According to poet Muriel Rukeyser, “the world would split open.”
This poem accurately describes what many women experienced in consciousness raising in the 1970s and what many women experience today in the #MeToo movement.
For many of us the world did split open. We began to take ourselves and our experiences seriously. To do so we had to question received wisdom encoded in such questions as: “What was she doing there in the first place?” “Was she drinking too?” “Why didn’t she change out of her bathing suit?” Underlying these questions is the assumption that: “whatever happened, she must have asked for it.”
A lot of people are wondering why congressmen and voters who claim to uphold Christian principles are not more outraged about credible allegations of sexual assault against a child whose name was Christine Blasey. Continue reading ““What Would Happen If One Woman Told the Truth about Her Life?” by Carol P. Christ”
From the archives – 9/23/11
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This semester I am teaching the course EcoJustice and chose Sallie McFague’s 
As I type this post, I have another browser window open to track the path of Hurricane Florence due to make landfall in my area sometime later this week. Though I now live a few hours inland, I grew up in a coastal town, so I know how unpredictable storms like these can be. It’s entirely possible that we will get a bit of rain and wind and nothing else–and it’s just as possible that we’ll be spending quite some time without power. I pray that the latter is the absolute worst of what we all endure here.
Though represented by its detractors as an incursion of paganism into Christianity, and presented as an integrally and intrinsically Christian phenomenon by its supporters, the truth about the Re-Imagining Conference and movement is that it was a product of a wider feminist awakening. The critique of patriarchal religions that emerged in the academy and in churches and synagogues in the late 1960s and early 1970s was part of the emerging feminist uprising. The feminist movement placed a question mark over all patriarchal texts and traditions, secular and religious, and as such was beholden to none.
The Goddess is the “All of Creation.” She is the Creatress and the Created. She is the life force of all there is. She is one, whole, and complete. Before Her, nothing was. She arose from the Great Void, the source of all potential, giving birth to Herself before anything else had ever been born. She separated the sky and the water, and She danced. In the ecstasy of Her Dance She conceived of all there is.
Feminism and Religion 