Bill McKibben – Feminism and Religion

From the Archives: Frozen 2: Can the Christian Church Hear its Gospel Song? by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

This was originally posted on March 5, 2020

The first time I saw Frozen 2, I was impressed by the ecofeminism and the efforts to respect the Sami culture. The second time, I thoroughly enjoyed the superb music and the character development. The third time… was a religious experience.

Other contrubutors have written wonderful reviews of Frozen 2, and I agree wholeheartedly that its animation reinforces the sexist idea that females should be tiny compared to males, except for our eyes, which should be larger than our wrists. These disempowering representations saturate today’s media, and I regularly spend a whole lot of time deconstructing them with my daughters.

However, there is a lot to love about Frozen 2, and as a Christian, I found myself resonating with several of the symbolic truths the film offers. I spent some time looking into the Sami religion, to see how much of it was incorporated into portrayals of the Northumbra. I knew that Disney had consulted with Sami representatives to portray their culture with respectful accuracy. The Sami history is an all too familiar tale of violent imperial conquest allied with Fundamentalist Christian Dominionism. The wounds of Sami history certainly give me terrible grief as a white American and a Christian, and I hope that the anti-colonialist messages of the film spread awareness of such violence in my country.

Frozen 2: Can the Christian Church Hear its Gospel Song? by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

What I Learned (and Found) Dumpster Diving, Part I, by Grace Yia-Hei Kao

“I get that consumers generally prefer to buy produce that looks a certain way, but can the routine act of trashing whole bags of clementines, apples, or tomatoes because of a few imperfections be justified in a world that is full of hungry and malnourished people?”

Renowned climate change activist and author Bill McKibben spoke at our graduation earlier this year. Among the charges he gave to all of us in attendance (i.e., not just the graduates) was for us older folks to be willing to bear more of the possible “costs” of political activism. His reasoning was that being a 20-something with an arrest record was not a particularly good thing for young job-seekers today.

I was inspired. I thought to myself, “I have tenure, I work with colleagues who champion prophetic civil disobedience, and my class privilege would allow me to post bail if arrested.”

When chatting with a graduate that afternoon, I told him that I’d like to make good on something we once discussed in class during a session on the ethics of consumption—I’d like to go dumpster diving with him.

Mind you, I don’t fit the stereotypical urban scavenger profile (although middle class dumpster diving is on the rise). I grew up in a gated community, once brought my portable curling iron on a junior high church group camping trip, and today am more bourgeois than Bohemian. So what interest did I have in electively digging through garbage?

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