I have been musing on a presentation I attended at the American Academy of Religion. Associate Dean Donna Bowman, Ph.D. of the University of Central Arkansas spoke on the prayer shawl ministry. Traditionally, the prayer shawl (tallis gadol, in Hebrew) is worn by men, based on the commandment to tie fringes (tzitzit) on the corners of their garments (Numbers 15:38-40). Also traditionally, a man would have one tallis for every day use and a special one for the Jewish New Year and Day of Atonement (Rosh Hashanaha and Yom Kippur). While there is no prohibition in Jewish law against women wearing a tallis there has typically been the understanding that it is a man’s obligation to wear the fringes, so women have not (that whole separation of gender roles thing). But over time, as women have found entrée into Jewish leadership, the tallis started to be worn by us. Some Jewish women now have the most delicate talleisim – pink, gold, lace, dancing women, butterflies, ribbons, etc., while others create stories about Jewish text (midrash) on their talleisim, using symbols, pictures, text phrases, and the like. Continue reading “Evolution of My Tallis by Rabbi D’vorah Rose”
AN ALTAR WITHOUT GOD? A “PLACE” FOR THE SACRED by Sara Frykenberg
The altar was not for particular spirits, but honored all the ‘spirits’ we brought with us to share: the spirits of the women and men in our stories, the memories imbedded in the items we gathered together and the spirit of every person present in the class that day.
Last week my students and I created a non-religious altar to conclude our class, Women, Religion and Spirituality. We read about different feminist spiritual traditions in which women created altars to honor their ancestors, spirits or deities; and I thought it might be fun to practice our own form of literal physical creation. I asked students to bring in inspiring items, pictures of people who’d helped them to grow or anything that honored what they considered sacred in their lives. I also asked them to bring food to share, as no altar seems complete without food of some kind. However, asking my students to participate in a course ritual, I also felt it was important to respect their very different beliefs… which resultantly, left me wondering how we would create an altar without God.
My religious experience taught me that altars were a place to surrender gifts in return for a greater gift of God’s blessing or love. The church I attended as a child did have a literal, physical altar; but this raised table was only used monthly to present the communion bread and grape juice before it was passed through the pews. Otherwise, I came to understand, one’s heart was the altar and we needed to present our sacrifices there. Financial gifts needed to come from the heart, then put into the offering plate. Gifts of time or action had to start in the heart, even when required by the youth group or spiritual authority; and resistance to giving these gifts also required sacrifice. My resistance or lack of desire to sacrifice required that I leave my unwillingness at the altar so that I might become appropriately grateful.
At some point I started leaving too much at the altar; and like Abraham’s Daughter I said enough is enough. I recognized myself in the sisters and brothers lying under the sacrificial sword, and I took back my heart. My heart, I realized, hadn’t been the altar; it had been the offering and sacrifice. Continue reading “AN ALTAR WITHOUT GOD? A “PLACE” FOR THE SACRED by Sara Frykenberg”
Somebody Almost Walked Off With All of My Stuff: And He Didn’t Even Know He Had a Thing of Value on the Open Market* by Carol P. Christ
Gina Messina-Dysert’s blog on sexual harassment by a Religious Studies professor brought up memories that have haunted me for years. It has taken me some months to find the courage to post this story.
When I was an undergraduate, I was very naive and barely dating. I was not as prepared for college work as most of the other students, and I devoted myself to my studies. I had a favorite professor, and I spent a lot of time in his office talking about books and about God. This professor encouraged me to go on for a Ph.D. in his field at a time when a woman with a Ph.D. was an oddity. His belief in my intelligence gave me the courage to overcome my parents’ opposition to the idea that I would pursue a doctorate. His recommendations helped me to win Danforth and Woodrow Wilson Fellowships. I naturally assumed that this professor respected me.
