Exploring the F-word in religion at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and community.
I have been drawn to the Goddess for a variety of reasons. Initially, as a young woman, She spoke to me of my own power, self-worth, self-determination and my/every woman’s inherent beauty. She lent Her hand to my emerging sense of independence from male domination.
Over the years my experience of Goddess deepened. At times I feel Her as manifest in me and as a symbol of my own power. At other times She is who I pray to for both personal and community help.
Feminism and Religion was founded in the late spring of 2011. Throughout the summer Gina Messina-Dysert hounded me about submitting a blog while I ignored her emails because I didn’t think I wanted to take on a new project. Gina was persistent nonetheless. Finally I decided that it would be easier to take an excerpt from a book review I had recently written than to explain why I didn’t want to write something for the blog, and so “Exciting New Research on Matriarchal Societies” became my first contribution.
I must have enjoyed writing the blog or reading the responses to it, because my FAR archives show that I was soon contributing a blog every other week and not long after that, every week. Continue reading “Let Us Give Thanks for Feminism and Religion Dot Com by Carol P. Christ”
It has occurred to me that it’s possible that some of the bloggers and readers of this site may not know very much about pagans, so here’s a little New Year’s lesson. The first thing to know is that pagans are almost by definition rebels. That means any generalization anyone may make will almost certainly have a thousand exceptions. You may have heard what Will Rogers wrote in 1932: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” Well, the same goes for pagans: many of us joke that we don’t belong to an organized religion. “Pagan,” by the way, is the generic term. Witches, Wiccans, and eclectics (among others, see below) are specific terms. Many of us belong to what are called traditions, which are somewhat analogous to the Protestant denominations. Some traditions are said to go back to the Middle Ages (or further back), but this is generally nonsense. Paganism as it is practiced today is a modern religion looking for (and—voilà! finding!) roots in the ancient and classical pantheons or in Old Europe, where archaeology shows us that the Goddess was worshipped thousands of years before Abraham met his god, ca. 2000 BCE (see Marija Gimbutas’ text for more information on this). Continue reading “Who Are the Pagans? by Barbara Ardinger”
“Furthermore, like Obama, [de Blasio] projects a masculinity that is empathic and introspective — anathema to the patriarchal attitudes that dominate hierarchal institutions like the police.”
I wish the analysis that accompanies this quote had been mine, but maybe I should be glad that it comes from aninsightful young man who goes by the name liamcdg. He who argues that the real beef the New York police have with Bill de Blasio is his challenge to their definition of masculinity as dominance, or shall we say white male dominance.
As noted by liamcdg, in the NYPD version of reality, parents should teach children to comply “to comply with New York City police officers even if they think it’s unjust.” In terms of competing definitions of masculinity, the NYPD version is that men in power should be respected simply in virtue of their position, even if they are acting or appearing to act unjustly. In other words we should respect the powerful because they are powerful.
To be empathetic is to be able to put yourself in another person’s place, and in its literal meaning, to feel the feelings of another. In the recent public conversations about race and the police, both Obama and de Blasio have invited white Americans to put themselves in the place of a black man stopped by the police for little or no reason and to ask themselves how they would feel in that situation.
In so doing, liamcdg asserts, Obama and de Blasio were not simply trying to explain the feelings of those on the other side of the racial divide, they were also redefining masculinity. We all know that according to traditional stereotypes, the realm of feeling is the realm of women. And of course we also know that real men don’t cry. Yet what is happening to black men is enough to make anyone who feels their feelings want to cry.
The conflicts between de Blasio and the police and Obama and a large segment of the older white male voting public may have as much to do with the challenge to white male privilege as it has to do with any particular event or issue. White male privilege involves a complex interconnection of race and sex. It is about the power that comes or is expected to come to one simply by virtue of being born into a white male body.
In recent weeks I have been asking myself why the police are so upset. After all there is room for improvement in any profession. Over the past few years I have also struggled to understand why some people object so strongly to the idea that women have a right to control their own bodies, to choose birth control or abortion. I am coming to the conclusion that the vehemence of the protest is rooted in the perception that the patriarchal edifice is crumbling.
