Women’s Spirituality – Feminism and Religion

Mabel McKay (1907-1993): “Dreamer” and Master Basket Weaver of the Northern California Pomo Indians, 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 July 23rd, 2024. You can see more of their posts here.

It’s hard to know what might have happened to Mabel McKay if her grandmother Sarah had not made it a point to care for and protect her. Sarah recognized her as a Dreamer, one who is owned by spirit.

Mabel’s great-grandfather, Sarah’s father, had been a medicine man descended from those before him. Sarah’s brother, Richard, had started the Dream religion “after the white people had taken everything but their souls to Dream”(Sarris 8). Sarah recognized the signs in her granddaughter but worried there was no one left to teach her.

One of the signs Mabel was a Dreamer is how she talked in her sleep at night as a girl, out loud speaking her Dreams. Spirit talked to her in her waking hours as well. She was a strange child and there was a lot of worry around her.

Lips Sealed Unsealed by Claire Taylor

My Grandmother, Bernadette Mary Claire at her first communion.

My name is Claire Taylor. I’m seventeen, and I was named after my maternal grandmother’s confirmation name, the Catholic tradition of giving someone a saint’s name at first communion. Her full name was Bernadette Mary Claire Szafranski, so you can tell religion was a big deal in her life. I was raised in an agnostic family with basically no spiritual life, but for the last six years I’ve gone to Immaculate Heart, an all-girls Catholic school in Los Angeles. And I love Catholicism.

I love the singing and the psalms, the traditions, the Bible stories, and how my teachers push me to actually think and argue about things. But something bothers me: my grandmother grew up Catholic and then left it, raising my mom with no religion at all, and my own school was founded by sisters who, in 1968, had to choose between staying under the archdiocese or keeping their values: social activism, feminism, progressive theology.

Faithfully Dissident Daughters Reclaiming Christian Womanhood Beyond Patriarchy by Chelsea Kim Long: Book Review by Esther Nelson

After a beautiful and insightful Foreword by Christena Cleveland, Chelsea begins her engaging book by telling us, “Up until the age of 26, I didn’t struggle to align my identity and my life experiences with the white, evangelical way of seeing the world.” Born in the late 1980s and raised in a nondenominational megachurch, she grew up with a strong sense of belonging. All was well as long as she matched her thinking and experiences with authoritarian expectations. “I was able to exist in those spaces just fine until, quite suddenly, I wasn’t.”

What changed? Pregnancy. “It was the first splinter in a crack that eventually ripped my whole worldview apart, forcing me into a crisis of theology where I felt I had to choose between myself and the church I loved.” Experiences surrounding pregnancy and childbirth opened Chelsea’s eyes to the realization that as a woman in a patriarchal structure, built by men, she didn’t fit. Interpretation of Biblical text empowered men. “I couldn’t see my femininity reflected in and affirmed by the God they made in their image.” She fled her home church.

“I walked through many lonely years trying to wrestle my way into a version of faith that reflected my reality and contained my life experience.” Chelsea, as a child, had memorized Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” No room in her natal faith for “heart knowledge” since logic and reason superseded intuitive thought. She had learned to mistrust and silence any wisdom that came from within her own Being.

Mary as Sister, Trickster, and Mother by Elanur Williams

The road to the House of the Virgin winds through the hills, a thin ribbon of light. Nestled on Mount Koressos (also known as Bülbüldağı, Turkish for “Mount Nightingale”) near Ephesus, its discovery in the late nineteenth century was inspired by the visions recorded in The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary by mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich, whose descriptions led priests to identify the small stone dwelling she saw in her revelations. Although the Bible is unclear about Mary’s later life, passages such as John 19:26–27, in which Jesus entrusts his mother to the Apostle John, lend narrative weight to the belief that she followed him; whether to Ephesus or elsewhere, this is a matter of faith and ongoing historical debate. For many, the House is a place of pilgrimage and serves as a symbol of interfaith devotion across centuries. At the wishing wall, candles and paper flutter in the breeze, small, tangled petitions to the divine. I feel my own within my heart as I light a candle among the others, its black wick catching the wind.

