Guests

GUEST CONTRIBUTORS

Ellen Blue, Ph.D. is a Professor at Phillips Theological Seminary and author of St. Mark’s and the Social Gospel: Methodist Women and Civil Rights in New Orleans, a story of white Southern women who worked for racial understanding in the early 20^th century.

Fr. Roy Bourgeois is a Catholic priest and activist dedicated to ending social injustice.  He founded the School of Americas Watch and is a strong supporter of the women’s ordination movement.  Fr. Roy has participated in multiple documentaries focused on human rights issues including the Oscar nominated School of Assassins and most recently, Pink Smoke Over the Vatican.

Zsuzsanna E. Budapest is the founder of the Dianic tradition and the Women’s Spirituality Movement and author of seven books including Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries.

Kittredge Cherry is a Lesbian Christian author and art historian who blogs about LGBT spirituality and the arts at the Jesus in Love Blog.  Her books include Equal Rites and Art That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ, and More.

Daniel Cohen is active in the Goddess movement in Great Britain for many years, and was co-editor of “Wood and Water”, a Goddess-centred, feminist-influenced pagan magazine which ran for over twenty years. He is particularly interested in how Goddess spirituality can open up new ways of behaviour for men, non-oppressive and using their talents to heal rather than harm. He believes that myths and old stories have great power to shape behaviour, and so a valuable tool for change is to find new stories or to tell old stories in new ways. This story is one of his many re-tellings and re-visions. An illustrated collection of twenty-five stories has recently been published under the title “The Labyrinth of the Heart” (ISBN 978-0-9513851-2-8), and can be ordered from both physical and online bookstores. Some of the stories, together with book reviews, articles, and poems, can be found on his website at http://www.decohen.com.

Egon Cohen is completing a Master of Theological Studies at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas, Egon’s research focuses on gender, sexuality, ethics, hermeneutics, and the intersection of liturgical praxis, politics, and BDSM. Egon likes riding motorcycles and eating Haribo gummibears. He is secretly still 10.

Kate Conmy is the Membership Coordinator for the Women’s Ordination Conference.  Kate celebrates spiritual activism, feminism, and human rights.  She currently works as the Membership Coordinator for the Women’s Ordination Conference and lives in Washington, DC.  She can be contacted at Kconmy@womensordination.org.

Max Dashú teaches global women’s history and heritages through images. She founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970 to research mother-right, female spheres of power, goddess veneration and shamanic arts, as well as patriarchy and the history of domination.  Her acclaimed dvd Women’s Power in Global Perspective was released in 2008, and a second movie, Woman Shaman: the Ancients, is now in production. For articles, image gallery, and video clips, see http://www.suppressedhistories.net.

Stuart Dean has a B.A. (Tulane, 1976) and J.D. (Cornell, 1995) and is currently an independent researcher and writer living in New York City.  Previously he worked in a variety of other capacities, including 15 years as a corporate attorney.

Lisa Galek is a professional writer and editor who earned her master’s degree Religious Studies from John Carroll University. In her spare time, she loves to read and write young adult fiction. She currently lives in Ohio with her husband and two beautiful daughters.

Ivone Gebara is Brazilian and belongs to the religious order Sisters of Our Lady (Canoneses of St. Augustine). She had been a professor at the Theological Institute of Recife for nearly two decades, and worked among women in poor neighborhoods. Well known for her work on ecofeminism and liberation theology, her many books include Out of the Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation (2002) and Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation (1999).

Amy Wright Glenn earned her MA in Religion and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She taught in The Religion and Philosophy Department at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey for over a decade. While at Lawrenceville, Amy was the recipient of the Dunbar Abston Jr. Chair for Teaching Excellence. She is a Kripalu Yoga teacher, a DONA certified birth doula, and a hospital chaplain. She recently published her first book: Birth, Breath, and Death: Meditations on Motherhood, Chaplaincy, and Life as a Doula; you can read a review written by another FAR contributor, Molly Meade, here. Her work has appeared in International Doula and she is the voice for “Motherhood, Spirituality, and Religion” for Philly.com.

Renny Golden,Ph.D.  is a writer, poet, and social justice activist.  She is a Dominican Sister and co-founder of the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America.  Her publications include Blood Desert: Witnesses  1820 – 1880,  War on the Family: Mothers in Prison and the Families They Leave Behind, and The Hour of the Furnaces, a book of poetry. She is also Professor Emerita at Northeastern Illinois University.

