General – Page 56 – Feminism and Religion

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: I am Beginning to Understand

This was originally posted on Feb. 13, 2012

Elizabeth Kelly Inglis died in 1927 at age 62 from complications of a stroke. Secondary causes were malnutrition and exhaustion.

When I was a child, my father, though he was very close to his own parents and sister, spoke very little about his ancestors. I knew that both of his parents lost their fathers when they were small children. I was told that the Christs were German and the Inglises were Scottish and Irish. My grandmother Mary Inglis Christ was as Irish as the day is long. She prayed to the blessed Virgin and took me to church with her in the early mornings where she lit candles and whispered the rosary while fingering faceted lavender beads. She voted for Kennedy because he was Irish and Catholic—to the horror of my father and his father who had no use for the Democrats. My grandmother sometimes cried when she showed us photographs of her family, especially when she pointed to her sister Veronica, called Very. I sensed that my grandmother felt sad to have left her family in New York when she moved with her husband and children to California during the depression, but I was too young to understand fully. As far as I know, I never met any of the relatives from her side of the family, even when I moved to “back east.”

Big Mama by Arianne MacBean

I used to tell my dance students that the dance floor was like a Big Mama, aways there to catch them, always there to sink into, always there to press back. This was my way of teaching them to trust the floor, that it was not a place where they needed to fear crashing into, but a place that wanted to take them in, hug them, love them. As dancers, we spend much time focused on the floor, how to release into it with control, how to push off it, even how to defy it and manipulate it. It becomes our partner in all dances, this blanket beneath us. But I haven’t been in a dance studio for a few years and so I have found myself looking up, instead of down.

Women’s Woven Voices at the Parliament of the World’s Religions by Brecia Kralovic-Logan

Imagine walking into a space surrounded by the woven stories of 1,000 women from around the globe and feeling you are at home. The Women’s Village at the Parliament of the World’s Religions conference in Chicago in August of 2023 offered a place where women could feel welcomed, safe, understood, honored, and inspired. It was surrounded by the color and texture of the Women’s Woven Voices project tapestry.

I am the founder of the international, collaborative, art project- Women’s Woven Voices- that supports women in claiming their powerful voices through writing, weaving, and sharing their stories. For six years I had been inviting women to reflect on their lives, write about their strengths, challenges, joys and what made them feel whole, and then, weave a strip of cloth to represent their story. I collected the woven “Story Cloths” and stitched them together into a collective tapestry. Having stitched over 1,000 stories into the tapestry from women from 10 different countries, I applied to participate in the Parliament as an art installation and then joined the Women’s Task Force to create a very special space for the thousands of women who would be attending the Parliament.

Judy Chicago, Feminist Trailblazer by Joyce Zonana and Janet Maika’i Rudolph

“Instead of looking to the male world for approval, I had to learn to rely on my own instincts. In some strange way, the rejections I faced strengthened me, but only because they forced me to learn to live as I saw fit and to use my values and judgment as my guides.”
The Flowering: The Autobiography of Judy Chicago

Janet: I live near New York City and am fortunate to be close to many museums. The New Museum has been showing an exhibit by Judy Chicago that takes up the entire facility of four floors. And it is remarkable. Not only is the breadth of her work astounding but so are the stories of how she has had to fight to be accepted in a man’s world of art. Joyce Zonana first recommended that I go. This blogpost came about as part of a discussion between the two of us.

Star Beings? by Sara Wright

The well-known writer LESLIE MARMON SILKO has a very interesting idea – that star beings come to earth crossing over occasionally when the membranes of parallel worlds are more permeable than usual. She painted some star beings and they spoke to her without words…. Some were not friendly; most of hers lacked compassion and didn’t care much for human beings.

This made me think about astrology, a very popular cultural belief system that has ancient origins involving divination and was once correlated with the stars in our galaxy and the patterns they created (the stories they might have been telling and others we told about them), but has since split away into a very fixed system that make little sense to me. However, since the 60’s popular astrology has become a kind of religion for some. Perhaps astrology is taking the place of religions of various kinds that are in a state of collapse?

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Body, Nature, Ancestors

This was originally posted on January 23, 2012

Some years ago, womanist theologian Karen Baker–Fletcher asked about ancestors following a lecture I gave on the body and nature. I have since come to realize that ancestors are a missing link between the two: we cannot speak adequately of embodiment and interdependence in the web of life without recognizing the ancestors whose lives made ours possible. Our mothers quite literally gave us our bodies. All of our ancestors gave us their genes. Care and callousness with origins going back longer than conscious memory was imprinted on the psyches of our parents and grandparents and transmitted to us. All of our ancestors give us connections to place. While many black people in America can recite oral histories that begin with slavery in the United States, I come from a family where stories of origin for the most part were not valued or told. Both of my father’s parents lost their fathers when they were very young, and my father, who was raised Catholic at a time when Catholics were discriminated against, preferred to think of our family as “American now.” Like the hero of the film Lost in America, most members of my family dreamed of “melting right into that pot.” In the process we lost stories we need to help us to understand ourselves and the complex realities that “becoming American” involved.

Rereading Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” by Xochitl Alvizo

I recently reread the essay titled “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” by late poet and essayist Adrienne Rich, with my students this semester. Published in the summer of 1980, on the heels of the Women’s Liberation Movement, I found that the essay still maintains its relevance and challenges us to remember that feminism is a political movement that itself must be continually interrogated.

The essay (which you can read here, with a foreword from Rich published 23 years after the original) has four sections which are titled only with the roman numbers I-IV. I labeled these sections for my students to try and capture the focus of each: I. Compulsory Heterosexuality – The Groundwork; II. Male Power and the Inequality of the Sexes; III. Lesbian Existence as Political Identity; and IV. Woman-Identification as Source of Power and Energy.

A Time of Renewal: Brigid Emerges at Imbolc by Judith Shaw

The wheel of the year continues turning and once again we find ourselves at the transition point from winter’s deep sleep to the first awakenings of spring. It is marked by an ancient Celtic festival called Imbolc, also known as Imbolg or Brigid’s day. It is believed to have been celebrated long before the Celts arrived in Ireland and Scotland, probably as far back as Neolithic times.

Navigating the Dark by Sara Wright

This morning I read an article about a woman who ‘forgot’ to light one of the candles on the Menorah or what I would call the ‘Tree of Life’ for the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah which takes place over a period of eight nights beginning in December. I was struck by her concern because she had forgotten one of the ‘rules’ and missed a night. Twice over a period of years…

While reading her reflection I noted that she seemed to get close to the underlying meaning behind the lighting of candles (present in every extant tradition) at the darkest time of year – she believed that she was bringing light into the literal darkness of night and kindling the divine spark within herself.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Of Human Life*

This was originally posted on December 30, 2011

Watching the last episode of the Australian series Brides of Christ in which Catherine leaves the sisterhood of the convent because of her disagreement with Humanae Vitae brought me right back to the Yale Roman Catholic chapel and the folk mass I attended regularly. In 1968 just after the publication of Humanae Vitae, priest and co-graduate student Bob Imbelli preached a sermon on the doctrine of conscience, arguing that though it was incumbent on Catholics to think carefully about the papal encyclical on birth control, it was also the responsibility of every Catholic to follow her or his conscience on the matter. In the episode, Sister Catherine encourages a Roman Catholic mother of six who has already self-induced more than one abortion to take the pill, but the woman decides she cannot go against the church’s teachings. Catherine allows an editorial against Humanae Vitae to be published in the school newspaper even though she knows it will probably lead to the expulsion of one of her favorite students.