feminism and religion – Page 45 – Feminism and Religion

The Women’s March on Washington: I’ll Be There in Spirit by Carol P. Christ

The Women’s March on Washington has released its statement of vision and principles, and what a stunning testimony to intersectional feminism and collaboration it is! The statement is woman-centered, while at the same time addressing a multitude of issues that affect women’s lives: from access to abortion for all, to an equal rights amendment to the constitution, to the rights of women as domestic and farm workers, to police reform, and so much more.

I was thrilled to read the list of women honored as foremothers to the march:

Bella Abzug*Corazon Aquino*Ella Baker*Grace Lee Boggs*Berta Caceres*Rachel Carson*Shirley Chisholm*Angela Davis*Miss Major Griffin Gracy*LaDonna Harris*Dorothy I. Height *bell hooks*Dolores Huerta*Marsha P. Johnson*Barbara Jordan*Yuri Kochiyama*Winona LaDuke*Audre Lorde*Wilma Mankiller*Diane Nash*Sylvia Rivera*Barbara Smith*Gloria Steinem*Hannah G. Solomon*Harriet Tubman*Edith Windsor*Malala Yousafza

Many of these women have inspired me, particularly (but not only): Bella Abzug, Rachel Carson, Shirley Chisholm, Malala Yousafza. I have taught books by or about many of them, including: Rachel Carson, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Harriet Tubman, Barbara Smith.

I hope these names will be read at the beginning of the ceremonies, followed by an invitation to all present to speak, shout, or whisper—all at the same time–the names of all the women, known and unknown, who have inspired their own activism for women’s rights. In this way, no one’s name is left out. We have a similar ritual on the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete, and it is incredibly powerful.

I first heard the Women’s March on Washington discussed at the meeting of the Feminist Liberation Theology Network held in conjunction with the meetings American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature ten days after the (so-called) election of Donald Trump. At that time a number of women asked if this march would be a white women’s march. Would women of color feel called or able to come? In the interim, women of color have become leaders of the Women’s March on Washington and it is definitely not “for white women only.” It was suggested that women of color might feel safer at local marches. These have been organized as well: learn about Sister Marches here. At the time of this writing 370 Sister Marches had been organized—in all 50 states and in more than 40 countries.

If, like me, you are feeling weary and despondent these days, the statement of the Women’s March on Washington may help to re-inspire your commitment to all women’s rights:

The Women’s March on Washington is a women-led movement bringing together people of all genders, ages, races, cultures, political affiliations and backgrounds in our nation’s capital on January 21, 2017, to affirm our shared humanity and pronounce our bold message of resistance and self-determination

Recognizing that women have intersecting identities and are therefore impacted by a multitude of social justice and human rights issues, we have outlined a representative vision for a government that is based on the principles of liberty and justice for all. As Dr. King said, “We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”

Our liberation is bound in each other’s. The Women’s March on Washington includes leaders of organizations and communities that have been building the foundation for social progress for generations. We welcome vibrant collaboration and honor the legacy of the movements before us – the suffragists and abolitionists, the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, the American Indian Movement, Occupy Wall Street, Marriage Equality, Black Lives Matter, and more – by employing a decentralized, leader-full structure and focusing on an ambitious, fundamental and comprehensive agenda. Read more.

Learn more about the march. Readers of FAR might want to participate in the march with WATER (Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual). I’ll be there in spirit from Molivos, Lesbos, Greece.

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Be among the first to order A Serpentine Path, Carol P. Christ’s moving memoir of transformation. Carol’s other new book written with Judith Plaskow is Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology. Carol also wrote the first Goddess feminist theology, Rebirth of the Goddess.

Join Carol on a Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete in 2017. Save $200.

Read two of the chapters in the book: Mysteries and Dionysian Rites.

Thanks to Judith Shaw for the cover art “Downward Serpent.”

A Gift Offered in Faith and Love by Elise M. Edwards

“The day begins with the sun and ends with the moon and stars; what you do in between is your gift to the world.” – Reyna Craig

The new year has begun, and many of us take this marking of time as an occasion to set intentions, goals, plans, or resolutions for the year ahead. For us feminists, the year ahead holds clear challenges. We know that the bodies, spirits, minds, hearts, and souls of women, racial and ethnic “minorities,” and all sorts of vulnerable people will be attacked. We know that the protections secured under the law for these bodies, spirits, minds, hearts, and souls have been eroded and continue to be dismantled in the name of… well, what exactly? Justice? Life? Religion?

We’ve seen voting rights eroded in the name of democratic ideals. We’ve seen challenges to bodily autonomy in the name of life. We’ve seen state-sanctioned murder in the name of law and order. We’ve seen a rise in religious intolerance in the name of religious liberty. Our work in this age must be to continue to expand our collective understandings of these ideals. This is the gift we offer to the world.

