Asking for Help by Carol P. Christ

I climbed trees and rode my bike and roller skated on sidewalks for hours on end when I was a child. As an adult, I have always been physically strong without having to work at it. Nor have I had to think much about my health. I have been able to trust my body to do pretty much everything I wanted it to do. I am also fiercely independent. And I don’t always like to be touched because my body is extremely sensitive to other people’s energies.

On the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete I was always the first one in and out of the caves and usually the first or one of the first up and down the mountains too. This changed when I injured my knee a few years ago in one of the caves and then six months later re-injured it in a fall on my front steps. I was told not to stress my knee by the pharmacist, and as a consequence stopped walking and doing yoga. I began to lose my physical strength. Continue reading “Asking for Help by Carol P. Christ”

Academics and Activism by Ivy Helman

unnamedTwo weeks ago, I spoke at a conference entitled “The Role of Academia and Religious Leaders in Relation to Refugees and the ‘Refugee Crisis,’” in Bratislava, Slovakia.  One of the main questions of the conference was: what role do academics play in the refugee crisis?  Are academics activists?  Many conference presenters and attendees directly linked the two ideas.  However, there were some who voiced their concern as to how in-touch academics actually are with reality and surmised that because of this academics probably weren’t activists. Wait!  What?  How can we not be activists?

On the way to the first night’s dinner, I had a conversation with someone who did not see academics as activists.  Why?  The response I got was that academic research functioned in a way that was largely inaccessible to the public and therefore academic work, academic participation in conferences as well as publishing was, for lack of a better word, unrealistic and impractical.  It would seem that some people are quite convinced that most academics are quite content being situated in that proverbial ivory tower. Continue reading “Academics and Activism by Ivy Helman”

Holy Women Icons Bearing the Light of Advent by Angela Yarber

There’s nothing like the holiday season to bring out everyone’s least feminist self. In one of the courses that I teach—Gender, Food, and the Body in Popular Culture—students are assigned to examine gender roles throughout the holiday season through the lens intersectional ecofeminism. Inevitably, almost every student returns from holiday break with the same assessment: mom, grandma, and a kitchen full of women prepare, cook, and clean every family meal; women do the holiday shopping; men in the family watch sports. Of course, this isn’t true of everyone. There are plenty of families who subvert and dismantle stereotypical gender roles, but the holidays seem to heighten these roles, undergirding them with some kind of nostalgic and theological weight that claims that if mama doesn’t arduously prepare her famed casserole, the season will be ruined. Otherwise committed feminists find themselves singing carols filled with sexist language and participating in holiday rituals that they would critique any other time of the year. Subversion be damned because we want our traditional family holiday!

I’ve long struggled with creative ways to subversively approach the holidays as a queer clergywoman, parent, artist, and author. People like their nostalgic and heart-warming traditions, even when they sometimes smack of patriarchy, racism, and heteronormativity. I’ve confronted this as a preacher and worship planner, often to raised eyebrows or angry phone calls from congregants who just want to sing the carols without the preacher changing the words, or dismissing the notion of a virgin birth, or hanging enormous paintings of pregnant women all over the sanctuary.

Continue reading “Holy Women Icons Bearing the Light of Advent by Angela Yarber”

The Feminine Mystique and Marx by Elisabeth Schilling

Betty Friedan interviewed the unhappy housewives, their human potential unfulfilled by a lack of vocation outside the home. I wonder if her claim was just a premise of the lawn being more manicured on the other side. The book received criticism by reviewers asking who was really oppressed and what perspectives were ignored. I’ve been on a few lawns, and I am here to confirm there is no true green grass anywhere. Mostly it’s either covered with the blood of women who die in the Global South because of the poor working conditions that pay them too little to support their families or laced with pesticides for profit or sheets of concrete to the dismay of our feet. I suppose there might green grass somewhere, but it costs more than some of us can afford, meaning a woman would have to earn more than what is only enough to rent a room in someone else’s house, an apartment of her own being too expensive much less any sort of fund for a cabin in the woods.  

I also want to talk about the middle class. Work is important. I agree with Friedan to the extent that we need something to do that inspires us, that gives us purpose. Marx liked work too. But he critiqued the capitalist tendency to cause an imbalance in the lives of the working classes. In The Grundrisse, he says, “The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power.” Continue reading “The Feminine Mystique and Marx by Elisabeth Schilling”

High Stakes for Women in Leadership: A Reflection and a Prayer by Elise M. Edwards

elise-edwardsA few weeks ago, I was asked to give the invocation for a luncheon at my university.  Baylor University was celebrating our presidential inauguration and there were several events leading up to the installation of the university’s 15th president. The inauguration was historic because it ceremonially marks the beginning of a term for our first female president, Dr. Linda A. Livingstone.

As I write, it is a year after Hillary Rodham Clinton lost the election for President of the United States of America. Like many of us, I’m still coming to terms with the choice my nation made, and how we came to it.  I’m thinking about women in leadership, especially occasions such leadership marks a first, a departure for an institution or system marked by male privilege.

What does it mean when an institution is willing to deviate from its long-established patterns of leadership and entrust its governance to women?

Continue reading “High Stakes for Women in Leadership: A Reflection and a Prayer by Elise M. Edwards”

How Do We Heal Rape Culture? Part 2: How to Help Men Become Safer by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

In Part 1, I presented a spectrum of male behaviors and attitudes, from violently misogynistic to safe ally. Next it is time to think about how we – as women, male allies, and society – can help men move up that scale to become increasingly safer for women. The strategies will differ depending on where a man starts out. However, using current research about change theory, we can find some concrete strategies to help us start to make progress.