Stefanie Goyette is completing a doctoral thesis on the Old French fabliaux in relation to medieval religious and medical culture. Her thesis is structured around the theme of bodies: bodies living, dead, and resurrected, as well as bodies of and as language. Outside of her thesis, she is interested Latin exempla, and in the relationships between dietetic texts, bestiaries, and vernacular, secular literature. She also works in cinema studies, specifically on twentieth- and twenty-first century French female filmmakers. Both her work on medieval literature and her explorations of film most often center on the body and its relationship to language.

Tallessyn Zawn Grenfell-Lee is a doctoral candidate in Environmental Ethics at Boston University School of Theology, studying the engagement of congregations with the local food movement. She previously did graduate research on Alzheimer’s Disease and preventive research on Ovarian Cancer. She received a B.Sc. in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.A. in Molecular Biology fromHarvardUniversity, and an M.Div. from the Boston University School of Theology. She lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts with her husband and two daughters, and enjoys gardening, canoeing, learning about medicinal and edible wild plants, and rewriting old hymns to make them more inclusive.

Mary Grey, Ph.D. is the Professor of Feminist Theology at St. Mary’s University College, in Twickenham, London, and author of thirteen books including A Cry for Dignity: Religion, Violence, and the Struggle of the Dalit Women in India.

Wendy Griffin is Professor Emerita from California State University, Long Beach, and currently serves as Academic Dean at Cherry Hill Seminary. She was the founding co-chair of the Pagan Studies group at the American Academy of Religion and the co-editor of the first academic series in Pagan Studies. She has published both academic and popular books and articles and an occasional blog posting that can be found at www.wendygriffinonline.com

Mary E. Hunt, Ph.D. is Co-founderand Co-director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. A Roman Catholic active in the women-church movement, she lectures and writes on theology and ethics with particular attention to liberation issues.

Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, Ph.D. (Korea and USA), is a scholar, teacher, and activist for Goddess Feminism. Hwang earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. degree in Women’s Studies in Religion (Claremont Graduate University, CA) and currently completing her second M.A. degree in East Asian Studies at UCLA. She has reconstructed Magoism, a pan-East Asian gynocentric cultural matrix that venerates Mago, the Great Goddess of East Asia. Hwang advocates Magoism as a historical framework in which women of the world can realize alliances across differences. Previously, she was a member of Maryknoll Sisters in Korea, New York, and the Philippines. Encountering Mary Daly’s Radical Feminism, she pursued her graduate studies.

Mary Johnson is the author of An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service, and an Authentic Life.  For twenty years, as Sister Donata, she was a Missionary of Charity, a nun in Mother Teresa’s order, until she left in 1997. A respected teacher and public speaker, she has been named a Fellow of the MacDowell Colony and is on the board of the A Room of Her Own Foundation. She lives in New Hampshire. For more information please visit http://www.maryjohnson.co, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter.

Amanda Kieffer is completing her Master of Sacred Theology degree at Boston University School of Theology in Practical Theology, concentrating on Narrative, Aesthetics and Trauma. She also received her M.Div. in Hebrew Bible from Boston University and has her B.A. in Christian Ethics.  Amanda loves finding new ways to weave together her passions for creative writing, feminist narrative, embodiment, spirituality and myth, both ancient and contemporary.

Kwok Pui-Lan, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized scholar and pioneer in Asian feminist and postcolonial theology, Dr. Kwok Pui Lan teaches at the Episcopal Divinity School and was the 2011 president of the American Academy of Religion. Dr. Kwok has published extensively and is the co-editor of two volumes Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology(Westminster) and Empire and the Christian Tradition: New Readings of Classical Theologians (Fortress). Her other publications include Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Westminster),  Discovering the Bible in the Non-Biblical World (Orbis), and Introducing Asian Feminist Theology (Pilgrim).

Bridget Ludwa is a Religious Studies Graduate alum of John Carroll University. She has come to identify as a nontheist, and is no less fascinated with questions surrounding feminism in religion.  Bridget intends to use her experiences to become a HUUmanist minister in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, serving other nontheists in need of community and empowerment.  Stemming from her military upbringing and her own military service, she is also an advocate for veterans issues by serving with AmeriCorps VISTA at the University of Akron.

