Carol P. Christ – Page 16

Home for the Holidays By Carol P. Christ

Yesterday I was watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy in which George’s father said to him, “you’re not like us, you’re a surgeon.” “And,” George’s father added, “you don’t like to do the things we like to do.” It is not easy not being like your family and not liking the things they like. When my mother was alive, she was the glue that held us together. Since then, my sheer presence in the lives of my father and my brothers and their families is disruptive. No matter that I try not to make waves, I make them all the same. I do keep my mouth shut about politics and religion and feminism. Even so, the last time I was home for the holidays my father asked me to stay in a hotel because having me in the house made him nervous and uncomfortable. To be fair, how would you feel if your daughter was 6 feet tall and you weren’t, she had a PhD and you didn’t, and even if she didn’t open her mouth at all, you knew that she didn’t agree with your political views or your everyday assumption that men make the final decisions on all important matters? Or if you were my brother who does not have a college education and who feels that women and minorities and gays have taken something from him? Or if you were my Mormon brother who is trying to keep his three daughters on the straight and narrow and not on the path chosen by their aunt? On the last Christmas day I spent at my brother’s house, I did not mention any of the obvious things, but it was hard to hide being astonished by the number of presents and the amount of money spent on them, and I simply could not force myself to watch football. Continue reading “Home for the Holidays By Carol P. Christ”

THE “G” WORD By Carol P. Christ

Recently, I saw the following line in a promotion for a book to which I contributed: “This volume includes voices from Christianity, Judaism, goddess religion, the Black church, and indigenous religions.” The editors of this book are to be strongly commended for expanding the dialogue in feminism and religion beyond the confines of the Christian hegemony in which it is still all too often framed. Nonetheless, I felt hurt and offended. I immediately wrote to the editors asking how they would feel if a book were promoted using the words: “This volume includes voices from Goddess religion and god traditions such as judaism and christianity.”

I am well aware that the conventions of English grammar dictate that the word “God” is to be capitalized when referring to the deity of the Bible and the Koran and in some other cases where a monotheistic deity is intended. I have been fighting this battle with editors of my work for years. Usually they automatically change “Goddess” to “goddess.” When I gained the courage to question this, an exception would usually be made for me, but the grammatical convention remained in force for other works by the publisher. Continue reading “THE “G” WORD By Carol P. Christ”

Women Blogging Thealogy By Gina Messina-Dysert

In Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality, Carol Christ offers a thealogy that is grounded in embodied thinking and begins with personal experience. She explains that experience is “embodied, relational, communal, social, and historical” (p. 37), and that experiences of the Goddess are shaped and inspired by the experiences of others. Consequently her thealogy, in addition to being personal, is also communal.

According to Christ, the “voices of women are a lifeline” (Rebirth of the Goddess, p. 41), a sentiment that has been loudly echoed by women in blogging communities. Although some may claim that a blog is nothing more than an online diary, it is a powerful tool that offers individuals the opportunity to express their thoughts and experiences in a public forum; blogging gives a voice to anyone who wants it. Recent statistics have Continue reading “Women Blogging Thealogy By Gina Messina-Dysert”

In the Web of Life — No Exceptions By Carol P. Christ

Carol P. Christ is a founding mother in the study of women and religion, feminist theology, women’s spirituality, and the Goddess movement. She teaches in the Women’s Spirituality program at CIIS and through Ariadne Institute offers Goddess Pilgrimages to Crete. Her books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions.

Does God love me more than She loves my doggies? Does She love animals more than She loves trees and flowers? Does She love trees and flowers more than She loved the first cells that formed in the waters of our planet? Did She not also love the atoms and particles of atoms that coalesced to form the earth?

In her books Sacred Gaia and Gaia’s Gift Anne Primavesi questions the notion that the dialogue between God and the world began with “our entry onto the scene.” Primavesi argues that “human exceptionalism,” the view that the world exists for us, and that we are an “exception” to the world, has been and is the predominant Christian view. In the stories of Adam and Noah, God gives dominion over the creatures of the earth to man. Theologians asserted that of all the creatures that inhabit the earth, only man is in the image of God, and the image of God in man is found in his rational intelligence, which is shared with no other creature. Because he is in the image of God, man will escape death, which is the lot of every other living thing. Rather than challenging human exceptionalism, modern science furthered it, asserting that “matter” was “dead,” and that therefore it was right and just for man to subdue “nature” through technology and to harness it for his needs. Continue reading “In the Web of Life — No Exceptions By Carol P. Christ”

