Book Review – Page 3 – Feminism and Religion

You Can Make Your Own Rose BOOK REVIEW by Lila Moore

You Can Make Your Own Rose by Andrea Nicki is a collection of poems infused with the spirit of feminist sensibility, social justice and activism. The poems offer more than mere therapeutic comfort while depicting shamanic-inspired healing rituals and magical encounters. They are trauma-free in the sense that Nicki doesn’t ask for our sympathy nor does Nicki simply wish to share traumatic memories. On the contrary, she utilizes somewhat analytical and educational language, interlaced with subtle picturesque and lyrical details alongside a severe social critique, to depict the emotional, intellectual, and social landscape of her reflections on incest and other gender-related forms of abuse.

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Review: In Search of Pure Lust, author Lise Weil by Sara Wright

In this remarkable memoir one woman’s life is set in the collective context of the women’s movement as a whole, and through Lise Weil’s eyes we get to see the “both and” quality of her struggle to understand the wound caused by what went wrong not only in her personal relationships with women, but between the powerful women who inspired the women’s movement in the first place. We can only heal this wound personally and collectively if we are willing to self-reflect, ask difficult and painful questions, and take responsibility for our actions, something that the author is willing to do. By addressing our own mother-daughter and woman to woman betrayals, choosing to respect one another’s differences regardless of sexual orientation, color, race, religion etc. we can finally unite with one purpose – to save ourselves and the planet.

What Lise proposes – namely, that Lesbian Visionary Thinking opened the door to women re–imagining women as powerful agents in their own lives even as they became women who acted upon these visions – is, I believe, truth. Lesbian visionaries envisaged a woman centered culture and created one. Many of us realize today that without a feminist standpoint, the ravages of patriarchy are going to destroy us all. We have much to learn from reading this story. Continue reading “Review: In Search of Pure Lust, author Lise Weil by Sara Wright”

Book Review: FLORENCE IN ECSTASY by Jessie Chaffee

FlorenceInEcstasy3DBook

Jessie Chaffee‘s Florence in Ecstasy is the most luminous debut novel I have read in a very long time. Imagine, if you will, a darker and more literary version of Elizabeth Gilbert’s popular spiritual seeker’s memoir, Eat Pray Love. This is not to diminish Gilbert’s memoir, which I loved, but Chaffee offers a much deeper dive into the dark night of a woman’s soul.

Hannah, a young American from Boston, goes to Florence, Italy to heal herself after her professional and personal life back home has disintegrated due to her anorexia. Surely, in life-loving Italy, where every meal is a celebration, Hannah can heal her disturbed relationship with food and her own body. Similarly, Eat Pray Love, with its luscious descriptions of Italian cuisine and Gilbert’s rejection of dieting in favor of buying a bigger pair of jeans, deals with body image issues and is often recommended reading for women and girls recovering from eating disorders.

But Chaffee’s novel, unlike Gilbert’s memoir, is no easy-going, feel-good read. Continue reading “Book Review: FLORENCE IN ECSTASY by Jessie Chaffee”

Murder at the Rummage Sale: Book Review by Judith Shaw

Judith Shaw photo Murder at the Rummage Sale (Albany, NY: Imagination Fury Arts, 2016) by Elizabeth Cunningham is a mystery novel with a style and depth of thought that offers not only the fun of figuring out “Who Dun It” but also gorgeous prose and poetic phrasing which is not so commonly found in the mystery genre.

Set in 1960 small town America, the book transports us back to that era with a fine eye to detail. It 9781944190019 takes place over a few days in the life of the Church of the Regeneration as the women prepare for their annual rummage sale. Charlotte Crowley, an over bearing kleptomaniac who wraps men around her little finger while antagonizing most of the women, has always led the effort. But with only a few days to go before the sale begins, Charlotte is found dead in the basement, smothered by a plastic dry cleaning bag full of coats.

