General – Page 4 – Feminism and Religion

Nature as a Regulating Intelligence by Paul Robear

Moderator’s Note: This appeared recently on the site the Cuyumungue Institute, now called the Cuyu Institute (see below for more information). You can see the original here.

Have you ever noticed that in certain natural environments your body begins to change before your thoughts do?

For me, my breathing deepens and something in my system settles – often before I’ve even fully registered where I am.

It’s not something I’m doing consciously. In fact, it seems to happen more fully when I’m not trying at all.

I’ve come to feel that it goes beyond the idea that nature helps us relax. It’s that our bodies are responding to something – something deeply organized, consistent, and connected to a quiet intelligence.

It’s easy to say that nature is calming, but that doesn’t quite capture what is happening. What I’ve come to feel is that nature is not simply soothing… it is regulating. It carries a kind of inherent intelligence, a living order that the body recognizes and responds to without needing instruction.

Burning Woman, by Lucy H. Pearce, 10th Anniversary Edition, Book Review by Beth Bartlett

As someone who came into feminism in the late 1970s early 1980s, reading Lucy Pearce’s Burning Woman was re-entering the power and promise of women-centered feminism – the heyday of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Mary Daly, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Andrea Dworkin, Charlotte Bunch, China Galland, Riane Eisler, Carol Christ, Gloria Anzaldúa, Susan Griffin, Starhawk, Sara Ruddick.[i] It was the era of reclaiming the Feminine from its patriarchal definitions and women defining themselves outside of patriarchy – celebrating women’s spirituality, art, music, language, bodies, sexuality, birthing, voices, and power – when feminism was about transforming patriarchy rather than fitting into it — when Meg Christian proudly sang Betsy Rose’s “Glad to Be a Woman.”

And then everything changed. Just as women were coming into our own beyond patriarchy, women-centered feminism came to a halt due to pressures both from within feminism and without – with a whole school of deconstructionist feminists[ii] now critiquing women-defined women as “essentialists,” and moving back to minimizing rather than maximizing the differences between the sexes,[iii] with an emphasis on abolishing the gender binary, welcoming trans and non-binary folk, and questioning the whole concept of “women.” Indeed, one of my Women’s Studies, now Gender Studies, students asked me privately if it was okay to call herself a “woman” because the term had become so forbidden among many of the students. At this time, feminist theorist Nancy Hartsock raised the important question, “Why is that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic?”[iv]

Maryam Rajavi by Yalda Roshan

My name is Yalda. I am a woman from the Iranian resistance who, for many years, has fought for women’s equality and worked to amplify the voices of Iranian women around the world. Today, I want to share with you the source of inspiration and motivation that has guided my path.

Covering every aspect of Maryam Rajavi’s life and thought in one article is a challenge, so today I will focus only on what has personally influenced me: her perspective on women.

She herself is a woman who has spent decades fighting against two dictatorships—the Shah’s and the misogynistic clerical regime—and believes that women can change the world. A brief overview of her biography: she was born on December 4, 1953, in Tehran and is a metallurgical engineer from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. From her teenage years, she embarked on the path of struggle, learning from action rather than words.

A Transgender Man’s Perspective on Purity Culture Got This Cisgender Woman Thinking by Liz Cooledge Jenkins

“Ewww, there’s been a boy in our cabin!” One of my cabinmates squealed. We were at sixth grade camp. Others chimed in quickly: “Gross!”

The evidence? A pair of boys’ cargo shorts, held gingerly between a thumb and forefinger as if they had cooties.

“Ew!” “Weird!” “How’d he get in here?”

The shorts were mine. But I did not admit this.

As a kid, I sometimes wore hand-me-down clothing from my older brother. It made sense. I didn’t have strong opinions about fashion, and the clothes felt just as comfortable and fit just as well as the girl clothes my parents bought for me.

My elementary school classmates didn’t seem to notice or care. But this was sixth grade. This was the first year of middle school. Things were changing, and I hadn’t quite realized the full extent of these changes. Showing up at sixth grade camp with hand-me-down boys’ shorts was taboo.

Coming Round and Round by Sara Wright

the circle
repeats
tightens
with age
crushing
an
aging heart
I cannot
breathe
through
these lifetimes
of
loss
instead
I relive
old
pain
4AM
lasts
an eternity
each mourning

A Brief Break!

No Kings! March 28, 2026- photo essay by Marie Cartier

The last No Kings rally was the largest one yet! In fact, the No Kings rally in March 2026 was the largest protest on domestic soil in the history of the United States.

Photos by Marie Cartier from Lakewood, CA

How to Talk to a War Goddess: A Poetic Lesson From Sekhmet by Annie Finch

Consensus decision making, according to the mother of matriarchal studies Heidi Goettner-Abendroth, is woven into the definition of matriarchal societies. In these cultures, the respect, empathy, kindness, maturity, and belief in sustainable relationships that consensus implies are foundational. War, as the inimitable Yael Deckelberg sings to us, is “not a woman’s game”; any society that truly hears women will not play it. Overseen through the caring wisdom of circles of elder women in what Genevieve Vaughan calls the Maternal Gift Economy, matriarchal societies have less than no use for such a cruel, stupid, wasteful custom. As my great-aunt Jessie Wallace Hughan, founder of the War Resisters League, used to say, someday humanity will consider war as absurd as we now consider the custom of dueling. But we won’t see the end of this integral outrage in our lifetimes; that day will likely arrive only after we’ve all come to our matriarchal senses.

Meanwhile, here we are again.

Roots in the Air by Sara Wright

I am a plant woman, that is a woman who has an intimate relationship with plants. As an ecofeminist writer I believe that women and plants have a ‘natural’ connection to one another. We see this mythologically as women turn into trees, hold ceremonies under trees, listen to them for wisdom, take comfort from them in distress.

Why do we look to the stars for direction and ignore the urgent messages about interspecies communication that trees and plants convey to us here on earth?

I think this is a very important question to be asking when our planet is facing ecological collapse.

What follows is one woman’s story.

Embraced by Grace by Margot Van Sluytman

I have Come Full Circle. March 27th is the 48th anniversary of the murder of my father Theodore Van Sluytman in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. An Easter Monday. My entire life from that time the age of 16 to this time now the age of 64 was, is, and will always be a connection to how word with a capital W and words with a lowercase w, infuse, inspire, and affect my life. I might even say infect my life.

After being contacted by one of my father’s three murderers, almost 30 years after he put the bullet in my father’s heart, we did share healing. All seemed well in the crucible of tying up loose ends as it were. Ten years later, however, he, made choices that were deeply unaligned to that meeting.

When he and I met, it was powerful. It was profound. Terrifying too. And liberating. His choices 10 years after that meeting, though they shattered me for a time, leaving me with feelings of smallness, stupidity, and inadequacy based on the fact that in choosing to meet him major rifts in my family occurred. Few supported my choice to meet him. However, I grew to understand that we are the poetry that we wish to read, to be, and to see in the world. That we are human. I thought about my feelings of smallness, stupidity, and inadequacy. Thought long and hard. Many times. In early dawning days. Sitting in the gloaming. Late into the night.