Carol P. Christ – Page 46 – Feminism and Religion

What if Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine Are Not Oppositional Categories? by Carol P. Christ

A friend who is a spiritual teacher speaks often “bringing back the values associated with the Divine Feminine.” For her this has to do with helping women to understand the beauty of our bodies and the importance of ways of being such as giving and caring for others that have been associated with the undervalued so-called “feminine” side of the masculine-feminine polarity. Though she also speaks about the Goddess, I think she prefers the term “the Divine Feminine” because of the implication that men too have their “Divine Masculine.”

This friend has a wonderful husband who is a teacher in his own right and who often ends up spending a lot of his time among powerful women who enjoy talking about the Goddess. In these conversations he sometimes speaks of the need for men to “recover the Divine Masculine” if they are to become whole.

I was reminded of these conversations when a two other friends, in different contexts, recently voiced their concern that Goddess imagery is problematic if it repeats sex role stereotypes. My response to them was that in the West, the feminist association of femaleness with power and value in Goddess symbolism automatically shatters the most important sex role stereotype: the notion that women are less powerful and less valuable than men. But, I said, after that, problems may arise.

I added that (for me) the categories of Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine are problematic because (it seems to me) that at their core these concepts are rooted in the notion that males and females are fundamentally different, and that the so-called “feminine” is relational, loving, giving, while the so-called “masculine” is independent, rational, aggressive, and sometimes violent and warlike. Those who speak of the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine as oppositional categories usually try to avoid categorizing men and women by stating that “we all have our masculine and feminine sides.” Still it is hard to avoid the implication that men are more masculine and women are more feminine.

Though I agree that men need new images of what it means to be men as much as women need new images of what it means to be women, I hesitate to speak of these as new images of the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine for two reasons. Although I recognize that others are inspired by images of the Sacred Marriage, for me it has been more important–and more possible–to find power within myself and in a wide variety of relationships, than to find it in a male-female heterosexual couple relationship in which the opposites are “joined.”

More importantly, I find that images of Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine often do justify patriarchal sex-role stereotypes. An internet search for “Divine Masculine” validated this fear. The first (and therefore most popular) website defined the Divine Masculine through six archetypes: God, King, Priest, Warrior, Lover, Sage.

The site’s author seems to want to help men learn new ways to interact with powerful women—as neither dominant over them nor submissive to them. The author writes: “The Divine Masculine represents an archetypal ideal, the best and most inspiring, elevating, and restorative aspects of masculine expression and manifestation in the universe. For those seeking an expanded understanding of the Self, the Divine Masculine is not a distant, detached, jealous and vengeful male deity. The Divine Masculine (along with the Divine Feminine) acts as a shining mirror of the Self, revealing aspects that need compassionate attention and support to become one’s highest potential.”

Following this insight, he redefines the God archetype as “unconditionally loving, inclusive, open, welcoming, heart-centered, spiritually focused, supportive and inspirational.” For him, the King archetype is “benevolent, evenhanded, calm, caring and thoughtfully present.” And the Warrior “finds his place in collaborative projects, being fulfilled and contented with the collaboration and not by ambition or competition.”

While I appreciate the ways in which this man redefines masculinity and male strength in terms that in the past have been associated with “the feminine,” I am concerned that he continues to view the six “archetypes” that include the King and Warrior as universal. He does not explicitly name patriarchy as a system of male dominance enforced through violence as the reason for redefining the meaning of the “archetypes.” I also worry that a good king is still a king, and that a warrior who fights for the good of others is still a warrior. From a feminist perspective, these archetypes are not universal, but rather are the product of patriarchy. Perhaps instead of redefining them, we should discard them.

peak shrine figurines 3 — Male and female figures from ancient Crete are not strongly differentiated.

