Feminism and Religion

Hal’s Backyard Hustle directed by Annie Spiegelman

All female Bay Area film crew. Photo credit: William Buzbuzian

An email with a video titled “Hal’s Backyard Hustle” and a short introduction came into our inbox recently. The video is meant as comedy but with the serious intent of inspiring younger adults to vote. It made us (the behind-the-scenes FAR co-weavers) chuckle a couple of times. We’re delighted that people are creatively finding ways to encourage voting and, with that, protect our rights.

As the imitable Carol P. Christ started writing and teaching us so many years ago, the underlying purpose of patriarchy is to control women’s bodies and fertility.

We are seeing this taken to the extremes in our own country here in the U.S. Women who can’t access the most basic standards of care are left traumatized and some are dying. Police forces have been pressed into the duty of policing women’s bodies. Legislatures are writing laws for maximum cruelty. Exceptions (for rape, incest, blah, blah, blah) are nothing more than gaslighting projects to make the law makers seem more compassionate because in practice they are meaningless. Just how close to death does a women need to be before she can be treated? Does the rapist have to be convicted before a pregnant rape-survivor can access care? Because, really, according to patriarchy, you can’t trust women. Nor doctors.

Flowers — Gifts of Goddess by Judith Shaw

I was captivated by a bunch of wispy, weedy zinnia flowers on my dining-room table, with its bright blossoms sprinkled on the curling stems. The zinnias pulled me from my current obsession with sea goddesses into a different zone, into the Kingdom of Plants (Kingdom Plantae). The Plant Kingdom is an important part of Goddess manifest, having come into being long before the appearance of our human family. It’s no wonder that flowers and other members of the Plant Kingdom play an important part in the mythology of our ancestors worldwide.

*Zinnia Joy*, gouache on paper by Judith Shaw

Elderberrying with the Yei by Sara Wright

Every year at the end of August I celebrate the Wild Harvest by gathering elderberries to make a medicinal tincture that I use all year long and share with close friends.

This gathering is a process that begins in the spring as I search for new bushes and then later blossoming elderberry flowers in old and new places. As the summer progresses, I continue to monitor the bushes searching for those with berries. Beginning in early August I am on alert for ripening. I am especially mindful because our weather is changing rapidly. If the trend of bad air, fog, and too many deluges continues unabated it’s probable that the times for harvesting berries may shift. In addition, many of the wild places that once supported elderberry bushes have been manicured to get rid of the wild plants by mowing them down, bulldozing the soil to remove all greenery, etc. The rape of wild nature has escalated with time.

This year I have been especially fortunate because I found new clusters bursting out in places they weren’t before. I think the Elder – Berry Woman is helping me. Destroying these precious wild plants and their habitat means that a once common ancient Native plant remedy may be disappearing. Despite horticultural advertising our elderberry bushes do not do well in cultivation, if they survive at all.

Legacy of Carol P Christ: WAR, WAR, WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR?

This was originally posted Sept 16, 2013. It is sadly pertinent today

“They used chemical weapons, we must do something to stop them.” A justification widely used in support of President Obama’s decision to launch a military strike against Syria.

We fought the Civil War to end slavery and racism. We fought the Second World War to end fascism. Did we end racism? Did we end fascism? Howard Zinn

At the time of the Revolutionary War, “a not inconsiderable Quaker element was on principle opposed to war, as itself a greater evil than any it might seek to right.”

Michelle Obama is against military intervention in Syria. Does the President dismiss Michelle’s dissent as “womanish”?

Queering Herstory Profiles by Anjeanette LeBoeuf

We are back with a new volume of uncovering and focusing on extraordinary persons. We start our first post of Volume II with 4 figures who in many ways throw history, narrative, and the status quo off their axis. All 4, if alive in 2024, would find solidarity and kinship with the Queer Community. So let us being.

Hatshepsut (1508-1458 BCE) Egyptian Pharaoh.

Hatshepsut was the daughter of Thutmose I, wife to Thutmose II, and stepmother to Thutmose III. Her husband died while his heir was too young to ascend the throne. Hatshepsut became not only the acting regent but full fledge ruler. She would reign for 21 years as the 5^th Ruler of the 18^th Dynasty of Egypt. Her reign was prosperous including funding for art, statues, and monuments that have stood the test of time and active destruction. Deir –el-Bahari became a significant temple for Hatshepsut.

