The Truth About Humans by Natalie Weaver

I have greatly enjoyed an odd little book I read over the summer.  It is Lucy Cooke’s The Truth About Animals (Basic Books, 2018). Cooke takes us through a journey of animal behavior, chronicling the curious narratives that naturalists, philosophers, theologians, and other high-thinking professionals impose on animals to render their behaviors meaningful, moral, and relevant.  Cooke shows us how tempting it has been historically for people to seek and discover confirmation of human values in all those other pairs so happily coupled on Noah’s Ark.

It has often been an important tool for feminists, as with other sets of thinkers, to make these connections as well.  And, as one familiar with the classical charges that women are more inherently corporeal than their spiritual-intellectual male counterparts, and that therefore women are more animal than the more accurately “human” form that their male counterparts represent, I understand the feminist investment in nature.  I appreciate that it involves a sort of ownership and redefinition of the slur; an acceptance of space and place as limited and essentially animal; an awareness of environmental sustainability; a deep sense of connection to the continuum of creaturely being that is the giant ecology of our planet.

Continue reading “The Truth About Humans by Natalie Weaver”

The Swan-Bone Flute by Rachel O’Leary: Reviewed by Max Dashu

A girl leaps out of her tree perch to warn a pregnant doe that a hunter is drawing his bow against her. For this act of defending the mother deer, who should never be hunted, her uncle beats her. And so this novel drops us into the world of East Anglia in the year 598, in the wake of the Saxon invasions and enslavement of some of the British population. In this world, the old folkmoot councils are threatened by the rising power of the thanes, a hierarchy of lords under the new Saxon kings. And these lords are eroding women’s power at a rapid pace. Continue reading “The Swan-Bone Flute by Rachel O’Leary: Reviewed by Max Dashu”

FAR Project Intern – Application Window Extended to Sept. 15, 2019

It’s about every three years when we at Feminism and Religions put out a solicitation for a new intern to join our team. Back in 2013 we had the great privilege of having Kate Brunner join us. She came on as an intern and stayed to become one of our permanent co-weavers who help run the day-to-day behind-the-scenes of this collaborative project. She reorganized the structure and rhythm of how we run things and made it easier for us to bring in the next person. Enter Katie M. Deaver at the end of 2016. She is the superhero who so smoothly swooped in as Kate stepped back to attend grad school. Katie shared all the values and ethos of FAR – it was the most organic match we could have hoped for. Truly FAR couldn’t have survived without each of them.

FAR is an all-volunteer effort and now, again three years later, we are looking to bring on a next team member. From the very start, we have been of the mindset that the more voices and perspectives we can bring into constructive, community-building dialogue, the better. So…might you be up and ready to contribute to this collaborative feminist task? Continue reading “FAR Project Intern – Application Window Extended to Sept. 15, 2019”

Finding Missing Pieces of My Ancestral Story: Scotland and Ireland by Carol P. Christ

When I began researching years ago, I knew the names of my grandparents and what country in Europe their ancestors were from, but not much more. I have now traced most of my ancestors back to the Old Country, some to the 1600s. But there remained four ancestors with unknown places of origin among my sixteen 2x great-grandparents. A week or so ago, I decided to go back to the online resources, focusing on James Inglis, the Scottish seaman, and his Irish wife, Anne Corliss. This time I was more experienced, and I was determined to find the records.

Several sources confirmed that James’ parents were James and Isabella. Unfortunately, more than one James Inglis was born about 1838 to parents with these names. I had already ruled these Jameses out, because they were living in Scotland during the 1861 census, while my ancestor was by that time married and living in New York City. Scottish birth, marriage, and death records are incomplete before 1855 when civil registration was required; neither the marriage of James’ parents, nor his birth record were online. Continue reading “Finding Missing Pieces of My Ancestral Story: Scotland and Ireland by Carol P. Christ”

Insect Conversations by Barbara Ardinger

“She’s doing it again,” Mrs. Cockroach is saying to her friend Old Mrs. Spider. “You know? The giant? She’s been blowing on me and telling me to live somewhere else. Like, I’d leave a good home?”

 

                         

 

Old Mrs. Spider looks up from her weaving. “Yes,” she says in a weary voice. “But you know she’s not a giant. She’s just a normal human being, well, overweight, as I understand humans measure their bodies. And if she’s going to blow on us and ask us to live somewhere else, well…..I think she needs to brush her teeth.”

Mrs. Cockroach chuckles. “Indeed. We insects, maybe with the exceptions of fleas and termites, we don’t have bad breath. Blood-breath and wood-breath are sour! I was sitting on the wall in her bathroom, keeping an eye on things and telling the termites to get away from the window, and she just walks up. Doesn’t she know we insects and arachnids are protecting her house?”