Forty years ago, inspired by the feminist movement, men began to speak about redefining masculinity. This was easier said than done. It is so easy to accuse men who criticize male power as domination of being “sissies,” “girls,” or “gay.” Even men who might of wanted to discuss the subject were all too often afraid of being labeled.
I say the fact that the NYPD is turning its back on de Blasio is one measure of how far we have come. I suggest that the NYPD recognizes that a different definition of masculinity and male power is being born right before their eyes. And it is this that they cannot bear to see.
We have been taught that feeling and feeling the feelings of others belongs in the feminine realm. What if it doesn’t? What if in the end male power and female power are much the same? And what if they both begin with empathy?
Perhaps we really have “come a long way baby.”
According to Heide Goettner-Abendroth, whose work I am fond of quoting in FAR, matriarchal societies defined the power of males and the power of females similarly.
What if Freud got it wrong? What if males do not have to differentiate themselves from their mothers by becoming “not like” women and girls? What if masculinity and feminity are not polar opposites? What if all any of us have to do is to learn to embody the qualities of those who nurture us?
We are beginning to glimpse a different world. Any thoughts on how to bring the NYPD and other older white males into a new world along with us?
Following up on an older (and my most popular) post, 5 Interesting Facts about Women and Religion, I am going to draw your attention to 5 other telling facts.
1: Women clergy are blowing up in the Anglican Church!
In U.K. Church Statistics, 2005-2015, Dr. Peter Brierly shows that out of 9,615 Anglican ministers, 1,928 are women. This is a radical spike since 2005. That is 20.05% of all Anglican ministers. This is about double compared to lead pastoral roles in U.S. Protestant Churches (see here). The year of 2010 showed the first time women outnumbered men in Anglican ordination, and it continues to rise up to the present day. And although they are growing as ministers, they are still blocked from becoming Bishops. The vote for allowing female bishops at a General Synod in 2012 failed to get the 2/3 support BY 6 VOTES! Continue reading “5 Interesting Facts about Religion and Modern Society by Kile Jones”
This story is written from the point of view of my childhood self growing up in the LDS church…
This is what I said in church yesterday. I messed up and instead of saying “I’d like to bear my testimony,” I said “I’d like to bear my family.”
The reason I said this is because after you say, “I’d like to bear my testimony, I know this church is true,” you are supposed to say, “I am grateful for my family.” Well, I just stood there saying I would like to bear them. I felt so embarrassed especially when I saw my mom looking at me funny.
Mom always gets serious in church. I try to focus and be serious too. After all, I know Heavenly Father is watching me. But sometimes I giggle and daydream too much. Then I get in trouble because I’m the oldest and I should know better. Continue reading “An LDS Girlhood by Amy Wright Glenn”
As we embark on a New Year, I find myself customarily cautious. The New Year, of course, is hugely emblematic of hopeful beginnings, revised behaviors, fresh outlooks, and personal commitments. Yet, because renewal is so difficult to achieve, I find myself always a bit wary of the New Year talk of resolutions, whose results, like fad diets, tend to be neither sustainable nor genuinely transformative. I have the same feeling, incidentally, after I get my teeth cleaned or get a car wash in the winter in Cleveland.
I live with hope and the possibility of change in my heart, but I am concerned about the effect of boundless messaging about insufficiency and inadequacy that pervades the culture. We learn over and again that we weigh too much; don’t use our time well enough; invest or use our money unwisely; need a better job; don’t cook healthfully enough; visit the gym too infrequently; aren’t nice enough; spend too little time with our kids; need better things and clearer skin; do too little; do too much; and on and on. At least for me, socially ritualized self-critique of this sort reflects a profound narcissistic spirituality of self-help and (often failed attempts at) self-improvement. Such spirituality reinforces the self-absorption and lack of true community that lead us into individualism and over-consumption in the first place.
This year, as I embark on the New Year, I am especially aware of many things I cannot change. For one, I am watching a good friend die, and there is no longer anything that anyone can do about it. I am watching my mother’s mobility decrease from a knee injury year’s ago. I am watching my children get older, and I hear surprising things that come from them from the environments they inhabit beyond the walls of my home. I learn more acutely what I already know, namely, that they will and must live in a world much larger than my own invention. I am watching my own self deepen into the reality of multi-generational familial responsibilities, as I grapple with what it takes to run a home, care for children, and meet others’ basic needs. I know I am not alone. I read student papers in my adult education class over the break, and the weight of their realities is tremendous. How tyrannical it seems to insist that we add to these realities of ours some kind of burden of change between 11:59 and 12:01!
