Women’s Voices – Page 30 – Feminism and Religion

What is Wrong with This Picture? Rewriting Eve by Caryn MacGrandle

One of my oldest friends who I met when I was eight years old reached out to me the other day saying that if there was ever anything she could do, please let her know. She lives in another state far away but is a subscriber to one of my blogs so she has been aware of the various things going on in my life (second divorce, so many changes and transitions in my life yet again, etc.)

Her note said if there was ever anything she could do to help, just let her know.

And I thought to myself: hmmmmmm.

You see I just put a new feature on my app where it emails local events to local users, and one of the first steps in getting this to work is having those local events on the app. So I asked her if she would mind helping me put local events on the app.

We had not actually talked in a long time, and when we had a zoom call to discuss this, I broke down crying.

I felt the pity from her. I also saw just how far I had departed from ‘normal.’

But I don’t want to be ‘normal’.

RELIGION, GOD, CHURCH, THE STATE, AND ABORTION by Esther Nelson

The phrase, “separation of church and state,” crops up frequently in conversation these days. I hear it most often when someone wants to clinch their argument on a politicized subject. Lately, it’s been concerning one’s “right” to an abortion. “It doesn’t matter what your church says, we have separation of church and state in this country.” That phrase, though, is not in the Constitution. It was Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) who paraphrased the Constitution in a letter to the Danbury Baptists, “…building a wall of separation between church and state.”

The first part of the 1^st amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” All manner of questions have been raised with this statement. What does it mean to establish a religion? What is religion? Is religion something intrinsically good? Most Americans think of religion in terms of God. What/who is God?

Redefining Sex and Intimacy in the New World We Are Making by Caryn MacGrandle

TRIGGER WARNING: Post divorce, I find myself redefining my relationships and want to share some discoveries I have made about sex and intimacy, and how that relates to my spirituality and identity as a feminist. I freely admit they might be a bit shocking.

Post divorce, I have had three ‘relationships’. Okay who am I kidding, I’ve had sex with three men. I suppose you could call them ‘relationships’. We talked. We texted. We fucked.

All three were painful in their own way. All three were pleasurable in their own way.

I’m redefining this area of my life just like I am redefining all the areas in my life. ‘Cernunnos’ points the way. This is one of my favorite cards in my Druid Craft Tarot deck, and I pull it often.

‘Cernunnos’ is the Lord of the Animals. “This card represents the raw power of the instincts and of Nature, and also the dangers of delusion and excess, but offers the potential for achieving both freedom and abundance.”

Like so much else in life, it’s all about the balance.

“Guns: The Sanctity of Life” by Marie Cartier

What can I say about guns?

I want to be like Gabby Giffords and survive

I want to be Emma Gonzalez and fight back

I want to be

I want to talk about how GUNS are less regulated

than my body

Guns can leave any state and travel to another state

and kill someone

I hate talking about guns

What Would a “Good Christian Woman” Do? by Liz Cooledge Jenkins

Early morning lap swim at the local pool is generally a peaceful space for me. It’s usually pretty uneventful. I try to go three times a week; I don’t always feel like going, but I always feel better after I do. The other day, though, something happened that upset my equilibrium and got me thinking.

When I showed up at the pool, ready to mind my own business and get a good workout in, I was happy to see three empty lanes. I don’t mind splitting a lane when needed, but it is a nice little luxury to have a lane all to myself. I chose one of the empty lanes, and in the next few minutes, two other swimmers arrived and filled in the other two. I did a long, leisurely warm-up and then stopped at the wall to find that another swimmer had joined me in my lane.

As he swam back and forth on the right side of the lane and I did the same on the left, I realized that he was taking up more than his fair share of the lane. I felt a little annoyed and disrespected. But it didn’t seem like a big deal. I started on my next set.

The Fall of Patriarchy: I Got Scammed by Caryn MacGrandle

I am a few months out of my second marriage. There will be no third. I know my task right now is to become self-sufficient.

Thanks to my second husband, I have valuable Project Management skills. He set up an S-Corporation when he was out of work in Illinois and handed it over to me when he found a salaried job. I gained needed self-confidence over the past eight years and figured out that I am good at Project Management.

