Feminism – Page 80 – Feminism and Religion

My Reaction to the Election Results by Elise M. Edwards

I wanted to stay in bed yesterday morning. I wanted to stay in bed for the whole day. When I heard that Trump won the US Presidential election, I didn’t know how to deal with it. How can I accept this reality? I still don’t have an adequate answer.

Turn to prayer? Yes. Do some writing? Ok. I’ll also take every hug and kind word that’s offered to me. And still, my emotions will be raw for a long time. I cry at random moments. My voice catches unexpectedly. I feel that so many Americans embraced a vision of the country that is intensely hostile to people like me (women, African-Americans, Black Lives Matter sympathizers, liberals, intellectuals). How can I not take that personally? Dismissing the harm of Trump’s open hostility or accepting it in deference to some supposedly higher goal feels like rejection too. It justifies and legitimizes his contempt and denies the seriousness of it. Do we really accept a man who speaks so openly of sexual assault because he promises to bring jobs back? That denigrates women and all assault victims. The hatred directed at immigrants, Muslims, and LGBTQA persons is even more unrestrained and horrifying!

Continue reading “My Reaction to the Election Results by Elise M. Edwards”

Mother Demdike, Ancestor of My Heart, Part 2 by Mary Sharratt

Continued from Part 1. As I sought to uncover the bones of the cunning woman Mother Demdike’s story, I was drawn into a new world of mystery and magic. It was as though Pendle Hill had opened up like an enchanted mountain to reveal the treasures hidden within. Every stereotype I’d held of historical witches and cunning folk was dashed to pieces. Continue reading “Mother Demdike, Ancestor of My Heart, Part 2 by Mary Sharratt”

Sacred Marriage or Unholy Cover-up? by Carol P. Christ

carol-p-christ-photo-michael-bakas Many women are drawn to the image of the Sacred Marriage—perhaps especially those raised in Roman Catholic or Protestant traditions where sex is viewed as necessary for procreation but nothing more, and who learn that the naked female body as symbolized by Eve is the source of sin and evil. In this context, the positive valuing of sexuality and the female body found in symbols of the Sacred Marriage can feel and even be liberating.

Jungians have claimed that the Sacred Marriage is an archetype of the wedding between the “masculine” and the “feminine.” Many women have been attracted to this idea as well. It “softens” the radical feminist critique of patriarchy and male dominance. Rather than “castrating” the “phallocracy” as Mary Daly urged, we can think in terms of the “marriage” of qualities traditionally associated with male and female roles. Women, it is said, can use a good dose of ego and assertiveness traditionally associated with the masculine, while men need to have their dominating rational egos tempered by feminine qualities like care and compassion. Continue reading “Sacred Marriage or Unholy Cover-up? by Carol P. Christ”

Turning One by Sara Frykenberg

14724657_10154061354658546_8918956387379465095_n This month I turn one as a mother. My daughter, consequently, is also turning one—a first birthday I am excitedly planning. Specifically, I want to make Hazel a rainbow cake with lots of colored layers and white frosting. I’m not even sure she’ll be able to eat the cake (avoiding lots of sugar for a one-year-old and all), but among those family pictures I treasure, my mother held a cake for her little ones. I want to be like my mother. I am going to make a cake.

But planning my daughter’s party, I realized that I am also going to have a kind of birth-day anniversary. Other moms have told me that it takes a year to really process the experience of giving birth. While I did consider the significance of my “birthing community,” in a blog last fall, I realized a couple of weeks ago that I wasn’t done understanding what I, what mothers, and what life givers of all kinds go through to bring life into the world. Continue reading “Turning One by Sara Frykenberg”

The Real World Series by Natalie Weaver

Natalie Weaver edited I live in Cleveland, and I am writing at the end of the World Series. I don’t know how it will conclude, but like most of the people in my city, I’m holding my breath. As I write, I literally just left the cardiac ward of one of the Cleveland Clinic hospitals, where patients’ lives actually seemed to hang in the balance of the game, according to one of the nurses who was monitoring heart rates from a central station in the hallway.

I, who never cared about baseball and avoided Cleveland sports, am more than a little surprised at myself. For, I have grown to care about the outcome of these games. Why so, I ask myself. Why am I sitting with my mom in the hospital, watching a game, when she’s ill, and neither of us has ever cared about sports? I’ve been thinking about this recently, and believe I have landed on the right answer.

You see, when you are from Cleveland, it is not uncommon to have this precise conversation or some permutation thereof:

Self: Hi.
Stranger: Hello there. Nice to meet you.
Self: Where are you from?
Stranger: Denver
Self: Denver is a lovely city. I visited for my friend’s wedding once.
Stranger: Yes. We love it out there. Great weather; friendly people. What about you… where are you from?
Self: Cleveland
Stranger: (chuckling) I’m sorry. Mistake on the Lake. River’s on Fire. Etc.

Clevelanders are made to feel shame about our city, whereas, by contrast, Chicago is heralded for its architecture, food, and skyline, and so one. Now, I have lived in Chicago. It is beautiful and all that, and, more importantly, Chicago is not what I am writing about. What I have come to observe about myself is that I actually love Cleveland for what it has to offer, which primarily includes people. Hard workers, brilliantly talented musicians, artists, actors, educators, physicians, architects, and more.

I have grown to appreciate the people and stories that built the city’s heritage, culture, ethnic churches, diverse neighborhoods, beautified lakefront, museums, international airports, colleges and universities, rivers, parks, gardens, and on and on. There is persistent and nearly inevitable derision that is glibly tossed our way here in the Two-One-Six. I realize, it has worn me down over the years.

