of God and concepts of salvation and sin. To understand that being a spiritual and/or religious person could mean being aware of and pursuing my desires and connections to other people instead of being a gatekeeper was redemptive. Continue reading “Sustaining Feminist Spiritualities in the Seeming Absence of Community by Elisabeth Schilling”
Truth and Consequences–This Feminist’s Perspective? by Marcia Mount Shoop
In John’s Gospel, Pilate’s response to Jesus’ self-identification as the one who “came into the world to testify to the truth” is a simple question: “What is truth?” His question hangs in the air as he moves from that conversation to the throngs he sought to please. Pilate took the temperature of that crowd to decide Jesus’ fate even though he, himself, found no reason to charge Jesus with a crime. Pilate asks the question from a position of power—literally holding life and death in the ambivalence and maybe even in the sincerity of his words.
The “t” word has been center stage in our collective conversation of late with Lance Armstrong’s Oprah-event confession and the Manti Te‘o girlfriend-dying-of-cancer hoax at Notre Dame . The Internet is abuzz with reactions to both confessional moments. Lance Armstrong’s confession apparently didn’t play well with the general public. And people are weighing in about whether Manti Te‘o could really be so naïve or if he just didn’t know how to tell everyone the truth when the story got out of hand. Continue reading “Truth and Consequences–This Feminist’s Perspective? by Marcia Mount Shoop”
From Bihar, India—The Thirteenth Sakyadhita Conference by Rita M. Gross
Above and all around us is a blue and white stripped fabric tent, as, about 250 strong, we participants in Sakyadhita’s Thirteenth Conference on Buddhist Women, shiver in the cold, listening to a wide variety of papers about women and Buddhism. We are meeting in Vaishali, in Bihar, India, at a Vietnamese nunnery that was recently founded at the place where Mahaprajapati, the first Buddhist nun, was ordained. She is a great hero to many Buddhist women for her persistence about receiving formal ordination as a nun, thus founding an institution that has endured for some 2,500 years in various parts of Asia, and now in the West as well, so it is fitting that we should meet here. The nunnery complex is still incomplete and under construction, which is one reason why we are meeting, essentially, in the outdoors. The thin fabric walls over little protection from the coldest winter in north India in forty years. That was not part of the planning for this event! So everyone, speakers and participants alike, wear all the layers of clothing we have, and cheerfully practice patience. It is quite a sight! Continue reading “From Bihar, India—The Thirteenth Sakyadhita Conference by Rita M. Gross”
Rebekah of the Hebrew Bible: A Mormon Feminist Model by Caroline Kline
This semester I took a class on women in the book of Genesis. I was particularly interested in learning more about the language used to describe Eve, since she is such an important model of inspired action and proactivity for Mormon women. However, I also discovered another woman in the book of Genesis whom I saw as a potentially powerful model for Mormon feminists, a woman caught in a patriarchal context, but one who decisively and creatively figures out how to insert herself, her ideas, her inspiration into the events at hand: Rebekah.
Let me recap the most crucial incident: When Isaac is old, blind, and believes he is approaching death, he determines to give a special blessing to his firstborn son Esau. When Rebekah hears of his plans, she springs into action, ordering her younger son Jacob to impersonate Esau in order to obtain this blessing. Rebekah feels so strongly that Jacob should get this blessing – and no wonder, given her revelation from God forty years before that Jacob should inherit the promise – that when he objects, fearing a curse from his father if he is found out, she says to him, “Let your curse be on me, my son. Only obey my word, and go…..” (Genesis 27:13). Continue reading “Rebekah of the Hebrew Bible: A Mormon Feminist Model by Caroline Kline”
And Thus God made a Covenant with Hagar in the Wilderness by Michele Stopera Freyhauf
We are familiar with the covenant God made with Abraham and Moses, but are you aware that God also made a covenant with Hagar?
In the wilderness Hagar encounters a deity at the well named Beer-lahai-roi (Genesis 16). Water and wells are important because they symbolize fertility and life. Wells for women are common places where they met their future spouses. Because wanderers in the desert need water to survive, water itself becomes a symbolic of life-giving or life.
