Foremothers – Page 22 – Feminism and Religion

Painting Isadora Duncan By Angela Yarber

A dancing woman stands center stage, her arms outstretched in natural, free, and unbound movement, as her heart cries out to us…

In May of 1877 a dancing, feminist, revolutionary was born. She was not constrained by the corsets, morals, or traditions of her time. Barefoot, clad in flowing garments, with a diaphanous scarf in hand, she stepped onto the stage and rocked the world: the world of dance, the world of women, and the world of religion.

Born in San Francisco as Dora Angela Duncan and known to us as Isadora Duncan, or Holy Isadora. This wild woman rejected the rigidity of ballet, conventional roles for women, and traditional religion. After feeling constrained by the pointe shoes, corsets, and unyielding technique of American ballet, Duncan left for Europe, intent on revolutionizing the world through dance. She claimed, “I have come to bring about a great renaissance of religion through the dance, to bring the knowledge of the beauty and holiness of the human body … (Duncan quoted by Terry Walter in Isadora Duncan).” Continue reading “Painting Isadora Duncan By Angela Yarber”

Painting Jarena Lee By Angela Yarber

When we gender the pulpit in the direction of justice, we ordain her spirit with gratitude for the many miles she walked and the countless sermons she preached.

This month I celebrate the release of my second book, The Gendered Pulpit: Sex, Body, and Desire in Preaching and Worship. As I celebrate the privilege I have as queer feminist to stand behind the pulpit each Sunday—to gender the space in the direction of justice—I must also recall the myriad holy women who have gone before me. I think of many of my Holy Women Icons with a folk feminist twist: Virginia Woolf , the Shulamite, Mary Daly, Baby Suggs, Pachamama and Gaia, Frida Kahlo, Salome, Guadalupe and Mary, Fatima, Sojourner Truth, Saraswati, and so many others. And this month I think specifically of my sister preachers, those who raised their voices in bold proclamations when the road was long and unimaginably difficult. I think of preachers like Jarena Lee.

Lee spent thirty years as an itinerant preacher and was the first black woman to be licensed to preach through the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church. Despite the fact that the AME issued a definitive ruling that women were not permitted to preach in 1852, Lee spent the bulk of her adult life preaching. Jarena Lee’s struggle to preach is a familiar story in nineteenth-century American Protestantism, even though the Second Awakening ushered in a period of intense religious revival; with camp meetings around every corner, there was an unprecedented opportunity for women to preach. Like Jarena Lee, though, they weren’t paid, ordained, or protected. Continue reading “Painting Jarena Lee By Angela Yarber”

Painting Saraswati By Angela Yarber

Saraswati reminds me that the divisions between fields are our construction; that academics can be creative, art can be holy, and preaching can engage the mind.

I was precariously perched atop a file cabinet tacking a giant cloth to the wall when another staff member entered my office. “What’s that?” she asked, puzzled, and pointing to the massive cloth now covering my wall. “Saraswati,” I responded, hopping off the file cabinet, “the Hindu goddess of arts, creativity, and learning.” She raised her eyebrows. “Our previous Baptist preacher didn’t have any Hindu goddesses hanging on the wall,” she said with a wry smile. “I guess I’m not your average Baptist preacher,” I chuckled.

For years I have been searching for Saraswati, claiming her as my patron saint, the one who guides my path as I navigate three seemingly disparate callings: artist, scholar, and preacher. In Saraswati, these three callings merge. Naturally, I hang a giant image of her on my office wall and wear a pendant bearing her likeness around my neck. She reminds me that the divisions between fields are our construction; that academics can be creative, art can be holy, and preaching can engage the mind. These three seemingly disparate callings do not have to be mutually exclusive. Saraswati certainly wouldn’t see them this way. Continue reading “Painting Saraswati By Angela Yarber”

Painting Sojourner Truth By Angela Yarber

This month, I am reminded of the importance of Jacquelyn Grant’s work on womanist Christology. In White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus, Grant reviews the white feminist discussion of the so-called problem of Jesus’ maleness, while beginning to construct a womanist response to this incarnational conundrum. She states, “It is my claim that there is a direct relationship between our perception of Jesus and our perception of ourselves.”[1]

Beginning with Mary Daly, feminists have responded to Jesus’ maleness in a variety of ways. Daly argues that because the person of Jesus is male, the male is recognized and celebrated as the superior being. Because of this, the male Jesus is to be rejected or exorcised because Jesus’ gender identity contributes to patriarchy and does not hold salvific power for women. Rather than rejecting Jesus altogether, Rosemary Radford Ruether asks the seminal question, “Can a male Jesus save woman?” Continue reading “Painting Sojourner Truth By Angela Yarber”

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”

Monthly Highlight: Emilie M. Townes

“In my teaching I want to get students excited about that notion of, you know, you’re not just here to get a Yale degree and have it on your diploma and be able to hang it on your wall…You should be here thinking about what kind of contributions can I make to society….What are you doing that helps enhance the lives of all of us, as opposed to (our) own little idiosyncratic research interests.” – – Emilie M. Townes

Emilie Townes is a pivotal person in the field of Womanist and Christian ethics as well as a foremother and pioneer in Womanist theology. Cornel West of Princeton University said:

“Emilie Townes is the towering womanist ethicist of our time….In this ice age of indifference and evasion, her powerful voice and viewpoint summon us. And we thank her for her vision and courage.”