The Research

Social scientists have conducted many studies about persuasion and social change, and I encourage everyone to follow these research trends. For this piece, I will focus on a few simple ideas about what works. I’m gearing this advice mainly toward men who want to become safer and to help other men become safer, but some of it applies to women as well. It also applies to religious communities – if they prioritize this issue, the men who attend will learn to be safer.

Continue reading “How Do We Heal Rape Culture? Part 2: How to Help Men Become Safer by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir”

Of Monument(al) Importance by Esther Nelson

I remember being blown away when I read Judith Plaskow’s book, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, shortly after it was published in 1990. She writes, “The need for a feminist Judaism begins with hearing silence.” She notes it’s a “silence so vast [it] tends to fade into the natural order….”  Women’s presence throughout Judaism has not been reflected in Jewish scripture, Jewish law, or in liturgical expression.

Plaskow zeroes in on the story in Exodus where the entire Israelite congregation, gathered at the base of Mt. Sinai, eagerly anticipates entry into the covenant, “the central event that established the Jewish people.” Before this communal event, the covenant had been entered into by way of the individual patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  The particularly disturbing verse for Plaskow is Exodus 19:15: “Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman.”

The specific issue Moses addresses is ritual impurity since the emission of semen renders both parties that engage in coitus temporarily unfit to engage with the sacred.  Both women and men need to be ceremonially purified before approaching the holy.  However, Moses does not say “Men and women do not go near each other.”  At this crucial juncture in Jewish history, “Moses addresses the community only as men.” The text makes women invisible. Clearly it was men’s experience that shaped Torah.

Plaskow writes that “[Jewish] women have always known or assumed our presence at Sinai.” Exodus 19:15 “is painful because it seems to deny what we have always taken for granted. Of course we were at Sinai; how is it then that the text could imply we were not there?”

Why make a big deal of this? Can’t the text, asks Plaskow, be relegated to a time in history “way back then” when people and communities accepted gender inequality as the natural order?  Why not just accept the past for what it was and get on with things?  Because Torah (Hebrew Bible) is not “just” history, “but also living memory.” When the story of Sinai is read and recited in services as part of the lectionary reading over and over again, year after year, “women each time hear ourselves thrust aside anew, eavesdropping on a conversation among men and between men and God.” Continue reading “Of Monument(al) Importance by Esther Nelson”

Please Keep It in Your Pants by Carol P. Christ

Trigger warning: this post describes sexual abuse

Last week while responding to a comment on my blog, I suddenly remembered a series of incidents in which men I did not know exposed themselves to me in public places. The first time occurred at a park around dusk during an outing with a group of girls. I was about 11, I may have wandered away from the group, or I may have been with others. What I remember is seeing a man with his pants down sitting on a park bench, possibly the first time I ever saw an adult man’s penis. I told or we told, but the man was not reported by the adults. Fast forward to the beautiful gardens of the Palace Schoenbrunn in Vienna where I was confronted by a penis while lost in thought when I was 19. I ran, but said nothing. In my 20s at the early showing of movies in New York City men would sit next to me and jerk off into paper bags. Continue reading “Please Keep It in Your Pants by Carol P. Christ”

Tonight Is Guy Fawkes Night by Barbara Ardinger

Mark Twain is reported to have said that while history does not repeat itself, it often rhymes. Let’s see what rhymes we can find in Tudor and Jacobean England and Trumpean America. Here’s the history lesson. What has changed in 400 years?

After about a thousand years of Roman Catholicism in the British Isles (with a few thrusts toward reform, like the 14th century theologian John Wycliffe, who translated the Bible into medieval English), it is Henry VIII who is usually given credit for “reforming” the English church, i.e., declaring his independence from the Roman church and the pope in 1534. While Henry still called himself a good Catholic (and even condemned Martin Luther), it was the Tudors and their advisors that thrust a militant and puritanical Protestantism on the people.

The Tudor dynasty, which lasted just over a century, began with the victory of Henry Tudor (who became Henry VII) over Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485. (Shakespeare turned Richard’s story into a Tudor propaganda play. In real life, Richard was a good king.) Henry’s second son, Henry VIII, was a tyrant who is best known today for his six wives. He was also more interested in luxury (in his day synonymous with vice) and self-aggrandizement than anything else.

Continue reading “Tonight Is Guy Fawkes Night by Barbara Ardinger”

Rest and Renewal: Gifts of Women’s Ritual Dance by Laura Shannon

 Samhain is past, and we in the northern hemisphere are once again entering the final outbreath of the solar year. At the winter solstice, light will be reborn. Until then, it is important to embrace the time of rest and renewal which is the great gift of this season. Like the falling leaves and the drying seeds, we too can relax and release old burdens. This is the best way, perhaps the only way, to draw new strength for the next active phase in the ever-changing cycles of our lives.
Many of us no longer follow the rhythms of the year and consequently subsist in an ongoing state of near-exhaustion. But rather than letting our energies get too depleted, we can learn to thrive within the limits of our available resources. As well as vastly improving the quality of our lives, this may lead to solutions for sustainable living in the long term – perhaps the most important skill humanity needs to develop now.  Continue reading “Rest and Renewal: Gifts of Women’s Ritual Dance by Laura Shannon”