Feminism and Religion

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Exciting New Research on Matriarchal Societies

This post was originally published on Aug. 5th, 2011

The following is a guest post written by Carol Christ, Ph.D., a pioneer and founding mother of the Goddess, women’s spirituality, and feminist theology movements, and director of the Ariadne Institute. She is also the author of multiple books including Rebirth of the Goddess.

Although there are some of us who disagree, the “party line” in the fields of Religious Studies and Archaeology—even among feminists– is that there never were any matriarchies and that claims about peaceful, matrifocal, sedentary, agricultural, Goddess-worshipping societies in Old Europe or elsewhere have been manufactured out of utopian longing.

I myself and most other English-speaking scholars defending Marija Gimbutas’s theories about Old Europe have studiously avoided the word “matriarchy” (speaking rather of “matrifocal, matrilineal, and matrilocal” societies) because the very word “matriarchy” conjures up the image of female-dominated societies where women ruled, waged wars, held men as slaves, and raped and abused men and boys. In fact, this fantasy tells us far more about patriarchy than about it does about matriarchy. Continue reading “Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Exciting New Research on Matriarchal Societies”

Ariadne and Me – The .5% by Arianne MacBean

When I travelled to Crete on a Goddess Pilgrimage last year, we were asked to introduce ourselves by our matrilineal lines. I am Arianne, daughter of Bernadette, granddaughter of Helen and a long line of women, known and unknown, stretching back to Africa. Many of the women in the group were able to intone long lists of names in their matrilineal lines. I was not able to go further than my Grandmother, Helen. No one in my mother’s large Polish family could remember my Great Grandmother’s name.

My journey toward Ariadne has been as circuitous as the labyrinth itself. In many ways, I have been searching for her since those first bedtime stories my father used to tell me as a child, when Theseus was the main character and Ariadne, merely a stop on his road. I longed for her, even then, to have her own heroine’s journey. I tried to imagine what that might look like but, without models, could not conjure anything beyond holding the red thread so others could triumph. Later, I began a more conscious search for Ariadne as I became curious about the connections between her choices, feelings, expressions and my own longings, betrayals, and outbursts. Since then, there have been moments when I let myself fantasize about being connected to her in some real way, beyond being named after her, or feeling and acting as she may have. In these fleeting moments when I imagine we are bonded, I am awash in an intense sense of belonging, something I never felt as an only child of divorced parents. But then in a flash, my mind takes a sharp turn, as in a labyrinth, and I negate those feelings with logic. You want to be connected to Her, so you are finding ways to make it true.

NOT POSITIVE MASCULINITY, BUT FULL HUMANITY by Esther Nelson

The following New York Times article titled “We Can Do Better than ‘Positive Masculinity’” by Ruth Whippman was published on October 9, 2024. Whippman is also the author of the book, REIMAGINING BOYHOOD IN THE AGE OF IMPOSSIBLE MASCULINITIES. Whippman’s New York Times article grabbed my attention.

Decades ago while taking undergraduate courses in the discipline that was then called Women’s Studies (now known as Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies), most of the authors I remember reading insisted that both masculinity and femininity (human ways of being in the world) were cultural constructs, not something innate in humans we refer to as women and men. Throughout the world, societies have shown a lot of variety in ways that women and men express themselves and are expected to behave.

CrossFit, Spirituality, and Trauma: An Introduction by Stephanie Arel with Ashleigh Gibb

We met online. Saram College hosted a theology and trauma workshop that Stephanie taught. Ashleigh asked a question. An immediate connection emerged.

The connection consists of mutual interest and passion around bodies, their strength, their vulnerability; around the spirit, its expressions and its intrinsic materiality; and trauma, what violations to our bodies cause to disrupt and annihilate us. Our interests intersect. Stephanie teaches Scripture and the Human Response to Trauma at Fordham; Ashleigh is a Crossfit Coach and Personal Trainer currently pursuing her PhD. She has nine years of experience working with survivors of trafficking and sexual violence. Together, we recorded a few YouTubes on CrossFit and Spirituality, on Crossfit and Community, and one forthcoming with a topic in the works.

Women’s Bodies As Battlefield by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in the introduction to her book The Women’s Bible:

The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgement seat of Heaven, tried, convicted and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity, a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man’s bounty for all her material wants . .

We are facing the long-term results of these biblical writings. This upcoming election is so unsettling because it is showing patriarchy in all its ugliness. We see how this is being played out, especially regarding abortion, but in all areas of the functioning of women’s bodies. The reason abortion is at the foundation of it all is that the drive to police women’s bodies is the crux which justifies all sorts of cruelties. It is the same with racism. These are issues that span the pantheon of rights; human, economic, healthcare, bodily autonomy. It takes a police state to quell all of these.