Continue reading “A Gift Offered in Faith and Love by Elise M. Edwards”

As It Might Have Been: Ancestor Stories in the Dreamtime by Carol P. Christ

carol-p-christ-photo-michael-bakas In the middle of the night in waking sleep, I asked my great-great grandmother Annie Corliss to tell me the story of how she met and married James Inglis. This story came through me in a place I have come to call the Dreamtime. The Aboriginal term feels right. As I understand it, this is not a place where the dead speak to the living but rather a space where boundaries blur as the ancestors speak in us.

Annie Corliss’s Story: As It Might Have Been

My mother decided to come to America after my father died. My brother Hudson was 7 and my brother Hugh was a baby. I was 13. Mother had a little money, and she said we would have a better life in America. We left Ireland on a boat that took us to Liverpool. There we boarded the big ship Continent that took us to America. The trip took about 6 weeks. While we were at sea, first Hudson, and then Hugh died. Their bodies were wrapped in the blankets that had covered them in the filthy cabins on the ship. The priest said a few words of blessing, and they were dumped into the cold angry sea. Every day, another body was thrown overboard, sometimes two. So much grief, so many tears in the night. After Hudson died, Mother wouldn’t let go of Hugh, so afraid was she of losing him. After he died, she would not stop crying. I kept telling her she still had me. She didn’t care anymore. “America is cursed,” she kept repeating. (1) Continue reading “As It Might Have Been: Ancestor Stories in the Dreamtime by Carol P. Christ”

Exe(o)rcising the Spirit by Natalie Weaver

Natalie edited Why bother? It’s a legitimate question. My oldest son, almost 12, announced that he is depressed. He’s got good reasons for it, so I don’t try to talk him out of it. My youngest, almost 8, told me yesterday that life was simpler when he was in my belly. Now, he says school is torture. They won’t just teach something and move on. They have to do “activities,” he says, he’s onto the racket that is known as busy work.

I spoke with an aunt, a cancer survivor, whose progress is steadily monitored. Life, it seems, has become about watching and waiting rather than living. There’s not so much to look forward to, she says wistfully, once you get to a certain age. My friend called in distress. Not one area of life – not work, not kids, not household, not romance – was untouched by significant stress. She said that she could understand how people are okay with their kids moving out. There is a time, she observed baldly, when it will be alright to die. She said, I’m tired.

What do we do with fatigue that becomes soul deep? In my own case, I used to move it around from one place to another, focusing on what I could do as a remedy for the things I could not change. What I have come to realize, though, is that we run out of storage space eventually. There’s no place to hide from this – this question – of meaning or meaninglessness. When I try to assess and work out what’s on my mind, that is, when I feel the fatigue of meaning, I realize that I am dealing with something spiritual in nature.

It’s plain as day, of course, when you give it a second’s thought. But, at first blush, it is not always immediately self-evident that the angry person mouthing “bitch” at me in the crowded parking lot or my frustration at my kids not responding to my third request, were and are, at the root, theological problems. Such things were and are, the things that push the self toward the precipice of spiritual demise.

Why bother, I wonder, when the handsome and seemingly happy couple in line in front of me to see Santa with their little boy turns to me hostilely and threatens me should my own eager child accidentally bump into them again. As I stand on, dazed, still looking at them with something of a smiling admiration on my face, trying to understand what I have just heard, I am yelled down for the look on my face. What is this world, I wonder, while my own joy begins to shift into an anger that I am now tasked with suppressing and rationalizing?

The more I recognize myself in this place, especially as a woman, the more I understand that traditional theology, and specifically traditional Christian doctrine of God, has more or less failed to help me here. It has failed to provide me, specifically as a woman, an adequate way of dealing with the inevitable fatigue of a life lived long enough. What do I mean by this? I find that I have internalized a distorted sense of value and more importantly a distorted sense of self in relationship to others.

In particular, the idea of servanthood, even service as leadership, can be an infectious and distorting delusion whereby one inclines oneself simply to be taken advantage of by others. This happens in family life, work, and even in volunteerism (especially at the Church). Likewise, the insistence on joy, hope, resurrection, loving the neighbor, the new day yet to come – these can become woefully burdensome, even to the very young, because such spiritual dispositions stifle the capacity to experience–honestly and without self-critique–anger, fear, boredom, and disappointment.

As a woman, I find myself to be particularly susceptible to spiritual instruction about service, docility, duty, and self-gift, in ways that I increasingly come to understand are not genuinely relationally intelligent or spiritually wholesome: they are gendered norms for desirable social being. Of course, I know all this stuff as theory. I have for two decades. But, now, now I know it for myself, in my skin, and that is a heavy transition in the soul.

