Major Feminist Thinkers in Religion – Page 9

Why am I a witch? By Zsuzsanna E. Budapest

Zsuzsanna E. Budapest is the founder of the Dianic tradition and the Women’s Spirituality Movement and is the author of seven books including Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries.

I was born to a witch mother, who happened to be an artist of sacred art, creating simple home altars that the peasants used in their “clean” room; used only on special occasions. We made our living from selling these Madonna’s with child, Triple Goddess altars. Goddess loving, primitive city folk and country folks bought them to pray in front of. Her art re-inspired an ancient pagan faith. Mother’s sacred art was legendary. Nobody ever bought an image of a male saint or even St. Joseph to pray in front of. When the hardships were upon Hungarians, they turned to the great Mother. Our pre-Christian Boldogassznony (Glad Woman).

All this happened during the so called Communists occupation, which lasted many decades. I grew up in a city that was filled with statues of the Goddesses and Dianads. With all the churches we have in Hungary, not one of them is dedicated to Jesus Christ, but they are dedicated to his mother Goddess, Mary and her relatives; St. Ann, St. Kathryn, St. Elizabeth (a homegrown saint), along with St. Margaret.

During the bombing, much of this art was destroyed, but enough of them remained to pass on to the new generation the message: We stand proud on our past, we knew once beauty and civilization. Continue reading “Why am I a witch? By Zsuzsanna E. Budapest”

Field-Dependent or Field-Astute? By Charlene Spretnak

Charlene Spretnak is one of the Founding Mothers of the Women’s Spirituality movement. She is the author of eight books, including most recently Relational Reality. She is a professor in the Women’s Spirituality graduate program in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies. For further information about her books, see www.CharleneSpretnak.com.

Field-Dependent or Field-Astute?

While listening to an NPR station a few months ago, I heard a man – apparently a marketing whiz – say, “Teenage girls are a field-dependent market for us.” Hmmmm. There it is again, the long arm of Herman Witkin’s influence decades after his famous experiment in the psychology of visual perception in 1954, which found that male subjects tend strongly to focus on a foreground figure, while female subjects tend strongly to perceive figure and ground as a gestalt, or holistic totality. (These results have been replicated thousands of times since then, including cross-culturally.) However, following the experimental findings themselves, then came the patriarchal spin. Witkin assigned the positive, admirable label “field-independent” to men and the less admirable “field-dependent” to women. He and other psychologists extrapolated from his findings that women’s cognitive style is “conforming,” “child-like,” and “global,” being similar, as Witkin added in 1962, to the [supposedly] undifferentiated thought processes found in “primitive” cultures. He added that women’s “field-dependence” renders us unable to maintain a “sense of separate identity,” unlike “field-independent males,” whose cognitive style was seen as “analytical” and “self-reliant.” In more recent decades female psychologists have suggested that women’s cognitive style might well be re-labeled “field-sensitive.” But is that really sufficient? After all, it carries the connotation of women’s being supposedly “over-sensitive.”

Why does this matter now? Because the ground is shifting fast under the old view of reality as an aggregate of discrete entities (foreground figures, as Witkin would say), which may or may not relate to one another. On the contrary, numerous discoveries in recent years indicate that the entire physical world, including humans, is far more dynamically interrelated – in both structure and functioning – than had been imagined (except by indigenous cultures and Eastern philosophy). Even as someone who’s been tracking the Relational Shift for decades, I was amazed by many of the recent discoveries – as well as the fact that this shift is now decidedly mainstream. Continue reading “Field-Dependent or Field-Astute? By Charlene Spretnak”

The Chispa* Carrier: Rosemary Radford Ruether By Renny Golden

The following is a guest post written by Renny Golden, Professor Emerita, Northeastern Illinois University.

The Chispa* Carrier: Rosemary Radford Ruether by Renny Golden

What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken? Adrienne Rich

She came to prison with hidden keys. The way forward,

she said, is behind us. With only a spoon of history she

gutted a tunnel that ran below the plazas of Prince after Prince.

We sat waiting behind bars: mouldy histories, slop theologies

in mush bowls shoved under cell doors. Eat this or starve.

