Dystopia – Feminism and Religion

Thanksgiving by Beth Bartlett

When I offered to write the FAR post for Thanksgiving a month ago, I had no idea how difficult I would find that task to be. I suppose I had a different vision of what these days would be like. I had no idea how heartsick and wordless I would become in the wake of a second and even more bizarre and dangerous Trump presidency. It hardly feels like a time for celebrating a national holiday.

Thanksgiving in the United States and the colonies before has gone through several iterations – from the mythologized feast of the Puritan colonists in Plymouth, Massachusetts with the indigenous Wampanoag following the successful corn harvest – corn the Wampanoag had taught the Puritans how to plant after half of them had starved to death the previous winter; to George Washington’s Thanksgiving proclamation giving thanks for the successful ratification of the US Constitution; to Abraham Lincoln in 1863 acceding to Sarah Josepha Hale’s 36-year quest to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday — “to heal the wounds of the nation.” Goddess knows we could use that now, but it seems farther out of reach than ever.

Lesser known is the proclamation of a day of thanksgiving by the Massachusetts Bay Company to celebrate their defeat of the Pequot nation following the Pequot Wars of 1636-1638 in which most of the Pequot peoples were killed or enslaved, giving rise to many indigenous peoples observing Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning.

Octavia Tried to Tell Us: Parable for Today’s Pandemic by Monica Coleman

In national quarantine and sheltering-in-place or is it “safer-at-home,” all I could think about was that we were living in a scene from the late Afrofuturist writer Octavia Butler’s book Parable of the Sower. So I texted my friend, Afrofuturist writer Tananarive Due and said: hey let’s do a webinar on this. And this turned into weekly – then monthly – free webinars on the wisdom we can glean from Octavia Butler as we live through these political days.

Here, I share a recent workshop and dialogue that lifts up Octavia’s Parable of the Sower and highlights themes of prophecy, dystopia, theology and a way forward in times like these.

If you are interested in engaging more intimate work centered on Octavia’s work, visit OctaviaWebinar.com for more information.

Dr. Monica A. Coleman is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware. She spent over ten years in graduate theological education at Claremont School of Theology, the Center for Process Studies and Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Coleman has earned degrees from Harvard University, Vanderbilt University and Claremont Graduate University. She has received funding from leading foundations in the United States, including the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation, among others.

Answering her call to ministry at 19 years of age, Coleman is an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and an initiate in traditional Yoruba religion.

Dr. Coleman offers workshops, lectures and books for your organization, university or church. She warmly connects with people as she shares principles for growth and liberation. Read her story here.

Dystopian Fiction Inspiration and Religious Lessons by Ivy Helman

me-hugging-tree We live in a dystopia. This world is filled to the brim in dichotomies: poverty and extreme excess, hunger and mountains of food, disease and cutting-edge medicine, materialism and an immense environmental crisis, and hour-long walks for water and hour-long luxurious baths. There are so many parts of our world that are not just unfair, unequal, broken and undesirable, but violent, traumatic and deadly. And, sometimes it feels like it is only getting worse, or at least, again teetering on the edge of yet another catastrophe.

Most of the world’s religious traditions agree that this is not the way the world should be. My own religious tradition, Judaism, traces this separation between the Creator’s utopia, the Garden of Eden, and our current situation all the way back to the beginning of humankind. The actions of the first two humans resulted in exile from the Garden: enter the world diametrically opposed: dystopia. Nonetheless, the Jewish religious tradition’s call for tikkun olam (repairing the world) suggests that it is possible to lift the veil between the Divine and us and consequently recreate the utopian Eden once again. One could say it is why we are here.

That being said, while the dystopian genre has been around for many decades, I have noticed a recent rise in the popularity of dystopian fiction. While I have always had a keen interest in science fiction, from Star Trek to FireFly and beyond, I myself have, as of late, become an avid reader of dystopian novels. I blasted through the Divergent series by Veronica Roth, have reread The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk more times than I can count and just began my dip (25 pages) into The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver – not so action-packed as the others. I’ve also been, one could say, addicted to dystopian films (yes many were books first) like The Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Gattaca, The Fifth Element and Serenity to name just a few.

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