Herstory – Page 2 – Feminism and Religion

PRESSLER’S PROGENY by Esther Nelson

David French, an Opinion Columnist for the New York Times, wrote an enlightening piece (05/14/2026) titled, “I Don’t Think You Can Even Call This Hypocrisy.” You can read the article here.

In his essay, French refers to a piece by Robert Downen, an investigative journalist, who wrote about Paul Pressler (d. 2024), an architect of the “so-called resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention,” the largest Protestant denomination in the USA. The MAGA movement, filled with loud and often uninformed, conservative Christians, is Pressler’s progeny.

From the early 1990s until 2006, the Southern Baptist Convention (as well as unaffiliated and independent Bible churches) experienced phenomenal growth. Many fundamentalist evangelicals viewed this growth as God’s blessing on the faithful. However, as journalist Downen dug around, he found “there was an overwhelming amount of evidence that Pressler was a morally corrupt and abusive man.” Not only was he a Confederate apologist, he purportedly sexually abused young men and boys and never lost his influence. Many Baptists believed that “…exposing Pressler’s misdeeds would ‘distort’ his public Christian credibility.”

Gay Pride 2026 by Marie Cartier

This past weekend– May 15-17, 2026 was gay pride in Long Beach, California. Long Beach KICKS off pride month in May, and is believed to be the first pride event of the nation– happening before the official pride month of June (commemorating the Stonewall Riot).

Here are some pictures I took from the 13th annual Dyke March, and Dykes After Dark poetry event! Completely community organized and free! And the Pride Parade in Long Beach was– fabulous! You may have heard that the Long Beach Pride festival was cancelled– community organizers worked to create a free event and as our resident drag diva, Jewels said, “Cancelled? I never heard of her!”

THE GODDESSNESS PRAYER by Annie Finch

A SACRED FEMININE VERSION OF THE LORD’S PRAYER BASED ON A TRANSLATION FROM THE ORIGINAL ARAMAIC

Genevieve Vaughan recently posted, on a Maternal Gift Economy group, a link to a new translation of the Lord’s Prayer directly from the original Aramaic. The translation is by Nabu who describes himself by saying he “decodes the hidden knowledge they buried inside religion, history and science.” Nabu recognizes Neil Douglas-Klotz as the foundational scholar of his own translations as well as adding his own notes. Click here for the link to Nabu’s site. I was excited to find the Divine Feminine playing such an important role in this translation.

When I assembled the restored versions of each line together, the resulting poem was not very well-written or easy to say, let alone to memorize. So I translated the translation into a more succinct and concrete version. I hope it will be useful.

Here is the compilation and my own version below, followed by a few notes on reasons for my translation choices.

The Legacy of Intergenerational Violence/ Silence, part 1 By Sara Wright

Patriarchy begins at home.

Author’s Note: One reason I am sharing this story is that I hope that it will ease another round of suffering. However, I would dearly like to believe that others might reflect upon the ways they have been impacted by family violence or silence in their own lives, so we don’t get caught by projecting these patriarchal roots outside of us onto the collective while dismissing them in ourselves. That dark patriarchal seed is present in all of us, and I think that telling our personal stories keeps us attached to the whole with humility – a challenge in this time of monstrous ethical, social, political, ecological breakdown.

I often have dreams that leave me with questions, dreams that provoke deep personal reflection, dreams that stay with me as the following one did. At mid-life I had written tributes for two men that mentored me from a distance who brought ‘good fathering’ into the foreground because each encouraged me to believe in myself, to celebrate my original thinking, to trust my intuition and more.

Heather Pringle: Celebrating Viking Women— Warriors, Weavers and Wise Women, part 2 by Theresa Dintino

part 1 was posted yesterday

Women weavers who made the Viking world possible

Viking Women were also farmers, running their own farms, merchants running their own businesses, and voyagers upon the seas, locating and settling new territories in Iceland, Greenland and even Vinland in Canada.

The chapter on the Viking weavers is truly astounding. Pringle details the importance of and vast amount of weaving the Viking women produced to support the excursions of the ships and to dress their husbands and sons — maybe wives and daughters—safely for battle.

“In 2016, archaeologist Morten Ravn, a curator at the Viking Ship Museum in Denmark, published an estimate of the total time required to construct two medium-size Viking ships, from keel to sail. Ravn based this estimate on projects documented by the museum staff. His calculations showed that spinning and weaving enough cloth for just one sail accounted for as much as 36.9 percent of the total number of hours logged by builders of an average-size Viking ship. This meant that just over a third of all the work that went into constructing such a ship was performed by women. And if the crew carried enough spare cloth to mend the sail—a practice recommended by one Old Norse text, King’s Mirror—that statistic climbed to 53 percent, more than half of all the necessary work.

But the women weren’t done there, they also produced a wealth of other high-quality gear for the raiders themselves, from heavy seafaring blankets to water-resistant clothing. And last but certainly not least, research now suggests that they made a surprisingly effective form of body armor”(NW 114).

Heather Pringle: Celebrating Viking Women— Warriors, Weavers and Wise Women, part 1 by Theresa Dintino

Moderator’s Note: This piece is in co-operation with The Nasty Women Writers Project, a site dedicated to highlighting and amplifying the voices and visions of powerful women. The site was founded by sisters Theresa and Maria Dintino. To quote Theresa, “by doing this work we are expanding our own writer’s web for nourishment and support.” This was originally posted on their site on April 22th, 2025. You can see more of their posts here.

Most people have heard of the Vikings, the seafaring warriors of Northern Europe. Their travels to Iceland, Greenland and the American continent long before most believed contact was accomplished proved their prowess in navigation and traveling the turbulent waters of the north. Others are familiar with Norse Mythology: the flying Valkyries, god Odin and goddess Freya. But little has been known of the lives of ordinary or extraordinary Viking women until recently.

In The Northwomen: Untold Stories From the Other Half of the Viking World, Heather Pringle does an incredible job of gathering and telling the stories of these erased, ignored and unacknowledged women.

The Glorians written by Terry Tempest Williams, discussion by Sara Wright

The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary is an astonishing book written by internationally acclaimed writer Terry Tempest Willams that is predicated on the necessity of bearing compassionate witness to all beings during these troubled times. It is a book about family, friends, earth and dreams, the later of which inspired the title. The volume is composed of a series of essays, only one of which I will discuss here.

Terry, who teaches at Harvard Divinity School, writes about the Divinity Tree, a two-hundred-year-old red oak that was removed from the Commons. Listening to this narrative as a ‘Tree Woman’ was/is excruciatingly painful. My stomach roils in misery, but I am compelled to listen, over and over, because this is my story too.

I came to the mountains because I was in love with trees and bears discovering an evergreen paradise or so I thought until the dreams began. In my night stories all the trees were being slaughtered and there was nothing I could do. Since I was surrounded by fragrant forests that stretched from horizon to horizon, I could make no sense of these terrifying warnings and let them be.

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.

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