In the News – Page 13 – Feminism and Religion

Protecting the Children, Jesus Christ Superstar Style by Marisa Goudy

“Where is my mother? I am thirsty.”

My four year old is crooning quietly to her dolls. She is making sense of the crucifixion through play, asking her Disney princesses to stand in for Jesus, the Marys, and “the bad guys.”

Whatever she’s working through has more to do with the voice of John Legend and the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar In Concert than it does with a reading of the gospels. My children were raised with an eclectic mix of goddess spirituality, “all gods are one god” thinking, and occasionally attending a holiday mass. Thanks to this soundtrack, however, they’re suddenly saying things like, “Mama, I really love Jesus!” and “can I be Mary Magdalene for Halloween?” Continue reading “Protecting the Children, Jesus Christ Superstar Style by Marisa Goudy”

Don’t Look Away by John Erickson

Why can’t social media be fun anymore? Why can’t we spread happy pictures of puppies, babies, and rainbows? While the answer may be simple to many of us, let me state it plainly to my relative: Because the world is on fire and we have a racist in the White House creating edicts that call for babies and children to be placed in ‘tender age’ facilities.

WEHO CA (June 7, 2015)©2015 Rebecca Dru Photography All Rights Reserved
http://www.rebeccadru.com

Don’t look away. I know how hard it is to say this but don’t look away. All of those images, recordings, and other horrific accounts of the deplorable, sickening, and unconstitutional events at the camps they have set up along the southern border need to be your fuel to take action, get fired up, and take back this country from those that would want to destroy everything we hold dear.

I’ve written a lot about how the 2016 election has impacted my family. If you want to catch up on any of those posts, you can click here:
* A Letter to Those I’ve Lost
* Happy Anniversary

I didn’t think I’d be writing a series about my family post-2016, but if I learned anything, it is that the personal is political, and sadly, things don’t seem to be getting any better. Continue reading “Don’t Look Away by John Erickson”

Then They Came for the Immigrant and Refugee Children by Marie Cartier

I started this blog June 18, 2018, writing about the horrific policy of the trump administration of separating children from their parents who seek asylum at the border. And this is where we are…a human rights disaster.

Then I watched with the rest of the nation as Rachel Maddow, our top news reporter, cried while trying to report the news that the Trump Administration has opened and is using three “Tender Age” facilities to house children 3 years and younger. They will soon be opening a fourth.

Continue reading “Then They Came for the Immigrant and Refugee Children by Marie Cartier”

“Morning” by Phillis Isabella Sheppard

This morning I awakened from yet another night of fitful unrest.

My sleep has been disrupted, again, because of the mistreatment of brown children.

How does it make sense to smile while separating children from their parents because they are neighbors and immigrants, but not white?

At the borders of this country, children and families are living a terror induced nightmare.

We call this holy sacred ground?

Those who read the Bible in its entirety know that it is complex but most of us cannot avoid the ethical demands that come with texts teaching us how to treat strangers and newcomers among us.

³³“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.
³⁴The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you,
and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt:
I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34 NSRV)

In this reading, the text only makes two demands for a moral life: do not mistreat the stranger and love the stranger as yourself. Continue reading ““Morning” by Phillis Isabella Sheppard”

Vagina Happy Fact by John Erickson

HNWH_TVM_Cast_Social_1200x1200_020918_A_REV2

A month ago, the Hollywood Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the City of West Hollywood presented the Vagina Monologues. The event was a complete success and we raised over $5,000 for Planned Parenthood Los Angeles! While the cast and crew worked together and formed a community in West Hollywood, communities were being ripped apart by senseless gun violence that took the lives of 17 beautiful souls at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida

The cast and crew began to have discussions over a specific monologue and whether or not the audience, or cast members, would be triggered by its use of gun specific language in relation to the power of the vagina.

Continue reading “Vagina Happy Fact by John Erickson”

Activism Helps You Heal: #RESIST #NeverAgain by Marie Cartier

Here we are, as I write this, a week after the horrible shooting of 17 students and teachers in Parkland, Florida. And the beginnings of a new student led movement: #NeverAgain—never another school massacre like what happened in Florida.

Today, one week after this horrific event, you had massive student walk-outs all over the country to protest the government’s refusal to do anything substantive about it. Here are images of student protests.

One of the out spoken survivors of the Parkland shootings, Emma Gonazlez, has turned into a spokeswoman/teen, for the movement, fueled by her fiery speech the day after the shootings.

She has continued to speak out as have the other students.

And the movement grows.

I am a college teacher, a college teacher in two public universities. I teach students one to four years older than the students at Parkland. Last week at one of the public schools I teach at there was an active shooter warning that turned into a hoax. I have in the past been on lock down because an active shooter was on campus. This is a very real problem for me.

