Throughout the course of this year my monthly posts are going to spotlight extraordinary women; a FAR Herstory Journey. Our first Herstory profile will be Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977): a staunch Civil Rights, Voter Rights Singing Activist, Preacher.
Continue reading “Herstory Profiles: Activist Preacher Fannie Lou Hamer by Anjeanette LeBoeuf”
I concluded my last post by suggesting that “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence (DI) should have been ‘Creatrix.’ Though ‘Creator’ imbues the DI with a bit of quasi-scriptural authority, the possessive pronoun “their” before it effectively limits the full benefits of creation to men. That alone should have precluded even the suggestion that the DI effectively endorses Christianity or that it constitutes the basis for a civil religion.
Quite obviously that has not been the case, but that should not be taken to validate the misogyny the DI manifests. ‘Creator,’ the masculine form of the Latin noun derived from the verb ‘to create’ (‘Creatrix’ is the feminine), is unambiguously masculine in a way that ‘God’ simply is not. Its appearance in the DI raises the suspicion that it was selected to underscore the masculinity of “Nature’s God,” the phase used in the DI’s opening paragraph. Surely some of the signatories of the DI knew their Latin authors well enough to know how peculiar it is to speak of Nature as having or needing a God. Perhaps they wanted to clarify things. Continue reading “She Alone Was There In The Beginning: Nature Creatrix by Stuart Dean”
Thanksgiving evokes deep memory and raises questions about what we are celebrating, now that we know the stories we were told about the Pilgrims and the Indians are not the whole truth about America’s early history. I thought about all of this as I prepared for Thanksgiving this year and cleaned up for days afterwards.
Although I do not live in America, I have celebrated Thanksgiving with a group of friends in my home in Greece many times during the past twenty years.
For me, Thanksgiving brings up happy memories of family gatherings in a time when my extended family, including Mom and Dad, brothers, great-aunts and great-uncles, aunts and uncles, cousins and second cousins, gathered at Grandma’s to eat turkey with all the trimmings. Grandma Lena Marie Searing Bergman was not only a great cook but also an excellent hostess. Her tables were laden with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, biscuits with butter and homemade jam, corn and green peas, pumpkin and mince pies, and also with crystal, china, and silver, and flowers from her garden.
Uncle Emery, my grandmother’s older brother, told stories about life on the farm in Michigan, where they had a pony and he lost parts of his fingers in a threshing machine. We children played croquet in the garden and ran races all around it while our mothers, aunts, and grandmother laid out the feast and cleaned up afterwards. These were the blessed days before television and televised football games came to dominate holidays in the United States. My memories are laced with the sadness of knowing that those days are in the past. Continue reading “Thinking About Thanksgiving by Carol P. Christ”
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