Feminism – Page 83 – Feminism and Religion

Realize by Natalie Weaver

Natalie Weaver edited Autumn of 1977. The faculty wives have come together in the modest University Heights home of a physics professor. Their Aquanet hair is sprayed to the heavens and at significant risk of igniting from lipstick-stained cigarettes that are resting precariously in the cradle a heavy crystal ashtray. Their business is serious. They are putting together a cookbook. The Faculty Wives Cookbook of 1977, to be precise. It is a noble task. They will cook from it for their young families, for their husbands, that is, the faculty. Even more, they will use each other’s recipes. Martha will cook Mary’s chili; Margaret will lose weight on Donna’s diet cabbage stew. It is an achievement that will be smugly displayed on bookshelves for decades. It will yellow, and the black plastic spiral binding will wear and crack. The Kinko’s heavy card stock cover will be ringed with coffee marks. And, one day, daughters-in-law will decide whether to keep it or to pitch it out.

I think I must have one of the last remaining copies of this rare book. Almost 40 years old, I stumbled on it while cleaning the other day, seeing at last with my own eyes a thing of legend. At the dinner table, I oft heard of the making of this collection of recipes – what a job it was to oversee and how much pride the wives felt in its completion. Holding it now, I was struck poignantly by the absence of its authors from the scene. No longer card bearing faculty wives, they are widows or caregivers to aged retirees or elderly divorcees or simply deceased. Continue reading “Realize by Natalie Weaver”

Caring as Resistance and Sisterhood by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente

sisterhood

Every week, the women participating in my workshops easily share their experiences in the social, political or community world. However, it is difficult for them to talk about themselves. Several of them face complex situations: A divorce or a long layoff, illness of a relative whom they are caretakers, raising a disabled child. They are ashamed to speak up about how they feel; this should not be so. We women have the right and the duty to speak openly about what ails us in our private lives. The idea that the personal is political has to be a perfect circle.

Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi says that the lack of attention to physical, emotional and spiritual needs of women has become one of the weak points in the work of feminists. In our own social and institutional spheres where we work, the combined effects of the strong reactions against women’s movements, harassment on social networks, cultural and religious fundamentalisms, the pressures for leadership and the challenge of finding a balance between multiple spheres of life make it difficult to conserve energy.

While activisms mean resistance to the hegemonic system, some dynamics could reproduce patriarchal control’s devices on women’s emotions and impact us negatively: The expectation of renunciation and silent sacrifice as supreme feminine virtue. Sadness, illness or emotional distress are political issues and a way to control us with them is through the imposing or adopted silence about. Continue reading “Caring as Resistance and Sisterhood by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente”

Power & Restraint: A Feminist Perspective on Mormon Sisterhood: A sculpture series by Page Turner, presented by David Volodzko

David Volodzko History offers few instances of women helping create scripture. Hinduism’s sacred Rigveda may have been partly composed by women, and scholars believe the biblical Book of Ruth was possibly written by a woman, but the evidence for each is wanting. And while Muhammad’s widow was entrusted with the manuscript that would become the Quran, its scribe was a man named Zayd ibn Thabit. The only clear exception to this is the Book of Mormon, which Joseph Smith partially dictated to his wife Emma. The central role of Mormon women in the church was therefore fixed from the start.

In 1842 Joseph Smith organized the church sisters into a philanthropic organization known as the Relief Society. Among other things, the Relief Society sent women to medical school and opened cooperative stores. Operating independently from local bishops, it afforded Mormon women unprecedented independence. In fact the early Mormon Church was a feminist pathfinder. The first Mormon pioneers arrived in Salt Lake City in 1846, and by 1870 Utah Territory became the second place in the Union (after Wyoming) to give women the right to vote—nearly fifty years before the Nineteenth Amendment. But Mormons wanted freedom for all women, and that same year the Relief Society held a meeting in which the renowned poet Eliza Snow entrusted Bathsheba Smith with a mission to travel “all through the South” preaching “retrenchment [restriction of government spending] … and women’s rights.” Continue reading “Power & Restraint: A Feminist Perspective on Mormon Sisterhood: A sculpture series by Page Turner, presented by David Volodzko”

Embodied Theology: Goddess and God in the World by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow

Today is the official release date for Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology. It just so happens that August 1 is also a day for celebrating the harvest. An excerpt from the Introduction introduces the embodied theological method” we hope will turn the field of theology upside down.