Though the police declared the death to be accidental, Lucy Way, an older woman with a bit of faery blood and white curls she is very proud of, has her suspicions. Lucy sets out to solve the crime with the help of a cast of characters associated with the church: the Reverend Gerald Bradley, the church minister with a love of drink; Anne Bradley, his wife who doubts the existence of God; Katherine Bradley, their fanciful seven year old daughter; and Katherine’s sworn blood brother, Frankie Lomangino Jr., son of Frankie Lomangino an ex-con who becomes the prime suspect. Continue reading “Murder at the Rummage Sale: Book Review by Judith Shaw”

Interreligious Friends after Nostra Aetate (Book Review) by Janice Poss

Janice Book Title: Interreligious Friendship after Nostra Aetate
Editors: J. Fredericks and T. Tiemeier
Series Title: Interreligious Studies in Theory and Practice
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2015

“… the Jew prayed words of blessing … over his Roman Catholic friend. …Willebrands could not find … words to say to Tanenbaum at that moment. Of course, as is usually the case in friendships, words are not really necessary to express one’s deepest emotions.” – James L. Fredericks, p. 5

Friendship

In 1965, at fifteen, I strategized to become a top women’s fashion designer. I felt it accessible to me! The Second Vatican Council’s documents had been published. Nostra Aetate was among them, I was clueless, I could have cared less about anything coming out of the Vatican –especially with a Latin title having no meaning for me — except a bejeweled embroidery that might have inspired a contemporary dress or jacket. Nothing theological or churchy was in my purview as I exerted my independence from parental authority and had one foot out the door from being a practicing Catholic. I had had enough of the disciplinary, androcentric, ‘Father’ God who was mean, hypercritical and presupposed that anyone practicing any religion other than Roman Catholicism was doomed forever to hell. Salvation was not for everyone. Continue reading “Interreligious Friends after Nostra Aetate (Book Review) by Janice Poss”

Book Review: Hild & The Patron Saint of Ugly by Mary Sharratt

Literature touches our spirit in a way that film, television, and even art cannot. Instead of presenting the passive viewer with a visual image, good writing demands our participation and co-creation. The words become the springboard for our own imagined vision of other worlds and other lives. In this imagined space, we can experience profound insights and revelations–soul-growing experiences we carry with us forever.

Books that try too hard to be spiritual can have the opposite effect. Discerning women demand books that respect us instead of preaching to us. Too often religion has been interpreted by and for men, but when women writers reveal their spiritual truths, a whole other landscape emerges, one we haven’t seen enough of.

Marie Manilla’s The Patron Saint of Ugly (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June 17, 2014) and Nicola Griffith’s Hild (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013) are two such transporting novels. They both draw on the lives of female saints in fresh and evocative ways.

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BOOK REVIEW: Amy Wright Glenn’s Birth, Breath, & Death by Natalie Weaver

Amy Wright Glenn’s Birth, Breath, & Death: Meditations on Motherhood, Chaplaincy, and Life as a Doula is a mid-life memoir of the author’s personal encounters and professional insights drawn from her work in the spaces of birth and death. Glenn gleans from her formative experiences as a daughter and sister, her trained experiences as a teacher and doula, and her wisdom experiences as a mother, chaplain, and friend. In an accessible voice, Glenn reflects compassionately on her early life in a Mormon family. She considers critically the nature of religious worldviews that are doctrinally dualistic and apocalyptic. Glenn further describes the therapeutic and illuminating value she found in the scholarly study of religions as an anthropological phenomenon. Glenn explores how religious discourse both expresses human joy and grief and also aids us in our encounters with life and death. Glenn intertwines her academic study with personal narrative and achieves a professionally-informed and experientially-based “thinking out loud” about the bookends of human life. Her writing is tender, and her vision is thought-provoking.
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Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Quests for Hope and Meaning by Gina Messina-Dysert

Rosemary Radford Ruether is one of the most brilliant theologians of our time and her newly released autobiography, My Quest for Hope and Meaning, is a gift to those of us who have been so touched by her work. In this intimate and beautiful piece, Ruether shares her personal journey in feminist scholarship and activism. The autobiography opens with a profound forward by Renny Golden (that is also shared here on Feminism and Religion) and continues with an introduction and six chapters where Ruether guides us through an exploration of the influence of the matriarchs in her life, her interactions with Catholicism, her continued exploration of interfaith relations, her family’s struggle with mental illness, and her commitment to ecofeminist responses to the ecological crisis.

Ruether states that “Humans are hope and meaning creators” (xii), and her autobiography details her own quests for hope and meaning. She reflects on the incredible impact made by the female-centered patterns in family and community in her life. According to Ruether, these “matricentric enclaves” grounded and shaped her interest in feminist theory and women’s history. She also describes the spiritually and intellectually serious Catholicism that she received from her mother and articulates her continued frustration with Vatican leadership that has undermined the efforts of Vatican II. For Ruether, her ongoing affiliation with feminist theological circles is crucial as she continues to work toward shaping an ecumenical and interfaith Catholicism.