Patrick Q. Mason is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies and Associate Professor of North American Religion at Claremont Graduate University.  He is the author of The Mormon Menace:  Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (Oxford University Press, 2011), as well as a number of articles and book chapters on Mormonism and American religious history.  He earned his graduate degrees from the University of Notre Dame in history and international peace studies.  His current research projects include a biography of Ezra Taft Benson and a book on a Mormon theology and ethic of peace.  Before joining the CGU faculty he served as the associate director of the Contending Modernities Project at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Sheila E. McGinn, Ph.D. (Northwestern University, 1989) currently holds the post of Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at John Carroll University, the Jesuit university in Cleveland, Ohio (USA). A frequent lecturer and author of numerous articles and books, her main area of interest concerns the development of the earliest churches and of the New Testament books in their social and cultural environments. Recent volumes have included studies on the Book of Revelation and Paul’s Letter to the Romans. She currently is working on a survey of the first Christian century. Prof McGinn lives in Cleveland with her two college-age children.

Margaret R. Miles is Emerita Professor of Historical Theology, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. She was Bussey Professor of Theology at the Harvard University Divinity School from 1978 -1996, and Dean of the Graduate Theological Union from 1996 until her retirement in 2002. Her most recent books are The Wendell Cocktail: Depression, Addiction, and Beauty, 2012; Getting Here from There: Conversations on Life and Work (with Hiroko Sakomura, 2011); Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter (2011); and A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350-1750 (2008).

Dawn Morais Webster was born in Kerala. She is the mother of two young adults, and wife of a man with Quaker and Episcopalian roots. She was raised Catholic in largely Muslim, cosmopolitan Malaysia and had her schooling with Franciscan nuns who remain an inspiration. Her blog at http://freecatholic808 is a small voice–but she believes she is part of a much larger community of faith-filled dissenters. Hawaii has been her home for more than a decade. The islands’ mindfulness of its past and the wisdom of those who have gone before, as well as its attention to place and people, help the soul to sing.

Judith Plaskow is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at Manhattan College and a Jewish feminist theologian. Co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, she is author or editor of several works in feminist theology, including co-editor of Womanspirit Rising and author of Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective and The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics 1972-2003.

Shelly Rambo is Assistant Professor of Theology at Boston University’s School of Theology. Herwriting and teaching examines religious responses to suffering, trauma, and violence. Her current research focuses on Christian theology and war.

Peggy Reeves Sanday, Ph.D. is the Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and is one of the founders of the anthropology of sex and gender.  Sanday is author of several foundational books including Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy.

Rabbi D’vorah Rose received her Rabbinic Ordination from ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal; her MA in Jewish Studies from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.  She is currently the Spiritual Care Coordinator for Washington Hospital Healthcare System in Fremont, California.  She lectures and writes on the topic of spirituality and health throughout the United States and internationally. Her particular topics of concern are the correlation of spirituality and health for healthcare providers; the spiritual needs of minority-religion patients; and the spiritual needs and barriers experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex patients, healthcare providers, and university students.

Laura Shannon has been researching and teaching traditional women’s ritual dances since 1987. She is considered one of the ‘grandmothers’ of the worldwide Sacred / Circle Dance movement and gives workshops regularly in over twenty countries worldwide. Laura holds an honours degree in Intercultural Studies (1986) and a diploma in Dance Movement Therapy (1990).  She has also dedicated much time to primary research in Balkan and Greek villages, learning songs, dances, rituals and textile patterns which have been passed down for many generations, and which embody an age-old worldview of sustainability, community, and reverence for the earth. Laura’s essay ‘Women’s Ritual Dances: An Ancient Source of Healing in Our Times’,  was published in Dancing on the Earth. 

Charlene Spretnak is a Founding Mother of the Women’s Spirituality movement and author of eight books, including Relational Reality.  She is a professor in the Women’s Spirituality graduate program in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies. For further information about her books, see www.CharleneSpretnak.com.

Starhawk  is a lifelong activist in peace and global justice movements, a leader in the feminist and earth-based spirituality movements, and author or coauthor of ten books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, and her latest, The Last Wild Witch.

Najeeba Syeed-Miller, J.D., is Professor of Interreligious Education at Claremont School of Theology. She has extensive experience in mediating conflicts among communities of ethnic and religious diversity, and has won awards for her peacemaking and public interest work.  Najeeba also writes her own blog, “Najeeba’s world,” and can be followed on Twitter @najeebasyeed.

Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA, she teaches and researches in the areas of women and religion, interreligious dialogue, comparative theology, Asian and Asian American theology, and Hindu-Christian studies. Tracy also co-chairs the Los Angeles Hindu-Catholic Dialogue.

Dirk von der Horst is a Visiting Scholar at Graduate Theological Union.  He earned his doctorate in Theology, Ethics, and Culture at Claremont Graduate University.  His dissertation focused on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century musical renditions of David’s Lament over Jonathan as source for rethinking contemporary gay theological usage of their friendship.