New research suggests that in matriarchies, there is no divine masculine per se, because though men have their own important roles, both males and females are encouraged to embody the values associated with mothers and mothering—in other words to be loving, giving, caring, and generous. In this context there is no opposition or sharp contrast between the divine masculine, the divine feminine, and any other divine gender or transgender.

I believe that that we need a multiplicity of images for divine power that express the diversity and differences of our bodies and all bodies in the web of life. We also need new images of how to be strong and powerful, yet loving and caring above all, in male, female, and other bodies.

However, if the “highest” values are the same for both—and all–genders, then perhaps it is time to retire the oppositional binary of Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine and to speak instead of images of divinity in male, female, and other bodies.

Carol leads the life-transforming Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete (facebook and twitter). Carol’s books include She Who Changes and and Rebirth of the Goddess; with Judith Plaskow, the widely-used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions and forthcoming next year, Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology. Explore Carol’s writing. Photo of Carol by Maureen Murdock.

Restored in Beauty by Carol P. Christ

The path leading to the Klapados Waterfall begins at the edge of an open meadow in the pine and oak woodlands of a mountain in the island of Lesbos. After driving several miles on a very rutted dirt track, we parked under an oak tree, crossed the meadow and scrambled down a winding path. After about 20 minutes, it ended at a stream surrounded by plane trees. From there, we climbed over rocks to reach a pool created by the seasonal waterfall.

On the day we visited it, the waterfall was only a trickle of cascading drops that moistened its moss-covered path to the pool. The roots of a plane tree growing at the top of cliff followed the path of the water, weaving a web over the rockface all the way down to the pool.

Sitting on a rock at the edge of the pool I realized that the cliffs that embraced it on three sides were the remains of a crater formed twenty million (or so) years ago when a finger of molten lava pushed its way through the earth, exploding in clouds of dust and projectile rocks.

In Lesbos the volcanic activity came not from a single source–for example, from the highest mountain. Rather, like the plane trees in whose shade we rested, the volcano’s trunk with roots in the molten lava of the earth’s core, had many branches from which it erupted at different times. Huge boulders thrown out in the explosions can be seen in the meadows, while the trees in the forest curve their roots around them to reach the soil. The mountain was also shaped by the settling of volcanic dust that crumbles again into tiny fragments when exposed.

As I was thinking of all of this my friend Cristina climbed over the roots of the plane trees that surrounded the pool, removed her clothes, and slipped into the water. Soon I followed her. We sensed that we were in a sacred place, and as we have done rituals together many times before, our ritual emerged spontaneously: it almost seemed as if our minds and bodies were moving as one.

We renewed ourselves in beauty, submerging our bodies under the water three times, while floating in the embrace of the pool, gazing up at the rock formations, admiring trees that looked like dancing women, moss that looked like pubic hair, and blue black damselflies that all together had created a most beautiful place that called to something deep within us on that day.

Later we would sing the English version of the song of the Navajo Beautyway:

I walk with beauty before me.
I walk with beauty behind me.
I walk with beauty all around me.
As I walk the beauty way.
I walk with beauty above me.
I walk with beauty below me.
I walk with beauty inside me.
As I walk the beauty way.

We are the creative process of life.

We are restored in beauty.

Blessed be!

Take Only What You Need and Give Away: Fundamental Principles of Sustainability Ethics

Why is it so important to take only what we really need? Because everything we take harms another life. I included this Native American teaching as one of the Nine Touchstones I offered as a counterpoint to the Ten Commandments in Rebirth of the Goddess.

Recently, I have begun to realize that the concept of taking only what you need is the heart* of sustainability ethics, an ethical system that can orient us to living in harmony with others and the natural world. The practice of great generosity is its counterpoint. When you have worked for, received, or accumulated more than you need, you should give it away.

