It is difficult to carve out time in a course that covers Christianity from the past 2000 years to address material beyond the standard textbooks. But yet, I must because the visual and material culture, the worship practices, and the daily activities of women and men who have called themselves Christians or followers of Christ throughout history also comprise the story of the Christian heritage.
Over the past several weeks, I have been developing material for a historical and theological survey course called “The Christian Heritage.” In the multiple sections of this course taught at my university, and I imagine similarly at schools across the country, students are assigned a course reader. The reader we use is a collection of texts that have shaped the Christian faith from the first century to the 21st. It is a good collection, and I have no objection to using it. However, for the way I would like to teach the course, I will need to supplement the reader with other material. I have two interrelated concerns: the reliance on texts as a way of determining theological history and the absence of women in that history before the medieval period (and even then the number of women included is small). Continue reading “Women’s Christian Heritage by Elise M. Edwards”
This year marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life, edited by Caroline Grant and Elrena Evans. I contributed a chapter. A few days ago, I was contacted by the editors and asked for an update. “What had changed for me in five years?” they asked. As I tried to respond to their questions, I was surprised by the gravity in my heart. When I wrote about motherhood and life as a professional theologian five years earlier, I was a new mother, applying for my third-year review, and trying to navigate my nascent roles as both mom and scholar/educator. I felt overwhelmed to be sure, but I was overtly grateful to have such a rich and full array of choices about how I lived my life. Here, a few years later, I am applying for full-professorship. I am a more seasoned mother with two healthy children. I chair two departments at my school, and I am generally more established in the many things I juggle simultaneously. Had I given it any consideration, I would have anticipated a more cheerful five-year check-in. Continue reading “To Dust and Ashes by Natalie Weaver”
Prompted by a dear friend of mine during the new moon, last month I set an intention to “clean my house.” This intention does, to a degree, involve the actual “house,” aka, apartment in which I live. Great—fantastic even, and no problem at all! I actually love to clean, particularly cleaning out closets, garages, cupboard or really, any space where junk can be hidden away, brought into the open, sorted and organized. I’m really not joking. I tell people this, and they laugh and say, “oh, I should have you come clean at my house.” Seriously—do. I am still waiting for several invitations.
But meditatively speaking and in dreams, one’s “house,” is often one’s self and one’s physical body in particular. This work has been a bit more challenging to me. As I shared in my January post, I have been working this year to “create a healthier relationship to food in at least one way,” which also involves creating a healthier relationship with my body altogether, physical, spiritual, mental and emotional.
One reason I began to practice yoga and meditation was so that I could learn to better care for my body. Feminism teaches me to reclaim embodiment and value physical bodies more, and yoga teaches me to incorporate what I learn in a highly physical way. In yoga, I also found a safer place to access what I consider sacred and divine by approaching it primarily in my body while my mind and emotions unlearned an abusive relationship to God. I have even searched my “house” once before through active meditation and visualization. It was extremely powerful. I fixed broken locks. I gave people back items I didn’t even know I had been storing for them. I also realized that I was not ready to open some doors. The process was fun and very rewarding, involving almost two hours of seated meditation.
Yet, I have also struggled to maintain this practice. I felt very disconnected from myself before the new moon last month and hadn’t wanted to meditate. I wanted a vacation from embodiment and myself. Embodiment, after all, often demands that we actually hear what our bodies are trying to tell us. Honestly, I don’t always want to listen. When I have too much work to do, I don’t want to know that I am tired. When I am anxious, I would rather feel in control. I knew, however, cognitively, that “cleaning my house,” would be good for me so I made myself set the intention. I pushed myself to carve out moments in passing during the day to focus my mind and tell me what I wanted to do. I then proceeded to have four powerful dreams in the week following this intention-setting, all related to my “house.” In the final dream, I spoke to me, literally. I faced myself and said very assertively, “You need to work with what you have.” Continue reading “Cleaning My “House” by Sara Frykenberg”
Most archaeologists and visitors to museums assume that when they see a horned bovine, they are faced with the image of the male God or the image of the bull sacrifice. In the minds of many, these two are one, as we have been taught that the male God who was the consort or son-lover of the Goddess was sacrificed. Yet horned Goddesses are not infrequent in the history of religions and Hindus still revere the sacred cow.
Cattle have played an important role in human life from the beginning of agriculture. Cows provide milk which is also turned into butter, cheese, and yogurt. Most of the young males and some of the females are killed for meat or leather, while a few males are kept to impregnate the females. Though the “raging bull” is the lens through which most of us think about mature male bovines, I have been told by a friend who raised cattle that in fact bulls are for the most part gentle and even sweet–though of course they are also potentially dangerous.
Before the industrial revolution, there was also a third category of bovines, the castrated males, known as oxen, who were used as “beasts of burden”–to pull plows, litters, and after the invention of the wheel, wheeled vehicles. Many people assume that only bulls have horns. This is not the case. Recently a friend who was raised on a dairy farm described to me the pain experienced by young female cows when their horns are burned out. So let us think again about the images of the horned bovines found in museums. Given that cows and oxen were long-term companions of early “man” and early “woman,” why should we assume that all horned bovines are bulls? Continue reading “GODDESS AND SACRED COW: A RE-EXAMINATION OF THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE SACRED BULL by Carol P. Christ”
Recently a controversy broke out surrounding a University talk I was to give in Tamil Nadhu, here in India. That visit was to include a workshop and several meetings, including one with the all women Jamaat or STEP – the first of its kind in the context of the male dominated personal status law scenario in India).
