In the News – Feminism and Religion

The Rest of the Christmas Story by Beth Bartlett

Every day another story of ICE agents randomly arresting and detaining immigrants – these are the chronicles of these times in the US. A few days ago, the news broke of ICE agents trapping two construction workers on the roof of a construction site in a suburb of Minneapolis for hours in frigid temperatures, while the thirty or so ICE agents took turns being inside their warm vehicles. They didn’t even know who the men were. They simply looked to be Latino. A day or two later, in Minneapolis, ICE agents tackled and arrested a Somali-American citizen who stepped outside during his lunch break simply because of the color of his skin. Yesterday brought the story of ICE agents forcibly arresting and separating suburban Minneapolis parents from their 7-year-old child when they came home from the grocery store. The story went on to talk about efforts being made to educate parents about preparing a DOPA – a Delegation of Parental Authority – that gives a designated caretaker temporary legal and physical custody of a child in the event parents are taken away from their children. This is the nightmare facing so many families in this country under the reign of terror inflicted by the Department of Homeland “Security.” One must ask, security for whom.

A few weeks ago, “This American Life” profiled a family trying to decide whether the husband and father of two should stay and risk arrest and detention or self-deport. Fidel, the dad, was married to an American citizen, but due to a technicality, could not get citizenship through his wife until he had lived outside the US for ten years. He had been living in the US “illegally” for thirty years, raised a family, had a good job, paid his taxes, had no criminal history. But the family had heard the stories of torture and abuse in the detention centers, and that possibility loomed over them now. When ICE agents started appearing near their small town in North Carolina, they faced the decision of whether to uproot the teenage girls and go together to Mexico or for Fidel to leave on his own. It was a painful decision. Ultimately, they decided Fidel would leave, and after working five years and getting her teacher’s pension, his wife would join him. The girls would come visit when they could. The family would be torn apart.

Ozymandias and Other Patriarchal Ego-isms by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 – 1822

There has been discussion of what to name Trump’s ever-expanding ballroom. Some have suggested naming it after Epstein. I would suggest naming it after Ozymandias from Shelley’s poem.

There is something about building projects that feed to the patriarchal ego. The Patriarchal ego stands on permanence, largess and if that involves crushing those “below” them, that is just how it is. Pre-patriarchal pagan systems focus on the cycles of life and are based on an understanding that impermanence is what life is all about. Life works on cyclic movement. The seasons, the moon, the sun, the stars, all is in motion and all presages different aspects of the wheel of life.

The Gendered Dimensions of the Water Crisis in Iran: Impacts on Women’s Health, Livelihoods, and Security

Moderator’s Note: This post has been brought to you in cooperation with the NCRI women’s committee. NCRI stands for the National Council of Resistance of Iran. You can learn more information as well as see this original article by clicking this link. A description of their Council can be found at the end of this post.

The water crisis in Iran has moved far beyond a simple environmental issue — it has become a humanitarian, ecological, and economic disaster.

While at first the problem seemed to be the result of drought and declining rainfall, its true causes ran much deeper: entrenched corruption and mismanagement at the heart of the ruling establishment. Until these systemic roots are addressed and removed, Iran’s present — and its future — will only become more precarious.

A significant number of researchers and international observers emphasize that 70 to 80 percent of the current crisis stems from mismanagement, unsustainable policies, lack of transparency, and corruption. As one report notes, “Iran’s water crisis is not a crisis of resources; it is a crisis of decisions—decisions that have made the land thirstier and the future darker. This crisis, alongside the erosion of public trust in governance, is a symptom of structural and managerial failure.” (Newsweek, August 1, 2025; The Times, December 8, 2022; Reuters, April 27, 2021)

Of Resistance and Risk, Community and Kin: A Thanksgiving Reflection by Beth Bartlett

At the No Kings rally on October 18^th, Anishinaabe elder Ricky DeFoe affirmed to the gathered crowd that “the natural response to oppression, ignorance, evil, and mystification is wide-awake resistance.” Such resistance, he claimed, calls for an “ethic of risk.” I was immediately struck by his use of the term, paralleling feminist theologian Susan Welch’s A Feminist Ethic of Risk.[i]Returning home, I picked up my copy and found many of the same points DeFoe had articulated.[ii] Both asserted that an ethic of risk recognizes that “to stop resisting, even when success is unimaginable, is to die,” and by this they meant not only the threat of physical death, but also “the death of the imagination, the death of the ability to care.”[iii]

Stick It to the Man and Black OUT Friday by Caryn MacGrandle

Before I go any farther, I want to clarify that I am not speaking of all men. There are a lot of good, strong, protector-type, kind, compassionate men out there.

But I am speaking of THE MAN – an archetypal dominator who has held the purse strings and the control the past few thousand years.

THE MAN who puts the almighty dollar above all else and doesn’t care who he has to step on in order to do so.

I’m sure you can think about quite a few. I would also include some women who behave like THE [DOMINATOR] MAN. The prevalence of this thinking has led to the spot we currently find ourselves in.

Black Friday is one of the most crucial sales periods for many retailers, with some earning a significant portion of their annual revenue during the holiday season. Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2024 alone generated billions of dollars in online sales.

The Beast at Our Door: Fenrir Wolf and ICE by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Binding of the norse mythological wolf, Fenrir. From Guerber, H. A. (Hélène Adeline) (1909). Myths of the Norsemen from the Eddas and Sagas. London : Harrap. This illustration is on page 92. Digitized by the Internet Archive Wikimedia Commons

When I was a shamanic trainee, our group spent a lot of time and focus on the “beast within” This concept has had many expressions in different circumstances – the shadow side (Jung), the dark side (Star Wars), letting loose the “dogs of war” (William Shakespeare), reptilian instincts (psychology).

