On a trip to Ireland several years ago, I was fortunate to have been able to see the Sheela-na-gigs in the National Museum of Dublin. Two of these Sheelas including the one removed from the Seir Kieran Church of County Offaly, pictured below, are currently on display. They stand at the doorway of a room dedicated to items from the medieval period and easily missed. As there was little interest in them and they are not in cases, I was able to silently commune without interruption.
Tag: feminism and religion
Honey: A Thousand Flowers by Mary Beth Moser
Today I am finishing the last bit of the honey I hand-carried home from my most recent trip to Trentino. Sun yellow in color, it is made from the nectar of mountain flowers. Its label tells its origin—di montagna, of the mountains, and its type — mille fiore, often translated as “wildflowers.” Literally, however, it means “a thousand flowers.”
The valley where my maternal grandmother was born, Val di Sole, is renowned for its honey. In Croviana, one of the villages in the valley, new honey is celebrated in July with a sagra, a communal food festival. There are more than a dozen different types of honey from Trentino, including apple, chestnut, and rhododendron. These are plants of place – nature’s gifts that appear in the folk stories and are present in everyday life. Continue reading “Honey: A Thousand Flowers by Mary Beth Moser”
Talking Gender and Islam at the Grassroots by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente
In my current trajectory linked to community development — via both activism and my professional field — I’ve learned that popular education is a very useful practice and methodology to decentralize all types of knowledge. Since I embraced Islam, part of my activity has focused on creating spaces for the production, discussion, and appropriation of religious knowledge for women at the grassroots. Religion is not separated from the daily life of believers, therefore, each of them carries knowledge that has been deliberately obliterated by hegemony.
The feminist hermeneutic of Islam is a paradigm that aims to provide Muslim women with skills and concepts that allow them to boost their agencies in their respective contexts, encouraging a transformation in the understanding of religious phenomena and its trajectory towards gender justice. For this transformation to be possible, knowledge must be accessible in language, methodology and location.
Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of liberation is a tool I consider to be critical and necessary for feminism, including Islamic feminism, at a time when debates about decolonization are very fashionable in academia. Freire’s methodology is democratizing because it allows, on one hand, to transfer knowledge from privileged circles to the margins and, on the other, to make visible the experiential knowledge produced in the periphery — to include them in the spectrum of what we understand and as such subvert, in this way, the dynamics of power, representation and discourses.
During my time in South Africa, I have engaged with popular education on topics related to Islam and Gender with Muslim women from the Cape Flats. These women have different backgrounds, races, life trajectories, and religious journeys. They exist in the geographic, cultural and epistemological margins of the social reality of Cape Town. Their experiences as Muslims do not appear in academic journals, nor are they even “noticed” by their highly androcentric communities of belonging.
For the past 7 months, I have met with them on a regular basis to talk about Gender and Islam. “Talk” is a methodological definition that means that we are placed in equal and interchangeable positions of teacher-student during our dialog — assuming than rather than learning something new, we are facilitating for each other a way to communicate things we already know. Muslim women of the Cape Flats know, indeed. But they have been told that they do not know by a system of privilege formed for the ulemas, for academia, or for the Islamic institutions. Continue reading “Talking Gender and Islam at the Grassroots by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente”
Sacred Water by Molly Remer
“Drinking the water, I thought how earth and sky are generous with their gifts and how good it is to receive them. Most of us are taught, somehow, about giving and accepting human gifts, but not about opening ourselves and our bodies to welcome the sun, the land, the visions of sky and dreaming, not about standing in the rain ecstatic with what is offered.”
–Linda Hogan in Sisters of the Earth
The women have gathered in a large open living room, under high ceilings and banisters draped with goddess 
tapestries, their faces are turned towards me, waiting expectantly. We are here for our first overnight Red Tent Retreat, our women’s circle’s second only overnight ceremony in ten years. We are preparing to go on a pilgrimage. I tell them a synopsis version of Inanna’s descent into the underworld, her passage through seven gates and the requirement that at each gate she lie down something of herself, to give up or sacrifice something she holds dear, until she arrives naked and shaking in the depths of the underworld, with nothing left to offer, but her life.
In our own lives, I explain, we face Innana’s descents of our own. They may be as difficult as the death of an adult child, the loss of a baby, the diagnosis of significant illness, or a destroyed relationship. They may be as beautiful and yet soul-wrenchingly difficult as journeying through childbirth and walking through the underworld of postpartum with our newborns. They may be as seemingly every day as returning to school after a long absence. There is value in seeing our lives through this mythopoetic lens. When we story our realities, we find a connection to the experiences and courage of others, we find a pattern of our own lives, and we find a strength of purpose to go on. Continue reading “Sacred Water by Molly Remer”
Why Is the Democratic Party Slapping Women in the Face? by Carol P. Christ
While the Republicans in Congress and in state legislatures across the country are working to repeal and restrict a woman’s right to control her own body, the Democratic Party has decided not to “insist” that the right to abortion is a basic human right.
During the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton was criticized for choosing a Tim Kaine as her vice presidential running mate even though as governor of Virginia, he had supported several anti-abortion bills. Last winter Bernie Sanders and his coalition were criticized for backing Heath Mello, a Democrat running for mayor of Omaha, Nebraska, who co-sponsored the first statewide bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks and who voted for a bill to outlaw the “telemedicine” (speaking to a doctor via the internet) to monitor medication abortion when no local doctor will supervise it. Last week the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Ben Ray Luján, said the party would support anti-choice candidates. Senate Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi agreed with him that abortion should not be a litmus test.
