Women’s Voices – Page 24 – Feminism and Religion

Curiosity by Beth Bartlett

In my last post I mentioned the tale of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods. Zeus’s punishment of eternal torture was not enough to avenge the offense.[i] In addition, Zeus punished the entire human race by sending the first woman, Pandora. Pandora is a woman of “all gifts,” one of which is the curiosity that drives Pandora to open the forbidden jar, unleashing evils and miseries into the world. Woman as punishment, as the bringer of evil and misery — these themes have shaped the western view of women for millennia.

Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time by Kapka Kassabova, Book review by Laura Shannon

Kapka Kassabova is an award-winning author of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, born in Bulgaria and now living in the Scottish Highlands. Her newest work of narrative nonfiction, Elixir, soars with the luminous prose and unflinching honesty we have come to expect from this brilliantly gifted writer.

Elixir is an extraordinary, profoundly moving book. The moment I finished reading it, I began again from the beginning, pausing only to order multiple copies for friends. Like Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, Kassabova effortlessly integrates science and the sacred, addressing historical, ecological, and personal trauma with clarity, compassion, and hope. Elixir combines memoir, travel, history, ethnography, botany, philosophy, spirituality, eco-psychology, traditional Chinese medicine, and even alchemy, in a subtle, sophisticated exploration which defies categorisation.

Inanna’s Sisters, by Molly M. Remer

Sometimes I feel like my own Ninshubur.
I set up a lamentation in the street.
I call my own name,
beat the drum
to lead myself back home,
prepare the temple
for my own arrival.
I will not give up on myself,
will not abandon my own wholeness,
I refuse to sacrifice my Self.
I will not stay in the underworld forever.
We all need people in our lives who will say:
No, this will not do.
I’m coming after you.
I will help you to crawl back up,
back out, back through.
I will reach out to you.
I will boost you up.
I will rise with you into becoming.
You will not stay behind defeated
and alone so long as I,
your Ninshubur,
draw breath.
I will beat the drum for you.
I will call your name.
You are not alone.
Come back to me.
I see your power
and your strength.
I hear your longing.
Return,
return,
return.

I first met Inanna in the firelit darkness of a midwifery retreat in central Missouri. Toddler son at my breast, I watched, spellbound, as the charismatic, dark-haired midwife recounted the tale of Inanna’s descent into the underworld, through the seven gates we traveled, to the seat of our own wounding and our own medicine.

Image and Likeness by Dale Allen

I attended a beautiful women’s circle to celebrate my dear friend Gloria’s birthday recently. Each woman was invited to bring a sharing for Gloria – a poem, reflection, oracle card, song or dance – whatever felt right. Each sharing that day was not only a gift to Gloria, but to each of us.

I had met Gloria during the period of my life when I had written a play titled, “Dancers of the Dawn,” with a cast of seven women of different ages, shapes, sizes and colors. The play featured original music, drummers, myth, history, dance, even comedy for a sumptuous experience of the sacred feminine emerging in modern women. Gloria was a part of the women’s sacred circles that we co-created during that time – circles that continued for a decade and still retain heart-connections today.

Ancient Her-Story by Annelinde Metzner

Lately I’ve been rereading and refreshing myself with important books of the Great Goddess. Three books at a time! I would switch off, chapter by chapter, among When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone, When the Drummers Were Women by Layne Redmond, and one that had remained overlooked on my shelf, Sanctuaries of the Goddess, The Sacred Landscapes and Objects, by Peg Streep (1994.) I’ve been immersed in the knowledge of 30,000 years of honoring and worship of women’s bodies and the Great Goddess. When I got to Chapter 7 of Peg Streep’s well-researched book, “The Goddess at the Peak: Crete,” I was blown away with the evidence we still have, in art, architecture, religion and culture, of a highly advanced society, full of life and joy, where women were central to all life. With my mind, my heart, my intuition and my sense of past lives, I’ve attempted to place myself there, before any influence of patriarchy.

Abundant Life Is for Women, Too by Liz Cooledge Jenkins

I lived in East Palo Alto, CA, for two years in my mid-twenties. During the first year, a man was killed down the street from my apartment building, in the parking lot of the building where my friends lived. I walked through that parking lot often, as a shortcut back to my own place from wherever I could find street parking. I didn’t know the man, but I knew people who knew him. His death was both disturbing and tragic. The neighborhood mourned. My friends and I got together and wrote a prayer for our community. The murder changed my experience of living there.

The World Needs More Feminist Books…And Why You Should Write One of Them by Dr. Angela Yarber

I believe more women—and particularly queer and/or BIPOC women—deserve to publish books. Let me explain why.

It was my first year of seminary. After majoring in religion in undergrad, I had a decent handle on feminist theology, but I hadn’t yet reconciled my strong, feminist upbringing with the faith tradition that held my ordination in their patriarchal hands. A seminary friend recommended I read Sue Monk Kidd’s Dance of the Dissident Daughter and everything changed.

This was twenty years ago. That one book helped me internalize the intersectional feminist theory that had always dwelled outside of me. Decades later, I find myself teaching in my own seminary classrooms and mentoring DMin students, requiring that same text, along with one of my own books, Queering the American Dream, and Christena Cleveland’s God is a Black Woman when discussing the power of feminist memoir in religious leadership.

Breaking the Silence by Sara Wright

I believe that The Fourth of July is the most despicable cultural celebration Americans engage in. This year I met the weekend head on. On July 1^st I publicly posted the following words knowing that locally, at least, there would be fallout:

Before the colonizers took over this land from Indigenous Peoples no one considered being “independent” because the People knew there was no such thing… Like it or not we all belong to the earth and are dependent upon this planet for our survival.

What we really celebrate on the 4^th of July is the Colonizers’ takeover of what was once a pristine continent ripe with lush forests, plants, wildlife, and peaceful people who had relationships with all their non-human relatives. These Native people also understood they belonged to the powers of each place they called ‘home’.

How Mary Magdalen Came into My Life: an excerpt, edited for brevity, from My Life as a Prayer: A Multifaith Memoir by Elizabeth Cunningham

(Author’s note: Mary Magdalen, or Magdalene, comes to people in many ways. To me, she came as an unconventional, fictional character. I worked hard to get the first century setting of her story as accurate as possible. Otherwise, I make no claim to historicity. I respect all the ways in which others know her.)

When I finished writing my novel Return of the Goddess in 1990, I thought I had nothing more to say. Yet, I sensed there was something—someone—missing.

An artist friend suggested I take up drawing or painting for a time—visual art being a form in which I had no experience, skill, and best of all, no ambition. I dabbled in paint and charcoal but soon reverted to magic markers, my childhood medium.

One day a line drawing in brown marker took shape. An ample woman sat naked at a kitchen table having a cup of coffee. The round clock on the wall read a little after three in the afternoon. (The same time of day I was born.) She told me her name was Madge.

The Importance of Finding a Local Sacred Circle or Event by Caryn MacGrandle

“What not many know that the founder Caryn MacGrandle (aka Karen Lee Moon), who is a soul-sister to me, has devoted her life to the building, developing and promoting of this app, in service to the Rising Feminine … “ Jonita D’Souza, Rising Feminine

I came back this weekend from my land in North Carolina to two email messages about women finding divinely feminine events through the divine feminine app. I cannot even begin to tell you how happy this makes me. After nine years of nurturing, developing, daily work and pouring my personal funds into the app, it is truly working.