And, especially when I travel for academic conferences and chat over drinks at the receptions, I am tired of playing Justin Martyr to the city, in large measure to defend my own merit as a scholar and educator. Continue reading “The Real World Series by Natalie Weaver”

Are White Women Voters (As a Group) Waking Up? by Carol P. Christ

Carol P. Christ by Michael Bakas high resoultion I have been following the statistics on the gender gap in voting patterns for many years, often patting myself on the back for belonging to a group that on the whole votes Democratic or breathing a sigh of relief that I am not part of a group that votes Republican. Imagine my dismay when in 2012 I read that though the gender gap exists, I belong to a group—white women—that is likely to vote Republican. Since 1972 only Bill Clinton in 1996 took a majority of the white women’s vote.

The gender gap in 2008 and 2012 was created by the fact that over 96 percent of African-American women and over 2/3 of Hispanic women voted for Obama. In contrast, white women voted for McCain by a 7 percent margin and for Mitt Romney by 14 percent.

Breaking these statistics down further, I could consider myself “home free.” Continue reading “Are White Women Voters (As a Group) Waking Up? by Carol P. Christ”

Sex, Death and the Gods (Part II) by Vibha Shetiya

IMG_20160112_101035 This continues my reflections on the Devidasis in Part 1.

The overall picture that emerged from the documentary “Sex, Death and the Gods” was that, in its current form, there were many layers to the Devadasi system. For one, the most heartbreaking of all, there were the helpless, underage girls protesting such an existence, pleading that they would rather be in school, instead of being trapped in what was essentially a form of sexual slavery. But then we also see the older Devadasis, women who had been dedicated as children themselves.

Within this latter bracket, there were two groups.Those that viewed the practice as evil, and those that saw it as empowering – they earned their own income and they didn’t have a man or mother-in-law to lord over them; in short, they were in-charge of their own households. To them, married life was akin to a life of servitude, sex was something they enjoyed, and they may have shared a more or less equal relationship with the men who were their customers, men who enjoyed their company and preferred being with a Devadasi rather than with spouses they never chose or couldn’t get along with. In the words of one Devadasi – “I am the boss.” Continue reading “Sex, Death and the Gods (Part II) by Vibha Shetiya”

The Tremble of Love: A Novel of the Baal Shem Tov by Ani Tuzman – Reviewed by Joyce Zonana

jz-headshot Never has it been more difficult for me to affirm that “love trumps hate” as during this unprecedented United States election season. After watching the Republican Convention last July in mute horror, I took to bed for several days, overwhelmed by the presentiment that everyone–blacks, women, Jews, Latinos, Muslims, queers– other than a certain breed of white American males was doomed to shameless malignment and persecution. The palpable hatred in Donald Trump’s acceptance speech seared me, arousing my ancestral memory of various persecutions of Jews, Muslims, and others–not something I usually think about or choose to foreground. For several months now, I have been haunted (and almost paralyzed) by fear.

tremble-of-love-cover-3d-for-web Hence Ani Tuzman’s The Tremble of Love: A Novel of the Baal Shem Tov has come as an especially welcome, healing antidote, affirming as it does the power of “unshakeable faith even in the presence of inhumanity” (473). I cannot say that I fully have such faith, but this novel, if anything can, leads me towards it. Page after page is filled with compelling examples of love’s power to disarm hatred and assuage pain.

Early on, a tale is told of a young man fearlessly facing three would-be highwaymen who have stopped the wagon in which he is riding with a rabbi’s wife and her three children, one of whom is disabled:

Continue reading “The Tremble of Love: A Novel of the Baal Shem Tov by Ani Tuzman – Reviewed by Joyce Zonana”

Atonement, Forgiveness, and Feminism by Debra Guckenheimer

As Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur approach, I am in the midst of my annual process of asking forgiveness to everyone I have knowingly wronged in the last year. During this time, Jews atone for our wrong-doings. We are tasked with not only asking for forgiveness, but making things right with those we have wronged.

This year, I’m realizing that I have been missing out on so many aspects of forgiving. What about the forgiveness I am not aware I need? I need to learn to forgive us and to invite others to call me out on the ways I have inflicted harm on them. Continue reading “Atonement, Forgiveness, and Feminism by Debra Guckenheimer”

Women Beyond Belief by Karen L. Garst

karen_garst_img If you knew about me, you might ask, “Why does a former executive decide to abandon retirement and devote herself to writing a book about women leaving religion?” Of course if you knew me well, you would understand that I must have a worthwhile project. Idleness is not in my nature. But the path that led me to the publication of Women Beyond Belief: Discovering Life without Religion is, hopefully, an interesting one and reveals a shy girl, born in the nation’s hinterland, who matured into an ardent feminist and then moved on to expressing that feminism through writing about women and atheism.

When I mention in interviews that I grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, most are able to guess that I was likely raised as a Lutheran. And they are correct. Trinity Lutheran Church, at the time a beautiful church with amazing stained glass windows, was the center of my life. Recently, my sister and I, who calls herself an agnostic, sang old hymns together on a road trip. With a 55,000 year history, it is no wonder that music leaves a deep impression on us. With long gowns, we walked down the aisle at Trinity singing “God’s Word is Our Great Heritage” in youth choir. It was a singular experience in my life that has no equal. This ALC church was fairly liberal though at the time there seemed to be a bit of a war going on with Catholics. Why else would I have asked my father at the tender age of seven if it would be okay if I married the Catholic boy who had just walked me home from school? Unpacking why I would think of marriage at seven must be left to another day. Learning Martin Luther’s catechism was arduous. I can honestly say I never understood it at all. Continue reading “Women Beyond Belief by Karen L. Garst”