After I began graduate school, I met my former professor at the American Academy of Religion meetings. One time, he invited me to his room for a scotch. There he told me that he had often imagined having sex with me when I was a student discussing religion in his office. I was shocked because I had always thought of this man as a professor–beloved professor, yes, but a lover, no–the thought had never even crossed my mind! Because he was closer in age to my father than to me, I had placed him in the category of father-God-authority figure. Continue reading “Somebody Almost Walked Off With All of My Stuff: And He Didn’t Even Know He Had a Thing of Value on the Open Market* by Carol P. Christ”
In Honor of All that Gives Life by Ashley Anderson
The depth of life’s interconnection is our greatest vulnerability and our greatest hope. We are beings in relation.
Today we celebrate Mother’s Day. Drenched in some strange amalgam of consumerism and genuine desire to nurture the ones who have nurtured us, we buy flowers and gift cards. We plan Sunday brunches or make that extra-long phone call to our mothers living far from us. My own mother, to whom I owe my courage and creativity, lives two thousand miles away. It was she whose breath gave rise to my own, whose gentle strength and fierce passion made way for my being in the world. It is my mother to whom I trace my beginning, and yet, if life is as Anais Nin imagines it, a “process of becoming” are we not ever-beginning? If all life itself is in process, if the powers of destruction and creation flow, creating and re-creating all that is, I wonder at the wombs that make and re-make us.
This process of becoming is an adventure through the whirlwind, a tour of the chaosmos. Our becoming, wrapped up with the becoming of Creation itself, is an unwinding of the fibers of the universe and our own souls, spiraling toward liberation. And so, on this Mother’s Day, I offer gratitude and honor toward all that gives us birth, to all who take part in our process of becoming.
In honor of ourselves. There is a sense that each of our beginnings emerges out of a wound, out of a dying. The day I was born was the day I received my first scar. I was a C-Section baby and the doctor nicked the edge of my forehead narrowly missing my eye. Soon enough, the wound healed and I still have a tiny scar by my right eye. Today, many years and many scars later, I marvel at our ability to heal. We give life to ourselves, after the movements of death have swept through us, after long nights of grief and the collapse of all we knew. In the quiet stillness of a soul razed, creativity moves. Continue reading “In Honor of All that Gives Life by Ashley Anderson”
Practicing the Presence of the Goddess by Barbara Ardinger
Practicing the presence of the Goddess is a term I invented in the early 1990s when I started teaching a class with that name. It started out as a class where I taught women about the goddesses of the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Norse pantheons and gradually turned into lessons on modern paganism, then into a class on creating effective rituals and doing magic, and finally evolved into being in the world—practicing Her presence.
When I wrote about ways of being in the world on April 29, I went past mere existentialism and suggested that benevolence is a good way to be in the world. Be kind to people. Be polite. (Or as kind and polite as it’s possible to be in a world that is markedly unkind and impolite.) What benevolence really is, is one element of what I call practicing the presence of the Goddess. Continue reading “Practicing the Presence of the Goddess by Barbara Ardinger”
Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month by Grace Yia-Hei Kao
“Did you know that…the Asian population grew faster than any other race group in the United States between 2000 and 2010…[and that] Chinese is the second most widely spoken non-English language in the country (behind Spanish)”?
Liberalism as Feminist Religious Tradition: Friend or Foe? By Amy Levin
Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving – Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Whenever I find myself in conversation with a liberal skeptic who assumes that the existence of a liberal Mormon or Catholic is about as likely as aliens walking the planet, I do two things. First, I show them our blog. Second, I attempt to describe the complicated, long, and constantly evolving relationship between American liberalism, religion, and feminism. The roots of this complex triad are planted in a complicated history whereby, on the one hand, religious liberalism helped women gain equal rights and social justice, while on the other hand, it created divisions among some religious women who felt liberalism threatened their theological beliefs. Of course, the term “liberalism” is fraught with its own contemporary meanings. However, religious feminists throughout history have nevertheless engaged in practices we could place under the rubric of liberalism, including the push toward cosmopolitanism, modernism, and political progressivism. The difficulty was (and still is) maintaining their religious practices and beliefs.