SheSpeaks! Women of the Bible Have Their Say by Janet Rudolph

Author’s Note: I have been working on this project for about 3 years now. It is based on almost 30 years of research. I have written about some of the vignettes here on FAR before. With each re-telling and each performance the story deepens and comes more alive. On Thursday, Sept. 24th at 11:00 am NY time, the SheSpeaks!Ensemble will be doing a one hour live/zoom, free performance of the arc called EveSpeaks! You can access the zoom link on the 24th through this webpage. (Scroll to the bottom of the page for the link.)

The storyteller holds great power to both reflect the culture and to give it further shape and form. This is especially true for stories of the Bible which are foundational to our world. Whether we see them as mythological, historical, divinely inspired, wisdom teachings or simple folktales, they have shaped our beliefs and values. People see all different faces of God. If we look to the movies, God has looked like George Burns (Oh God, 1977), a vengeful John Huston (The Bible, 1966), Morgan Freeman (Bruce Almighty, 2003) and even Groucho Marks (Skidoo, 1968). There aren’t a lot of women although Alanis Morrisette did play a silent God (Dogma, 1999). If most people were asked to describe God, they would most likely picture a Charlton Heston-like figure (The Ten Commandments, 1956) when he played Moses reflecting the vehemence of God’s anger.

But . . . alas . . .biblical women’s history is most like Alanis – mute. Women’s voices have been diminished and even silenced. Female deities, female voices have either been translated out of reach or turned into purveyors of “evil” or curses.

Slippery tongued Witches by Claire Bullion

“It is still Eve the temptress that we must beware in any woman” St Augustine (354-430 CE)

I’ve been annoyed recently by suggestions that the ‘feminization’ of institutions involves increased deceit and manipulation because of an inherent deviousness to be found in women. Why is the idea of the manipulative woman still so powerful in our culture? When 165 of the 193 countries with UN membership are led by men and the top 10 richest people in the world are all men, why are these manipulative women doing so badly? Are men manipulating women to think they are manipulative? Both Helen Andrews (2025) and J. Stone (2019) in their essays, which insist that the increase representation of women in institutions is ruining the world, quote the work of Harvard Lecturer Joyce Benenson as evidence of this inherent feminine deviousness that needs to protected against.

“Woman, by her nature, is the instrument of the devil. A woman’s voice is the hissing of the serpent” Pope Urban II (c.1035-1099CE)

Nine Goddesses Every Woman Should Know by Annie Finch

Are you a woman (or man) who has lost touch with yourself spiritually — or

has never gotten in touch with yourself spiritually — or who just wants more joy in each day? If so, you may want to try entwining more goddess energy into your life. Many anthropologists believe that human societies were originally goddess-centered, and goddesses are still worshipped on every continent. Whatever your desire — strength, wisdom, compassion, fertility, creativity, sexuality — there is a goddess who can help you. Connecting with the goddesses who call to you — in the form of jewelry or art, words and music, or simply your thoughts — can sweeten and enhance your days with bright threads of unity, wonder, and female power.

But how to begin? The number and diversity of goddesses loved, worshipped, and celebrated throughout time and into the present, in every corner of the earth, is so breathtakingly large that trying to keep track of them can feel like counting the stars. To start you off, here are nine of my own favorite goddesses, chosen from among the most popular female divinities celebrated today (please note that many of them may also be known by different names or spellings).

Durga. The great Hindu mother goddess Durga is really nine goddesses in one. Durga’s nine manifestations — embodying qualities from courage to piety to blissful joy — are celebrated in India during a huge nine-day festival called Navarati. Durga is often pictured as a fierce goddess with many arms riding a lion. I have revered her ever since I found an ancient and powerful stone carving of her in the Asian wing of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. You can call on Durga’s invincible spirit when you need to be strong to your core!

