Women’s Voices – Page 3 – Feminism and Religion

Brave Girls, Bad Witches: Age, Agency, and Anxiety in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia by Elanur Williams

Lewis, C. S. *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe*. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes, 1950

In the landscape of mid-twentieth-century children’s literature, C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia initially appears remarkably progressive. Long before modern fantasy embraced the trope of the fiercely independent heroine, Lewis gives us the Pevensie sisters, Jill Pole, Aravis, and Polly Plummer. These are active, clear-eyed adventurers. Lucy is the spiritual compass of the entire saga, possessing a theological clarity that routinely eludes her brothers. Jill braves subterranean terrors to rescue a captive prince, while Aravis flees an arranged marriage with the sharp wit of a seasoned survivalist. In Narnia, childhood is a meritocracy of spirit, and Lewis grants his young girls immense pluck, agency, and divine grace.

However, from a feminist and theological perspective, this grace comes with a strict expiration date, and a jarring ideological fracture occurs the moment a female character crosses the threshold into adult womanhood. I find that although Lewis champions the plucky girl, he displays narrative anxiety toward the grown woman. Could it be that in the Narnian universe, female maturity is treated as a spiritual fall from grace, an intersection where Christian purity is compromised by adult desire and bodily autonomy?

Into Me I See: The Sacred Torch of Feminine Heat by Jsabél Bilqís

There’s that throbbing again! In the slit center of me. Spreading vehemently, devouring, insatiable, red like blood and warm like body. They say I’m Jezebel because I like it when she purrs.

𖦹

‘Now you can get pregnant.’

I became a woman but all my mother saw was a dirty girl. Like the wombs before and around me, scorched by estranged origins, I got in bed with shame and became disembodied, found myself in hell.

‘Virgin or Harlot?’, they asked me at the gates.

Sensing my fullness, I looked Illusion in the eyes.

‘Both.’

Engulfed in the flames, I chose all of me and it purified every thing that was not free.

The Legacy of Intergenerational Violence/ Silence, part 2 By Sara Wright

Part 1 was posted last week. You can read it here.

I also came to understand the role Intergenerational Silence played in the dance between my mother and father. My mother controlled through silence, a perfect correlate to her husband’s explosive rages. Silence and Rage make grotesque bedmates, and both destroy relationships.

My mother’s story remained veiled. Except on one occasion, my mother never apologized to me for her actions so that bridge remains broken.

Everything I know about my mother’s history (and that isn’t much) I learned from her relatives. I knew she was illegitimate, the daughter of a wealthy and very married senator and my grandmother. She lived a privileged life and was sent to the very best schools/colleges. Once a month she visited with her biological father. By the time my mother was in her twenties she severed this relationship for unknown reasons. I have no idea if she ever met her half – brothers and sisters. She disliked – blamed (?) my grandmother who was banned from the family when she became pregnant. No doubt shame was an issue for all. My mother lived with my grandmother’s sisters, my great aunts and called my grandmother by her first name. She married twice. The first marriage was annulled by the family. No idea why. Secrets and Silence ruled my mother’s family; and she clearly perfected that tendency. Didn’t anyone recognize that secrets leave holes that cannot be bridged once that person is dead?

PRESSLER’S PROGENY by Esther Nelson

David French, an Opinion Columnist for the New York Times, wrote an enlightening piece (05/14/2026) titled, “I Don’t Think You Can Even Call This Hypocrisy.” You can read the article here.

In his essay, French refers to a piece by Robert Downen, an investigative journalist, who wrote about Paul Pressler (d. 2024), an architect of the “so-called resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention,” the largest Protestant denomination in the USA. The MAGA movement, filled with loud and often uninformed, conservative Christians, is Pressler’s progeny.

From the early 1990s until 2006, the Southern Baptist Convention (as well as unaffiliated and independent Bible churches) experienced phenomenal growth. Many fundamentalist evangelicals viewed this growth as God’s blessing on the faithful. However, as journalist Downen dug around, he found “there was an overwhelming amount of evidence that Pressler was a morally corrupt and abusive man.” Not only was he a Confederate apologist, he purportedly sexually abused young men and boys and never lost his influence. Many Baptists believed that “…exposing Pressler’s misdeeds would ‘distort’ his public Christian credibility.”

Gay Pride 2026 by Marie Cartier

This past weekend– May 15-17, 2026 was gay pride in Long Beach, California. Long Beach KICKS off pride month in May, and is believed to be the first pride event of the nation– happening before the official pride month of June (commemorating the Stonewall Riot).

