Women’s Voices – Page 24 – Feminism and Religion

Ritual Theatre for What Ails You by Caryn MacGrandle

Tanishka the Moon Woman at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August in Scotland

The power of the Eleusinian Mysteries: “so powerful that ‘people in Greco-Roman civilization came to Eleusis to be initiated every fall for almost 1300 years.” The greatest “mystery” about the Mysteries is that they were secret; only the initiates knew what had happened there.”*

Yesterday, I spoke with Tanishka Moon Woman. I have known Tanishka’s work since I began the divine feminine app a decade ago. It was wildly popular. I believe she had about 400,000 in her facebook group. Tanishka has 27 years of writing books, hosting and teaching Red Tents amongst other online and in person offerings. She travels extensively between Australia, Bali and the UK.

Listening to One Another: Part Two by Beth Bartlett

Part 1 was posted yesterday.

What are the conditions necessary to foster an environment in which we can truly listen to one another across differences? Gathering insights from many perspectives[i], Alison Jaggar outlined the essential conditions for what she called Feminist Practical Discourse or FPD. These include: 1) the creation of opportunities for participants to talk about their own lives, stressing the importance of first-person narratives and of others listening; 2) the equal importance of each person’s experience; 3) an openness to reevaluating one’s perspective; 4) the inclusion of people whose lives are different from our own and each other’s, especially those whose public voices have been most marginalized; 5) a nurturant, rather than an antagonistic environment, while still allowing for respectful disagreement; 6) participant qualities of self-discipline, responsibility, sensitivity, respect, and trust; and 7) the motivation of care and friendship.

Listening to One Another: Part One by Beth Bartlett

“Listen is such a little, ordinary word that it is easily passed over. Yet we all know the pain of not being listened to, of not being heard.“[i]

“You heard me. You heard me all the way.” So goes the oft-quoted statement of one of the participants in a consciousness-raising (CR) group in which feminist theologian Nelle Morton participated. It is a testimony to the power of what happens in CR groups – of hearing each other into speech. “When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow with us and come to life,” wrote Brenda Ueland, the first female journalist in Minneapolis.[ii] This was the blossoming born of CR groups, where women began to discover truths long buried and watch them unfold and come to life.

Ariadne and Me – Stumbling Toward the Divine by Arianne MacBean

The Sacred Myrtle Tree with its protective fence at Paliani Monastery

I went to Crete because I longed for some kind of communion with Ariadne. Each time I gathered in ritual with the women on my trip, I hoped She would speak to me, or that I would feel something and know that She was in me, or I within Her. At Paliani, I had these same wishes as I walked toward the over-1000-year-old sacred myrtle tree. Set back in the corner of the quiet convent, I was struck by the contrast between the tree’s black bark and surrounding black fence set against the hopeful flickering of silver ex-votos that filled each branch. I walked around the back of the tree on a slight upper landing and searched for a branch within reach. Finding a spot where I could rest my forearm, albeit awkwardly, I leaned in and waited for Her.

Life-Giving Blood by Michelle Bodle

“What did you think?” This question was posed to me by a young woman I am mentoring in ministry. After receiving The Book of Womanhood by Amy Davis Abdallah as a gift, she asked me to walk through the book and discuss it with her, as suggested in the introduction.

I inhaled deeply before replying that I thought Davis Abdallah was writing from a posture of privilege that she was completely unaware of – and that deeply troubled me.

Davis Abdallah’s premise is that Christian women need a rite of passage accompanying the journey of getting to know themselves. Piloted at the former Nyack College where Davis Abdallah taught, Woman was a program that sought to develop a Christian right of passage for women focused on relationships with God, self, others, and creation.

The Courage to Go Your Own Way by Caryn MacGrandle

My eleven-year-old daughter is regularly called a lesbian in the conservative Southern town that we live. Not because she has identified her gender, but because she does not dress the same as all of the other girls or wear any makeup. She wears linen baggy pants with casual t-shirts. And it is not as if the other girls are dressed more formally than her, but there is a ‘prescribed’ casual look that involves Lululemon and expensive sports casual clothing bought at stores like Dick’s Sporting Goods.