Mythology has many stories about this phenomenon. In our group, we studied the stories as a way to learn what we must do in our own lives to tame the beast so we had this energy available to use the energy without letting the crueler destructive aspects of the beast run rampant. Here are two of the stories as we discussed them.

Fenrir Wolf

Fenrir Wolf is a deity from the Norse tradition who was known and feared as a great monster. Tyr was the only God in Asgard brave enough to tend to Fenrir. For a long time, Tyr fed and cared for him. Eventually, though, Fenrir grew too large to handle and began running throughout the land called Midgard, killing both gods and people. Odin called a council to discuss how Fenrir could be slain.

From the Archives: Censored Angel: Anthony Comstock’s Nemesis. A Novel by Joan Koster

This was originally posted on October 10, 2024.

Moderator’s Note: With the Trump administration getting closer and closer to re-establishing the Comstock Laws in their efforts to stop all abortions in the United States, we felt it important to repost this story. It is about Ida Craddock, her life and her efforts to stand against Anthony Comstock. Joan Koster wrote a powerful book about her. This post today is also a prelude to tomorrow’s post which will discuss a new movie Sex Radical that will be premiering this month about Ida Craddock’s life.

“I would lay down my life for the cause of sex reform, but I don’t want to be swept away. A useless sacrifice.” Ida C. Craddock, Letter to Edward Bond Foote, June 6, 1898

In 1882, Ida C. Craddock applied to the all-male undergraduate school of University of Pennsylvania. With the highest results on the entrance tests, the faculty voted to admit her. But her admission was rejected by the Board of Trustees, who said the university was not suitably prepared for a female. (U of P only became co-ed in 1974)

With her aspirations blocked, Ida left home determined to leave her mark on women’s lives by studying and writing about Female Sex Worship in early cultures. At the time, little information was available to women about sexual relations. To do her research, Ida resorted to having male friends take books forbidden to females, such as the Karma Sutra, out of the library for her.

An unmarried woman, she turned to spirituality and the practice of yoga, a newly introduced practice to the American public at the time, as a way to learn about sex. In her journals, she describes her interaction with angels from the borderlands, and in particular, her sexual experiences with Soph, her angel husband through what was likely tantric sex.

THERE’S ONLY LOVE by Esther Nelson

Charlie Kirk embodied characteristics lauded by people I remember from my fundamentalist, Christian upbringing. Confident “believer” who knew the absolute “truth,” a willingness to proselytize (or better known in fundamentalist circles as spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ), and a pugnacious personality essential to fight Satan and his minions in this “ungodly” world.

In a New York Times article titled “We Need to Think Straight about God and Politics” (9/25/25), David Brooks writes: “As people eulogized Kirk, it was rarely clear if they were talking about the man who was trying to evangelize for Jesus or the one trying to elect Republicans.” A spokesperson at Turning Point USA said, “He [Kirk] confronted evil and proclaimed the truth and called us to repent and be saved.” Brooks asks, “Is that what Kirk was doing when arguing with college kids about tariffs?”

I want to focus here on some of the brilliantly choreographed, yet deceptively cruel imagery present at Kirk’s memorial service, showing how the MAGA movement uses a religious group’s theology to foment hatred—with the goal of gaining/retaining political power.

Patriarchy, Thy Name is Cruelty by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Andrew Young famously said that ‘anything is legal if 100 businessmen decide to do it.” I would add a more modern take. Nothing is too low, too immoral, too illegal if 5 or 6 Supreme Court justices decide to allow it.

Their recent decisions could fill a book on how corrupt they are. (I’ve discussed this before. But this post is looking at immigration and the cruelty that this administration is fomenting. We have always been a cruel nation. Patriarchy has honed cruelty as its worked to crush women’s bodies while silencing women. How else would women have agreed to our loss of power? Carol Christ has written eloquently about this. Immigration policy has blown the lid off this pot. Perhaps because it is too new, too shocking. Because ICE is in our faces with agents flooding neighborhoods and engaging in unfettered cruelty.

For example, when ICE raided an apartment building in the Bronx on Feb 24th, they arrested 19 year old Merwil Gutiérrez. When they realized they had the wrong person, their response was “take him anyway.” Read that again, “take him anyway.”

Merwil Gutiérrez was then deported to the notorious prison CECOT in El Salvador. For months, his family couldn’t find him. He was eventually sent to his native Venezuela.

This is the time for good trouble by Marie Cartier

Marie Cartier performing this rant poem at the John Lewis Good Trouble Lives On Rally in Lakewood, CA July 17th. Photo by Mel Saywell

This I can guarantee you: there will come a day when it seems you cannot stop crying.

When will that day come? Today it came for me reading The Atlantic while I drank my morning coffee:

This is what they are reporting: the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow…the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash.

There will come a day.

And here we are in these United States with people in hiding, speaking of food. Why are they hiding? They are hiding from immigration officials and some of us are sending those people in hiding – food. Toiletries. Macaroni and cheese boxes line my grocery cart,

In these United States, we are building more prisons. And I read the detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz puts thirty-two people in a cage. Each person/prisoner costs the United States taxpayer approximately $275 a day. I guess I mean not prisoner, immigration detainee.