Feminism and Religion

Mary’s House by Sara Wright

Feminists have always found holy places in the forest, under trees, near springs or wells or by rivers and streams and this year my refuge has been the forest, where the goddess lives still…I have spent most of the summer visiting in a very special forest, one that has been protected by people who have bought up thousands of acres to protect the land from motorized vehicles and other machines that ruin the earth. Old trees shade an understory that is thick with new growth, ground cover and mushrooms abound. There are beaver ponds and springs, rivers, and bogs. When I enter the narrow winding barely discernable paths I feel as if I am parting a veil to enter a holy place because the trees have been allowed to grow and the forest is so healthy.

Fireless Altars and Crone Encounters By Barbara Ardinger

We’ve just entered November, the beginning of winter, the season of darkness. Twenty-odd years ago, I led a group of students through the Wheel of the Year in a class I called Practicing the Presence of the Goddess. (I also wrote a book with the same title.

Last Tuesday Night by Marcia Mount Shoop

It’s been just over a week. Last Tuesday night to be exact. That’s the night the four of us huddled around our beloved companion of sixteen and a half years and said goodbye.

Buck became a part of our family when he was three months old. We were living in Oakland, California at the time. My son was five and my daughter had just turned one. My husband was coaching for the Raiders and he was gone all the time. It wasn’t a great time to get a puppy on paper—but our hearts said otherwise, so we did.

Just a little over a year earlier I had said goodbye to Tino. He’s the Blue Heeler that found me in a dream when I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That morning I woke up and just had to get a puppy. It was a visceral pull. And I went to the Santa Fe Human Society and there was the puppy from my dream. He didn’t look like any dog I had ever seen until my dream the night before.

Elephant – Earth’s Gentle Giant by Judith Shaw

Elephants amble along through forest and savannah in unity with each other, generally causing no harm. They have long symbolized intelligence, power, wisdom and loyalty.

An All Hallows Story – My Father becomes a Beaver by Sara Wright

Transmutation?

The year my father died I fell in love with beavers. All summer I watched them at dawn and dusk gnaw down the poplars, drag them to the plume, observing keenly how the trees slid so easily into the stream… as the kits grew, little furry heads accompanied their parents carrying whittled sticks in their mouths to help shore up their ever expanding lodge. I always sat quietly so some evenings around dusk the kits would swim right up to me. Occasionally one would slap a leathery flat tail before diving deep.

When the ‘call’ came on All Hallows Eve my father sounded sad and resigned. He was being operated on for colon cancer that week. The shock of finding out so suddenly choked me up with grief so intense I could barely respond. He had told no one he had cancer. We hung up. A trip to NY and to*** the hospital was distressing. I saw my dad twice. The first time he barely acknowledged me; that night he looked into my eyes and called me “his girl,” words he had never used to describe me, his daughter, during our entire life – time together. Two days later, after returning to Maine, I awakened from a dream with the words, “your father has become a beaver” just as the phone rang. My father had died minutes before.

Diversifying Marvel and the Monolith of Superheroes by Anjeanette LeBoeuf

It’s been some time since I penned a FAR post. Much has changed and much has stayed the same. I have since moved to a different part of the United States and have started a new teaching position at a large university. Yet, I am still a scholar who seeks out the connection between feminism, gender representation, religion, and popular culture. Which brings me to this new post.

Women’s March in Long Beach, CA by Marie Cartier

Hello FAR family! Here are photos from the October 2nd Women’s March in Long Beach, CA. The Women’s March began after the 2016 “election” and continued through the Trump years, and was not immediately active after Biden won. But after Texas passed it horrific ban on abortions with no exceptions, the Women’s March re-ignited across the nation… especially in response to the recent Supreme Court approval of the unconstitutional ruling on abortion in Texas which limits abortion access to 6 weeks of pregnancy – a time span that denies abortion completely as almost all women do not even know they are pregnant within this time, never mind having time to decide if an abortion is their choice.

