Feminism and Religion

Knossos: The Truly True Story by Barbara Ardinger

Barbara Ardinger (Note: this story was inspired by a blog written by Carol P. Christ. But she’s not responsible for the nonsense I write.)

Once upon a time there was a woman named Carol who lived in the largest house on the Island of Crete and had the largest flower garden and the largest herd of cattle. Because of her riches, not to mention her common sense, she had been elected chief of the Council of Mothers, the government of the island. The Council had searched and searched for a proper title for their leader and finally, reluctantly, decided that Queen was as good as anything else…as long as everyone remained politically correct and understood that Queen was merely a handy title. Queen Carol had a husband named Minos who tried and tried to assume the title of King, but no one ever paid any attention to his pretensions. Because he had nothing else to do, he spent most of his time lounging in the front parlor and reading the Knossos Times-Myth-Dispatch.

“Look here,” he said one day, waving the newspaper at his wife. “The Greeks are ramping up for a war over in Troy. They’re calling for kings and armies to join them.”

Carol laid her feather duster aside for a minute. “Well, if you really want to,” she said, “you can go. It’ll be better for you than sitting around here all the time and complaining that you’re bored. But you’d better not come back here and set yourself up as a warrior king! None of those huge statues like they’ve built in Egypt. None of those huge temples with carvings of conquering armies on them, either. We mothers won’t stand for it!”

Continue reading “Knossos: The Truly True Story by Barbara Ardinger”

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right by John Erickson

Kim Davis does need a lot of things but saying of suggesting that she needs a haircut, a makeover, or even to lose weight, makes you and those that continue to repeat it no better than she is; to state such statements doesn’t purport the ideal that #LoveWins, which took over social media just mere months ago, but changes the whole narrative to symbolize that sexism and hate are more important than love and equality.

Kim Davis, the defiant county clerk, is currently sitting in isolation in a jail cell after refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Rowan County, Kentucky, even after she was ordered by a judge to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage or be held in contempt of court.

Everywhere I turn on both social media or in person people are talking about Ms. Davis, her actions, personal history and for some weird reason her hair and looks. I’m all for individuals taking a virulent stand against an individual who chooses to not uphold the law of the land as well as continually acting in an unjust discriminatory way but bringing her looks or anything else about her physical appearance into the narrative is not only just plain wrong it is sexism in its worst form. Continue reading “Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right by John Erickson”

Life’s a Garden by Jassy Watson

Gardening is one of my greatest loves. The rhythm of the earth revealed in this little piece of Eden in sunny Queensland Australia, pulses in the cells of my being. Through close observation of the natural cycle of all life in my garden and atuning into the greater cosmological ebbs and flows, waxes and wanes I have come to know intimately not only this ‘outer’ space, but the inner as well.

Imagery and metaphor are effective tools for personal growth and transformation and the metaphor of gardening is a powerful way of looking at and experiencing the process of inner growth. I only need to look to my garden to see what needs tending, weeding, pruning, tilling, feeding, harvesting and composting in my life. Continue reading “Life’s a Garden by Jassy Watson”

Venus and Mary by Natalie Weaver

Natalie Weaver edited Of the many things I have read recently, one thing stands out in my mind in high relief. It is the opening of Lucretius’ masterwork on Epicurean philosophy, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). Here Lucretius invokes Venus to help him craft this work, identifying her as the governor of all nature and the one through whose light all else comes into being. With her help, Lucretius trusts that he can write his truths with confidence and ability in defiance of dominant philosophical norms.

Lucretius goes on to extol the great wisdom of that ancient Greek, Epicurus, claiming that the philosopher saved humankind from foully groveling upon the ground by liberating people from religious superstition. Superstition, he goes on to say, is the source of true impiety and criminality, made manifest in Lucretius’ example in the sacrifice of child virgins.

Why do people succumb to religious superstition and such horrible deeds, he queries rhetorically. Because of fear of death, terror at the anticipation of penalties in the afterlife, and the desire to avoid tribulations during life. So great is the fear of suffering that it makes people susceptible to religious exploitation and subordinate to the authority of priests, whose power rests exclusively on superstition. Such a ruinous condition can only be countered by the philosophical examination of nature, including all things celestial and terrestrial, spiritual and material. Having prayerfully introduced his case and the reason for his critique, Lucretius proceeds to explore the basic tenets of Epicurean metaphysics and ethics. Continue reading “Venus and Mary by Natalie Weaver”

Why Is Pizza Round? The Black Goddess of Rome by Stuart Dean

The remains of an ancient Roman bread pie from Pompeii, carbonized in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE — The remains of an ancient Roman bread pie from Pompeii,
carbonized in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE

The poem Moretum (discussed in my last post) narrates the preparation of a meal that can be characterized in modern English as ‘pizza.’ Round flatbread is baked; to go on it, a cheese spread is mixed. The details of the narration are such as to create a recipe of its ingredients and related cooking instructions.

The most important ingredient, however, is not an ‘ingredient’ as such, but a shape. The bread, the cheese, and the cheese spread are all round. That by itself might not seem remarkable, but the Latin terminology (words from which ‘orbit’ and ‘globe’ derive) is identical to then contemporary astrological terminology. The bread is even scored into quadrants, symbolizing, among other things, the four elements and the quadrants of an astrological observer’s circle.