I’m not sure I agree that religion the opiate of the masses, but I do agree that one of the foremost reasons people create religion as a framework for interpreting life is that they are confronted with the profound task of meaning-making out of what often seems to be the unfathomable reach of meaninglessness. Theology is a response to that, as is worship. The older or perhaps wiser or perhaps more reckless I get, the more I understand that is incumbent on each of us to be able to think theologically in ways that are authentic and true to our own experiences and insights.

It is perhaps for these reasons that I have been expanding my own capacity for prayer and ritual by participating in alternative spaces of worship, like the sweat lodge, as well as creating my own, as I have been over the past several on New Year’s Eves, with the invention of a symbolic meal, a structured memorial for the deceased, readings, and a fire ritual at midnight. I feel at times like a syncretistic pagan wannabe, but I set those self-critiques aside in the knowledge that I am exe(o)rcising the spirit.

That phrase, “exe(o)rcising the spirit,” feels laden, and I have yet to unpack its full import, but I know it means both ridding myself of what does not work and claiming the authority to honor what does in ways that are sacramental and meaningful to me and to those in my community of intimates.

Perhaps the best way that I alternatively theologize is through creative writing, through the beckonings of theopoesis, where I find I can speak without the impositions of structure in the quasi-grammarless realm of experiential knowing. It is here that I have discovered freedom to disagree and complain as well as to integrate and praise in a voice that talks to God in earnest, as though God were listening. In preparation, for a solstice sweat, this is what I had to say.

These sides are not

sharp antagonisms

that bring to points

their points of view

but a pond’s surface

under moonlight,

swirling like mercury,

beneath which minnows,

fluid, do

their works of

harmonious disruption.

So, let my prayer be not

please,

for, I fear

I have been

an ungrateful guest.

Sojourning pilgrim,

refugee,

all this life, all will be,

a lesson in how to say

thank you.

Natalie Kertes Weaver, Ph.D., is Chair and Professor of Religious Studies at Ursuline College in Pepper Pike, Ohio. Natalie’s academic books include: Marriage and Family: A Christian Theological Foundation (Anselm, 2009); Christian Thought and Practice: A Primer (Anselm, 2012); and The Theology of Suffering and Death: An Introduction for Caregivers (Routledge, 2013). Natalie’s most recent book is Made in the Image of God: Intersex and the Revisioning of Theological Anthropology (Wipf & Stock, 2014). Natalie has also authored two art books: Interior Design: Rooms of a Half-Life and Baby’s First Latin. Natalie’s areas of interest and expertise include: feminist theology; theology of suffering; theology of the family; religion and violence; and (inter)sex and theology. Natalie is a married mother of two sons, Valentine and Nathan. For pleasure, Natalie studies classical Hebrew, poetry, piano, and voice.

Life in the Tenements by Carol P. Christ

carol-p-christ-photo-michael-bakas During my ancestor research, I have seen the word “tenement”—with the implication of poverty, filth, and disease–handwritten onto more than one death certificate. Last month, I visited the Lower East Side where my Irish 2x great-grandmother Annie Corliss lived in the tenements near the docks with her husband the Scottish seaman James Inglis and their nine children.

Though the tenements where they lived in the vicinity of Cherry Street a block from the East River have been torn down to build public housing, my newly discovered third cousin Hattie Murphy still lives in the area. She arranged for me to visit the “Irish Outsiders” house in the Tenement Museum on nearby Orchard Street in order to gain an understanding the conditions of life in the tenements in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Tenement housing, which was a euphemism for apartment living in crowded and impoverished conditions, was often built on 25 x 100 foot lots that had been intended for single family homes. These several story buildings with four windows on the front of each floor were divided into small three-room apartments eight to a floor, each with one window facing the street or the back alley.

montrose-st-across-from-170 — Buildings like this may look charming from the outside, until you imagine living your whole life in a small apartment set behind only one of these windows.

In the apartment we visited, the window was in the sitting room in the front, the bedroom was in the back, and the kitchen was in the center. The kitchen included a coal stove that was the only heating for the house. Laundry hung above the stove, and, as our guide explained, dirty diapers with only “number one” were simply pinned up to dry. Coal dust hung in the air and fell upon everything. Even in the summer when the windows were open, fresh air rarely reached to the kitchen, let alone to the bedroom in the back. Our guide remarked that the smells of cooking, coal, babies, and unwashed bodies would have been overpowering. Despite their poverty, the women purchased pretty dishes, often chipped, at second hand stores, and proudly displayed them.

tenement-museum-irish-house-kitchen-and-bedroom — This photo shows the communal staircase, the open door of the apartment, kitchen and bedroom. The window inside the apartment was added to improve air circulation due to health regulations. Blue Willow pattern dishes on display upper left.