Today I heard the president of the United States suggest that the solution to the every growing problem of gun violence is to arm teachers or other school officials with weapons. As a black belt in karate, I have had gun training and gun safety as part of my training and it is part of my self-defense resume. I had to learn it. What I can tell you about owning a gun (which I don’t) is that having a gun is not the same as knowing how to us one. I know how to disarm someone, if I am lucky and the fight goes in my favor. Anyone with any experience in self-defense will tell you that the quickest way to escalate a situation is to introduce a gun into the situation.

Continue reading “Activism Helps You Heal: #RESIST #NeverAgain by Marie Cartier”

A Rescue Remedy, Part I by Barbara Ardinger

A year, now. It has been a full year since the phony election that put El Presidente in the Golden Office. A year since people began leaving the capital and the nation’s other large cities. While some of the refugees emigrated to quasi-democratic nations, most of them settled in the small towns and on the farms across the countryside, where they began building new, rural lives. A year ago, it was a flood of refugees. Now fewer people are able to escape.

A year, now, and even though she has studied and practiced, the wicked witch is no wickeder than she ever was. Nowadays she even forgets to put on the wicked-witch mask that she used to think scared people. But it’s easy for everyone to see that, masked or not, she’s just an ordinary woman practicing an old-time religion. She’s never fooled anyone, not the sixty or so refugees who now live on her farm, especially not the various ravens who drop by regularly for snacks in exchange for gossip.

Continue reading “A Rescue Remedy, Part I by Barbara Ardinger”

Just South of Ventura by Sara Frykenberg

For those of us living in Southern California, it has been a tense week to say the least: flames ravaging up and down the coast, homes lost, thousands displaced, freeway and school closures, smoke thick in the air, and ash raining from the sky.

And the fires are still raging.

Whether or not one is directly impacted by the wildfires here in Ventura and Los Angeles County, you can’t walk through the grocery store, turn on the radio, or get a cup of coffee without engaging the fear and concern, or hearing about the devastation left behind. We are sharing a trauma, howbeit differently, and with different levels of need.

I have been lucky during the fires. I live just south of Ventura. My work is on the Getty side of the 405: it was threatened, but not in flames. I spent the week checking in with family and friends, offering my home, and breathing the toxic air. I also made dinner, picked my brother up from the airport, attended a baby shower, and graded papers. … This is a strange juxtaposition, and like many Californians, I have had a hard time processing what’s going on.

On Sunday afternoon, surrounded by the unnatural darkness of an ash filled sky while traveling down the 101 freeway, I wrote the following. This is my effort to make sense. And I offer it to you all here, in case this helps you make sense too. Continue reading “Just South of Ventura by Sara Frykenberg”

Looking for a Mouth to Tell the Story by Esther Nelson

In Chinua Achebe’s novel, THINGS FALL APART, Okonkwo, a proud, hard-working, albeit quick-tempered tribesman living in the village of Umuofia, fires a gun at Ekwefi, one of his three wives, almost killing her. Chielo, a widow with two children, who also serves as the priestess of Agbala, Oracle of the Hills and Caves, asks Ekwefi, “Is it true that Okonkwo nearly killed you with his gun?”

Ekwefi replies, “It is true indeed, my dear friend. I cannot yet find a mouth with which to tell the story.”

I love Ekwefi’s turn of phrase as she responds to Chielo. Shaken, distraught, and outraged over being shot at by her fiery husband, she “cannot yet find a mouth with which to tell the story.” That’s exactly how I feel these days.

Continue reading “Looking for a Mouth to Tell the Story by Esther Nelson”

Freedom and Speech by Sara Frykenberg

Feminist theories and theo/alogies are often concerned with voice, naming and re-membering. Many feminists do this work, again and again, because of persistent silence and silencing, invisibility, erasure of stories, desires, religions and ways of being, because of missing histories, and a dominating culture’s inability and unwillingness to hear those they marginalize. We “hear each other into speech,” to counteract and recreate, to find power in ourselves and with those whom we share common cause.

We hear each other into ….speech.

Speech is treated as a sacred thing; and certainly, I hold the stories and voices of those with whom I’ve shared parts of my own feminist journey very sacred. I find the ability ‘to voice’ sacred. But I am also aware that as a citizen of the United States, “speech” or more specifically, “freedom of speech,” is sacralized as a part of my national mythology.

It is an implicit myth: all one needs to do is utter the word “speech” in the United States to conjure images of protest, civil rights, the free press, revolution, etc. There are many heroes in this mythology, most of whom “spoke truth to power,” rebuffing domination for the “common good.” The ‘free speaker,’ is often cast as the subjugated “everyman” (sic) whose autonomy and purpose drive society towards greater freedom. “He” and “his” subjugation, real or “alternative fact,” are then made to serve the larger myth of the American Dream. There is a major problem here: “the American Dream” is about freedom and independence for the white, Western male. So is it any wonder, then, that the myths surrounding “freedom of speech,” are so easily turned around to villianize those who might challenge this hegemonic power? Continue reading “Freedom and Speech by Sara Frykenberg”