We prayed for deliverance we could not name.

We imagined her walking through deserts, our prophet

searching the sand for bones, pouring through ancient scripts,

gospels, archeologies, the dank stacks of basement libraries,

reliquaries with their throb of real blood, archives.

We rattled the bars with questions: Can she pick locks? Continue reading “The Chispa* Carrier: Rosemary Radford Ruether By Renny Golden”

What is Feminism and Why Should We Do it? By Rosemary Radford Ruether

The following is a guest contribution by Rosemary Radford Ruether, Ph.D., Professor of Feminist Theology at Claremont Graduate University and Claremont School of Theology. She is a founding mother of the feminist theology movement and author of multiple articles and books including Sexism and God-Talk, Gaia and God, and Women Healing Earth.

What is Feminism and why should we do it? Is it still relevant? Is it relevant cross culturally? Feminism basically means the affirmation of the full humanity of women. This means that all the ways women have been defined as inferior, secondary and dependent on men since the rise of Patriarchy roughly six-to ten thousand years ago are rejected. It means that women are affirmed as fully human, not partly human or complementary to the male, but with all human attributes and capacities, in relationships of both autonomy and mutually with other humans, male and female, as well as the ecosystem.

Feminism is relevant cross culturally because all known cultures presently existing have been shaped in one way or another by patriarchy, although in different ways. Thus feminism must take a vast plurality of cultural contexts and forms. What it means will be different for working class African-American women than for middle class white women; different for Jewish or for Muslim women than for Christian women. These differences do not negate one another, unless some feminists make the mistake of thinking that their feminist context is normative. Rather this diversity is precisely the wonderful richness of feminism, its capacity and necessity of being articulated in many contexts and cultural locations.

Feminism has accomplished a lot in the last hundred years since it began to reform law, culture and social relations in the late nineteenth century, but it has still only barely begun. Patriarchy is very deeply entrenched and has endless ways of reasserting its patterns of male domination, covertly and overtly. In some areas it asserts itself aggressively and violently, as in Afghanistan when women are forced to wear all-encompassing burkas, acid thrown in their face when they have uncovered heads and schools for girls are burned. In other areas such as the West women are seduced by dress and appearance to play the roles of bodily mirroring of male power. Religious is evoked to shame and enforce patriarchy; but psychiatry and biological science can also been used to claim unquestionable authorization for women’s dependency. Continue reading “What is Feminism and Why Should We Do it? By Rosemary Radford Ruether”

Catholic Church Targets Proponent of Women’s Ordination; Feminist Theologian By Mary E. Hunt

The following is a guest post written by Mary E. Hunt, Ph.D., co-founder and co-director of WATER (Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual).

As a senior official for Pope John Paul II, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger envisioned a leaner, meaner church, with conservative doctrine and compliant faithful. Now that he is Pope Benedict XVI, his dream is coming true. Other senior churchmen, apparently unaware of the scandal that pedophilia and episcopal cover-ups have wrought, go blithely about their business of disciplining priests, nuns, and theologians. What used to be a large tent of a church is now a tepee—soon to be a pup tent—if these gentlemen have their way. Catholics wonder where it will end.

Click here to read the full article by Mary E. Hunt. It appears in the online magazine Religion Dispatches.

Cross posted at WATER Voices – www.watervoicesblog.blogspot.com.

Will Women Priests Change the Church? By Mary E. Hunt

The following is a guest post written by Mary E. Hunt, Ph.D., co-founder and co-director of WATER (Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual).

A New Documentary, “Pink Smoke Over the Vatican,” starts the conversation…

Catholic women priests are an oxymoron for the Vatican. It considers them automatically excommunicated before the holy oil is dry on their hands. Other Catholics accept them as sacramental ministers and are delighted with the innovation. Still, others, myself included, want far deeper structural changes in the Catholic Church such that priesthood loses its baked-on charm and ministry becomes the expected task of adult members. This is an important theological conversation that the Vatican wishes would go away. Memo to them: it is just starting.

Read the full article by Mary E. Hunt on the online magazine Religion Dispatches.

Originally posted at WATER Voices – www.watervoicesblog.blogspot.com.