The reason these principles are important is because “taking what you need” is “taking” from the web of life. We “take” other lives (whether plants or animals) in order to eat, to clothe ourselves, to build houses, and in agricultural societies to clear land to plant, to remove unwanted plants (weeds) from cultivated land. In our industrial age, we “take” so much more to fuel our cars and to provide electricity. To take more than we need is to do unnecessary violence to the web of life. When we give away what we don’t need we help others to survive, and we also help to ensure that no more lives than necessary are taken.

On the first Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete, we decided to incorporate the give-away as part of our closing ritual. It is nice to give and receive a gift at the end of an intense two weeks spent with other pilgrims. However, I am coming to realize that in comparison with the deeper meaning and intention of the ritual, our give-away, like the practice of giving presents in our wider culture, is superficial. When we give gifts to friends we try not to give too much or too little. When we give to children we often do so without regard to what they really need. When we receive gifts, we may feel burdened with one more thing we don’t want or need.

Being raised in acquisitive and throw-away cultures, it is not surprising that few of us have any real idea what the principles of taking only what you need and giving away mean. In traditional cultures, there are constraints on accumulation. If women in your family had to weave and sew and embroider all of your clothing, and if this process was time-consuming and involved time taken from other tasks, you would not be likely to have been given or to have learned to demand more clothes than you really need. Similarly, if all of the food for a clan is produced by its own labor, people would be unlikely to grow more than they needed to eat and store for the winter.

I suspect that all of this changed when wars of conquest became integrated into social structures. When other groups were conquered, their precious goods, including ritual items and ritual clothing and jewelry, were appropriated by the victors as “the spoils of war.” Land and people too were “the spoils of war,” and with the introduction of slave labor and the acquisition of lands that belonged to others, an excess of everything could be produced for the benefit of the ruling class, or to be more accurate, the war lords. This is another story, and I have discussed it elsewhere.

To return to the question at hand, I am suggesting that if we wish to live sustainably on planet earth, we must return to the values of our ancestors, distant and not so distant, who practiced taking what you need and sharing what you don’t need. These values are not the exclusive property of Native Americans, but are the values of the ancestors of all of us, if we go back far enough. As I have discussed, these values are still practiced in rural Crete. And they are the foundation of living matriarchal cultures. Many of us who have traveled have met people in rural cultures who have little, yet seem happier than anyone we know at home.

At some level we know that accumulating things does not make us happy. At the same time, prodded by advertising, we continue to shop compulsively and to buy things we don’t need. It will not be an easy task to change our patterns of consumption. If we could do so, our economic system would collapse, because it is based on creating needs for more and more things. This is why chosen or forced “austerity” threatens the capitalist system. You and I may not need all of the things we are used to buying, but if large numbers of us stop spending, the makers and sellers of goods suffer. On the other hand, the world will not survive if we carry on as we are, because we are depleting the world’s resources.

What would happen if each of us, like the subjects on the popular reality programs on hoarding, went through each of the rooms of our homes and designated the things we really need and gave the rest away? What if we then took a good look at our homes and asked if we really need the space we have. I presume this would be a long term process in which we would continually discover that we don’t need things we have always thought we could not live without.

What if we stopped buying what we do not need and gave a large portion of our income and savings to others? Would we discover what it means to live in harmony with others and the whole web of life? Could we learn how to flourish with others, not at the expense of others?

*I am not saying these are the only ethical touchstones we need to build an ethics of sustainability, but I do believe they are at its center.

Experiencing Divinity in the World by Carol P. Christ

As I work on revisions of the new book, Goddess and God in the World, that Judith Plaskow and I are writing, I am thinking again about John Cobb’s notion of the “two ultimates” as two different ways of thinking about divinity. Cobb suggested that religions have defined the nature of ultimate reality as personal and as impersonal, as God and as the ground of being. The ground of being is the impersonal ultimate: the metaphysical principles that structure all of life, principles that he described as creativity or the creative process.

Judith describes God as the impersonal creative process and views personal language for divinity as metaphoric or symbolic. I define Goddess as personal, yet also view the impersonal ultimate, the creative process, as sacred. For me, this raises the question of the relationship between Goddess and the creative process.

