Feminism and Religion

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Women For Peace–Take To The Streets

This post was originally published on Nov. 19th, 2012

Sometimes we are told that domination and violence and war are innate in human nature; therefore, it is futile to protest war. But this is not true.

I oppose war because I oppose all forms of power-over, domination, and violence. As a radical feminist and ecofeminist I believe that power can and should always be power-with, the power that nurtures the growth and development of self and others. The power of Goddess/God is always and everywhere power-with and not ever power-over.

Are violence and domination innate in human nature? We have been told that we are the “naked ape” descended from “apes” who, like the chimpanzees with whom we share 98% of our DNA, were male dominant and violent. Do we, then, have any hope not to be violent and dominant?

Franz de Waal’s studies of the other “ape” species that shares 98% of our DNA, the bonobo, debunks this popular myth. The bonobo live in peaceful matriarchal clans, and their response to conflict is to rub each others’ genitals until the desire to fight goes away. They are living proof that species very much like us can choose to “make love not war.” De Waal says that the most we can conclude from studies of our ape relatives is that ancestors of human beings, chimpanzees, and bonobos had the capacity to evolve toward dominance enforced by violence, or toward more peaceful ways of resolving conflict.

Continue reading “Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Women For Peace–Take To The Streets”

Womanist Sapphic Reflections on Sex, Desire, and Power by Chaz J.

**This post is based on my personal experience, research, survivor of the purity movement, and professional experience as a therapist and spiritual advisor of 5 years.

**Sapphic = women loving women <3

Everything is sex, except sex- which is power. Now ask yourself who is screwing you. – Janelle Monae

Desire, a flame that flickers, not always fanned to embers of the flesh, but today, let’s speak of its carnal heat, its dance with power, its intimate embrace with sex.

A tempest roils within, desire’s current a raging, untamed beast. A lifetime shrouded in the gloom of putrified dread, where yearning was condemned, branded a scarlet path to eternal fire, has left its indelible scar. The hollow pronouncements of warning, like the venomous whisper of James 1:14-15, still slither within, etched into the marrow of my bones: “Temptation comes from our own desires, which entice us and drag us away. These desires give birth to sinful actions. And when sin is allowed to grow, it gives birth to death.” These words, seared into my soul, a brand of shame, a constant, gnawing reminder of the perceived treachery of wanting, the supposed sin of simply feeling and wanting.

From the Archives: Forgive Me My Ancestor(s) by Elizabeth Cunningham

This was originally posted on January 19. 2020. An ‘Update Note’ has been added at the end of the post.

Elizabeth Cunningham

When I was a child in the 1950s we often played cowboys and Indians. There is a photograph of my brother and me in no doubt inauthentic costume complete with feathered headdress. In kindergarten I named myself Morning Star. (I just googled and see that I must have gotten the name from the 50s television series Brave Eagle, the first with an indigenous main character. Morning Star is the female lead.)

When I was a teenager, my aunt came across a privately printed book The Gentleman on the Plains about second sons of English aristocracy hunting buffalo in western Iowa. My great grandfather accompanied them as their clergyman. I wish I could find that book now to see how this enterprise was presented. In my adolescent mind these “gentlemen” looked like the local foxhunters in full regalia. On opening morning of foxhunt season an Episcopal clergyman (like my father) was on hand in ecclesiastical dress to bless the hunt and then invited to a boozy breakfast.

Love Without Want by Arianne MacBean

I have only felt love without want twice in my life. The first time was when I was invited to my therapist’s funeral. The summons arrived without surprise. Strangely, my therapist and I had talked about it, before dying any time soon was a thing either of us thought would occur. After my own mother had just received her second breast cancer diagnosis, I impulsively asked my therapist during our session, “How will I know if something happens to you? Will someone call?” Someone would call. I was on a list – a list of people to call if my therapist died.