Football as a Ritual Re-enacting Male Domination Through Force and Violence By Carol P. Christ

The other day when Paula McGee asked on this blog how Penn State students could rally in support of Sandusky, I was also reading a student paper quoting Rianne Eisler’s opinion that peace and environmental justice cannot be achieved in dominator cultures. Xochitl Alvizo commented that we should not be surprised by the reactions of the students as we live in a “rape” culture. I would add that we must examine the culture of male domination through force that is “football,” one of the “sacred cows” of American patriarchy, just as we need to examine the culture of hierarchical male domination of the Vatican in the context of child-rape by priests. Continue reading “Football as a Ritual Re-enacting Male Domination Through Force and Violence By Carol P. Christ”

Should Our Children and Grandchildren Live Better Than Us? And Whatever Happened to Our Dreams? By Carol P. Christ

Last Sunday on Meet the Press Tom Brokaw spoke about the breakdown of what he felt had been a common consensus about American life. He said that Americans are questioning the American dream which tells us that “our children and grandchildren will live better than us.” He found it disturbing that people now feel their children will not be better off than they were. The poor no longer see a way out of poverty and the middle class fear that their children will be unemployed for long periods in their lives, burdened with college debt, and unable to afford mortgages and college educations for their children. I have heard this idea expressed many times in the recent economic crisis, including by progressive journalist Adrianna Huffington.

What Brokaw and others do not mention is that a few generations ago, this American dream was the hope that one’s children would not live in poverty. Now, for the middle class if this dream means anything, it means having a bigger house, more cars, $2000 suits, botox and plastic surgery, expensive vacations, weddings costing tens of thousands of dollars, store-bought Halloween costumes, and so many Christmas presents that children step on their new toys to get to the tree for more packages. What Brokaw and others did not address is whether the desire for your children to have “more” than you had, once your family is out of poverty is a valid, good, or sustainable desire to have. Of course we should all hope that our children and children’s children will find employment and not live in poverty, but an endless upward spiral cannot be sustained and there is no evidence that it makes anyone any happier. Continue reading “Should Our Children and Grandchildren Live Better Than Us? And Whatever Happened to Our Dreams? By Carol P. Christ”

Forty Years and Counting: Women and Religion in the Academy By Carol P. Christ

The receipt of an invitation to the Fortieth Anniversary Celebration of the Women’s Caucus in the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature this week, takes me back to the summer of 1971. At the first meeting of Women Theologians at Alverno College (which was followed up at Grailville in succeeding years), I proposed that we form a feminist caucus in the field of religion, as had already been done by feminists in several other fields.

Since I was one of the few women at Alverno who had attended the annual meetings in the field of religion, I was delegated to call Harry Buck, then director of the AAR, to ask for space on the program. Harry, who continued to support the work of women in the field through lecture series at Wilson College and the magazine Anima which he founded, offered not only space at the meetings, but a print-out of the names and addresses of all of the members of the AAR who were not obviously male. I invited all of them to come to a feminist meeting at the AAR in Atlanta. It is hard to imagine now, but before 1971, the women who attended the AAR in any given year could probably have been counted on one hand. Continue reading “Forty Years and Counting: Women and Religion in the Academy By Carol P. Christ”

What Does It Mean to Say that All White Feminists Are Racist? (Questions Posed to White Women/Myself about Our Part in the Dialogue with Women of Color) By Carol P. Christ

Carol P. Christ, a founding mother in the study of Women and Religion and Feminist Theo/a/logy, has been active in anti-racist, anti-poverty, anti-war, feminist, pro-gay and lesbian, anti-nuclear, and environmental causes (in that order) for many years. All of these issues have informed her teaching, her scholarship, and her politics.

The recent posting of Mary Daly’s letter to Audre Lorde on the Feminism and Religion blog is a correction of a piece of feminist history that is important in its own right and because of the way Lorde’s letter has shaped feminist discourse and politics up to the present day. Knowledge of the existence of Daly’s letter and the facts surrounding Lorde’s distortion of history has been in the public domain since the 2004 publication of Alexis DeVeaux’s Warrior Poet, but when I searched the internet for a copy of “Mary Daly’s letter to Audre Lorde” a few days ago, what came up was Lorde’s letter to Daly — not Daly’s letter to Lorde.