In Cobb’s view, the two ultimates are co-eternal: the personal God did not “create” the creative process, nor was the personal God “created” by the creative process. Rather, for Cobb, God as the personal ultimate, like all other individuals, participates in the creative process. What then is the creative process? Although the term “creativity” has multiple meanings, in process philosophy it has a specific one.

Whitehead’s description of the creative process is rooted in the insight of modern science that the most basic components of our universe are particles of atoms that defy being categorized as either matter or energy, but seem to move and change, depending on their relationships. It is from the relationships of these tiny individuals that the evolutionary process of our universe began. This insight led Whitehead to recognize that the nature of reality (or being) is not fixed and static (as Western philosophers before him had concluded) but is always moving, changing, or “in process.” Whitehead’s understanding of the creative process is summed up in his much-quoted phrase, “the many become one, and are increased by one.”

The creative moment in the creative process (which is in fact every moment in the life of an individual) is the moment when the individual (whether particle of an atom, cell, animal, human, or divinity) in an act of creative freedom unifies the world (the many) into a new synthesis (the one): this new synthesis adds a new fact to the world (the many is increased by one). This is an abstract description of the creative process in its most basic form. In fact, however, we do not experience the world in the abstract, but in the concrete.

In this moment I (Carol) remember my past (many different Carols situated in many different worlds and some of the books I have read) as I shape this sentence (with my hands on my computer acting in concert with the feelings of my body and the thoughts that are flowing in my mind) and unite myself and my world in a new synthesis (which is this sentence). As I do so, I add a new fact to the world (the many are increased by one), a sentence that may be read by others in the future, therefore influencing their lives.

The reader who reads my words (you) reflects on them in relation to her or his memory (your memories of your past selves in your past) and asks if what I am saying makes sense: in the moment that she or he (you) decides if it does or it doesn’t, a new fact is added to the world (the many are increased by one), an opinion that in turn may be expressed to someone else (the many is again increased by one) who in turn responds to it (the many is increased by one more).

Though this description of the creative process focuses on mental actions, our mental processes are not divorced from our bodies and feelings, and the relations of mind, body and feeling are complex. In some creative moments, feelings are primary, while in others the body leads. This second richer description of the creative process is still an abstraction. We do not generally experience life as a series of moments but as a flow in which one moment is indistinguishable from the others; nonetheless, we can recognize that our lives are made up of a series of moments in which we along with others create the world anew.

Sometimes we take a longer and broader view of the creative process, recognizing patterns and cycles within the world that we share with other than human life. Traditional peoples, for example, often speak of or invoke the creative processes of birth, death, and regeneration that are the basis of life on this earth. This is also an important way of describing the ground of being because it situates human creativity within the creativity of the web of life. In our time we might also speak about the evolution of life. Taking a long view, we experience the sacrality of the web of life.

I experience—feel and sense—the personal ultimate, the presence of Goddess as intelligent love in my body, mind, and spirit and in all bodies, minds, and spirits, as I go about my everyday life. She is always there: feeling the love and joy I feel; supporting and understanding me when things are difficult; inspiring me to share the grace of life with everyone and everything. I also feel the power of the impersonal ultimate, the creative process that supports the creativity or freedom of all individuals who interact with each other in the web of life. For me the two ultimates—Goddess and the web of life—are both real.

Though the two ultimates are separate in the abstract, in the concrete experience of those of us who affirm a personal divinity, they are intertwined because the personal divinity is experienced through the creative process that is the basis of life. Thus, at one and the same time, I experience myself and divinity within me, other individuals and the divinity with in them, the creative process and the divinity within it.

I celebrate the creative process and its fruits, the powers of birth, death, and regeneration and the evolutionary process as a whole, as the ground of all being as well as the Goddess I experience as a personal, intelligent, loving, compassionate presence who cares about me, all other individuals in the world.