Mourning by Beth Bartlett

Grief is the experiencing . . . Mourning is the process,
when we take the grief we have on the inside and express it outside ourselves –
writing, planting, burying, burning, rising up
ceremony, ritual, community[i]

A glimpse of our cottage as I drove away.

“As long as I stayed there, I could keep you with me. . . .” Those words kept repeating in my mind throughout my long drive home from my sister, Jeannie’s, “Celebration of Life” service. I’d stopped midway on my thousand-mile journey at the cabin our family has shared for sixty years. There I could still feel her presence — on the hillside where we so often sat with our morning cups of tea, or watching the sunset, or chatting away the afternoon; on the dock where we’d lie in the sun or sit late at night and watch the stars come out, or cuddle up in blankets on windy, fall days; in the circle of couches and chairs where we played telephone Pictionary, charades, and CatchPhrase; in the kitchen where we’d cooked and eaten and played card games together; in the bedroom we often shared with a dog between our beds; the road where we’d go for family walks – eight, ten, twelve of us all together, and always two, three, or four dogs; even the driveway where we’d greet and hold each other with great gladness after months of separation, and where we’d hug and say goodbye, and then hug once more because in the back of our minds we’d be wondering if this was the last time. . . .

A Leaf Peeper’s Reflection by Sara Wright

Twice a year, once in May for a few days and during the first week of October I can’t leave home because I’ll miss the next moment of spring flowering or scarlet flames.

Last week I was captivated by how the golden morning light affects each deciduous leaf. For about five days I ran inside and out all morning to feast upon the astonishing leaf color changes as the sun rose higher. ‘Fire on the Mountain’, crimson, gold, seductive sultry salmon brilliance. In and out for hours. I drove my dogs crazy. Noting the bees on the blushing hydrangea, glad for dragonflies cruising around the house. Greeting little green frog framed against his log. Breathing in the Light. Infused by all too brief moments of swamp maple’s fierce fiery splendor.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: WOMEN ARTISTS AND RITUALISTS IN THE GREAT CAVES: THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF INDOLENT ASSUMPTIONS

This was originally posted October 21, 2013

In an earlier blog, I suggested that women might have blown red ocher around their hands to leave their marks in prehistoric caves.

At the time I thought this was a rather bold suggestion.

Had I been asked why I thought the images were made by women, I might have said that people have understood caves to be the womb of the Great Mother, the Source of All Life, from time immemorial. I might have added that those who performed rituals in the caves cannot have been performing simple “hunting magic,” but must also have been thanking the Source of Life for making life possible for them and for the great beasts they hunted. Still I am not certain that I imagined women as the artists in the Paleolithic caves.

On Noach and its Ecofeminist Potential.

The Torah portion for November 2, 2024 is Noach. The portion includes the stories of Noah’s ark and the tower of Babel and ends with Abraham and Sarai settling in the land of Canaan. In my feminist analysis of Noach, I will focus on the ecofeminist potential of divine acknowledgements and how the divine is portrayed.

As ecofeminists at the intersection with religion, one task we have is to interpret those sacred texts which have something to say about nature and animals. Within Judaism, there are numerous such texts, and parshah Noah is one of them. Afterall, most of Noach revolves around a great flood in which the deity destroys the earth and most of its inhabitants, animal and human.

The divine destruction of the material realm is problematic. The deity blames the divine decision to destroy creation on the rampant corruption of the flesh: human and animal alike (6:13). In feminist thinking, linking material existence to corruption is unsettling since patriarchy often disavows material existence by linking it to evil. In addition, in Noach, an aspect of the material world, water, is used in bringing about that destruction. However, water is also ironically what all flesh depends on for life.

Why Celebrating the 9th Anniversary of the Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality Movement? (Part 2) by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang

As I noted in Part 1, this year marks the 9^th anniversary of the first volume of She Rises trilogy, a collective writing project, which was first published in 2015 by Mago Books. Entitled Why Goddess Feminism, Activism and Spirituality?, the 93 contributors trumpeted the onset of the Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality. It was followed by the second volume, How… Goddess Feminism, Activism, and Spirituality?, with 96 contributors, in the following year, and the third one, What… Goddess Feminism, Activism, and Spirituality?, in 2019. The 9^th anniversary of the first volume provided a new momentum for all contributors of the trilogy to come together as a virtual group, which we named “She Rises…” This group allows the authors of all three volumes to gather together for the first time, while inviting newcomers from outside the She Rises trilogy.