Exploring the F-word in religion at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and community.
Sometimes I come across a resource that’s so fantastic that all I want to do is promote it.
This incredible graphic from the blog site Radical Discipleship recently made the rounds on my Facebook news feed.
Continue reading “Let’s Talk About White Supremacy by Grace Yia-Hei Kao”
Doing a recent talk on pioneering woman writers, I like to do the Before Jane Austen test with my audience. Who can name a single woman writer in the English language before Jane Austen? Alas, because woman have been written out of history to such a large extent, most people come up blank. Then we talk about pioneering Renaissance authors, such as Aemilia Bassano Lanier, the subject of my recent novel, THE DARK LADY’S MASK, or her mentor, Anne Locke, the first person of either sex to write a sonnet sequence in the English language.
But my next question takes us even further back into history. Who was the first woman to write a book in English?
The answer is Julian of Norwich, who wrote Revelations of Divine Love. Continue reading “The Motherhood of God by Mary Sharratt”
He told me his “come” was a sacrament… He made the sign of the cross with it on my breasts. Jean Hargadon Wehner in The Keepers
I sat glued to my television last weekend watching seven episodes of The Keepers one after the other. Out of all the horrific information in this Netflix documentary, these words stick in my mind. Jean Hargadon Wehner said Father A. Joseph Maskell told her that she was sinner after she confessed to him that her uncle had molested her. Father Maskell explained that her case was so severe that ordinary absolution might not work. Thus, he told her, she must participate in ritual sex with him in order to purify her soul. Jean Hargadon was too young and naive to question his authority. She only knew that she dreaded hearing her name called out on the school loudspeaker with instructions to report to Father Maskell’s office. Continue reading “The Keepers and the Roman Catholic Church by Carol P. Christ”
My partner and I are getting married in a little over a month. She, a lawyer, and I, a professor, live in the Czech Republic. Technically, we aren’t getting married because the Czech Republic doesn’t have marriage equality. Our relationship will not be recognized in the U.S. For that, we need to be married in a state or nation that has marriage equality. Germany might soon. Other options would be a number of EU countries or the United States, but that doesn’t affect our status in the Czech Republic. Finally, our marriage will also not be recognized by some in Jewish circles as well since the ketubah, the Jewish marriage document which possesses legal status in Jewish courts, is between two women.
There is nothing legal about our Jewish wedding except one could argue its Jewishness. So, the day after our wedding our relationship will have the same recognition as it had the day before and the day before that. This would not be the case if we were a heterosexual couple. It reminds me of the countless commitment ceremonies that took place before marriage equality in the United States. They were not prohibited (like the marriages that slaves had because slaves weren’t considered people under the law or eligible to enter into legal contracts while in bondage (see pages 301-302). Yet, similar to the “contubernal relationships” of slaves performed by their masters or other slaves (page 302), they weren’t particularly legal either. Despite the ceremony, there was no change in status of the couple within society. Yet, recognition was and still is an important component of both struggles for rights. In fact, according to Darlene Goring in “The History of Slave Marriage in the United States,” (345-346), the process of gaining legal recognition was very similar for both ex-slaves and the marriage equality community in the United States. Continue reading “Reflections on Marriage by Ivy Helman”
I find myself asking (again), when the religious right, evangelicals, and Christian fundamentalists hear Trump say, “Make America Great Again,” do they really hear him saying, “Make America Christian Again?” How can the really hear him saying that in light of what this man has actually said and actually done? The answer: because of the same mythical purity that erases the violence, slaughter, and atrocity attached to this “Christian nation’s” founding.
My mother sometimes likes to watch the movie “Independence Day,” on the 4th of July—you know, the one where Will Smith, the gutsy and heroic Marine pilot, Jeff Goldblum, scientist, and Bill Pulman, president, save the Earth from extraterrestrial invasion? It’s an action film loaded with implicit myth and exceptionalism, extolling “mankind’s” common humanness in the face of annihilating, “alien” difference. The heroes ultimately unify the globe with fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants “American” ingenuity, luck, and bravery. Continue reading “Making America What Again? Reflections for the 4th of July by Sara Frykenberg”
I had few expectations before my visit in the winter of 1999 to Cairo’s Rav Moshe Synagogue, also called the “Rambam.” I only knew it to be an obscure synagogue and yeshiva associated with the renowned twelfth-century theologian, sage, and physician, Moses Maimonides.
I left Egypt as an infant with my parents in 1951. Now I was finally back, hoping to experience the place that had shaped my family. Accompanied by a Muslim Egyptian friend, I walked the streets my parents had walked, attended services in the elegant downtown synagogue where they’d been married, tasted the familiar foods of my childhood, listened with delight to the melodious sounds of Egyptian Arabic. But seeking the Rambam was little more than a whim, sparked by a few lines in a Guide to Jewish Travel in Egypt. “Not on any tourist itinerary,” the brief blurb stated about the derelict synagogue in ‘Haret al Yahud, the city’s medieval Jewish quarter, far from where my parents had lived. Still, I had to go.
In a world where humans were small and nature was big, surrounded by forests of trees of immense size and stature, it’s not surprising that the ancient Celts came to hold trees as sacred. Like many others, the Celts revered the World Tree or the Tree of Life as the mythic bridge between heaven and earth. The roots reach down and ground with the Earth while the branches spread their canopy up to the heavens.
When we come together, we are the Divine. I didn’t think I could experience that twice in one year; clearly, I was wrong.