Women’s March targets Supreme Court, with abortion on line – ABC News (go.com)

The Women’s March came together in October in a very short amount of time. For example the Long Beach rally came together in just 10 days. I attended and was one of 500+ (though reports said 200, I was there and we were more!

Click then scroll to see full image…

May the revolution continue! As Hillary Clinton said, “Women’s Rights are human rights.” And my favorite chant throughout the March was, “Who sent us? Ruth sent us!!”

Bio

Marie Cartier has a Ph.D. in Religion with an emphasis on Women and Religion from Claremont Graduate University. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall (Routledge 2013). She is a senior lecturer in Gender and Women’s Studies and Queer Studies at California State University Northridge, and in Film Studies at Univ. of CA Irvine.

Heart Vibration: Biblical Poetry by Janet MaiKa’i Rudolph

My inspiration for biblical verses this month comes from the lovely and soulful translations of Rabbi Yael Levy in her book Journey through the Wilderness (subtitled: A Mindfulness Approach to the Ancient Jewish Practice of Counting the Omer). She has given me permission to quote her translations (thank you!). I use 2 of her verses in this blogpost.

One of her translations aspects I found most fascinating is that of YHVH (LORD in the bible). She uses Mystery. I have used Mother/Father Creator, and more lately, Vibration.Being. I love her usage. It taps into the magic that YHVH is the ultimate Mystery of all creation. These beautiful translations are meaningful, differing, yet connected aspects of the holy name. These prism-like views come together to make an even more exquisite truth.

For today’s blogpost my main focus is on several verses from Psalm 119. It is poetry which talks about the heart and chesed, or in English, lovingkindness.

Mirror Reflections by Sara Wright

The Old Woman still lives in the Forest as she once did in fairy tales. She can present her dark side to those who are uninitiated (mirror mirror on the wall…) but she also offers gifts to those that visit her wild untrammeled places… After a week spent in a forest where a river snakes her way through thousands of acres and beavers act as transformers I wrote this poem because even with the astonishing autumn crimson, orange, and gold I was drawn repeatedly to the mirror reflections of trees, leaves, clouds and sky in the still pools. When I untangled the why I wrote this poem realizing that what caught me was the importance of having an accurate reflection from another, person, or aspect of nature in which to see the world and self as whole. Accurate reflections are intimately tied to relationships of all kinds.

Mirror Reflections

Relationship needs honest
Reflection – S/he knows a
Broken mirror won’t do.

Water is made of magic
  above and below
Sky blue, slate gray,
  piercing orange
  flames fly through
thin air –shafts of light
slice wavy ripples
embrace the river’s flow,
Sand hill cranes
and geese soar overhead…

Rituals for Our Sons, Part 2, by Molly Remer

Five years ago, I wrote an essay for Feminism and Religion musing about rituals for our sons. I wondered aloud how we welcome sons in manhood, how we create rituals of celebrations and rites of passages for our boys as well as our daughters. I have been steeped in women’s ceremony and ritual since I was a girl myself, watching the women wash my mother’s feet and crown her with flowers at her mother blessing ceremony as she prepared to give birth to my little brother when I was nine years old. Her circle of friends honored us too, crowning their daughters with flowers and loosely binding their wrists with ribbon to their mothers as they crossed the threshold into first menstruation.

At 24, I then helped plan the rite of passage for my youngest sister, then 13, as she and her friends gathered into a wide living room, flowers on their heads and anticipation in their eyes as we spoke to them of women’s wisdom and the strength of, and celebration of, being maiden girls on their way to adulthood. I knew then that I would have a ritual for my own daughter, yet unconceived, one day. I birthed two sons and lost another son in my second trimester. I led a circle of mothers and daughters through a series of nine classes culminating in a flower-becked coming of age ceremony while newly pregnant with the rainbow baby who would become my own daughter.