In the seemingly barren dessert, the fertile Hagar finds out that she is pregnant and going to be the mother of many children. Hagar is promised progeny in a motherless state. According to Pamela Tamarkin Reis, this is called the “after-me” descendants, which guarantees Hagar that her children will live for “immeasurable generations;” a pattern that fits within the scope of this promise. This same promise of progeny is also given to Eve in Genesis 3:20, providing and interesting parallelism between Eve and Hagar.
It is worth pointing out the irony exists in this promise. Sarai uses Hagar to “build her up.” According to Nahum Sarna, to be built up in terms of the number of children that you have, implies that you are mother to a dynasty. In this pericope, however, it is Hagar, not Sarai that is built up through this divine promise.
This patterns of promise exists within the birth narrative through the annunciation of Ishmael and the promise of progeny. It is through this narrative that Hagar enters into a covenantal relationship with the deity. According to J. H. Jarrell, birth narratives have six common elements that establish this relationship: mother’s status, protest, offer, son’s future forecast, Yahweh naming, and acceptance of the contract. Hagar’s story contain these elements:
- Mother’s Status: Hagar is without child because she is a virgin (16:1).
- Protest: Hagar flees from her mistress (16:8).
- Offer: Return to your mistress and submit to her authority (16:9).
- Son’s Future Forecast: He will live at the east of all his brothers (16:12).
- Yahweh Naming: You will bear a son Ishmael because the Lord has given heed to your affliction (16:11).
- Acceptance of the Contract: She called the name of the Lord (16:13).
Connection to Ancestors in Earth-based Theology by Carol P. Christ
“I am Carol Patrice Christ, daughter of Jane Claire Bergman, daughter of Lena Marie Searing, daughter of Dora Sofia Bahlke, daughter of Mary Hundt who came to Michigan from Mecklenburg, Germany in 1854. I come from a long line of women, known and unknown, stretching back to Africa.”
Like many Americans, my ancestral history was lost and fragmented due to emigration, religious and ethnic intermarriage, and movement within the United States. Though one of my grandmothers spoke proudly of her Irish Catholic heritage and one of my grandfathers acknowledged his Swedish ancestry, I was raised to think of myself simply as “American,” “Christian” and “middle class.” Ethnic and religious differences were erased, and few stories were told.
Over the past two years, I have begun to discover details of my ancestral journey, which began in Africa, continued in the clan of Tara, and was marked by the Indo-European invasions. In more recent times, my roots are in France, Holland, England, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, and Sweden. In the United States, my family has lived in tenements in New York City and Brooklyn, in poverty in Kansas City, and on farms in Long Island, Connecticut, upstate New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. My parents and grandparents settled in northern and southern California during the 1930s. I have lived in southern and northern California, Italy, Connecticut, New York, Boston, and now Greece.
Learning details about family journeys has created a shift in my sense of who I am. Continue reading “Connection to Ancestors in Earth-based Theology by Carol P. Christ”
On Love, Theodicy and Domestic Violence by Ivy Helman
Last week, I introduced my students to the theological concept theodicy. Theodicy is a theological explanation of why suffering and evil occur that usually includes some kind of defense of divine attributes. For example, if G-d is all-knowing (omniscient), ever-present (omnipresent), all-powerful (omnipotent) and all-loving then how do we explain hurricanes, illness, mass murder, airplane crashes and other forms of evil and suffering? This is quite difficult because, as my students point out after a few minutes of discussion, most explanations are often unfulfilling or inadequate. The discussion turns quite quickly to two reactions. Either, G-d isn’t what we thought G-d was or science does a better job explaining these examples of evil and suffering. Science explains that hurricanes happen because of various environmental factors or a plane crashes because of mechanical problems. Even the concept of humanity’s freewill as the cause of evil often circles back to G-d’s creation of humanity and leaves students unsettled. If G-d created within humanity the possibility of evil, how, then G-d can be all-loving?
The love/evil dichotomy is often the real conundrum of theodicies in monotheism. This has been pointed out by numerous theologians throughout the ages. How do we account for evil when there is only one divine Being? How can an all-good, all-loving Being c
reate or even be responsible for evil? Which leads to the next question, is evil the absence of love? These are extremely difficult philosophical and theological questions.
To explore then, we should start where it is often suggested that we learn most about love: family, close friends and intimate relationships. Take this for example. Continue reading “On Love, Theodicy and Domestic Violence by Ivy Helman”
Feminism and Religion 