Carol leads the life-transforming Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete (facebook and twitter). Carol’s books include She Who Changes and and Rebirth of the Goddess; with Judith Plaskow, the widely-used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions; and forthcoming in 2016, Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology.

Gender, Friendship, Collaboration, and Unacknowledged Authorship by Carol P. Christ

In recent weeks Judith Plaskow and I have been revising the manuscript of our new book Goddess and God in the World in preparation for sending it to the publisher. Yes, we have a publisher. We signed a contract with Fortress Press a short time ago. The book should be out in 2016.

We have been hard—and I mean very hard—at work revising the four chapters in the book that are jointly written. The versions have been going back and forth and forth and back as we revision what we want to say and revise each other’s revisions of the drafts we have. We both want the final manuscript to say things just right and it is very hard not to make one more set of (alleged) improvements.

In the process we have realized that while we often disagree on words and wording, we have come to think alike on a wide variety of issues to the point that it becomes hard to say who had the ideas first. In addition we have both become so familiar with each other’s positions that we can each easily articulate both sides of our dialogue on the issues on which we disagree.

All of this has gotten me to thinking again about authorship and co-authorship and original and shared ideas. This train of thought led me back to the subject of Judith’s and my first essay together originally titled “Against My Wife” but published as “For the Advancement of My Career: A Form Critical Study in the Art of Acknowledgement.” We discussed 5 formulaic tropes used in acknowledgements to wives in academic books, ending with “the wife as unacknowledged co-author.” Continue reading “Gender, Friendship, Collaboration, and Unacknowledged Authorship by Carol P. Christ”

Kassiani: Placing a Woman at the Center of the Easter Drama by Carol P. Christ

For many years I been told of the beautiful Hymn of Kassiani, sung only on Easter Tuesday night, but I had never heard it until this week. For many this song is the high point of Easter week.

Kassiani, also known as St. Kassia, was a Greek woman born into a wealthy family in Constantinople (now Istanbul) about 805 to 810 AD. According to three historians of the time, she was intelligent and beautiful and selected as a potential bride for the Emperor Theophilos. The chroniclers state that the Theophilos approached her and said: “Through woman, the worst,” referring to the sin of Eve. Clever Kassiani responded, “Through woman, the best,” referring to the birth of the Savior through Mary.

Apparently unable to accept being put in his place by a woman, Theophilos chose another bride. Kassiani founded a monastery in Constantinople becoming its first abbess. She was an outspoken theological advocate of icons during the iconoclastic crisis (for which she was flogged). One of only two women to publish under her own name during the Byzantine Middle Ages, Kassiani wrote both poetry and hymns. Up to 50 of her hymns are known today, with 23 of them being part of the Greek Orthodox liturgy. Continue reading “Kassiani: Placing a Woman at the Center of the Easter Drama by Carol P. Christ”

Spring in the Era of Pesticides, Global Climate Change, and War by Carol P. Christ

This was not a normal winter. It rained and rained and rained. It was grey, grey, grey. Gale force winds blew in from the ocean, not once but many times. Several of my shutters were shattered. An olive tree fell in my garden. I pruned the dead leaves from its branches and had it hauled away. I am still in the process of pulling out a large number of plants that did not survive an unusual number of very cold days.

The soil is so saturated that streams are running where they have never been seen before, the land gives way, and boulders come crashing down the mountainsides. I have decided to remove all of my traditional shutters rather than repair them–as it is becoming clear that no shutters will survive the winds that will blow over our island in the coming years.

They say that we used to have strong gale winds of about 50 miles per hour once a year. Now we have hurricane force winds of 70 miles per hour several times each winter. I once read that Lesbos has the largest number of sunny days of all the Greek islands. We often sit out of doors wearing light jackets in the middle of winter. This year we did not.

My response to the long winter that has only just begun to give way was to stay inside. Though I said I was mildly depressed, I think deep down I was sad and angry.