In session, we talked through how her unexpected disappearance might go – playacting for therapeutical reasons, but not knowing we were setting the stage for a true and imminent exit. She asked me if I would like to come to her funeral. There was no hesitation. Yes. I had been seeing her for twelve years. She had gotten me through life, she had gotten me through me. Of course, I wanted to go to her funeral. Then, we talked about what would happen if I died. I asked her if she would come to my funeral. Yes. I asked her if she would give the eulogy. She laughed, “That might be a little weird.” Just two months later, she received her own gut-wrenchingly aggressive cancer diagnosis. We needed no list. She told me herself. The funeral was planned and when it arrived, I sat in the back row not knowing anyone there, listening to stories about a woman I didn’t know but knew. Because as much as I didn’t know anything about her, I knew her so fully through the way she loved me. The funeral invitation, her last selfless gift.

WHEN I SAY THAT I MISS MY MOTHER (THIRTY YEARS AFTER HER DEATH), WHAT PRECISELY AM I MISSING? by Rebe Huntman

On the eve of my 50th birthday, I found myself longing for my mother. She’d been dead thirty years—so long that I’d forgotten the sound of her voice or the temperature of her skin. And yet I missed her. Desperately. Shamefully.

The shape of that missing had something to do with the fact that I was nearing the age she’d been when she died. As a child, I’d watched my mother dress for a night of dancing with my father, lining her lips with red and stringing her neck with beads—sure signs she knew the secrets of being a woman: self-possessed; striding through the world with confidence and self-assurance; a real badass!

By now, I’d expected to feel that same sense of largesse. But the truth was that I still felt like the nineteen-year-old version of myself who had lost her mother, a child still waiting for someone to show me the way.

~*~

I wasn’t alone. My whole country seemed to have lost our way. We were surrounded by images of the feminine—pop icons and underwear models, feminists and porn stars, soccer moms and saints—all of them flashing large but pointing in different directions, unglued from whatever architecture might give them a coherent narrative: A blueprint that might hold us through the waters of our deepest anxieties. A guide who might answer our deepest questions: Who am I? Am I part of something larger than my own life? And if so, how do I fit within it?

~*~

Navajo Mountain Way Chant : Bear as Healer – He Who Frightens Away Illness, part 1 by Sara Wright

All Navajo ceremonial practices emphasize healing human illness, emotional, mental, and physical, while restoring balance and harmony between humans and the rest of Nature. The most sacred of these ceremonies occur during the winter months. All the winter ceremonies have at their center the healing power of animals. The best known of these is probably the Night Chant that lasts nine days and nine nights and is held sometime around the winter solstice – the timing of these ceremonies is fluid. Like the Night Chant, the Mountain Way Chant probably stretches back into prehistoric times from 60,000 – 4000 B.C.E.

The Mountain Way Chant, the second and equally sacred although less well-known ceremony is also a nine-day night chant that marks a transition between the seasons of winter and spring. The Mountain Way Chant takes place in late winter before thunderstorms strike and the spring winds arrive ( any time after First Light which occurs in the beginning of February until the Spring Equinox). It’s important to know that these ceremonies are not only fluid but can occur as many times as are needed. One purpose is to call up the rains. The ceremony is led by a medicine man that addresses, in particular, the mental uneasiness and nervousness associated with transitions, helping to bring individuals and their extended families back into balance and harmony with the rest of nature (my italics).

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Connection to Ancestors in Earth-based Theology

This post was originally published on Jan. 14th, 2013

“I am Carol Patrice Christ, daughter of Jane Claire Bergman, daughter of Lena Marie Searing, daughter of Dora Sofia Bahlke, daughter of Mary Hundt who came to Michigan from Mecklenburg, Germany in 1854. I come from a long line of women, known and unknown, stretching back to Africa.”

Like many Americans, my ancestral history was lost and fragmented due to emigration, religious and ethnic intermarriage, and movement within the United States. Though one of my grandmothers spoke proudly of her Irish Catholic heritage and one of my grandfathers acknowledged his Swedish ancestry, I was raised to think of myself simply as “American,” “Christian” and “middle class.” Ethnic and religious differences were erased, and few stories were told.

