Carol P. Christ – Feminism and Religion

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Death with Dignity

This was originally posted on 11/3/14

In the summer of 1960 when I was 14 years old my much loved grandmother Mae Inglis Christ died of a cancer that affected her brain. The last time I saw my Nannie was shortly after her diagnosis in the early spring. While we were visiting, the cancer affected her back, and she took to her bed. In those days children were not allowed in hospitals. I never saw my grandmother alive again, but my mother told us that our grandmother was hooked up to tubes much longer than she should have been. Mother vowed, “This will never happen to me.” I was driven to the funeral in a limousine with my grandmother’s girlfriends. They spoke about my grandmother’s last days, describing how (because her mind was affected by cancer) my little grandmother had screamed and screamed at them for not visiting–even though they were with her every day. They found my grandmother’s outbursts so traumatic that they said they were relieved to see her looking so peaceful in her coffin.

Who Turns the Wheel? Gender in the Modern Pagan Year, part 1 by Myriapath

A blessing, and a calendar younger than it sounds

Pick up almost any introduction to the modern Pagan festival year and you will meet a couple: a goddess of the growing season and a god born, crowned and cut down at harvest. Writing for this site in July 2017, Carol P. Christ described Lammas as the point at which “the young male God identified with the harvest … is sacrificed.” She closed the same post with a blessing that names no gender at all: “As we bless the Source of Life, so we are blessed.”

The eight-festival Wheel of the Year and its divine-couple story were assembled in the middle of the twentieth century by people whose names, meetings and dates are known. That recency is exactly why the wording has been open to revision, and revised it has been, in public and on the record. What follows traces that rewriting rather than judging it.

How the eight festivals came together

In a 2008 study in Folklore, the historian Ronald Hutton traces the eight festivals to two separate modern sources. The solstice and equinox feasts descend from Edward Williams, better known as Iolo Morganwg, who invented four Druidic solar festivals between 1792 and 1826. The quarter days come from Margaret Murray’s now rejected account of witch festivals.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: The Greek Elections and the 1%

This was originally posted on January 26, 2015

Alexis Tsipras of Greece & Pablo Iglesias of Spain hope to change Europe for the 99%

On January 1, 2016, 1% of the world’s population will own 50% of the world’s wealth, according to Oxfam.

On January 26, 2015 Alexis Tsipras will be in the process of forming a new anti-austerity government in Greece. Some believe this will be a new beginning not only for Greece, but for the world–if others follow the Greeks in resisting the domination of their economies by the international monetary interests that represent the 1%.

The bondholders and the international press tend to portray the Greek economic crisis as a morality play in which foolish Greeks borrowed too much and must suffer the consequences to pay back their loans. If Greece were a lazy teenager appearing on Judge Judy, tough love might be the answer.

But this simplistic equation cannot be made to work for a country of 10 million people, only some of whom colluded in taking out loans they could not pay back.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: What is the Cause of Violence? A Response to Karen Armstong

This was originally posted on January 12, 2105

“So, when we in the West talk about religion as the cause of this violence, how much are we letting ourselves off the hook, and using religion as a way to ignore our role in the roots of this violence?” Karen Armstrong, author of Fields of Blood

This statement was made by scholar of religions Karen Armstrong in an interview in Salon magazine in response to characterizations of Islam as a violent religion by Bill Maher and others. Speaking in the context of the rise of anti-Islamist prejudice in Europe, Armstrong said that Maher’s demonization of “the other” was the kind of talk that could lead us back to the concentration camps.

Bill Maher makes blanket statements against religion in general and Islam in particular. Maher clearly does not have a nuanced view of any religion. He is fueling anti-Islamic sentiment when he singles out Islam as a violent religion. If religions are going to be criticized as violent, then we must not limit ourselves to criticizing Islam, but must begin closer to home, by discussing the relation of religion and violence in the Bible, in Christianity, and in Judaism. My rule of thumb is always to begin with Christianity because it is the hegemonic religion of western cultures.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: The Spirit of Capitalism vs. the Spirit of Traditional Rural Life

This was originally posted on Dec 29, 2014

In this picture, Marika from Skoteino Crete toasts our group and downs a glass of her homemade raki. Marika, who is best friends with Christina who makes lunch for us, has just returned from her home next door with her gift of a glass of raki for each of us.

Marika, who has little, is eager to give to us. Hers is but one of many gifts from the heart we receive on the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete. Why is it that we who have so much do not give as spontaneously?

One answer is that capitalist individualism has taught us to count our worth by how much we have and to fear for the day when we will have nothing.

These words may be a cliché, but they hold a profound truth nonetheless.

Heide Goettner-Abendroth tells us that in matriarchal societies with small-scale sustainable agricultural economies, people did not hoard or save for a rainy day. With the labors of their bodies and minds, they took only what they needed from the land. When there was a surplus, they gave parties, sharing what they had with others. Even with the coming of patriarchy, ancient matriarchal customs of generosity survived among rural farmers.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: BARBARA LEE SPEAKS FOR ME

This was originally posted on June 23, 2014. This post is as pertinent today as it was 12 years ago. In fact we are still deeply living with the decisions made at that time.