Changes in the weather are normal and natural phenomena. But it is becoming increasingly evident that the changes we now experiencing are not. Climate experts tell us that because of the carbon we have released into the atmosphere of our planet, we will experience more and more extreme weather conditions.

I have noticed a decline in bees and butterflies in my garden in recent years. So far this spring there are almost none. This is not the result of global climate change, but of our failure to heed the warnings of Rachel Carson to stop poisoning the environment with pesticides.

The house martins have returned. I hear their liquid chatter as they fly above me. Freesias and irises are about to come into bloom. Pale pink, almost white petaled flowers are opening on the quince tree. Red leaves are budding on the pomegranate trees. The Judas tree burst into deep pink blossom overnight. Spring is a time of rebirth and renewal. This year is no exception.

Spring has also brought an increase in the arrival of refugees fleeing war in Syria and Afghanistan to our island. People discuss what will happen to them, but no one is talking about ending war.

Although spring is coming, it is hard for me to rejoice today. Human beings seem to be hell bent on destroying life. Right now I am holding back tears and screams because I fear that if I let them out, they will not stop.

Postscript: I will find the strength to rejoice in the regeneration of life and to redouble my commitment to save what can be saved–because we must.

Carol leads the life-transforming Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete (facebook and twitter)–space available on the spring and fall 2015 tours. Carol’s books include She Who Changes and and Rebirth of the Goddess; with Judith Plaskow, the widely-used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions; and forthcoming next year, Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology. Photo of Carol by Maureen Murdock.

The Inalienable Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness vs. the Right to Religious Freedom by Carol P. Christ

In his speech announcing that he signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Governor Mike Pence of Indiana did not mention the issue of the so-called “right” to refuse service to gays, lesbians, and transgendered individuals as one of the reasons this bill came to his desk. However, the idea that bakers could be “coerced” into baking cakes for gay weddings, photographers “required” to photograph them, and venue owners “forced” to provide space for them was frequently mentioned in discussions of this and similar bills. Governor Pence’s evident defensiveness during his press conference, and his repeated assertion that “this is not about discrimination” made it clear that an elephant was very much in the room.

Instead of defending the alleged “right” of religious individuals to discriminate against gay, lesbians, and transgendered individuals, Governor Pence invoked the right of employers to refuse to provide contraception to women as part of employee insurance plans, mentioning the Hobby Lobby and University of Notre Dame cases. If anyone has forgotten, in the Hobby Lobby case the Supreme Court decided that employers with a deeply held conviction that birth control is wrong do not have to offer it to their employees as required by federal law if “less restrictive” ways of providing it can be found.

Governor Pence apparently thought that openly defending the so-called “right” to discriminate against women is less controversial in his state than openly defending the so-called “right” to discriminate against lesbians, gays, and transgendered individuals. In fact, these two issues are linked in the minds of the people like Governor Pence. Continue reading “The Inalienable Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness vs. the Right to Religious Freedom by Carol P. Christ”

Genderqueering by John Erickson

We find our versions of home in these communities and it is within these spaces where our home not only begins to define who we are but we, as a reflection of that space, begin to outwardly redefine the spaces we exist in. If we slowly begin, through our experiences to shape our homes based on privilege and power without self-reflection and acknowledgment of others, then we are no better than those oppressive forces we say we’re against.

Leelah Alcorn, Ash Haffner, Aniya Knee Parker, Yaz'min Shancez — Leelah Alcorn, Ash Haffner, Aniya Knee Parker, Yaz’min Shancez

This post is a response to a recent blog entry titled “Who is Gender Queer?” on this site from Carol Christ. The post can be read by clicking here. I want to thank my friend, advocate, and upcoming scholar Martha Ovadia for reasons only she knows! Stay brave, speak up, be heard!
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It is terrifying to know that something is wrong but not be able to speak truth to power.