This is how the events unfolded: Before I came to India last year, I began communications with various Non-Government Organizations on gender and justice in Islam and with academics or others related to the study of Islam. At that time an invitation to visit Madras University was extended to me. It took the better part of the year to get the details sorted out. Meanwhile, I traveled throughout India, spoke at about a dozen Universities and several community organizations (including mosques), and started a book club discussing reformist Islam with interested persons in Kerala. Continue reading “Why I Try to Stay Away From the Media by amina wadud”
Part of my research is focused on how the social sciences relate to “religion” and religious studies. More specifically, I spend time examining the sociology of religion. I look at stats, demographics, and polls. I look at rates of attendance, frequency of prayer, levels of “religiosity,” apostates (or the less religiously-loaded term “exiters”), and political outlooks. I also look at how bias this area of study is in favor of religion. One facet of this work that has always interested me, is the differences in “gender” and “sex” as they relate to religious beliefs and observances. Accepting the fact that there are spectrums of sex, gender, and identity, and the presence of difficult philosophical questions surrounding self-identification and the limits of labels, some really interesting facts and statistics crop up time and time again. In what follows I will lay out a couple of these interesting facts, along with some thoughts on them: Continue reading “5 Interesting Facts about Women and Religion by Kile Jones”
Aine, (pronounced AW-neh), was originally worshipped as a Sun Goddess. Like so many goddesses and gods, Aine has assumed many other roles over the years, being seen as a Moon Goddess, a Goddess of Love, a Fertility Goddess, a Healing Goddess, and a Sovereignty Goddess. Aine is also known as a Faery Queen. She is often called Aine, Goddess of Love, Light, and Fertility. Her name means “brightness, glow, joy, radiance; splendor, glory, fame” and she is associated with the abundance of summer.
Epistemology—the study or theory of the nature and the ground of knowledge, particularly with respect to the limits and validity of knowledges and the sources of knowledge.
Being—the qualities and characteristics that constitute conscious existence; a living thing.
I look outside the open window of my temporary apartment and read and re-read the sign that beckons drivers to notice this unspectacular place. “Welcome Home” it says in black Times New Roman font on a plain white background. As if saying it so simply, makes it true.
It doesn’t feel much like home to me right now. And thankfully it doesn’t really need to. Soon I will move into a new house. Then I will take the next step in working to make a home in this new place where my family and I have moved. For my husband, kids, and me, the knowledge that the apartment is temporary helps us deal with the strangeness of it. We know it’s not for long. And knowing that helps us behave in certain ways and cultivate particular expectations. This mode of operations allows us to bide our time. We have done just enough settling in to feel ok here—unpacked a suitcase, stocked the refrigerator. But we won’t hang pictures; we won’t be too intentional about meeting the neighbors. Being cordial is enough. After all, this isn’t really home. My nine-year-old daughter has actually made a rule that no one is allowed to call this apartment “home.” Continue reading “Be-pistemology by Marcia Mount Shoop”
“There’s a river of birds in migration, a nation of women with wings.”—Goddess chant, Libana
On the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete, I explain that many of the names given to “Minoan” (c. 3000-1450 BCE) Cretan artifacts and architecture are products of patriarchal and Eurocentric imaginations, and as such, are misleading. For example the name “Minoan” was given to the culture of Bronze Age Crete in honor of “King Minos,” who was said to have ruled in Crete a few generations before the Trojan War–several hundred years after the end of the culture to which his name was attached. In fact, despite his eagerness to find evidence that King Minos ruled at Knossos, the excavator Sir Arthur Evans finally had to concede that the best he could do was to produce a fresco of a “Prince of the Lilies” which he identifed as the image of the male ruler of the culture he called “Minoan.” Evans’ Prince had white skin, a fact that Evans conveniently overlooked–because according to his own interpretation of “Minoan” iconography, white skin would mark the figure as female. Mark Cameron, who reviewed Evans’ reconstruction of the fresco, suggested that the Prince is more likely to be a young woman who is perhaps leading a bull to take part in the bull-leaping games. He also stated that the “crown” belonged to another fresco altogether.
Evans’ failure to find evidence of a King or for that matter a Queen at the complex of buildings he called “The Palace of Knossos” calls into question his idea that these structures were palaces. Nanno Marinatos argued that the “palace” was instead a ritual center for the surrounding village, as well as a community gathering place, a place for storing grain, wine, and oil in a sacred way, and a place where ritual objects were fashioned of clay, bronze, stone, and gold. Following her lead, I renamed the “Palaces” “Sacred Centers.” In this blog I will experiment with renaming the “Minoan” culture “Ariadnian,” after the pre-Greek name Ariadne, which may be one of the names of the Goddess of Bronze Age Crete.
The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep – E. Joseph Cossman
I.
Sleeping is like hitting the reset button. People die without sleep.
It can make us maniacal and cut off our connection to spirit to be without sleep.
Are you afraid of missing something—if you sleep…? Is it something you are afraid you didn’t do or didn’t get to do? And yet…what part of our spiritual practice is suffering as a result of not sleeping…?
It is difficult to carve out time in a course that covers Christianity from the past 2000 years to address material beyond the standard textbooks. But yet, I must because the visual and material culture, the worship practices, and the daily activities of women and men who have called themselves Christians or followers of Christ throughout history also comprise the story of the Christian heritage.
Feminism and Religion 