I often hear younger feminists say that “all white feminists” of the older generations “were racist.” Sometimes Mary Daly is mentioned. Setting the record straight about Mary Daly is one step in retelling the history of feminism in a more complex way. Continue reading “What Does It Mean to Say that All White Feminists Are Racist? (Questions Posed to White Women/Myself about Our Part in the Dialogue with Women of Color) By Carol P. Christ”

The Black Horse: Our Bodies, Our Selves By Carol P. Christ

Carol P. Christ is a founding mother in the study of women and religion and women’s spirituality. Her books include She Who Changes , Rebirth of the Goddess, and the widely used anthologies she co-edited with Judith Plaskow, Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions. She has been thinking about the black horse in relation to the online course she is teaching on Ecofeminism in the Women’s Spirituality Program at California Institute of Integral Studies.

“The driver…falls back like a racing charioteer at the barrier, and with a still more violent backward pull jerks the bit from between the teeth of the lustful horse, drenches his abusive tongue and jaws with blood, and forcing his legs and haunches against the ground reduces him to torment. Finally, after several repetitions of this treatment, the wicked horse abandons his lustful ways; meekly now he executes the wishes of his driver, and when he catches sight of the loved one [i.e. his master] is ready to die of fear.”

I can’t seem to get this image from Plato’s Phaedrus quoted in Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature out of my mind or my body these days. The other day I tried to read the above passage to a friend and my body became so tense that I accidentally cut off the phone connection—twice. Now while I am writing my muscles are tight, and I am beginning to get a headache. I cannot get the image of the black horse out of my mind because “she” (I know that Plato’s horse was a “he”) has lived in my body for as long as I remember. She probably first took root in my body when I began to fear my father’s discipline. She became bigger and stronger every time someone or something in culture told me that my body and the feelings of my body were bad, that I as a girl or woman was unworthy, that the things I cared about were not important, that my thoughts were wrong. Continue reading “The Black Horse: Our Bodies, Our Selves By Carol P. Christ”

Love Divine, All Loves Excelling By Carol P. Christ

A founding mother of the study of women and religion and feminist thealogy, Carol has been active in social justice, anti-war, feminist, anti-nuclear, and environmental causes for many years. Her books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely used anthologiesWomanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions.

In my last blog I wrote that the image of God as a dominating other who enforces his will through violence–found in the Bible and in the Christian tradition up to the present day–is one of the reasons I do not choose to work within the Christian tradition. To be fair, there is another image of God in Christian tradition that I continue to embrace. “Love divine, all loves excelling” is the opening line of a well-known hymn by Charles Wesley. Charles Hartshorne invoked these words and by implication the melody with which they are sung as expressing the feelings at the heart of the understanding of God that he wrote about in The Divine Relativity.

Love divine, all loves excelling also expresses my understanding of Goddess or as I sometimes write Goddess/God. Though I am no longer a Christian, but rather an earth-based Goddess feminist, I freely admit that I learned about the love of God while singing in Christian churches. Hartshorne wrote that he knew the love of God best through the love of his own mother, and I can say that this is true for me as well. My mother was not perfect, and she did not understand why I wanted to go to graduate school, my feminism, or my adult political views, but I never doubted her love or my grandmothers’ love for me. (I count myself lucky. I know others did not have this experience.) Like Hartshorne, I also learned about the love of God through the world that I always understood to be God’s body. Running in fields and hills, swimming in the sea, standing under redwood trees, and encountering peacocks in my grandmother’s garden, I felt connected to a power greater than myself. Continue reading “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling By Carol P. Christ”

A Meditation on a Mantra: Sat-Nam By Sara Frykenberg

The following is a guest post written by Sara Frykenberg, Ph.D., graduate of the women studies in religion program at Claremont Graduate University. Her research considers the way in which process feminist theo/alogies reveal a kind transitory violence present in the liminal space between abusive paradigms and new non-abusive creations: a counter-necessary violence. In addition to her feminist, theo/alogical and pedagogical pursuits, Sara is also an avid fan of science fiction and fantasy literature, and a level one Kundalini yoga teacher.

Sat-Nam. It means, “My name is truth.” Or if you will, I am who I am. It is an affirmation in the Kundalini Yogic tradition, a greeting and a mantra. According to one of my teachers, saying the phrase “Sat-Nam” even once changes something inside of you and accesses a resonant power attached to the vibration of the mantra. Sat Nam. I am speaking myself. I am authentically me.