People who reject the popular image of God as an old white man who rules the world from outside it often find themselves at a loss for words when they try to articulate new meanings and images of divinity. Speaking about God or Goddess is no as longer simple as it once was. Given the variety of spiritual paths and practices people follow today, theological discussions do not always begin with shared assumptions about the nature of ultimate reality. In the United States, the intrusion of religion into politics has led many people to avoid the subject of religion altogether. In families and among friends, discussions of religion often culminate in judgment, anger, or tears. Sometimes the conversation is halted before it even begins when someone voices the opinion that anyone who is interested in religion or spirituality is naïve, unthinking, or backward—or, alternatively, that religious views are a matter of personal preference and not worth discussing at all.

Talking about divinity is also surprisingly intimate. Continue reading “Embodied Theology: Goddess and God in the World by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow”

White Privilege: Confessions of a Poor White Girl by Cynthia Garrity-Bond

cynthia garrity bond Recently FAR contributor Sara Frykenberg posted an article to Facebook that caused me to think again about the now-famous essay by Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” In “Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person,” Gina Crosley-Corcoran does an excellent job of including issues of class, meaning poverty, into the discourse about race and privilege using the theory of intersectionality. If I am honest, the tensions between race and poverty have made the owning my white privilege challenging.

Like Crosley-Corcoran, I was raised in poverty. After my parents divorced in the early 1960s, our fall into poverty was pronounced. My mother liked to move, so much so that I attended no less than 15 different schools before high school. We lived in one house for two years without hot water. I learned early on the stigma of poverty, when even a Catholic school uniform could not protect me from signs of inferiority. Perhaps worse was the alienation I experienced as a young girl when other children’s parents discovered my father’s second job as a tattoo artist. Once that was known, most friends could no longer play with me outside of school. My psyche situated itself between shame and love, with the burden of keeping my humiliation a secret from the rest of my family. Continue reading “White Privilege: Confessions of a Poor White Girl by Cynthia Garrity-Bond”

Solitary Marriage by Esther Nelson

esther-nelson I’ve been married for most of my life. Marriage, along with all our institutions, is influenced by and therefore takes shape from the culture/society in which it exists. When I got married, I had certain expectations that I’d absorbed from my environment. Attaining “marital bliss” by achieving an indistinguishable oneness with my spouse was part and parcel of it all. Popular thought tells us that marriage (especially heterosexual marriage) brings about the completion of two individuals. How often do we hear about people searching for, and sometimes finding, a person they label as their soulmate? People seem to long for that one human being they think will make them happy.

I recently picked up Rainer Maria Rilke’s (Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, 1875-1926) short book, LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET, and found his thoughts about marriage liberating. A few months after he married Clara Westhoff he wrote, “I am of opinion that ‘marriage’ as such does not deserve so much emphasis as has fallen to it through the conventional development of its nature. It never enters anyone’s mind to demand of an individual that he be ‘happy’,–but when a man marries, people are much astonished if he is not!” Continue reading “Solitary Marriage by Esther Nelson”

Boann, Celtic Goddess of Inspiration and Creativity by Judith Shaw

Judith Shaw photo Boann, Celtic Goddess of Poetry, Fertility, Inspiration, Knowledge and Creativity was one of the Tuatha De Danann (People of Danu). She was associated with the 70 mile long river Boyne in Northeast Ireland and its source, the Well of Segais. Some bards say that long, long ago when the world was young and wild places were everywhere, Boann initiated that spring by walking counter-clockwise around stones found there, causing the water from under the earth to spring forth with great strength and rush down to the sea. The pool formed by the spring was encircled by nine sacred hazelnut trees, whose nuts could impart knowledge when eaten. The salmon of wisdom swam in the waters of this hidden pool from which the river Boyne flows.

Continue reading “Boann, Celtic Goddess of Inspiration and Creativity by Judith Shaw”

The Emergence of Feminist Theology: Remembering our Roots by Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ

This blog is an excerpt from our new book Goddess and God in the World which will be published by Fortress Press in just one week — on August 1. As we look forward to its release, we remember the critical works that started us on a journey of discovery that continues to unfold. In a jointly written chapter, we describe the beginnings of feminist theology.

