Feminism and Religion

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.

Suzanne Simard Creates a Bridge to the Future by Sara Wright

It interests me that September 30^th was declared Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada because this is the day I was born and this is where I think we need to begin. Truth and Reconciliation is about acknowledging the wound and healing the split between the Indigenous ways of being in the world and the rest of western civilization. First we become fully accountable for the blood that was shed on this continent by immigrants (knowingly or unknowingly). Healing the bloody root that is still caught underground. And then we need to begin to listen to those who are still in direct relationship with the earth…If there was ever a time for humans to surrender one perspective for another it is now. We need to reject the values of patriarchy – domination, war, hatred, and division – and make a shift to what Carol Christ calls an egalitarian matriarchy – a communal way of living that values relationships and compassion and thrives upon equality between the sexes – one that also celebrates diversity. Turning to Nature and Indigenous peoples to learn how to make this shift is a road to genuine hope…

All summer I have been engaged with mushrooming in the forest, a practice that has deepened my relationship with the forest as a whole as well as making it even more real to me that I am walking on hallowed ground with Forest Scientist Suzanne Simard, who also learned about (symbiotic) mycorrhizal networks by examining mushrooms. Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of some of the millions of gold, silver, red and orange threads that lie just beneath the forest floor. Thanks to the work of this feminist, (the word is never used in her book Finding the Mother Tree…) Suzanne is a prime example of a woman who has lived her life as a radical feminist who is indebted to her male relatives and does not find men a threat.

Professors, Sex, and the Academy by Esther Nelson

Amia Srinivasan (b. 1984) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. Her recently released book, THE RIGHT TO SEX: FEMINISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, is a series of essays, drawing on earlier feminist tradition, dealing with topics such as pornography, power, desire and more.

The following New York Times opinion piece authored by Srinivasan, “What’s Wrong with Sex Between Professors and Students? It’s Not What You Think,” sheds light on that thorny question, pushing us to think further and differently about the stereotypical older male professor/younger female student sexual alliances at colleges and universities. Although Srinivasan focuses on heterosexual relationships in her article, she also gives an example of a relationship between a lesbian professor and female student in an academic institution.

My Encounter with the Venus of Dolní Věstonice by Ivy Helman.

Marija Gimbutas, in her book Language of the Goddess, mentions only one goddess figurine from what was, at the time of her writing, Czechoslovakia (pages 31-32). That figurine comes from Předmosti, in the very eastern part of what is now the Czech Republic. However, there are more, and I would like to introduce you to the one that I encountered during a visit to another part of the Czech Republic several weeks ago.

Meet what Czechs refer to as the Venus of Dolní Věstonice. There is not a lot of information about her, so I have pieced together what I can find. Said to be the oldest known fired terracotta figurine (some 29,000 years old), she was first unearthed in 1925. She was found broken into two pieces at the site of the Stone Age settlement known as Dolní Věstonice, in the southeastern part of the Czech Republic. This settlement, according to Archeo Park Pavlov, was part of the Pavlovian culture, a Stone Age culture local to the area.

Author’s photograph of a replica of the Venus on display at Archeo Park Pavlov.

Join the Resistance by Mary Sharratt

“Rest is resistance,” journalist Cassady Rosenblum wrote in her recent essay in the New York Times , entitled “Work is a False Idol.”

This statement completely undermines our American work ethic that elevates productivity to the highest altar. Rosenblum, a journalist who left a high stress job, wrote lyrically of the happiness she discovered just sitting on her parents’ porch in West Virginia. Some of her readers were up in arms—how dare she hang out on a porch when she could be working? Who does she think she is? Rosenblum received such a bashing in the comments section, you’d think she was Marie Antoinette torturing puppies.

Rest is a four-letter word, as un-American as Communists were in the 1950s. If you want to provoke the rage of strangers on the internet, publicly praise the joys of taking a sabbatical.

The Celtic Cross and the Compassing of the Divine Womb, Part 1 by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

No one knows why Celtic Crosses have a circle. Guesses include pragmatic utilitarianism (to hold the arms up),¹ the sun, Greek laurel wreath, Egyptian ankh, circle of creation,² the Chi-Ro Greek monogram for Christ,³ the divine light that imbues all creation,⁴ the “Celestial Sphere” found in earlier Eastern Christianity,⁵ and a range of fanciful inventions based on modern imagination and pseudo-scholarship about Celtic “paganism.” [Leading scholars of pagan history agree that almost nothing is known about pre-Christian beliefs in Britain and Ireland. The few, conflicting descriptions we have, all come from highly tendentious, frequently incorrect foreigners (such as Julius Caesar, who also claimed that German forests were full of unicorns) or from Christian writers of later periods with strong agendas of their own (such as creating a native pagan history and mythology to rival their snobby Greek and Roman “Classical” neighbors).⁶] The circles on Celtic crosses remain a mystery.

With that in mind, I do not suggest an historical hypothesis here; rather, I offer a theological insight from a modern Feminist Christian perspective. I ask the invitational question: “What happens when modern Christians allow Celtic Crosses to symbolize the Compassing of the Divine Womb?”