Here are some pictures I took from the 13th annual Dyke March, and Dykes After Dark poetry event! Completely community organized and free! And the Pride Parade in Long Beach was– fabulous! You may have heard that the Long Beach Pride festival was cancelled– community organizers worked to create a free event and as our resident drag diva, Jewels said, “Cancelled? I never heard of her!”

The Legacy of Intergenerational Violence/ Silence, part 1 By Sara Wright

Patriarchy begins at home.

Author’s Note: One reason I am sharing this story is that I hope that it will ease another round of suffering. However, I would dearly like to believe that others might reflect upon the ways they have been impacted by family violence or silence in their own lives, so we don’t get caught by projecting these patriarchal roots outside of us onto the collective while dismissing them in ourselves. That dark patriarchal seed is present in all of us, and I think that telling our personal stories keeps us attached to the whole with humility – a challenge in this time of monstrous ethical, social, political, ecological breakdown.

I often have dreams that leave me with questions, dreams that provoke deep personal reflection, dreams that stay with me as the following one did. At mid-life I had written tributes for two men that mentored me from a distance who brought ‘good fathering’ into the foreground because each encouraged me to believe in myself, to celebrate my original thinking, to trust my intuition and more.

The Glorians written by Terry Tempest Williams, discussion by Sara Wright

The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary is an astonishing book written by internationally acclaimed writer Terry Tempest Willams that is predicated on the necessity of bearing compassionate witness to all beings during these troubled times. It is a book about family, friends, earth and dreams, the later of which inspired the title. The volume is composed of a series of essays, only one of which I will discuss here.

Terry, who teaches at Harvard Divinity School, writes about the Divinity Tree, a two-hundred-year-old red oak that was removed from the Commons. Listening to this narrative as a ‘Tree Woman’ was/is excruciatingly painful. My stomach roils in misery, but I am compelled to listen, over and over, because this is my story too.

I came to the mountains because I was in love with trees and bears discovering an evergreen paradise or so I thought until the dreams began. In my night stories all the trees were being slaughtered and there was nothing I could do. Since I was surrounded by fragrant forests that stretched from horizon to horizon, I could make no sense of these terrifying warnings and let them be.

Burning Woman, by Lucy H. Pearce, 10th Anniversary Edition, Book Review by Beth Bartlett

As someone who came into feminism in the late 1970s early 1980s, reading Lucy Pearce’s Burning Woman was re-entering the power and promise of women-centered feminism – the heyday of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Mary Daly, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Andrea Dworkin, Charlotte Bunch, China Galland, Riane Eisler, Carol Christ, Gloria Anzaldúa, Susan Griffin, Starhawk, Sara Ruddick.[i] It was the era of reclaiming the Feminine from its patriarchal definitions and women defining themselves outside of patriarchy – celebrating women’s spirituality, art, music, language, bodies, sexuality, birthing, voices, and power – when feminism was about transforming patriarchy rather than fitting into it — when Meg Christian proudly sang Betsy Rose’s “Glad to Be a Woman.”

And then everything changed. Just as women were coming into our own beyond patriarchy, women-centered feminism came to a halt due to pressures both from within feminism and without – with a whole school of deconstructionist feminists[ii] now critiquing women-defined women as “essentialists,” and moving back to minimizing rather than maximizing the differences between the sexes,[iii] with an emphasis on abolishing the gender binary, welcoming trans and non-binary folk, and questioning the whole concept of “women.” Indeed, one of my Women’s Studies, now Gender Studies, students asked me privately if it was okay to call herself a “woman” because the term had become so forbidden among many of the students. At this time, feminist theorist Nancy Hartsock raised the important question, “Why is that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic?”[iv]

Maryam Rajavi by Yalda Roshan

My name is Yalda. I am a woman from the Iranian resistance who, for many years, has fought for women’s equality and worked to amplify the voices of Iranian women around the world. Today, I want to share with you the source of inspiration and motivation that has guided my path.

Covering every aspect of Maryam Rajavi’s life and thought in one article is a challenge, so today I will focus only on what has personally influenced me: her perspective on women.

She herself is a woman who has spent decades fighting against two dictatorships—the Shah’s and the misogynistic clerical regime—and believes that women can change the world. A brief overview of her biography: she was born on December 4, 1953, in Tehran and is a metallurgical engineer from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. From her teenage years, she embarked on the path of struggle, learning from action rather than words.

Coming Round and Round by Sara Wright

the circle
repeats
tightens
with age
crushing
an
aging heart
I cannot
breathe
through
these lifetimes
of
loss
instead
I relive
old
pain
4AM
lasts
an eternity
each mourning