At an opening address at the Convocation in 2005, Townes stated that there is a need to live in a “deep walking hope” that shapes lives “in ways that are not always predictable, not always safe, rarely conventional” and protests “with prophetic fury the sins of a world, and sometimes theological world views, that encourage us to separate our bodies from our spirits, our minds from our hearts, our beliefs from our actions.” Continue reading “Monthly Highlight: Emilie M. Townes”

Honoring the Older Women of December’s Darkness by Carolyn Lee Boyd

carolyn portrait

Winter’s hungry hand has taken another powerful and precious older woman. No one knew Ellen beyond her family and friends, her church and her neighbors. She was 90, a nurse, faithful to her church and of service to her community, and quiet in manner and tone. In my work in elder services over 25 years, I have come to know many Ellens, older women who have labored relentlessly in their homes or in the outside world for little recognition or financial recompense but who have made a tremendous difference in the lives of other. For reasons that may have to do with the harshness of New England winters, or maybe just coincidence, or maybe only perception, winter seems to be the time when they leave the Earth and we are bereft.

Ellen and the many older women I have known like her do not fit into any standard or feminist image of a powerful woman. They do not generally challenge the status quo, except with occasional complaints about unfairness to women in comments to friends. They may not feel comfortable labeling themselves as “feminist.”

Continue reading “Honoring the Older Women of December’s Darkness by Carolyn Lee Boyd”

A Gift I hope I can give: A Thank you to Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz by Sara Frykenberg

At some point, I finally asked the mentor what her name was and with a smile and joy that I do remember, she said, “I’m Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz.” OH MY GOD/DESS. I was completely taken aback. I really couldn’t believe that I was sitting at a table and casually talking with this woman whose work I had read and loved: a woman I considered famous. More than this, however, I couldn’t believe that she was talking to me.

I attended a memorial panel for Mujerista theologian, teacher and activist Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz at the American Academy of Religion National Conference this year. After panelists shared their memories of their friend and mentor, audience members were also invited to speak. Sitting in the audience, listening to story after beautiful story of this woman’s life, I was amazed not only by how many people Isasi-Diaz affected in that one room, but also by the similarities of the stories I heard. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz was a woman who shared her gift with many people: empowerment and access to their own power. She generated confidence, both by creating opportunities directly and indirectly for others, and by rewarding the faith of those who believe in her work by living her ideals in an obvious, open and caring way.

I was lucky enough to meet Prof. Isasi-Diaz once in my life. I was attending a women’s mentor luncheon as a graduate student, hoping to meet a more senior scholar who could tell me something I needed to know in order to get a job some day. I sat down at a table with another student and a woman older than both of us who seemed to be our mentor representative. I do not remember the entire conversation. However, I do remember that we, the students at the table, did most of the talking and the mentor asked us questions. Continue reading “A Gift I hope I can give: A Thank you to Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz by Sara Frykenberg”

Thinking About Thanksgiving by Carol P. Christ

Thanksgiving evokes deep memory and raises questions about what we are celebrating, now that we know the stories we were told about the Pilgrims and the Indians are not the whole truth about America’s early history. I thought about all of this as I prepared for Thanksgiving this year and cleaned up for days afterwards.

Although I do not live in America, I have celebrated Thanksgiving with a group of friends in my home in Greece many times during the past twenty years.

For me, Thanksgiving brings up happy memories of family gatherings in a time when my extended family, including Mom and Dad, brothers, great-aunts and great-uncles, aunts and uncles, cousins and second cousins, gathered at Grandma’s to eat turkey with all the trimmings. Grandma Lena Marie Searing Bergman was not only a great cook but also an excellent hostess. Her tables were laden with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, biscuits with butter and homemade jam, corn and green peas, pumpkin and mince pies, and also with crystal, china, and silver, and flowers from her garden.

Uncle Emery, my grandmother’s older brother, told stories about life on the farm in Michigan, where they had a pony and he lost parts of his fingers in a threshing machine. We children played croquet in the garden and ran races all around it while our mothers, aunts, and grandmother laid out the feast and cleaned up afterwards. These were the blessed days before television and televised football games came to dominate holidays in the United States. My memories are laced with the sadness of knowing that those days are in the past. Continue reading “Thinking About Thanksgiving by Carol P. Christ”

In Memoriam Patricia Monaghan: The Goddess Community Remembers and Mourns by Dawn Work-MaKinne

Patricia Monaghan, scholar, author, poet, activist, artist, visionary and vice-president of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology died early on November 11, 2012 after a two year journey with cancer. Patricia was one of the Founding Mothers of the Goddess Spirituality community in the United States, and her loss is a profound one for our spiritual and scholarly communities.

I was a very junior scholar when I first met Patricia in the 1990s. I had long admired her work, especially O Mother Sun!, her comprehensive study on sun goddesses. We were at a regional gathering, and Patricia had been deputed to lead a table of discussion devoted to Goddess scholarship. When we introduced ourselves, she simply said that she was Pat, from Chicago. Our discussion was rolling along when recognition hit. As I remember, I broke into the conversation. “You’re Patricia! From Chicago! “ I enthused. “Your work has been so important to me!” One of Patricia’s key characteristics was her generosity, especially with young and emerging scholars. I left that gathering with her email address, and I thought I was the richest young woman in the world. In the ensuing years, she encouraged me all the way through my doctorate. We had a long and joyous journey together. Continue reading “In Memoriam Patricia Monaghan: The Goddess Community Remembers and Mourns by Dawn Work-MaKinne”