Feminism was welling up from under during [the late 1960s]. We became feminists early in graduate school but did not discover feminist theology until we were preparing for our comprehensive exams. As Judith was later to write, feminism placed a question mark over absolutely everything for us: the maleness of God, the male authorship of the Bible, and the male perspectives from which virtually all theologies had been written. Three key essays set the stage for future work in the field, including our own. We have already mentioned these essays, but it is important to address the challenges they posed to traditional theology, and our own responses to them, in more detail here. Continue reading “The Emergence of Feminist Theology: Remembering our Roots by Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ”

The Adjectives We Use by Deanne Quarrie

Deanne Quarrie As a practicing witch, feminist, energy worker and a student of life, I am often puzzled as to why, in this day and age, we continue using the terms “masculine” and “feminine” as descriptive modifiers. What exactly does it mean when we call an energy masculine or feminine, anyway? While I understand that these are descriptors that generally address what are typical characteristics – why do we insist on being so vague, misunderstood and perhaps even, insulting, depending on who we are speaking to? Continue reading “The Adjectives We Use by Deanne Quarrie”

Misogyny in the Republican Party by Gina Messina

Gina Messina-Dysert profile In my home city of Cleveland, Ohio, yesterday Donald Trump received the nomination to run as the Republican presidential candidate in the 2016 election. While we were on an upswing following the Cavaliers NBA championship and have been highlighted as “Believeland,” the nomination of Trump is another disappointing and health hazardous event that can be added to the reasons Cleveland is sometimes called “the mistake on the lake.”

There are so many reasons to be angered by the nomination of Trump; his blatant racism and bigotry, incitement of violence, ignorance of domestic or foreign policy, his insistence on discussing his penis size, and the list goes on. With the recent tragic murders of Alton Sterling, Philandro Castile, and eight police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Sterling’s 15 year old son has called for us to come together as “one united family” and end the violence. Trump on the other hand, capitalized on their deaths as a way to highlight his “law and order” campaign and argue that Obama and Hillary Clinton are weak.

We’ve seen time and time again that Trump is unable to articulate anything meaningful in relation to his ability to fulfill the role of POTUS and his hateful rhetoric is influencing the ongoing violence in our nation. Critical points are being made about an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Latino, pro-white supremacy Trump; however, I am concerned that appropriate attention is not being given to the anti-woman sentiment of Trump and the GOP in general.

Oppressions are deeply intertwined and must be uprooted together. And so, the misogyny that exists within the Republican party must also be acknowledged as problematic.

Trump has certainly been condemned for his statements about women; however as a whole the Republican party is focused on a campaign that is anti-woman and ordained by God. My question is why are many much more willing to acknowledge racist and bigoted statements, but often turn a blind eye to the repeated right wing attempts to over turn Roe vs. Wade, defund Planned Parenthood, and regulate women’s sexuality in the name of religion?

Despite the fact that we are a secular nation, the Republican Party has claimed Christianity as a weapon against women’s human rights and it has been accepted as fair game in the world of politics. Trump’s argument, along with Gingrich’s and others that we should create tracking systems or ban Muslims from coming into the nation has been immediately recognized as racist, ethnocentric, and fear mongering (and rightfully so). But attempting to control women’s bodies and send us back to biblical times, well, it is something that many shrug their shoulders at and call a reasonable political issue.

All forms of oppression need to be addressed; you cannot uproot one, you must uproot all. And so, if we are to properly address the bigoted statements coming from the Republican nominee, and booming through Cleveland at the moment being, we must acknowledge the complexities of these issues, the ways they are intertwined, and why all are unacceptable.

Gina Messina, Ph.D. is an American feminist scholar, Catholic theologian, author, and activist. She is also Co-founder of Feminism and Religion. She writes for The Huffington Post, has authored multiple publications and is the co-editor of the highly acclaimed Faithfully Feminist: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Feminists on Why We Stay. Messina is a widely sought after speaker and has presented across the US at universities, organizations, conferences and on national platforms including appearances on MSNBC, Tavis Smiley, NPR and the TEDx stage. She has also spoken at the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations to discuss matters impacting the lives women around the world. Messina is active in movements to end violence against women and explores opportunities for spiritual healing. Connect with her on Twitter @FemTheologian, Facebook, and her website ginamessinadysert.com.