Continue reading “Liberalism as Feminist Religious Tradition: Friend or Foe? By Amy Levin”
A RITUAL OF FAITH: SENDING LOVE TO THE CHILDREN OF VETERANS by Stephanie Mines
May is the Month of Mary and the Month of Mothers. With this in my heart I want to ask everyone receiving this newsletter to SEND LOVE to the children in the families of our returning veterans. As vets stream back from Iraq and Afghanistan, many with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and/or TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury), the children in their families are the most vulnerable to how war comes home.
Children are prime targets for the unnoticed and untreated war wounds of intergenerational shock. As politicians wrangle for power and use the current wars for that purpose, the children absorb the fallout and cannot hide. Their very shelter is a war zone. I am not talking about a few children. I am talking about thousands and thousands of children. The Pentagon itself notes, through Dr. Sonja Batten, Assistant Deputy Chief of Patient Services for the VA, “PTSD and TBI are occurring in unprecedented numbers. At least 320,000 soldiers have been diagnosed with TBI and one in eight returning soldiers has PTSD.” Continue reading “A RITUAL OF FAITH: SENDING LOVE TO THE CHILDREN OF VETERANS by Stephanie Mines”
Art – A Bridge Between the Physical and Spiritual Worlds by Judith Shaw
Brushing yellow gold on top of deep crimson, I sense the paints coming alive, even as I feel myself moving outside of ego, outside of time, and inside to my deepest source.
At least forty thousand years ago the human family began to make art; drawing, painting, sculpting and playing music. For much of human history, art has served a dual purpose. Some art has been purely decorative, while much art has expressed a spiritual understanding of our physical existence.
During the Paleolithic period, c.15–18,000 B.C. on the walls of a sacred cave, Lascaux, in southern France, our ancestors created beautiful paintings, often interpreted as a ritual that invoked sympathetic hunting magic. They are a reminder of the bond between the spirit world and the human world. This was a magical time in which humans lived immersed in the connection between the physical and spiritual worlds. Art was a means to both express and facilitate that connection.
The seasons turned and the art and mythical imagery of the Paleolithic era was transmitted to the Neolithic era in Old Europe. Worship of the Goddess, as giver of all life, continued as did the art which honored Her and our connection to Her. The artists from these ancient days expressed their communal worship through the creation of cult idols and objects, shrines, painted pottery, and religious ceremonialism. The artists, though anonymous, were the hands and eyes of the creator, deepening and transforming the consciousness of their community.
As the human community in the western world developed and grew, art remained firmly grounded in the spiritual. From the megalithic stones of the Celtic era, to the illuminated manuscripts, mosaics and fresco paintings in the churches of the Middle Ages, right up to the work of painters like Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian in the more modern era of late 19th and early 20th century – art expressed our human connection to the divine.
Continue reading “Art – A Bridge Between the Physical and Spiritual Worlds by Judith Shaw”
“AS WE BLESS THE SOURCE OF LIFE, SO WE ARE BLESSED” by Carol P. Christ
Blessing the Source of Life harks back to the time when shrines were built near springs, the very literal sources of life for plants, animals, and humans.
The prayer “As we bless the Source of Life, so we are blessed,” based on a Hebrew metaphor which refers to a water source and set to music in a Jewish feminist context by Faith Rogow, has become one of the bedrocks of my Goddess practice.
In Minoan Crete, seeds were blessed on the altars of the Goddess and the first fruits of every crop were returned to Her. The ancient Minoans piled their altars high with barley, fruits, nuts, and beans, and poured libations of milk and honey, water and wine, over the offerings they placed on altars. Evidence of these actions is found in the large number of pouring vessels stored near altars.
Recreating these rituals on the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete, and singing together, “As we bless the Source of Life, so we are blessed,” again and again, we begin to understand that the gestures of our ancestors were based in gratitude for Life itself. They understood that the fruits of the earth, the grain, the wine, and the oil, the cherries, the peas, the olives, and everything else that we eat, are gifts of bounteous Mother Earth. Continue reading ““AS WE BLESS THE SOURCE OF LIFE, SO WE ARE BLESSED” by Carol P. Christ”
Feminism and Religion 