My daughter doodles a skeleton on her hand, and the girl next to her calls her ‘emo’ akin to pariah in the culture. The boy on the other side says, ‘why don’t you just go kiss a girl already. Faggot.’

My heart breaks when I hear her tell me these things.

‘Keep carving your own way. Fly,’ I silently entreat her.

RACHEL KADISH: TRANSCENDENCE AND TEXT, part 2 by Theresa C. Dintino

THE SYMBOL OF THE GENIZAH

Being a non-Jew, the first word I had to look up while reading The Weight of Ink was genizah—a hiding place or the act of hiding sacred texts until they can receive proper burial in the earth. In Jewish tradition this is a required honoring of the written word, especially if it is writing about God. It can also mean depository or treasure; something hidden away in time with hope for more welcome in the future that finds it.

Genizah was the perfect word for me to have etched into my mind with regard to The Weight of Ink as it set the stage and opened a space in my heart for a novel which concerns itself with the power of writing and words through time. The story is centered around human lives engaged in passionate intellectual pursuits, the love of books and learning, and imaginations set afire by the academic.

RACHEL KADISH: TRANSCENDENCE AND TEXT, part 1 by Theresa C. Dintino

Moderator’s Note: This post is presented as part of FAR’s 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. This was posted on their site on November 7, 2023

I love recognizing Toni Morrison’s influence on a writer as I am reading a book. Reading Rachel Kadish’s novel, The Weight of Ink, immediately sunk into Jewish reality, life, and experience without any explanation or apology, I sniffed a familiar point of view, a ghost of novels prior, detected the faint fingerprints of a giant. I liked it and when I recognized it for what it was, I thought to myself, Good for her.

Kadish had taken Toni Morrison’s advice to black writers that says you don’t have to explain yourself to white readers and applied it to not explaining herself to non-Jewish readers.

Why not?

Powerful Women in Pre-History by Rachel Thomas

*Image of a Goddess, maybe Inanna. Could she also be a Shaman and/or Queen? From 2400 BC, Sumeria.* *Photo by Rachel Thomas at the* Morgan Library, on loan from the Vorderasiatisches Museum of Berlin.

Women’s History Month brings our attention to women of the present and the recent past. What about those women from our distant past? Those whose great stories go back thousands of years?

Scholars are discovering more and more evidence of powerful women in pre-history. Here is a snippet of the true herstory of my ancestral grandmothers.

Every day there is more research showing that women played leadership roles in the earliest large-scale civilizations of Western Asia, North Africa and Europe. We know that these areas had international trade and exchange of ideas going back at least 5,000 years. Maybe more.

Women’s Rights: How Far Back in Time Will our Legal System Go? by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

I was in the process of writing this blogpost last week when the Arizona supreme court decided to turn abortion rights back to the civil war era (1864). This was a time when women had no rights at all and abortion from conception was illegal. But civil war era laws are downright quaint and modern compared the legal underpinnings of the supreme court’s Dobbs decision.

In his decision, Mr. Alito cited four “great” and “eminent” legal authorities, Henry de Bracton, Edward Coke, Matthew Hale, and William Blackstone. For perspective here are their dates.

Henry de Bracton c. 1210 – c. 1268
Edward Coke 1552 – 1634
Mathew Hale 1609-1676
William Blackstone 1723 –1780

To help me understand Alito’s logic, I read up on some conservative commentary. Here is what I learned: When the founding fathers needed to create legal documents, they didn’t create them out of thin air. They relied on the logic of the four men (and others) listed above. Yes, they did pick some enlightened aspects of these thinkers of the time, esp. in regard to the rights of the common people in relation to royalty. The thought of commoners having rights was revolutionary in its day. But as we have learned so painfully, our founding fathers limited who those rights applied to. They did not take into consideration the rights of anyone other than landowners, which at the time meant white men.