The following is a guest post written by Karen Torjesen, Ph.D., Margo L. Goldsmith Professor of Women’s Studies in Religion at Claremont Graduate University where she has helped establish graduate programs in Women’s Studies in Religion and Applied Women’s Studies. For ten years she served as Dean of the School of Religion, partnering with religious communities to create programs in comparative religion. She has published extensively on women, gender and sexuality within Christianity.
Originally posted at Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karen-torjesen/torjesen-women-image-of-god_b_893367.html
Last month I preached — in South Africa — in Johannesburg — in a township — in a Pentecostal church. In Pentecostal worship, preaching is giving your testimony. So how do I translate my life into a testimony, find the threads that connect to their experience, speak in a spiritual vocabulary to these human needs, and be honest about the depths of my unknowing? I am an American academic, a historian of the early church, a professor of Women’s Studies. Where would I find the points of connection?
I could speak of my own struggling with what it meant to be a woman — inferior, valued less, silenced, excluded, constrained, exhorted to be submissive–and my discovery of the American women’s movement. However, for the context of African Christianities, where traditional tribal patriarchies merged with colonial European patriarchies, there would be little resonance. I would need an alternate framework to human rights feminism. Western notions of equality, individualism, and rights have little resonance in cultures with a strong sense of kinship and communal identity and of responsibilities based on age and gender rather than rights based on citizenship. Continue reading “Women Created in the Image of God By Karen Torjesen”
Feminism and Religion 