If you’re anything like me you not only hate opening up your Twitter feed each morning but also feel compelled to in order to make sure you didn’t miss whatever new atrocity to come out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. After the Women’s March, I felt charged. I felt that whatever this administration threw at the proverbial “us,” I knew we could and would overcome it. Although that charge kept me going for a few months, there came a time where I just couldn’t go on anymore and that I was completely drained; then walked in a man named Brian Pendleton.
After the Women’s March on January 21, I didn’t know what to expect. The event was truly so successful that many of the organizers and coordinators were on an activist high as a result of what was a truly magical and divine moment. A few months came and went and the 45th President of the United States continued (much to our surprise) to be as awful as we all knew and expected. However, while I am able to exist in a world, no matter how oppressive, as a cisgendered white male and the full on privilege and power that comes along with that territory, many of the individuals and communities being attacked did not have those same freedoms; and like with the Women’s March and how that all took shape, in walked Brian Pendleton to my life to talk to me about the #ResistMarch.
Although my involvement during the 120 days or more that led up to the #ResistMarch happened in a flash, one thing is for certain: miracles exist not because of divine intervention but because G-d places people on this Earth to make positive impacts. The beauty of the #ResistMarch was not just the passion of the organizers but the beauty of the rainbow that came out in full force on June 11
The strength shown by our community was one that, for all intensive purposes, proves that love does conquer all. RuPaul couldn’t have expressed the common and conquering theme better than when he said: “It’s all about love; giving love and being able to receive love. That’s our secret weapon; that’s the one thing they don’t have: our love and our music. That is our activism. That is what we use and what we always use to fight the ugliness.”
That is the one experience that I took most out of the #ResistMarch: the power of love and friendship; the beauty in the unexpected conversation that leads to changing the world, again. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, for bringing us all together to resist, recharge, and love.
When we come together, we are the Divine. I didn’t think I could experience that twice in one year; clearly, I was wrong.
John Erickson is the President of the Hollywood Chapter of the National Organization for Women. John is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Religious History at Claremont Graduate University where he is finishing up his dissertation tentatively titled “Step Sons and Step Daughter”: Chosen Communities, Religion, and LGBT Liberation.” John holds a MA in Women’s Studies in Religion; an MA in Applied Women’s Studies; and a BA in English and Women’s Studies. He is the Founding and Past President of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh’s LGBTQA+ Alumni Association and currently serves as the Chair of the Legislative Committee for the Stonewall Democratic Club, a Diversity and Inclusion Fellow at Claremont Graduate University. He is a permanent contributor to the blog Feminism and Religion, a Co-Founder of the blog The Engaged Gaze, and the Co-Chair of the Queer Studies in Religion Section of the American Academy of Religion’s Western Region, the only regional section of the American Academy of Religion that is dedicated to the exploration of queer studies in religion and other relevant fields in the nation. In April 2017, he was the first openly gay athlete to be inducted into the Wisconsin Volleyball Conference Hall of Fame. Most recently, John was one of the coordinators of the Women’s March Los Angeles, which brought together 750,000 people in downtown Los Angeles on January 21, 2017, and a Committee Member for the #ResistMarch, which brought together 100,000 people from Hollywood to West Hollywood in honor of LA Pride on June 11, 2017.
This earth is my sister; I love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am how we admire the strength in each other, all that we have suffered, all that we have lost, all that we know. We are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget: what she is to me, what I am to her.
These words are from Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature which I often recommend as one of my favorite books. Over the years I have read this passage and others from Woman and Nature aloud with my students, and we have always been moved, most of us to tears. More recently these words have become the center of the “Morning Blessing” on the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete.
In the epigraph to the book Griffin writes,
These words are written for those of us whose language is not heard, whose words have been stolen or erased, those robbed of language, who are called voiceless or mute, even the earthworms, even the shellfish and the sponges, for those of us who speak our own language . . .
Continue reading “Woman and Nature: Our Bodies Are Ourselves by Carol P. Christ”
On June 10th anti-Muslim demonstrations were held in 28 cities across the United States, including one a few miles down the road from me at the North Carolina Capitol grounds in Raleigh. Organized by ACT for America, identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as the largest Anti-Muslim hate group in the country, these “anti-Sharia” gatherings were advertised with propagandist messaging like “If you stand for human rights, please join us to march against Sharia” and “Sharia is incompatible with our Constitution and our American values.”
It’s no coincidence that these anti-Muslim demonstrations were organized during LGBTQ Pride month, specifically the weekend before the one year mark of the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando that left forty-nine people dead and fifty-three others wounded, nearly all of whom were young members of the Latinx community. The shooter Omar Mateen had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State before opening fire at the gay club. Scott Pressler, one of the major organizers of the anti-Muslim gatherings, claims that the Orlando massacre was a wake-up call that led him to do two things: to come out as a gay man, and to join ACT for America “to fight for my community, my country.”
ACT for America operates under the guise of human rights and women’s liberation to justify its anti-Muslim, white Supremacist agenda. The organization’s founder, Brigitte Gabriel, cited acts of violence against women including female genital mutilation and honor killings as the basis of organizing these anti-sharia demonstrations. She criticized U.S. feminists, claiming (falsely) that they have we have been silent on these issues. In an interview Scott Pressler also tried to appeal to feminists in joining his anti-Muslim crusade when he said, “ We [the LGBTQ community] are under attack simply because of our sexuality. Just like women, just for being born a female you are already under attack, and I think that’s demonstrative of how extreme radical Islam really is.”
Continue reading “Anti-Muslim Demonstrations Demand Our Response by Katey Zeh”
Feminism and Religion 