Me (5^th from right) with friends at a Durga Puja Celebration in Kolkata, India, many-armed Sculpture of Durga in background

Maiden, Mother, Crone: The Anthology by Madeleine White

Introduction: When I last wrote for Feminism and Religion, I shared some of the experiences that led me to write Maiden Mother Crone, a memoir in verse exploring trauma, motherhood, addiction, recovery, hope and the search for more inclusive forms of spiritual expression.

That personal journey has now opened into a wider conversation.

Maiden Mother Crone: The Anthology, published by Sea Crow Press and co-edited by me and Sea Crow Press founder and publisher Mary Petiet, is the third and culminating volume in my Crossing Places series. Drawn from around 150 submissions and developed through workshops in the UK and internationally, it brings together poets from across cultures, generations and geographies to explore body, memory, land, love, loss, motherhood, daughterhood, ageing, renewal, courage and hope.

While responding to Mary’s questions about the anthology, I found myself returning to Bosorka, a statue I encountered recently in Bratislava. Created in memory of the women and men persecuted and killed after being accused of witchcraft, she seemed to embody many of the questions at the heart of the collection: whose voices are heard, whose experiences are mistrusted or erased, and how poetry and storytelling can help us remember, bear witness and create connection.

THE COURAGE TO BE HATED by Esther Nelson

Carla Power, a prolific journalist, has written a long-awaited, insightful biography of amina wadud (b. 1952) titled THE LADY IMAM HOW AMINA WADUD’S LIFE AND FAITH CHANGED THE WORLD (One World 2026). (Because the Arabic alphabet uses no capital lettering, amina chooses to be consistent with that script by not capitalizing her name.)

amina and I were colleagues from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, where she was a Professor of Islamic Studies. In this essay, I want to highlight some anecdotes from Carla’s book as well as offer some of my own reflections about amina. This essay is not intended to be a book review, but a tribute to someone who learned to navigate her life with grace in spite of myriad difficulties which included diagnoses of bipolar disorder and ADD/ADHD.

Notwithstanding the many words written and videos made about amina, she herself (in addition to chapters in books and essays) has written the following two books:

QUR’AN AND WOMAN REREADING THE SACRED TEXT FROM A WOMAN’S PERSPECTIVE, Oxford University Press 1999.

INSIDE THE GENDER JIHAD: WOMEN’S REFORM IN ISLAM, a book that demonstrates that “jihad” (to struggle) encompasses something well beyond the popular understanding of “holy war.” Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.

She Changes Everything She Touches: A Reflection on Love and Loss, part 2 by Sara Wright

part 1 was posted last week, you can read it here.

How much I like clipping by hand. Surprised by this realization I feel satisfaction rising. I was bored by this task as a child. I am delighted to meet a bevy of fat nubbly toads who appear out of the overgrown ground covers and in between sun warmed stones. Both child and ‘old woman’ feel happy that none will get mowed down by a polluting gas guzzling machine. The Peace of this Land that we belong to steals over us. Less is more. I’ll tackle the patch of bracken later, or maybe not until tomorrow. In this weather accomplishing one simple chore a day is enough.

Well not quite. I am creating a serpentine path of fieldstone that stretches from my front door to meet the path that climbs the hill. My original intention was to have someone ‘more professional’ do the work, but they were too busy so here I am, an almost eighty-one-year-old woman, creating a mosaic out of cracked stone! ‘I am the artist’ I say, as I carry a few more irregular rocks down from the huge pile sitting in front of the garage eyeing the mosaic for the perfect fit. Illumination strikes when wind hits the stones. Blowing seeds, withered crabapple bits, pine needles and leaves into the cracks I see what is happening. Small plants like violets, creeping charlie, ground ivy, and catmint will find niches in the soil that is being created before my eyes. Mosses will follow in the shade. Ah, Nature is going to help me craft a unique and imaginative fieldstone floor. Each time it rains the stones flatten out becoming more stable. That same feeling of satisfaction steals over me again. Vaguely I think that I may be doing something else besides laying stones in an artistic way and trusting that Nature will fill in the cracks, but I am not clear just what this might be. All I know is that it doesn’t matter how long this project takes. Process has taken precedence. This much feels just right.