The Purpose of Women by Beth Bartlett

12^th century theologian Thomas Aquinas didn’t think much of women. He’d known less than a handful during his lifetime – his mother, who sent him off to a Benedictine monastery when he was five, as was the custom at the time, and later abducted and imprisoned him, with the help of her other sons, seeking to “rescue” him from his choice of becoming a Dominican priest; his two sisters who were sent to him while imprisoned to dissuade him from his choice; and the prostitute his brothers sent into his prison cell to try to tempt him to sin and break his vows – unsuccessfully. So perhaps it is no wonder that Question 92 of his Summa Theologica asks, “Should woman have been made in the original creation?” Though more likely his question was prompted by the milieu of misogyny in which he was raised and lived, having been educated in the theological tradition of Augustine who believed women to be the “lesser” sex and necessarily subject to men, and highly schooled in and known for reviving the thought of Aristotle, who said of women, “a woman is a misbegotten man.”[i]

Daughters of Witches By Julia Park Tracey

“We are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn.”

That’s a popular meme going around the internet these days, as we await the joyful coming of our savior, Kamala Harris, or the End Times, with the Mango Mussolini. I say that only slightly in jest, because I do believe we are in a fraught time. A woman president could set us up for incredible progressive movement, while a Trump/Vance win could mark the beginning of the end of women’s rights altogether.

There’s no way not to be political in an essay about feminism and religion, so if the current election is not of interest to you, I say, enjoy your privileges while you can and I hope the leopards don’t eat your face, as another meme goes. Regardless, the bodies of witches and the bodies of all our women, young and old, are still interconnected, both by virtue of our gender and of our position as political pawns (again? still? It is to weep).

By Song, All Was Created by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

This blogpost is part of an on-going collaborative project between myself and my dear friend Ecuadorian elder and medicine woman, Susana Tapia Leon. The purpose of the project is to illuminate in word and images the underlying pagan meanings of biblical verses. There are many rich verses that got hidden within translations. This has had the effect of erasing their original meanings or at least making them very difficult to uncover. I have come to call these hidden gems because they were not erased completely. In this post, I am offering alternative translations of 3 verses that focus on song.

Susana Tapia Léon, Cantadora 1
“She came alive after a month of work
She was always inside waiting to be revealed.”

Why Ritual in Turbulent Times? by Terry Folks

It is Autumnal Equinox. Five women gather equidistant apart beneath a giant avocado tree in the garden at Evi’s place near the village of Zaros. This little hamlet is under the watchful loving eye of Psiloritis (Mount Idi) on the Island of Crete in Greece. We leave the solitude of our individual cottages where we have been quarantined to co-create an Autumnal Equinox ritual I have initiated for this occasion. Since we are still testing positive for COVID, we maintain our distance. I have a nasty strain as I’m exhausted, foggy, my nose bleeds, and I’m coughing so much my head hurts. Still … this ritual is important as our morale seriously needs a boost. We are dubbed the five “Corona Sisters” or the “COVID Girls” whose Goddess Pilgrimage on Crete was cut short when we contracted the virus somewhere between our homes in Australia, Canada and the United States, and our arrival in Heraklion a few short days ago. We have renamed ourselves the “Avocado Sisterhood” to acknowledge the blessing of our togetherness, and we represent a quarter of the women participating in Carol Christ’s Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete in 2023.

Seeds of Life by Sara Wright

I have been involved with plants since I was a toddler. My first word was ‘fower’ for bright yellow buttercups, a nickname I was given by my grandfather that stuck.

I guess it’s no surprise that I started out with gardening as a three-year-old under my grandmother’s tutelage. Her large vegetable plot fed us for most of the year. I seeded my first yellow summer squash into rich moist earth and watched with wonder as the seed emerged with two emerald ears.

In college when students were decorating their rooms with drapes and bedspreads, I bought a pepper plant to brighten my cement surroundings and soon had a windowsill full of plants.

As a young adult I grew many house plants and often talked to them, noting that we seemed to have an uncanny personal relationship, a childhood reality that I had been educated out of. I also gardened with herbs outside my back door, because I loved to cook and needed tasty condiments. Soon I moved on to planting a full – fledged vegetable plot. I canned what I could like my grandmother still longing for the bountiful flower gardens of my dreams. I come from a lineage of female flower gardeners and farmers that stretched back three generations (that I know of) but as a young single mother who worked and one who was frozen from loss, I didn’t make the time.