I have come to believe that much, probably all, of the spiritual life that leads to redemption (or liberation or salvation… whatever we wish to call it), is about reconciliation with that which one cannot change, with what is imperfect, with what we would have as otherwise. There is an enormous need for us to release control over life itself and to forgive ourselves the relative impotence we experience in the face of it all. In an even greater leap, somewhere along the way we must also forgive or reconcile with God for the gaping distances between that which is and that for which we hope.
I eschew welcoming the New Year as a series of televised media extravaganzas that make me feel somehow bad-about-myself-yet-wildly-energized-about- how-much-better-I-can-be (especially if I use the right products). Rather, the New Year might more helpfully be greeted as a gentle continuation, one next persistent push in the sequence of the tide’s rush against the shore. It is just another moment in a larger history that carries on independently of us. We cannot change the seascape; we cannot outrun it; the tide will bring in all sorts of beautiful things that we did not make and also dangerous things that we cannot sidestep. It will be what it will be.
What we can do is notice it better. For my part, I can quietly adjust my perspective near and far, and then perhaps I might also quietly find my values realigning with my more intentional vision. I might thereby experience the beginnings of a soft metanoia toward more mindful creatureliness. And, here, I might also begin to become the proverbial change, within my limited spheres of influence, that I wish to see in the world.
Constructive agency must begin in the prayerful appreciation of limited creaturely life. It is only then, I suspect, that one might have a chance at sustainable, transformational being in oneself, in relationship to others, and in the world. It begins, however, with letting go of Luciferian ambitions for a more prefect world of our own design. My New Year’s meditation, then, is this: I will try to accept being a human creature: a finite, earth-dependent, truly human animal. I will try to understand the balance between what I can and should do as a responsible, moral being on the one hand and where aspiration becomes an idolatry of dominion on the other. I will try to understand limitation as its own sort of revealing grace and eject constructions of fall and punishment that badly theologize what is mere creaturely disappointment at not being God. I will try in earnest to understand and to live in these words:
“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, about your body; or what you will wear… Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet… not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. Who…by worrying can add a single hour to his life?… Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matt. 6: 25-34)
Natalie Kertes Weaver, Ph.D., is Chair and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Ursuline College in Pepper Pike, Ohio. Natalie’s academic books include: Marriage and Family: A Christian Theological Foundation (Anselm, 2009); Christian Thought and Practice: A Primer (Anselm, 2012); and The Theology of Suffering and Death: An Introduction for Caregivers (Routledge, 2013). Natalie is currently writing Made in the Image of God: Intersex and the Revisioning of Theological Anthropology (Wipf & Stock, 2014). Natalie has also authored two art books: Interior Design: Rooms of a Half-Life and Baby’s First Latin. Natalie’s areas of interest and expertise include: feminist theology; theology of suffering; theology of the family; religion and violence; and (inter)sex and theology. Natalie is a married mother of two sons, Valentine and Nathan. For pleasure, Natalie studies classical Hebrew, poetry, piano, and voice.
In my first blog for Feminism and Religion, I discussed the cognitive and embodied dissonance that some Muslims experience as a result of historically (not eternally) gendered ritual forms. I ended with a promise to share with readers the ways in which el-Tawhid Juma Circle mosques try to create space to break free of those forms. Our mosques affirm all human beings as spiritually, socially, and ritually equal and try to break down the social hierarchy of ritual and theological leadership by opening up a space for all bodies, minds, and hearts to lead and follow as equals among each other.
Continue reading “Creating Space: Mosques Affirming All Bodies, Minds, and Hearts by Laury Silvers”
“All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” These words posted on the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno have an eerie resonance in our time.
Marie Cartier recently posted a blog on children and hunger with facts so devastating I could not finish reading it. Earlier in the month Jassy Watson wrote about her deep feelings of grief on hearing Luisah Teish’s “Prayer for Disappearing Species.” Grief, despair, and sadness about the injustices in our world can be overwhelming.