Over the past two years, I have begun to discover details of my ancestral journey, which began in Africa, continued in the clan of Tara, and was marked by the Indo-European invasions. In more recent times, my roots are in France, Holland, England, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, and Sweden. In the United States, my family has lived in tenements in New York City and Brooklyn, in poverty in Kansas City, and on farms in Long Island, Connecticut, upstate New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. My parents and grandparents settled in northern and southern California during the 1930s. I have lived in southern and northern California, Italy, Connecticut, New York, Boston, and now Greece.

Learning details about family journeys has created a shift in my sense of who I am. Continue reading “Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Connection to Ancestors in Earth-based Theology”

From the Archives Imagine a World of Beauty for Beauty’s Sake by Carolyn Lee Boyd

This was originally posted Oct 18, 2023

Reconstructed Minoan Frescoe: Martin Dürrschnabel, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

Imagine a world where beauty is revered just for bringing pleasure and joy; where buildings abound in graceful, naturalistic, lively renderings of animals and plants; where the human body is magnificent art; where everyday objects for all are ornamented with complex, graceful imagery. Imagine a world where “beauty” is not a narrowly defined style of attractiveness or an attribute of works created by a small elite, but a revelation of life’s joy created by all, an expression of delight in the Earth, and a bridge to the worlds within us. If we look back across human history, we will find all these expressions of “beauty for beauty’s sake,”

From our earliest millennia, “where you find humans, you will find art,” says pre-historian Jean Clottes (Marchant). People carved zig zags in shells 500,000 years ago (Handwerk). About 164,000 years ago, people left behind in South African caves ochre and pierced shells, perhaps for jewelry (Marchant). Artists created the oldest cave paintings yet found, stunning in their realism and movement, in Spain 65,000 years ago (Handwerk).

From the Archives: TULIP by Esther Nelson

This was originally posted on May 7, 2022

I’ve been blown away this Spring by the abundant beauty and sheer number of tulips planted throughout Roanoke, Virginia, a city I’m beginning to think of as “home.”

If I were to pick a favorite flower, it would be the tulip, yet I find it impossible to look at a tulip without being reminded of my religious upbringing regarding “salvation” as represented in the acronym of Calvinism’s “Five Points.” Each tulip displays five petals in its flower. Each petal stands for one point.

T=Total Depravity

U=Unconditional Election

L=Limited Atonement

I=Irresistible Grace

P=Preservation and Perseverance of the saints.

When my (now ex-) sister-in-law delivered her first baby one Spring, I gave her a pot of tulip plants, reminding her that T-U-L-I-P was the basis of our faith. The plant didn’t live to the following Spring, portending perhaps my future abandonment of T-U-L-I-P doctrine—doctrine being an interpretation of Scripture. T-U-L-I-P lays out an understanding of soteriology (doctrine explaining human salvation) hammered out by the French theologian John Calvin (1509-1564) and developed further by his Protestant followers.

Expansion and Contraction: The Rhythms of Life by Dr. Mary Gelfand

Mary and her Aunt Dot (Dorothy Ellis) near the end of her life

This morning, my husband and I loaded seven large orange garbage bags into the car, along with two containers each of paper products and plastics. Off we went to the local transfer station to dispose of our trash and recycling. Next, we drove to the grocery store and came home with 3 bags of food. Disposables out, consumables in.

This rhythm is familiar from my old urban life as well—haul garbage cans to the curb—shop for more food. Indeed, it is a pattern repeated multiple times daily across the country, and perhaps even the world. It is a pattern present in our bodies and the bodies of all other living things. Receive food, water, air—release waste products composed of food, water and air. A simple process of in and out—inhale and exhale—repeated ad infinitum until death claims us.

In the Journey of the Universe, cosmologist Brian Swimme discusses the creation of the universe in terms of natural cycles of expansion and contraction. These “two opposing dynamics, expansion and contraction, were the dominant powers operating at the beginning of the universe. … the universe as a whole…has been shaped by these two opposing and creative dynamics. (p. 6)”