It is even more terrifying to know something is wrong, be able to speak to it, and then silence those voices that do not have that same privilege, power, or position.

The struggle that many of us in positions of privilege and power face is not just that of being ostracizing and essentializing forces—it is that we, as allies, members of communities, or even those dedicated to a cause, can ourselves participate in the oppression we are fighting against and can do harm.

It’s taken me a long time to not only be comfortable with who I identify as, but also how I go about fighting and defining my life based on said identity and experience. However, the one thing that I have the ability to do is choose that identity more freely than others. Unlike Leelah Alcorn, Ash Haffner, Aniya Knee Parker, or Yaz’min Shancez pictured above, I did not have to face the types of oppressions they did, to which they sadly lost their lives, as a result of the fact that we exist in a society that can’t deal with the inability to leave things undefined or to allow people to define who they are on their own terms.

It is vital that although my lived experiences could never meet nor match the same types of oppression that these brave individuals had to face, I, as a white, cisgendered gay male, do not become part of their oppression through my own position and privilege.

As a man who exists in the world of feminism and within various women’s communities, I walk a daily tightrope of privilege and power to insure that I do not silence those that I consider allies, friends, mentors, or colleagues. As a man who exists in the world of the LGBTQ community, I walk an additional tightrope to additionally not take away from or diminish the experiences of those members of our community that do not have the same type of lived experiences as myself. Even within minority communities, there are positions of hierarchy and within these hierarchies of knowledge, identity, or power, comes a responsibility to insure that the oppressed do not become the oppressors.

We find our versions of home in these communities and it is within these spaces where our home not only begins to define who we are but we, as a reflection of that space, begin to outwardly redefine the spaces we exist in. If we slowly begin to shape our homes based on privilege and power without self-reflection and acknowledgment of others, then we are no better than those oppressive forces we say we’re against.

I can’t speak for what identity feels like –I can only speak for what essentializing does, and what it does is reflected in the deaths of Lelah, Ash, and the many others who die nameless. It is our responsibility, as allies, members of communities, and those fighting to end sexist, patriarchal, and, even now, homonormative oppression, to make sure that no more deaths occur on our watch or that truth is spoken to power even when power is masquerading around as truth.

John Erickson is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Religious History at Claremont Graduate University. He holds a MA in Women’s Studies in Religion; an MA in Applied Women’s Studies; and a BA in Women’s Literature and Women’s Studies. He is a Non-Fiction Reviewer for Lambda Literary, the leader in LGBT reviews, author interviews, opinions and news since 1989 and the Co-Chair of the Queer Studies in Religion section of the American Academy of Religion’s Western Region, the only regional section of the American Academy of Religion that is dedicated to the exploration of queer studies in religion and other relevant fields in the nation and the President of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh’s LGBTQA+ Alumni Association. When he is not working on his dissertation, he can be found at West Hollywood City Hall where he is the Community Events Technician and works on policies and special events relating to women, gender, sexuality, and human rights issues that are sponsored or co-sponsored by the City of West Hollywood. He is the author of the blog From Wisconsin, with Love and can be followed on Twitter @JErickson85

The Power of Female Friendship: Remembering Karen McCarthy Brown by Carol P. Christ

News of Karen Brown’s recent death came via email from a mutual friend of ours, Christine Downing.

There are many things that can be said about Karen’s life and career, including that she won prizes for her life’s work Mama Lola in scholarly associations in the fields of religion and anthropology, that her work has been influential in bringing the study of Vodou into the scholarly mainstream, and that it has been inspiring to women of color.

Here I will focus on the years when our friendship provided crucial support for our audacious scholarly work. I first met Karen through the New York Feminist Scholars in Religion, a group Anne Barstow and I organized in 1974 that nurtured work on women and religion for many of us, including besides me and Karen, Judith Plaskow, Naomi Goldenberg, Ellen Umansky, Lynn Gottlieb, Beverly Harrison, Nelle Morton, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza.