A friend of mine has recently fallen into a deep depression. When I try to talk her out of it, she repeats that they are threatening to cut down the last remaining old growth forest in her home state of Oregon and that she can no longer eat fish because radioactivity released in the Fukishima nuclear plant disaster is reaching the seacoast of Oregon.
When I tell my friend she should not dwell only on these things and that she must remember that the world is still a beautiful place, she responds, “I do not want to give up my feelings. I know I must find a way to acknowledge my sadness and make a place for joy, but I don’t know how to do it.”
I have been in the grip of deep grief about the planet myself, not once but many times. But this happens less frequently than it used to. When I think about the differences between how I once felt and how I feel now, I think the difference is that I have come to terms with and accepted the likelihood that “the world as we know it” is “going to hell in a handbasket”—as I put it.
I believe that the most likely conclusion of the choices human beings are making on planet earth today is massive environmental destruction leading to great suffering and probable extinction for human and many other species on planet earth. This is what I believe, but I also remind myself that I cannot know for sure. The earth and its species including human beings may have resources of resistance and survival, transformation and adaptation,that I do not know about and cannot imagine.
When I began to accept that the world I know and love (where spring follows winter, where birds sing, and where there is hope that injustice can be rectified) may not exist in the very near future, I had an astonishing insight. The death of the world I know and love will not mean the death of our planet or the end of the evolution of the universe.
Thinking about the disappearance of species and the death of human beings from starvation often feels too much to bear. None of this should be happening. Still, it can be strangely comforting to remind myself that the world I love is not the only possible world. There have been other worlds on this very planet—the time when the first cells were formed, the time of the dinosaurs, and many others. Evolution will continue on planet earth for several billion more years, and when our sun burns out, other suns will most likely still be shining in the universe.
This insight was followed by another. The reason for hope is not the conviction that we will be able to save the world we love. The reason for hope—and the reason to keep trying to save our world—is the deep knowing that it is right to try. Even if we cannot save the world we love for all time, we can savor the gift of life, and we can continue to try to create a world in which the gift of life is shared widely today and tomorrow.
I have written many times that we must learn to love a life that ends in death. I was speaking about accepting that each one of us will surely die. I do not fear death. Overcoming this fear has opened me to a greater and more clear-sighted love for life.
Can we learn to love life while accepting that the world we love may be dying? Can we continue to work to improve the conditions of life for individuals and species knowing that the world as we love it may not survive? Do we have any other choice?
For me the hope that can trump despair in our time begins in gratitude for a life that has been given to us, a life that has come down to us through the generations, and through billions of years of the evolutionary process on our planet.
Let us bless the Source of Life.
Let us bless the Source of Life, and the cycles of birth, death, and regeneration.
Let us turn back from despair.
Let us embrace the gift of life and share it with as many others as possible in the new year.
Carol P. Christ learned to be grateful for the gift of life in Crete on the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete she leads through Ariadne Institute. It is not too early to sign up for the spring or fall pilgrimages for 2014. Carol can be heard on a WATER Teleconference. Carol’s books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely-used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions. She wishes you great joy in the new year.
In midwinter 2002, I moved from the sun-drenched San Francisco Bay Area to Lancashire, in northern England, further north than I had ever lived. In bleak December, it was as though someone had switched off the lights. The sun barely managed to rise at 8:45 am. By 4:00 pm, it was pitch black. Even during the daylight hours, the sky remained muffled in oppressive clouds. There was no glittering white snow, either, just lashing, relentless rain. It was so oppressively dark, I felt as though I were trapped inside some claustrophobic gothic novel. For the first time in my life I began to suffer what they call winter depression. It didn’t help that it was Christmas and that I was new to the country and didn’t know anybody.
Every religious tradition that evolved in the northern reaches of the Northern Hemisphere honored the great mystery of the birth of the Divine Light from teeming midwinter darkness. As well as formal religious observances, countless folkways, carols, and mumming plays helped bring meaning and radiance to cold midwinter nights. Continue reading “Awakening to Life: Hildegard’s Cure for Seasonal Depression by Mary Sharratt”
Feminism and Religion 