Announcing the 2017 Rosemary Radford Ruether Conference by Grace Yia-Hei Kao

On October 7, 2017, five distinguished panelists will speak at a one-day event: the Rosemary Radford Ruether Conference for Justice and Peace. Co-sponsored by the Friends of Sabeel—North America (FOSNA), Claremont Area FOSNA, Claremont School of Theology, and the Women’s Studies in Religion program at Claremont Graduate University, the conference will be held at Pilgrim Place (Decker Hall)–the retirement community for folks serving in religious or charitable organizations where Dr. Ruether currently resides.

Continue reading “Announcing the 2017 Rosemary Radford Ruether Conference by Grace Yia-Hei Kao”

Cleaning and Cleansing: Rituals of Embodied Life by Carol P. Christ

While the world is falling apart all around me, I have been slowly engaged in a major cleaning and cleansing of my home.

It started when I began to move my summer clothes to my main closet in June.  Here in Greece we have no tradition of second-hand stores, Goodwill, or Salvation Army. This makes it difficult to get rid of anything: often the garbage can is the only option. Still, I began with my clothes, tossing out even some much loved and still beautiful things that no longer fit. My Greek-Albanian cleaning lady took all of them, and I didn’t ask her what she did with them.

Then I moved on to the kitchen. Continue reading “Cleaning and Cleansing: Rituals of Embodied Life by Carol P. Christ”

The Internet and the Divine? by Ivy Helman

studyWhen my dad was in town for the wedding, he asked me a question about Prague.  I didn’t know the answer.  So, I said, “let me look on my all-knowing phone.”  I googled the question, found a reliable website and told him what it said.

I used to only mention the qualifier all-knowing, or omniscient, in relation to theology, often in discussions of theodicy: who is the divine in the midst of evil and suffering?  If we presume that G-d is all-knowing, does that mean that the divine has competition?  Perhaps that is a crass remark, but I also think there is a measure of truth to the idea.  In reality, the phone is not a divine competitor, but the internet might be.  And, maybe, then the phone is our intermediary or our way to access the divine.  Computers belong to this distinction as well.

This concept of technology taking the place of the divine is not new.  The television set has been accused of being an altar.  That is clearly not a compliment.  Continue reading “The Internet and the Divine? by Ivy Helman”

Bridging Beyond Binaries: Painting Gloria Anzaldúa by Angela Yarber

One of the great joys of being an artist and writer is working on commissions, enlivening in paint, canvas, and word the stories of revolutionary holy women who have emboldened and inspired the one commissioning the Holy Woman Icon. Gloria Anzaldúa was on my list of holy women for a while when Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza finally gave me the nudge to paint her by commissioning an icon. Anzaldúa gave Robyn—and so many others—the framework, the bridgework, for dismantling the binaries of difference, for finding the beauty that resides at the borderlands of race, gender, and sexuality. As a scholar-activist, Robyn speaks of Anzaldúa as a patron saint, saying:

“Anzaldúa has always been for me the bridge between theory and action, and her work, both in writing and teaching, compels me to live into my vocation as a public theologian, which at root is bridging across lines of radical difference. Without Anzaldúa and without her bridging frame, I am unable to do the work that I now do. This icon offers me a visual reminder of the ways in which I’m called to be a bridge in curating communities of radical difference.”

Queer borderlands. Chicana borderlands. Feminist borderlands. Gloria Anzaldúa (September 26, 1942 – May 15, 2004) was an American scholar who focused on the intersections among queer theory, feminist theory, and Chicana cultural theory. Born in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, Anzaldúa also bridged the borders of personal and academic writing, weaving together theory with lived experience, English with Spanish, and inviting readers into a new world—Mundo Zurdo—that transcended these seeming binaries. Continue reading “Bridging Beyond Binaries: Painting Gloria Anzaldúa by Angela Yarber”

Book Review: FLORENCE IN ECSTASY by Jessie Chaffee

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Jessie Chaffee‘s Florence in Ecstasy is the most luminous debut novel I have read in a very long time. Imagine, if you will, a darker and more literary version of Elizabeth Gilbert’s popular spiritual seeker’s memoir, Eat Pray Love. This is not to diminish Gilbert’s memoir, which I loved, but Chaffee offers a much deeper dive into the dark night of a woman’s soul.

Hannah, a young American from Boston, goes to Florence, Italy to heal herself after her professional and personal life back home has disintegrated due to her anorexia. Surely, in life-loving Italy, where every meal is a celebration, Hannah can heal her disturbed relationship with food and her own body. Similarly, Eat Pray Love, with its luscious descriptions of Italian cuisine and Gilbert’s rejection of dieting in favor of buying a bigger pair of jeans, deals with body image issues and is often recommended reading for women and girls recovering from eating disorders.

But Chaffee’s novel, unlike Gilbert’s memoir, is no easy-going, feel-good read. Continue reading “Book Review: FLORENCE IN ECSTASY by Jessie Chaffee”

Gaining Perspective by Natalie Weaver

I don’t know if I could be a deep-sea welder.  I don’t know what the risks of lethal electrocution, broken limbs, or the bends would be.  I suspect it can be a dangerous occupation, like operating heavy equipment on good old dry land or fishing for crab or even collecting garbage from the neighbors’ driveways.  So too is this the case with window washing, paving, disposing of medical waste, brick making, driving a giant tanker truck, and more.  There are aspects of the world I know I take for granted, but the moment I stop to consider what those aspects might be, I am humbled and reminded of the privilege it is to philosophize and ponder the functions of religion in the shaping and making of society.