Now I need to convince another company of that. Because I am not good at sales and no longer have my main client in my company and with my divorce, I need a steady income.

I thought I had found one.

I was reached out to by a supposedly Swiss company called HAND-Lease that leases and sells extremely large equipment from $25,000 up to $55 million. They had just established a Pennsylvania office and were now opening a Birmingham office. I was phone screened by a customer service employee who said if they were interested, the Human Resource department would reach out to me for a longer interview.

From Footbinding to Abortion and Beyond – This Has to Stop! by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

My husband, Marty, is a retired podiatrist. He worked in pockets of New York City that were poor and largely immigrant. When he first started his practice, he treated women from China whose feet had been bound. Despite being officially outlawed 1912, footbinding was still being practiced well into modern times. He saw these patients in the 1970s and 80s.

For those who don’t know what it is, young girls, as young as 3-5 would have the bones in their feet broken and then the feet bound with cloth strips. Every few years, the feet would be broken again until the desired result was created. To create that affect, the toes would be flattened against the bottom of the foot and arch would be so broken and damaged that the heel would curl back to the front of the foot. At each of the breakings the girl would need to learn to walk again. One can only imagine that pain of walking on foot bones that had been repeatedly broken. And here is an especially chilling part. The mothers would do it to their own daughters. I won’t go into further gruesome details because they can be easily looked up on the internet. It left the girls crippled for life.

An ode to the old me: An ode to Roe v. Wade by Chasity Jones, M. Div

Greetings Feminism and Religion family! It has been soooo long and I have missed you so much!!

I have been working on a few projects that were rudely interrupted by a heartbreaking divorce, decisions of survival, and the subsequent recovery that followed this period. I have spent the past at least 6 months healing from the shame, guilt, pain, and blame that was placed in my lap for the collapse of the marriage. Needless to say, that shit is heavy and it kept me in an endless and perpetual night- not the beautiful mysterious, infinite, expansive darkness that I have come to know but the night that I was afraid of when I was young. No one could save me from the ways that I tormented myself or questioned my womanhood, motherhood in particular. Even more, no one could save me from being an emotional punching bag from my ex-spouse, who also torments himself.

That being said, I am on the mend and am settled in my own apartment furnished with peace, wholeness, and healing for myself and my daughter. As an earth sign, stable ground and a comfortable home in which I can be myself means the world to me. I am a spiritual advisor at a recovery center in Massachusetts and therefore have studied the art of recovery in many ways. Recovery from loss and recovery of self are two procedures that I address in my upcoming book, Black Gold: The Road to Black Infinity!!

The Daughters of Zelophehad and the Five Feminine Powers of the Kabbalah by Rabbi Jill Hammer

Jill anointing her daughter. photo by Shoshana Jedwab

This summer, I visited Iceland, a beautiful and magical land. While I was there, I saw the Kerid Crater, which is a caldera: a volcanic crater with a lake inside. My family and I hiked around the edge of the crater and then down close to the lake. The perfect roundness of the crater-lake gave the impression of a circular container—a jewel-box shaped by some immense hand— or else a massive eye looking up from the earth. My daughter and I sat by the lake’s waters and anointed one another, having the sense we were in a sacred place.

Later that summer, I grappled with a story that reminded me of the crater. In Numbers 27, five sisters—the daughters of a man named Tzelafchad—approach Moses with a question. Their father had daughters, not sons, and it seems this means his family will receive no land allotment in Canaan. The daughters ask that they be given land allotments: “Let our father’s name not be lost to his clan just because he had no son!” (Numbers 27:4). Moses takes their complaint to God and brings back an answer: the daughters have spoken rightly, and will receive a land allotment as they request. However, they must marry men of their own tribe so that the tribal land is not lost— if the women married men of another tribe, their heirs would belong to that other tribe and so the land would change its tribal designation. Thus, patriarchy is mitigated but not ultimately contradicted—the women become heirs to their father, but primarily for their father’s sake, not their own.