A Precious Gift by Natalie Weaver

This has been another hard month.  I don’t feel it to be hard.  I just know objectively that it is.  The typical challenge of balancing my work with the children’s needs and the management of a household has been intensified by the onset of a serious medical condition in my family.  I now enter that phase of elder care, which I understand is more or less bound to bankrupt the average household.  I have become the much-begrudged adult child, compelled to make decisions for other people’s lives and regarded in the fog of suspicion. My intentions are now under scrutiny; my time is usurped; my efforts are thankless.  I’m not complaining really.  I am just describing.

In the midst of things, I have managed to take my older son to the seeming ends of the earth to visit potential high schools.  I am managing a Destination Imagination team for my fourth grade son’s class.  I am teaching six courses, and my home is relatively clean.  I am running a weekly lecture series, I volunteered at the Church this month, and no one has missed any meals.  I even managed to sew a blanket for a friend’s new baby. There are many more serious family, medical, and economic issues that underlie my day-to-day, but along with everyone else, and perhaps a little more so than some others, I just accept that I am amazingly over-extended.

Continue reading “A Precious Gift by Natalie Weaver”

Women’s Ritual Dances and the Nine Touchstones of Goddess Spirituality-Part Two by Laura Shannon

In the first part of this article, I looked at how Carol P Christ’s Nine Touchstones of Goddess Spirituality from Rebirth of the Goddess are related to traditional women’s ritual dances of the Balkans. After more than thirty years of researching and teaching these dances and the way that they pass on information in encoded symbolic ways, I have come to see them as an educational system, a women’s mystery school.[1] The main message which the dances convey is an ethic of community, partnership, mutual support, and other life-enhancing values aligned with the Nine Touchstones, which can be directly experienced in the dance.

We know from the research of Marija Gimbutas that these values were central to the Old European civilizations which honoured the Goddess, while Yosef Garfinkel and Elizabeth Wayland Barber show that circle dances have their roots in these same early Neolithic cultures of Eastern Europe and the Near East. This leads me to suggest that Balkan women’s circle dances surviving today may have their origin in early egalitarian matriarchal cultures of Neolithic Europe. The Nine Touchstones of Goddess Spirituality provide an perfect template through which to explore the ethics of women’s ritual dances.

Continue reading “Women’s Ritual Dances and the Nine Touchstones of Goddess Spirituality-Part Two by Laura Shannon”

Just Show Up by Katie M. Deaver

Happy Midterm Election Day 2018!!

The first article I ever wrote for Feminism and Religion, (“I Never Thought That I Would Need to Be a Part of History,”) ran just a couple of weeks after the inauguration of the current President.  As I sat writing this Monday afternoon, I kept trying to find some new or more exciting way to talk about voting in today’s election, I couldn’t help but go back and take a look at that first article.

As I wrote in that article, I never really imagined that I would need to be a part of history.  As a scholar of theology and feminism I certainly understand that we are a long way from being a truly inclusive society. We still need to fight oppression and push for the acceptance of all those who are othered in our society, but somehow our current issues and “battles” seem so much larger than they did only a couple of years ago.

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Challenging Christian Feminists to Re-Imagine the Goddess by Carol P. Christ

From the 1993 Re-Imagining Conference:

Our mother Sophia, we are women in your image:
With the hot blood of our wombs we give form to new life.
With the courage of our convictions we pour out our life blood for justice.
Sophia-God, Creator-God
let your milk and honey pour out,
showering us with your nourishment.

From my reflections on the Re-Imagining Conference presented at Hamline University on Novemeber 1, 2018:

One reason the creative re-imagining of God as female has not taken hold in churches and synagogues is fear of paganism and the Goddess. The creators of the Re-Imagining Sophia ritual took great care to guard against this charge by connecting it to Bible and tradition. Commenting on the reasons for the backlash against the Re-Imaging Conference, Sylvia Thorson-Smith stated:

One was the liturgical use of the biblical image of Sophia – but blown up as evidence of Goddess worship. Second was the milk and honey ritual – an ancient part of early Christianity, but attacked as a pagan substitute for communion.

While I understand her reasons for doing so, “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Continue reading “Challenging Christian Feminists to Re-Imagine the Goddess by Carol P. Christ”

When the Gods Retire by Barbara Ardinger

Come with me in your imagination to an old land, a Demi-Olympus, a fabled and possibly invented land to the north of Mount Olympus, home and throne of the fabled Olympian gods. It is to this Other Olympus that the gods have retired. Now they reside in the Divine Rest Home whose proprietor is a black goddess. Not African black, She is as black as space, and if we look closely at Her, we can see galaxies and constellations and comets in Her. She is the Ur-Goddess, the Divine Creatrix, eldest of all, and She answers to the name Mama. (Note: many years ago, I actually saw this goddess after an all-day asthma attack that nearly killed me. She was in the ER with me.)

Helping Mama run the Divine Rest Home are Gaea, the mother of all life, and the Titans and Titanesses, who are older than all the gods who have come to the Divine Rest Home to…well…rest. The Titans and Titanesses held numerous important stations in the primeval universe and should probably retire, too, but they just keep going. That’s probably a good thing, as most of the retired gods need a great deal of attention.

