Women’s Agency – Page 6 – Feminism and Religion

Genuine Inclusivity Means Rejecting “Comparative Suffering” by Dr. Hadia Mubarak

Moderator’s Note: Part 1 was posted yesterday. You can read it here.

Rejecting the notion of “comparative suffering” is critical for those who are committed to the work of social justice, human rights, and antiracism. There is no Guinness world record for “human suffering” for which groups or individuals need to vie to outrank one another. The human capacity to empathize with one people’s suffering does not diminish our capacity to empathize with another group’s suffering, even when those respective groups are at war with one another.

On March 26, I began my talk on a women’s panel titled, “Global Women Speak,” for Mount Saint Mary University with this reminder. Before I could speak about the humanitarian challenges facing Palestinian women in Gaza today, I felt compelled to make this argument due to my experience six days earlier at another women’s interfaith panel. In this previous panel, a co-panelist rudely cut me off four times within a span of one minute when I began to address Palestinian suffering, although she had already addressed Israel’s current challenges in response to a question that we were all asked. For several days following this jarring experience, I kept wondering, what felt so threatening to this co-panelist about the stories of Palestinian suffering that she felt compelled to shut it down?

New Beginnings: Sedum tells a Story by Sara Wright

Almost two weeks ago my beloved Vet retired from the Bethel Animal Hospital. He will continue his healing acupuncture practice elsewhere part-time, but he will no longer be at the clinic. For regular acupuncture and all serious issues with my two dogs (one has been seriously ill for the last few years) he will work in conjunction with a new vet who I have yet to meet.

He has assured me that I will like Shelby, the woman he has chosen for us. I do trust his judgement.

I desperately wanted Gary to retire for health reasons last fall and spoke to him about it. We have been very close friends for many years, and it had become obvious to me that it was time. His wife felt the same way. He made the final decision to retire in November. My personal sense of loss was hidden under the shadow of my deep concern for him.

Miriam Speaks by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Intro: I have been working on a project inspired by Charlene Spretnak and her book Lost Goddesses of Early Greece. I am writing biblical stories through the eyes and words of the women. The scribes who wrote down the tales of the bible, wrote mostly from men’s point of view. And they had their own which was to destroy evidence of the Goddesses. I tell Noah’s story through Naamah, his wife. Abram and Sarai’s journey to Egypt through the eyes of Sarah. Exodus in Miriam’s voice. In my telling, Miriam went to Midian with Moses and, while there, experienced the Burning Bush and worked with Moses’ wife Zipporah to protect knowledge of the Goddesses. Below is an abridged version of this section of Miriam’s tale.

I look around at your world today. You, yes you, are my descendants. My beloveds. I mourn for what you’ve lost. No, I am angry, how could things have gotten this bad? I dare you, I dare any of you to challenge my work. We did everything we could. It should not have taken this long to find our clues. But then I see the job the scribes did. It was better and more thorough than even we, who saw so much, could have imagined. I look around at this precious earth we bequeathed to you and see how damaged it is.

Activate your Body to Navigate Overwhelm

We live in a time of radical change, in a steam cooker of accelerated alchemy. No wonder most of us struggle with chronic overwhelm.

Beliefs, habits, thought patterns and organisational structures don’t change overnight, and we need ways to boost our resilience in the long arc of paradigm shifts. How can we look after ourselves during this personal and collective dance of change?

In this post I reflect on the connection between movement and health, breathing, and the role of our nervous system. I propose 5 simple steps to minimise and transform overwhelm when it happens.

The Mothers, the Goddess, Lost and Found, part 2 by Elizabeth Cunningham

Excerpts in two parts adapted from My Life as a Prayer: A Multifaith Memoir. Part 1 appeared yesterday. You can read it here.

The Goddess finds me

Between the birth of my son and the birth of my daughter, I had a second miscarriage. The signs that something was wrong were subtle at first. I drove myself to a doctor’s appointment, hoping to be reassured that everything was all right (though I already sensed it wasn’t). En route to the office, perhaps to distract myself, I pondered why it was that I had never written about the church, or Christianity. Then…

I turn onto the main street. I glance at an old clock tower, and there she is superimposed against it, huge, big as the sky, vast as the earth.

I hear her voice.

“You have been searching for me all your life.”

She speaks inside me, all around me.

“The wild mother, the witch in the wood.” [She shows me the stories I’ve written.] “You have been searching for me all your life.”

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.

Let Your Voice Be Heard • Let Your Heart Be Inspired! by Dale Allen

I was honored to be a part of a special project for the Parliament of the World’s Religions Women’s Task Force: conducting interviews inside the first-ever Women’s Village in Chicago at the Parliament Convening. I had been on a team of women led by Sande Hart with Pat Fero. We met online over the course of nearly a year to plan the Women’s Village. It was a very special endeavor, and our group efforts produced a beautiful, calming, nurturing, sacred and inspiring space.

The McCormick Center is America’s largest convention center, and yet we were able to create serenity. The tapestries of Women’s Woven Voices provided a colorful and meaningful enclosure for our space. A fountain cascaded a peaceful hum. Majestic staffs created by Erin Beatty stood as sentries; keepers of ancient feminine power. A great Mother Tree crafted by Elisa Guyton and Leah Myers spread her paper branches outward and received the written prayers and blessing posted there by attendees. The crown-making table was always busy with women talking and crafting exquisite headpieces. The Red Tent room was a tranquil place of mediation, rest, and a variety of spirit-nourishing workshops and presentations.

The Great Mother Tree crafted by Elisa Guyton and Leah Myers, close up with written prayers and blessings.

On the changing role of the Goddess

Goddess Prominence & Nature Participation through time

Today I reflect on the presence or absence of the goddess in religion and society, and how we view humanity and participate in nature as a result.

This post is inspired by “The Myth of the Goddess. Evolution of an Image” by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, and especially by its final chapter “The Sacred Marriage of Goddess and God: the Reunion of Nature and Spirit.” This dance of integration of apparent opposites is essential to my work.

Invisible Connections: The Hidden Web of Women Writers, part 2 by Theresa C. Dintino

You can read part 1 here.

The erasure of this web is to make women feel alone and disconnected. Maybe it would make them want to give up.

Angela Davis and Toni Morrison

This may sound extreme but imagine this scenario: You are a young woman starting out and you are told that the path you wish to follow is one of pain, loneliness and lacks any kind of support or network with other women that came before you. There are plenty of men but you are left out of that network.

Why would you want to do it? Because in your soul of souls you are a writer, or an artist or a scientist . . . So you decide to do it anyway. But instead of expecting support and connection you have already decided, based on what you have been told, that there won’t be any and so you start to not expect it.

Invisible Connections: The Hidden Web of Women Writers, part 1 by Theresa C. Dintino

Moderator’s Note: We are pleased to announce that we are forming a 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 Nov. 16, 2021. You can see more of their posts here.

created by Data Visualization Specialist Mia S.Szarvas as part of a larger project of Nasty Women Writers about the Web of Women Writers

In the years that my sister Maria and I have been writing for Nasty Women Writers, one of the things that has become increasingly clear is how connected women writers are to one another. Every time I explore the life of a woman writer for Nasty Women Writers, I learn of other women writers she is connected to, inspired and supported by. Some of these connections are through time, meaning one woman writer reads and interacts with the body of work of a woman writer whose lifetime preceded hers chronologically, others are alive at the same time and they interact in person or through letter writing.