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In A Sacred Grove by Laurie Goodhart

I’ve always been an artist-painter, with an innate drive to explore the mystic and ethereal. Concurrent with artwork I minored in Philosophy as an undergrad, then farmed (certified-organically) with animals and plants for thirty years, all the while accumulating a fine archaeology reference library.  The farming grounded the other endeavors in a way that probably nothing else can. Scraping by in the best of years, and always subject to the vagaries and perils of natural forces, one learns that there is no other way forward than to surrender, constantly alert to the complex nuances of Earth and Life.

Even though no longer farming, I still carry on in this way. A couple of weeks ago I participated in a three-day regional Artist’s Open Studio Tour, hosting the general public during some of the most sweltering days on record in our area. Bringing people into the un-air-conditioned studio to suffer was an awful prospect, so I hung forty large paintings and twenty tiny ones in a large shady area that I’ve thought of as The Sacred Grove, since acquiring this property five years ago.

A sacred grove because it is bordered on its long side by a small stream that emerges from a spring at the uphill end. Further uphill from this area is a columned platform that the previous owners erected and dubbed, The Parthenon.  These wonderful features dovetail exquisitely with the fact that for the past twenty years my artwork has focused on what I call Remnants And Residents Of A Lost Sanctuary Of Aphrodite. Continue reading “In A Sacred Grove by Laurie Goodhart”

Siddur – An Amendment by Ashley Roque

July 24, 2018

“Blessed are you O God, King of the Universe,
Who has not made me a Gentile
Who has not made me a slave
Who has not made me a woman”

Blessed are you Yahweh Elohim
Jehovah Jireh
Alpha and Omega
The Author and Finisher of my feeble faith
Who makes faith and hope temporary
And love last forever 

But I am a woman
In your eyes and in mine and in the monthly passage
Of my bloody womb
It all gives me away Continue reading “Siddur – An Amendment by Ashley Roque”

“The Monster at the End of This Post”* by Tallessyn Zawn Grenfell-Lee

“The Monster at the End of This Post”[i]

I admit it. I was terrified of monsters as a kid. And vampires. I was also scared of bears and spiders. And probably hell, if anyone had asked… even though my family did not focus on fear-based theology, it was a part of our lives and culture. (I was pretty scared of spankings, too.)

I have thought quite a lot about fear, and about monsters – especially when I had to figure out how to talk about these things with my own kids. The more I have explored these ideas, the more I have come to believe that if monsters are real – and they may very well be real – they are only as real as we let them be. Allow me to explain. Continue reading ““The Monster at the End of This Post”* by Tallessyn Zawn Grenfell-Lee”

Lion – Guide to the Power that Resides Within, by Judith Shaw

judith shaw photoLion, ancient symbol of strength and courage, is found in cave art from our early days. From the Egyptians to the Medieval Christians, lion could represent danger and chaos or protection and triumph over chaos. But through it all lion’s traits of strength and courage – power and vitality –  remain at the core.

Continue reading “Lion – Guide to the Power that Resides Within, by Judith Shaw”

“This Golgotha of Modern Times” by Joyce Zonana

Our visit to Poland coincides with the Feast of the Assumption, a time when tens of thousands of pilgrims arrive on foot to pay homage to Our Lady of Częstochowa, Poland’s Black Madonna. I too am a pilgrim, visiting the sites, not of miracles but of martyrdom. As I make my way through what Pope John Paul II called “this Golgotha of modern times,” I am overcome; like him, I “am here kneeling down” to implore Our Lady to help us heal the vast, still open wound that is our life on this earth.

4BC9846D-628B-4F1D-89BF-BB212E5D94BCI had never imagined visiting Eastern Europe, a place toward which I felt no attraction, or, if anything, a deep aversion. To my mind, these were the killing fields, where six million Jews, Roma, political prisoners, homosexuals, and others were massacred by the Nazis during World War II. As a bisexual Jew, a dark-skinned Middle Easterner sometimes taken for a gypsy, why would I want to go there?

But my husband, who was raised Catholic in Chicago, is of Polish and Lithuanian descent. He and his two sisters have talked for years about visiting the villages from which their grandparents, escaping economic hardship and military conscription, had emigrated early in the twentieth century. It remained wistful talk until Mike and I made plans to attend a yoga retreat in rural Denmark. We’d be so close, we reasoned, why not cross the Baltic to explore his ancestral homes? His two sisters readily agreed to join us. Continue reading ““This Golgotha of Modern Times” by Joyce Zonana”