Women’s Voices – Page 31 – Feminism and Religion

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.

Archives from the FAR Founders: A Time for Organized Rage by Gina Messina

This was originally posted on October 20, 2018. This is part of a project to highlight the work of the four women who founded FAR: Xochitl Alivizo, Caroline Kline, Gina Messina, and Cynthia Garrity-Bond

With the recent confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh and the torturous treatment of Christine Blasey Ford, we are reminded that we continue to live in a rape culture and very often, Christianity — and religion in general — is used as means to perpetrate misogyny and control the lives of women.

While there were many moments of the Kavanaugh hearing that made me gasp, one in particular was when Senator Kennedy asked the now Supreme Court Justice if he believes in God. Kennedy used Kavanaugh’s Catholic faith as the basis to vote in his favor. Rather than using his time to explore critical information revealed through testimony and investigative reports, Kennedy decided that God should be the focus of his questions and that Kavanaugh’s affirmative response meant that he did not assault Ford.

Future of Mifepristone by Winifred Nathan

Today is the one year anniversary of the Dobbs decision.

The alarm grows louder. How far will the antiabortion lobby restrict women’s reproductive health care before they are satisfied? If they successfully secure a complete abortion ban, will they stop? Or will they go on to control women’s dress, education, travel, etc.?

Reportedly, Dobbs v Jackson overturned Roe v Wade so the states could set the legal boundaries of abortion through the democratic process. But on November 18, 2022, the US District Court of Northern Texas delivered Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine et al. v US Fodd and Drug Administration et al., a decision that stops medical abortion in all fifty states by ending FDA approval of mifepristone. The Supreme Court has stayed (paused) the Texas order as the appeal works its way to their docket. Mifepristone continues to be available, but for how long? Will the Supreme Court eventually side with the plaintiffs?

Bathsheba: From Survivor of Sexual Abuse to Queen Mother by Linda Cooper Costelloe

Bathsheba by Artemisia Gentileschi, wikimedia commons, public domain

The image we have of Bathsheba is that of a scheming temptress. That’s the way she’s been portrayed in media, such as the 1951 movie, David and Bathsheba, and Leonard Cohen’s song, Hallelujah. She deliberately bathed on a rooftop in sight of King David. She caught his eye and he was helpless to withstand her charms. The Bible does not support that image of Bathsheba, however. It says that Bathsheba was used and abused by David, and God was displeased.

The Bible says that David was on his rooftop. It does not say where Bathsheba was, only that she was bathing to purify herself after her period (2 Samuel 11:2-4). She was probably in an inner courtyard. In their book, Flawed Families of the Bible. How God’s Grace Works Through Imperfect Relationships, David E. Garland and Diana R. Garland write: “The laws required ritual washing at the conclusion of her menstrual period. A woman would be highly unlikely to conduct such a cleansing from her menstrual period as a come-on. If she were in public view, she would have washed without disrobing. There is no reason even to assume that she was naked. Public nudity was not acceptable in this ancient Jewish culture but instead was considered shameful. There is no foundation for assuming she was some kind of exhibitionist.”ⁱ

A Poem for Enheduanna by Nan Lundeen

Cuneiform Tablet from Nippur, Sumeria
(Modern Iraq) 2300 – 2100 BCE
_{Mary Harrsch from Springfield, Oregon, USA,}
_{CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>,}
_{via Wikimedia Commons}

In beautiful synchronicity, I received an invitation to submit a poem to an anthology in the voice of a female-identified persona around the same time I first learned of Enheduanna. The first named author and poet was mentioned in my New Moon Womyn’s Circle. When I looked her up, I was flabbergasted. I am a poet, a feminist, and a long-time student of Women’s Spirituality, and yet the world’s first author—a high priestess who worshipped a female supreme deity, was unknown to me.

I learned that Enheduanna was a brilliant poet who wrote with majestic metaphors, who shared her emotions, and who grappled with concepts of the divine as a female supreme deity in and with nature, and with whom she experienced a personal relationship. She lived and wrote around 2300 B.C.E. Scholars say they do not have the specific dates of her birth and death, but they do know that she served as high priestess for 40 years at the city of Ur in what is now Iraq.

Who Gets to Define What it Means to be Pro-Life? by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

The sky and sun on June 7th in the afternoon on Long Island.

Today I am coughing and choking here on Long Island because of our unhealthy air quality. The smoke from the wildfires of Canada have reached us. We, here in NY, are not alone in dealing with air so polluted that breathing is at risk. I think of the CA wildfires, the SpaceX rocket that exploded in April, the Ohio train derailment in Feb. No place is safe.

While coughing and thinking about this, two bits of news came into my consciousness, The first was the Supreme Court ruling narrowing the scope of the Clean Water Act.

My first thought was, do they and their children not have to live in this world too? Do they think they can buy a clean environment for themselves and their families and the rest of us be damned?

The next report I heard was from a prominent conservative commentator who explained how “prolife” he is and went on to describe his “deep concern” for life.