And why not? Why should the Democratic Party have a “big tent” that includes those who deny a woman’s right to choose abortion? Continue reading “Why Is the Democratic Party Slapping Women in the Face? by Carol P. Christ”
Look Up by Natalie Weaver
He said, “Look up.” So, I looked up, and I saw the most beautiful stars. They were like Hubble Space Telescope Images, but I could see them with my own unaided eyes. All the colors were there, close enough to touch, yet glittering and dancing against the black of space, each one twinkling its own unique light. I was kneeling in the dream, but the sight was so beautiful it knocked me backward, the backs of my thighs now folding onto my calves. I began to cry, and that is when I woke up.
Earlier in the dream, I had been visiting a friend. When I had meandered outside the walls of a weathered barn where I had been perusing the friend’s library, there were two gentlemen who greeted me, one rocking quietly in an old wooden chair and the other seated in a still chair beside him. “Hello,” the rocking one said, “I’m Hiram.” “Hiram,” I replied, pronouncing the name like high-rum. “That’s an interesting name.” “It’s pronounced ‘hear-em.’ Hear-em Edson,” he followed. Continue reading “Look Up by Natalie Weaver”
As We Bless the Source of Life in Midsummer by Carol P. Christ
August 1 is the Neo-pagan and Wiccan holiday known as Lammas. For many witches and pagans this is the time when the young male God identified with the harvest of the seasonal wheat crop is sacrificed in the interest of the larger cycles of birth, death, and renewal. Here in Greece August 15 is a major holiday celebrating the Dormition and Assumption (death and rebirth) of the Panagia, She Who Is All Holy.
In her ground-breaking book The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess, Starhawk identified the ancient religion of the great Goddess with Wiccan tradition defined by the Englishman Gerald Gardner and transmitted to her through her initiation into the Faery (or Feri) tradition of the Americans Victor and Cora Anderson. In her vision, the ancient religion of the great Goddess is understood to be a magical tradition in which spells play a prominent role. Continue reading “As We Bless the Source of Life in Midsummer by Carol P. Christ”
Grief and Healing by Carol P. Christ
My father died on July 6, 2017, 98 years, 4 months, 12 days. The last time I saw him was in the spring of 2004. During that visit, he gave me “the silent treatment” (refused to look at me or speak to me) when I stepped over an invisible line. That was not the first time, but it would be the last. When I gave lectures in California in 2008 and 2010, I agonized and yet made the decision not to visit him. I did not want to give him the chance to hurt me again.
My father and I kept in touch at Christmas and birthdays. In recent years we found our mutual interest in the family genealogy to be safe ground on which we could make contact. I was pleased to be able to tell him that I found the place of origin of our branch of the Christ family in Unterpreppach, Lower Bavaria when I visited Germany in the spring of 2016 with my cousin Bill. My father was with me in spirit when I visited the Christ family graves at Most Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Cemetery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the winter of 2016.
When my father had his first heart attack a few years ago, I agonized again and made the decision not to visit. I did not want to give him the chance to hurt me again. This time the decision was final. Continue reading “Grief and Healing by Carol P. Christ”
Another One Bites the Dust: Orthodox Priest Defrocked for Declaring God Our Mother and Father Is Love by Carol P. Christ
While trying to find a topic for today’s blog, I came across a facebook post from July 10 by former Orthodox priest Christoforos Schuff in which he announced:
After reaffirming my beliefs on gender, sexuality, faith and the Church…and sharing my declaration of faith with His Eminence Jean, Archbishop of the Rue Daru Exarchate of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, I was asked kindly and respectfully to remove my cassock and cross. It is finished…with love, peace and mutual respect. May the Divine enlighten our minds and hearts!
Schuff posted the letter to the Archbishop that resulted in his defrocking: Continue reading “Another One Bites the Dust: Orthodox Priest Defrocked for Declaring God Our Mother and Father Is Love by Carol P. Christ”
Mulling over Movies: Moana, Pt. 2 by Elise M. Edwards
Every summer in the US, movie theatres show their newest big budget films, hoping to draw in large audiences. While I appreciate an air-conditioned theatre on a hot day, I love the opportunity to go to an outdoor movie screening. These screenings are usually community-oriented opportunities for social gathering. In my previous post, I talked about Moana, a Disney film I saw at an outdoor screening earlier this summer. I enjoyed watching this movie with my friends and their families and I was delighted by the story itself. It has several religious and spiritual themes and strong female characters. Previously, I spoke of the significance of myths in this movie. Today, I’m focused on depictions of nature in Moana and their remarkable beauty.
Many feminist and womanist theologians and religion scholars have raised concerns about the interrelated dominations of women and nature, as well as the disproportionate hardships women and children are exposed to with increasing climate change and environmental degradation. Our changing environment affects all life on the planet, but it is the people who are most vulnerable (physically, economically, politically) who at most at risk. Obviously, animals and plants are endangered, too. Ethicists like me are interested in finding ways to address these concerns because we are committed the preservation of life. As feminists, there’s more to it, though. We recognize the way nature itself is often feminized (“Mother Nature”), which makes it even more troubling when it is cultivated without respect for the wellbeing of existing ecosystems and the life forces dependent upon them.
Continue reading “Mulling over Movies: Moana, Pt. 2 by Elise M. Edwards”
Feminism and Religion 