While I was in Crete on the Goddess Pilgrimage teaching about and experiencing a Society of Peace where violence and domination were neither celebrated nor encouraged, another war broke out in Iraq, breaking my heart, breaking all of our hearts—yet again. When will we ever learn, oh when will we ever learn?

Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against the US war powers authorized after 9/11 which were used to launch war in Afghanistan; she also voted against authorization for the Iraq war in 2002. Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq war, despite clear indications that the US administration was lying about weapons of mass destruction—which were never found in Iraq. I voted for Barack Obama because he opposed this war. Then he listened to General Petraeus and expanded the war in Iraq. Barbara Lee speaks for me. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama do not.

The Iraqi people are once again living in fear of their lives as reports surface that armies and militias are engaging in mass executions of their so-called “rivals.” Is there any cause that could justify this?

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Dance of the Bees: Reading the Language of the Goddess

This was originally posted on Dec 1, 2014 and then reposted on July 11, 2022

The image from an ancient Cretan bowl (c.1700 BCE) from the Sacred Center of Phaistos pictured here has often been interpreted as an early depiction of Persephone’s descent or rising. But are clues from later Greek mythology pointing in the right direction in this case?

Recently, my colleague Mika Scott posted the Phaistos bowl image on our Goddess Pilgrimage Facebook site in conjunction with the bee pendant from Mallia. This juxtaposition led me to think again about the importance of bees and pollination in agricultural societies and to offer an alternative reading of the symbolism on the bowl.

In her important work The Language of the Goddess, Marjia Gimbutas taught us to “read” the language of the Goddess in the artifacts of Old Europe through a process of careful comparison of imagery and motifs, making use of what she called the archaeo-mythological method. This method finds that clues in later mythology and folklore can unlock the symbolism of ancient artifacts. Another possibly more important part of the method involves careful attention to plants and animals and their cycles of birth, death, and regeneration, which are portrayed on the artifacts.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: The Cop on the Beat is Not Ice-T, the Prosecutor Is Not Sam Waterston, and Mariska Hargitay and S. Epatha Merkerson Are Not in Charge

This was originally posted on December 8, 2014

I have watched every episode of Law and Order and Law and Order SVU, and most of them more than once. Though there is police violence on these programs, it is usually investigated, and viewers are given the sense that it is not OK. Not living in black America or even in the United States, I guess I was under the illusion that police forces are no longer primarily white and male, that police reforms advocated decades ago have had some effect, and that cops cannot get away with murder.

This despite the fact that I knew that inmates in US prisons are far more likely to be black than their numbers in the population warrant, and that I knew that stop and frisk and arresting black men for petty crimes are ordinary police policies.

For readers who don’t watch MSNBC as avidly as I do, stop and frisk, now banned in New York City, is the policy of searching (primarily) young black men hanging around on street corners to see if they have illegal drugs or weapons on their persons. This policy can lead to the incarceration of young black men for having one or two marijuana cigarettes intended for personal use in their pockets. Stop and frisk is not a policy on college campuses, where police are just as likely to find young white men and women in possession of illegal drugs. Why? Because college authorities and parents of white college students simply would not allow it.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Anne Hutchinson, America’s First Feminist Theologian: 1591-1643

This was originally posted on Oct 20 2014

“She had rather been a husband than a wife; and a preacher than a hearer; and a magistrate than a subject.” Reverend Hugh Peter of Salem

Anne Hutchinson was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for heresy in 1637 and excommunicated from the Puritan Church of Boston in 1638. Her banishment came just three years after she, her husband, and eleven living children arrived in America seeking the freedom to practice their religion as they saw fit. Governor Michael Dukakis pardoned her in 1987. Historian Howard Zinn called her a true American hero.

I managed to get through graduate school in Religious Studies without ever having studied the theology of Anne Hutchinson,* though I vaguely remember references (probably with smirks of disapproval) to the “Antinomian Controversy” which is associated with her name. I recall Anne Hutchinson’s name because of an article published in Feminist Studies in the 1970s, when I had just begun to study women and religion. However it was not until recently that I learned of her place in history through reading American Jezebel by Eve LaPlante.

Hutchinson was accused of theological errors in her trials. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination figured heavily in the accusations. But the real issue at stake was that Anne dared to follow her own inner knowing, to articulate it theologically, and to teach her views against the grain of the Puritan authorities in Boston.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: We Could Have Been Canadians and Other Thoughts about My New England Colonial Heritage

This was originally posted on Sept 1, 2014

My 2x great-grandparents Nathaniel Searing and Louisa Caroline Martin were pioneers who cleared the land and built a log cabin in Lyons, Michigan in 1840. They were descended from English Puritan Colonial settlers in New England. At least two of my ancestors are recognized by the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolutions. Other members of my family who were Quakers proudly refused to take part in the Revolutionary War.

My great-grandfather James Augustus married a woman of German descent, his daughter Lena Marie married a Swede, and my mother married a man who was German, Irish, and Scottish. As the descendants of Nathaniel Searing and Louisa Caroline Martin moved around the United States and married into the families of newer immigrants, the succeeding generations also lost touch with their history. Our family’s connections to the New England Colonists were not even mentioned at Thanksgiving!