I have a newfound, barely there insight, both on my privilege and my need to be wiser, derived from the use of (hold your breath) a yardstick.  In what is either a desperate gambit for meaning or the fulfillment of a dream long deferred, I returned to school to take some art classes this fall.  I have my own homework, assignments, a syllabus, and, gasp, grades to worry about for the first time since 2003.  As I drove in the dark and rain for almost an hour this morning at 6:00 am, to a parking lot that sits a solid half hour away from the bus I need to take, which deposits me a fifteen minute walk from the building where I study, in order to make a 7:45 am start time, I wondered briefly what I was doing and why.  But, as soon as I took out my yardstick to measure and represent objects in perspective, I remembered why I undertook such an errand. Continue reading “Gaining Perspective by Natalie Weaver”

Shame and the Caregiving Relationship by Stephanie Arel

I was asked recently to present my work on shame and guilt for a documentary about the experience of being in a caregiving relationship. Initially, I felt concerned. My conceptualization of the idea of caregiving circulated around 1) aspects of parenthood and 2) the inevitable life situation of witnessing a parent’s death. I have no experience with either of these. I expressed my concern to the producer and one of the cameramen as we discussed the protocol for the shoot. They suggested I try to tell stories. This perplexed me a little further. Then, in order to offer me a context, they posed questions about times I might have cared for people in the past. Their inquiry uncovered a large range of possible, personal caregiving experiences upon which I could draw. For me, these include experiences involving my in-laws, my aunt’s dying of cancer when I was a child, and, most currently, my tending to a friend who had a massive stroke at the brain stem at the age of 40.

What struck me most during the conversation was the way that I eschewed being called a “caregiver.” The cameraman noted that this was not an unusual phenomenon. Apparently, people consider the word “caregiver” somehow stigmatizing and resist its use. AARP has tried to come up with an alternative term but has not been successful. (As an aside, AARP’s website has useful resources for the caregiver.) The stigma undulating beneath the undertaking of caregiving aligns it with the experience of shame. Continue reading “Shame and the Caregiving Relationship by Stephanie Arel”

SHEELA-NA-GIG by Carol P. Christ

On a trip to Ireland several years ago, I was fortunate to have been able to see the Sheela-na-gigs in the National Museum of Dublin.  Two of these Sheelas including the one removed from the Seir Kieran Church of County Offaly, pictured below, are currently on display.  They stand at the doorway of a room dedicated to items from the medieval period and easily missed.  As there was little interest in them and they are not in cases, I was able to silently commune without interruption.

Continue reading “SHEELA-NA-GIG by Carol P. Christ”

Are These Three Novels Prophetic? Part 2: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy by Barbara Ardinger

Members of this community (and others) have been feeling that the world is out of balance since the 2016 election. There’s a feeling that people are becoming less kind and that some men (following the model that lives and tweets in the White House when he’s not at one of his golf resorts) are more misogynistic. I’ve heard that Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eight-Four is more popular than ever before. We seem to be living in a new dystopia. It’s very sad and very scary.

I’ve recently reread three novels that I think may be both prophetic and inspiring. I’m hoping that if you read them, too, you’ll inspired by their brave heras to keep on resisting. The novels are Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1996) by Sheri S. Tepper, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy, and The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) by Starhawk.

The woman who is on the edge of time is Consuelo (Connie) Ramos, a Mexican-American who lives in a New York barrio and has a life so dreadful that even as Piercy describes the poverty and the abuse in exquisite detail, I can’t really see it…though I bet any homeless person who lives on or under a freeway overpass could add more horrific details. Connie’s father beat her, two of her three husbands beat her, her daughter’s pimp beats her. Her brother has anglicized himself by changing his name from Luis to Lewis. Her third husband was a blind black musician named Claud; it was while she was deep in mourning (and withdrawal) that she struck out at her daughter and injured her, which led to her first imprisonment (Lewis signed the committal forms) in an insane asylum that is immeasurably worse than, say, Dotheboys Hall in Oliver Twist. The bureaucrats who run the asylums have zero interest in their patients. If a patient complains of a burnt back (the pimp knocked Connie into a hot stove) or a headache, that patient is accused of making a “medical diagnosis.” The favored treatment? Huge doses of Thorazine, which has terrible side-effects. Connie finds herself “stymied, trapped, and drugged with Thorazine that sapped her will and dulled her brain and drained her body of energy.”

Continue reading “Are These Three Novels Prophetic? Part 2: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy by Barbara Ardinger”

Fostering Conversation and Connection in Community by Katie M. Deaver

I recently began a new job as the Associate Director of Admissions for the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, one of the seminaries of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.   This week was orientation for our new and returning students and much of the time has been focused on getting to know one another as well as getting to know the corner of Chicago in which we are located.  There have been so many life giving conversations as well as so many questions!

Our mornings featured speakers who helped us to engage one another in conversation as well as to start thinking about the unique reality of our place within not only the LSTC community but also within the rest of the Chicago community and the larger world.  Throughout these presentations  and getting to know you activities my thoughts continued to be pulled back to the question of how to have life-giving conversations in a time when so many of us feel emotionally and spiritually drained by the world around us.

Continue reading “Fostering Conversation and Connection in Community by Katie M. Deaver”