Continue reading “When the Gods Retire by Barbara Ardinger”

Women’s Ritual Dances and the Nine Touchstones of Goddess Spirituality-Part One by by Laura Shannon

In Rebirth of the Goddess, feminist theologian Carol P Christ offered a list of ‘Nine Touchstones of Goddess Spirituality’.[1] She revisited the Nine Touchstones in an interview with Karen Tate on Voices of the Sacred Feminine titled ‘Gratitude and Sharing: Principles of Goddess Spirituality‘, and in an inspiring series of blogs on this site recently exploring each touchstone in depth.

In her incisive analysis of the ethics of Goddess religion, Christ argues that Goddess spirituality can offer the ‘ethical guidance that we need to combat the forces of evil in our world’, and that this ethic is not imposed from a set of rational principles nor from a transcendent God known through the prophetic traditions of the Bible, as suggested by Rosemary Radford Ruether.[2] Rather, the ethics of Goddess spirituality are discerned through intuition and reflection on the world of which human beings are a part.[3]

Continue reading “Women’s Ritual Dances and the Nine Touchstones of Goddess Spirituality-Part One by by Laura Shannon”

I Was Brainwashed to Believe I Wasn’t Human. Now I’m on a Mission Against that Cult-Part 3

Trigger warning: rape, sexual assault, domestic abuse, graphic sexual content

In Part 1 of this story, I introduced a discussion of Johan Galtung’s theory of cultural violence as it relates to my experience as a young woman in an abusive relationship. To recap:

Cultural violence is: “…any aspect of a culture that can be used to legitimize violence in its direct or structural form. Symbolic violence built into a culture does not kill or maim like direct violence or the violence built into the structure. However, it is used to legitimize either or both.”

Cultural violence against women is: Normalization and promotion of pornography, prostitution, degradation, and sexual objectification of females in media, predominantly male language in civic, business, and religious institutions, gender roles and stereotypes, misogynist humor, gaslighting, minimizing or denying any of these forms of violence.

Continue reading “I Was Brainwashed to Believe I Wasn’t Human. Now I’m on a Mission Against that Cult-Part 3”

Hear Me by Winifred Nathan

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I found the confirmation hearings of now Justice Kavanaugh deeply disturbing. I have ideas for preventing a replay.

First, secret keeping doesn’t work. For too long girls/women have suffered in silence with their secret while boys/men move along often without any sense of guilt about  their “fun”. When the victim/survivor keeps her secret, the perpetrator remains in control.  An important  step for the victim to regain control is to tell her story.  Then the next step … she needs to be heard.   Dr. Blasey Ford spoke, but her distracters did not hear her.  They questioned her credibility. She was criticized for her years of silence, and her lack of memory of details.  What I learned from this is that the victim/survivor must be prepared to speak, and that this preparation must start well before it occurs.

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Lifting the Veil – #WontBeErased by Joyce Zonana

Samhain is upon us. Halloween. The Day of the Dead. All Saints’ Day. All Souls’ Day. That liminal time of year when the doorways to what the Celts called the Otherworld, Annwn in Welsh, are open. In New York City, we have the 45th annual Village Halloween Parade, a queer extravaganza of puppetry, masquerade, and cross-dressing that draws some 60,000 participants and over 2 million onlookers. Elsewhere, we have children in costume and lawns covered with plastic skeletons and illuminated ghouls. Everywhere, if we’re lucky, we might catch a glimpse of  “the piper at the gates of dawn,” the vision granted Rat and Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows: “something very surprising and splendid and beautiful”—Pan the goat-god, boundary-crosser, Friend and Helper, trans-being.

jz-headshotJust last week—a few days after the New York Times reported on the Trump administration’s efforts to define transgender out of existence—I read for the first time Welsh writer Arthur Machen’s 1894 novella, The Great God Pan, today considered a classic of horror fiction. Condemned as “morbid” and “abominable” by most critics when it was first published, the tale was hailed as “un succès fou” by Oscar Wilde, recuperated in the 1920s by H. P. Lovecraft, and particularly praised more recently by Stephen King, who called it “maybe the best” horror story “in the English language.”

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Original edition with cover illustration by Aubrey Beardsley

The “queer” tale (the word “queer” recurs frequently throughout) is told by a series of straight-laced Victorian men, each of whom is horrified by the unspecified behavior and bearing of a mysterious woman, Helen Vaughan. Readers are led to suspect that Helen is guilty of some sort of sexual excess or transgression, but nothing is specified until after her suicide, when the medical examiner reports that he was “privileged or accursed” to see the “skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and the bones, and the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchangeable, and permanent as adamant, beg[i]n to melt and dissolve”: Continue reading “Lifting the Veil – #WontBeErased by Joyce Zonana”

Not Yet the Death Rattle by Marcia Mount Shoop

Marcia Mount ShoopI have had the honor of sitting vigil with dying people. And I have prayed through the coming of the death rattle. It can be painful to witness, especially for those witnessing death for the first time. Sometimes the person can hang on, seemingly fighting the inevitable final step of their transition into death.

In those times, I have encouraged families to share affirming words with their loved one, to tell them that it’s ok for them to go, that they are going to miss them, but that they will be ok.

I have listened as wives tell husbands thank you for all the years, for all the love, for the life they have lived together. I have been there with parents forcing themselves to say the excruciating goodbye to a child passing too soon, so the child won’t have to suffer anymore—telling them it is ok to rest, it’s ok to stop fighting. And I have listened as adult children find the courage to release the parent who has so deeply formed them.  “I love you, dad. You have taken good care of me. Thank you for loving me. It’s ok for you to go now.”

It is a sacred passage. These are Holy moments.

Continue reading “Not Yet the Death Rattle by Marcia Mount Shoop”