My friendship with Karen was sparked by the explosion that occurred in the New York feminist scholars group when Anne Barstow and I spoke in the fall of 1976 about our attractions to the Goddess. Our presentations evoked a great conflagration, which I remember as coalescing around Beverly Harrison’s authoritative and authoritarian statement that there can be no ethics in Goddess religion because ethics comes from a transcendent source—not from nature. Karen was among those who responded tentatively that she was not so sure Beverly was right.

In the discussions that continued over the academic year, Karen and I exchanged meaningful glances, supported each others’ comments, and finally met for a few longer conversations shortly before I left New York to take up a new teaching position in California. Karen was then in the process of leaving her husband and moving into the magnificently quirky loft apartment that she would decorate with Haitian art in Tribeca on the lower west side of New York City.

I offered to do a house blessing for Karen’s new apartment, and she agreed. We blessed the thresholds and the corners of each room with salt and water and incense, and Karen spoke of the new life she hoped to begin in her new home. Later Karen told me that Alourdres (Mama Lola) insisted on blessing the house again and that the rituals were nearly the same.

During the years Karen lived in the Lower West Side from 1977 to 2001 or 2002, I stayed with her several times a year when conferences and lectures brought me to and through New York and on my way back and forth from teaching in Greece in the summers. During that time we had many long and intimate conversations in which the details of our lives were interwoven with the details of our work.

Our friendship was important to both of us, not only because we were pioneers in the study of women and religion, but also because within it we were becoming a minority within a minority as our work took us outside an increasingly Christian-dominated field. Our conversations ranged fluidly around many subjects including: leaving Christianity; the importance of female symbolism for divinity; whether we need male Gods of war or not; religions that focus on the divine and human connection to nature; similarities and differences between Goddess and Vodou rituals and altars; healing; female leadership styles; the experience of living between cultures; and our common struggles to find a voice in which to write about what we were discovering.

Karen and I were in the process of rejecting the dispassionate voice of scholarly objectivity and searching for a way to write that combined scholarly research with the passion to know the world more deeply and to think about it clearly that inspired our work. Our conversations with each other were a lifeline, as we had no role models for the personal paths we were exploring or for the new ways of writing our scholarship with which we were experimenting. We quite literally “heard each other into speech” to quote the phrase Nelle Morton used to name the importance of our female conversations.

I happened to visit Karen shortly after she underwent her initiation into Vodou, which was at about the same time that I experienced what felt to me like revelation at the temple of Aphrodite in Lesbos. We both felt that we must incorporate these moments into our writings, but we also were afraid to do so because we feared that others would call us heretics and dismiss our writing as unscholarly. Karen and I spoke publicly of these experiences on a panel organized by Rita Gross at the American Academy of Religion in 1985 that was published in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 3/1 (1987).

Karen received more scholarly recognition for her transgressions than I have. This is in part due to a greater interest in difference among anthropologists than among theologians. However, Karen often told me that scholarly recognition is not the only way to judge the importance of feminist contributions and reminded me that my work has had a major impact within and outside the academy.

One day Karen and I were discussing whether she could fully embrace Haitian culture and whether I would become Greek. Invoking the Vodou concept of living “between the worlds” of the spirit and ordinary reality, she said that this was how she understood herself: she could never be nor would she want to be Haitian, but neither would she ever be fully American or Christian again. She added that one of the reasons she felt comfortable living between worlds was that she had never felt comfortable in her own culture.

In the intervening years, I have thought about this conversation many times. While there was once a time when I wanted to become Greek and leave my American culture behind, I have come to realize that this is not possible. Like Karen, I live between worlds and find my greatest comfort in belonging to two worlds and to neither. This insight is only one of the many gifts I gained though my friendship with Karen McCarthy Brown.

Remembering Karen, let us bless the Source of Life, and the cycles of birth, death, and regeneration.