The ancient audience of Moretum would have recognized in all this the world view of the Italian poet from southern Campania, Parmenides. Though the only poem he is known to have composed is in Greek, the combination of the fact that he likely wrote it while in Italy and that it had over the centuries since its composition become one of the most influential philosophical works of pre-Christian antiquity meant Parmenides had special importance to Romans. It is not surprising Moretum has the same meter and many of the poetic images as are found in the poem of Parmenides. Continue reading “Why Is Pizza Round? The Black Goddess of Rome by Stuart Dean”

Holding On Too Tightly by Sara Frykenberg

Raised in an evangelical, Protestant Christian tradition, I was repeatedly told that “God is love.” God is love. While much of my Christian experience was difficult and even abusive, I have always interpreted this teaching—while sometimes confusing to me, and other times, fueling my spiritual inquiry—as a positive thing. When learning to shed the abusive contexts in my life, I did so encouraged by those who knew that love and god/dess shouldn’t be abusive. When challenging and responding to abusive paradigms within Christianity through my dissertation writing process, I reflected on how leaving an abusive cycle can feel like a hiccup from love, a frozen breathlessness and confusion on how to access love in new ways; but I also had to conclude that love hadn’t really been absent, even if hard to find.

God/dess is love—even when the dominating power celebrated within a particular religion, family or society distorts access to god/dess-loving. Yet, this issue with access, the trained approach to receiving love that is taught in an abusive context, is a habit that I have had to continually and consciously shed. I catch myself falling into patterns of get-love-through-control or get-love-through-performance behaviors. I try to be someone or something to ensure my access to what I perceive as love, sometimes finding it hard to accept that I am loveable without performance, role-playing or being someone that somebody else wants me to be. The more I experience mutual loving—or as Carter Heyward puts it, “godding” –the less I fall into this trap of performance; and the more I realize that my “performing” who I think others want me to be actually hinders my most loving relationships. However, while living outside of the abusive context has become easier in my life, sometimes I panic. Sometimes I hold on too tightly, afraid of the reality of loving without (the illusion of) control. Continue reading “Holding On Too Tightly by Sara Frykenberg”

Argument from “Absence” and Absence of Dialogue by Carol P. Christ

Recently in a conversation with a noted archaeologist and his male graduate student assistant, I proposed that the absence of war and the trappings of war, including images of larger than life-size warrior kings, suggested to me that we should not understand the social structure of ancient Crete on the model of patriarchal kingship. “Kings are always warriors,” I said, “yet there is no clear and convincing evidence of organized warfare in ancient Crete. And,” I continued, “because warrior kingship is not a ‘natural state,’ but one achieved through warfare and domination, kings must legitimate and celebrate their power through larger than life-size images of themselves. Such images were common in ancient Sumer and in ancient Egypt, but are not found in ancient Crete.”

The response I received was unexpected: both archaeologists seemed dumbfounded. “Is kingship always associated with war?” they asked. “Yes,” I responded, “this is a conclusion I reached many years ago while studying the cultures of ancient Greece and ancient Israel, and I have recently elaborated this theory in a series of essays on the blog Feminism and Religion ( See “Patriarchy as a System of Male Dominance Created at the Intersection of the the Control of Women, Private Property, and War”).” Continue reading “Argument from “Absence” and Absence of Dialogue by Carol P. Christ”

I am mad by Mama Donna Henes

I am mad. So very mad. No, that doesn’t begin to describe it. I am pissed. I am angry. I am irate. I am incensed. I am outraged. I am enraged. I am livid. I am GODDESS DAMN FURIOUS.

“All men are created equal,” states the Declaration of Independence. From the very beginning, women were denied equality in this country. It has taken over two centuries for women to win the right to vote, to have alleged protection under the law, to earn as much as 68 and 77 cents on the dollar (depending on our skin color) that men are paid, and to gain control over our own bodies and destinies.

And now, nearly 250 years later, we are seeing our rights, our freedoms, our health care being stripped away, one by one, by mean spirited, misogynistic, right wing religious uber-conservatives. In 2015 there is still no Equal Rights Amendment. Women are still not equal under the law. Continue reading “I am mad by Mama Donna Henes”

Covenanting Justice. Covenanting Joy. by Margot Van Sluytman

Margot Justice as a lived and living experience is a poem. Is a song. And as a song it is filled with all manner of rhythm, of texture, and of sound via melody and lyric which affects us in an infinity of ways. The voice of poetry is the voice of The Song of Songs. It is a voice of invitation. Chapter Two of The Song of Songs is an invitation to strangers to Scripture. Strangers who want to feel a rhythm of joy, of loving embrace of tender and generous welcome. The gravity of the language is its graceful invitation to be seen, to be gazed at, to be heard.

My own vocation as a Sawbonna/Restorative Justice practitioner and a Therapeutic Writing facilitator, has blessed me with the opportunity to share words, via Word, in many different places and spaces around the Globe. The word that I use for justice as a lived and living experience is: Sawbonna. Sawbonna is a Zulu greeting that means I see you. You see me. I hear you. You hear me. Sawbonna contextualizes Restorative Justice in the crucible of our connectedness. Sawbonna, which is the essence of Chapter Two of The Song of Songs, clears the way for engagement, via words, with Word. Continue reading “Covenanting Justice. Covenanting Joy. by Margot Van Sluytman”

I Am A Woman’s Poet by Marie Cartier

This is the first poem I ever wrote and had published.

I wrote it in the early 80s at the height of the second wave of Women’s Liberation.

Having just returned from the final Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, I publish it here with FAR today as an homage to that time period, to those women (myself among them), to many “womyn with a ‘y,’” and what we accomplished—battered women’s shelters, rape crisis centers, health clinics, women’s studies programs, bookstores, festivals, music and culture etc. etc.

Much of what we accomplished is because we learned to listen to each other’s repetition until, as Nelle Morton said, we “heard each other into speech.” Continue reading “I Am A Woman’s Poet by Marie Cartier”