Sat-Nam. “I am who I am”… “I am that I am”… I write this interpretation of the mantra twice because it is uncomfortable for me. It sometimes still feels blasphemous to utter this phrase: a phrase that I was taught in my Christian upbringing belonged to God and was the name He gave Himself (sic). But when I feel this way, I am now inclined to ask myself, what is wrong with saying that I am me? Do I really feel like this is a power that god/dess reserves for herself? No. I affirm me. I exist. “I am,” means to me that I am living, breathing, lively and thriving in this space between life now and life later that I like to think of as an event horizon full of gravity and opportunity. Continue reading “A Meditation on a Mantra: Sat-Nam By Sara Frykenberg”

Is the Prophetic Vision of Social and Ecojustice the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree? By Carol P. Christ

Carol P. Christ earned her BA from Stanford University and her Ph.D. from Yale University. She is a founding mother in the study of women and religion, feminist theology, women’s spirituality, and the Goddess movement and work has revolutionized the field of feminism and religion. She has been active in anti-racist, anti-war, feminist, and anti-nuclear causes for many years. Since 2001 she has been working with Friends of Green Lesbos to save the wetlands of her home island. She drafted a massive complaint to the European Commission charging failure to protect Natura wetlands in Lesbos. In 2010 she ran for office in Lesbos and helped to elect the first Green Party representative to the Regional Council of the North Aegean. She helped to organize Lesbos Go Green, which is working on recycling in Lesbos.

My hope for the new blog on Feminism and Religion is that it can become a place for real discussion with mutual respect of feminist issues in religion and spirituality.

I agree with Rosemary Radford Ruether who argued in a recent blog “The Biblical Vision of Ecojustice” that the prophets viewed the covenant with Israel and Judah as inclusive of nature. Indeed in my senior thesis at Stanford University on “Nature Imagery in Hosea and Second Isaiah,” in which I worked with the Hebrew texts, I argued that too. I also agree that the dualism Rosemary has so accurately diagnosed as one of the main sources of sexism and other forms of domination comes from the Greeks not the Hebrews. I agree that Carolyn Merchant is right that nature was viewed as a living being in Christian thought up until the modern scientific revolution. I agree with Rosemary that it is a good thing for Christians to use sources within tradition to create an ecojustice ethic. I am happy that there are Christians like Rosemary who are working to transform Christianity. Finally, I am pleased to admit that I have learned a great deal from her.

Continue reading “Is the Prophetic Vision of Social and Ecojustice the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree? By Carol P. Christ”

Do White Feminists Have Ancestors? By Carol P. Christ

Some years ago when I was speaking on ecofeminism, womanist theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher posed a question that went something like this: What I am missing in your presentation is reference to ancestors. For black women, this issue is critical.

Baker-Fletcher’s question provoked a process of thinking that continues to this day. For example, I began to notice that when black women spoke at the American Academy of Religion, they often began by thanking their foremothers Delores Williams and Katie Cannon for beginning the womanist dialogue. It is far rarer to hear a white woman thank Valerie Saiving, Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Ruether, or Marija Gimbutas before her talk.

To the contrary, many white women take great pains to distance themselves from feminist foresisters. I once heard a white woman Biblical scholar tell women students to do work on women in the Bible or other areas of religion without using the word feminist or placing their work in a female or feminist train of thought– if they wanted to get it published. She was very proud that she had used this method and succeeded. In other words, she was following in the footsteps of Mary Daly, Phyllis Trible, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza but acting as if she had invented the study of women and the Bible herself. The reason for this, she freely admitted, was that male scholars who held power in her field would not respect her work if she used the “f” word. Continue reading “Do White Feminists Have Ancestors? By Carol P. Christ”

Exciting New Research on Matriarchal Societies By Carol P. Christ

The following is a guest post written by Carol Christ, Ph.D., a pioneer and founding mother of the Goddess, women’s spirituality, and feminist theology movements, and director of the Ariadne Institute. She is also the author of multiple books including Rebirth of the Goddess.

Although there are some of us who disagree, the “party line” in the fields of Religious Studies and Archaeology—even among feminists– is that there never were any matriarchies and that claims about peaceful, matrifocal, sedentary, agricultural, Goddess-worshipping societies in Old Europe or elsewhere have been manufactured out of utopian longing.

I myself and most other English-speaking scholars defending Marija Gimbutas’s theories about Old Europe have studiously avoided the word “matriarchy” (speaking rather of “matrifocal, matrilineal, and matrilocal” societies) because the very word “matriarchy” conjures up the image of female-dominated societies where women ruled, waged wars, held men as slaves, and raped and abused men and boys. In fact, this fantasy tells us far more about patriarchy than about it does about matriarchy. Continue reading “Exciting New Research on Matriarchal Societies By Carol P. Christ”