Our visit began in the back “garden” where there were four toilets for twenty-two families. I shuddered to imagine trying to clean them or to run down to use them in the middle of the night. There was a pump for fresh water. The guide handed around a bucket filled with pebbles to give us an idea of the weight the housewives and their children had to lug up flights of stairs numerous times each day. No wonder baths were infrequent. I remember an older Greek friend telling me how they used to wash with a cloth from the waist up one day and from the waist down the next. Annie’s family may not even have managed that.

tenement-museum-toilets-outside — Outdoor toilets in the back “garden” serving twenty-two families.

Our tour included a description of a sick and dying baby and a funeral with the baby’s body laid out in the sitting room. My 2x great-grandmother gave birth to nine children of whom, unusually, the first eight lived to adulthood. Annie must have understood that hygiene is heath. Her days would have been spent fighting to keep her house and her children as clean as she could.

tenement-housing-boy-at-sink — Boy washing in tenement kitchen. The sink doubled as a work space.

The bedroom in the apartment we visited had a small double bed pushed up against two walls, with just enough room to walk past it to get to a small closet and a few trunks crammed in the space against the back wall. When James the seaman was home, this would have been the marital bed, but when he was gone, the younger children slept with their mother, while the older ones wrapped themselves in sheets and blankets near the stove or in the sitting room.

annie-corliss-young — Annie, at the time of her marriage

Anne, age 20, and James “Ingles,” mariner, age 25, husband and wife, living in the area of the docks, appear on the 1855 New York State census. In fact, Annie was perhaps 15, while James was 17. I suspected this was an unusually young age to marry, and research proved me right. The average age for Irish marriages at the time was 20 for the bride and 25 for the groom. Annie would have had every reason to lie about her age for reasons of propriety.

Documents I have only recently found show that Ann “Carless,” age 13 arrived in New York with her mother Mary on January 16, 1854. Her two younger brothers, one 7 and the other an infant, died on the ship. As I could not find Ann’s mother Mary after that, I assume she died soon after arriving, leaving her young daughter on her own.

Annie lived her whole life in America in tenements in the the unsavory area near the docks—filled with bars, drunken sailors, prostitution, and crime. She died at the age of forty-five of a stroke, leaving her husband and eight children. Because of her, I am here.

Also see “The Careless Spirit of Annie Corliss.”

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Join Carol on a Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete in 2017. Save $200.

Read two of the chapters in the book: Mysteries and Dionysian Rites.

Thanks to Judith Shaw for the cover art “Downward Serpent.”

A Letter to Those I’ve Lost by John Erickson

Out of all of these things, the one thing that has kept coming to my mind is G-d. What is he (or she) thinking? I feel like I’m back in one of my Old Testament classes discussing the harsh and cruel G-d that thrust so many horrible things onto their believers. Maybe, the worst part about the election isn’t Donald Trump, but it is the realization that G-d may be dead after all.

Dear [Insert Name Here],

Something died on November 8, 2016, and I do not think I’ll ever be able to get it back. I sat there, walking back to my house, in disbelief and utter shock and scared about the next 4 years of my life.

For weeks leading up to the election, I had found myself praying in the copy room at my work almost daily. I would sit there, silent and alone, having just read some misleading article or alt-right post from a family member that called Hillary Clinton the devil, and wonder: when did everything go so off the rails?

Although we’ll spend years trying to figure the answer to my above question out, for me, it is a question I have been asking myself ever since election night and specifically knowing how certain members of my family would, and ultimately did, vote. Continue reading “A Letter to Those I’ve Lost by John Erickson”

Ancestor Connection in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Carol P. Christ

carol-p-christ-photo-michael-bakas In early December 2016 I visited central Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York, where my 2x great-grandparents Thomas and Anna Maria Christ and their son George and his family, including my father’s father Irving John, lived for over fifty years. I had compiled a list of all the known addresses of the family in Williamsburg from census and death records. The family lived in a several block square area surrounding Most Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church on Montrose Street for all that time.

Most of the buildings at the addresses where the family lived had been torn down and replaced with housing projects in the mid-twentieth century. Some of the remaining ones are being torn down today, as this area of Williamsburg is being gentrified. Still, enough of the old buildings remain to give a sense of what the neighborhood was like in the 1800s. Continue reading “Ancestor Connection in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Carol P. Christ”

Murder at the Rummage Sale: Book Review by Judith Shaw

Judith Shaw photo Murder at the Rummage Sale (Albany, NY: Imagination Fury Arts, 2016) by Elizabeth Cunningham is a mystery novel with a style and depth of thought that offers not only the fun of figuring out “Who Dun It” but also gorgeous prose and poetic phrasing which is not so commonly found in the mystery genre.

Set in 1960 small town America, the book transports us back to that era with a fine eye to detail. It 9781944190019 takes place over a few days in the life of the Church of the Regeneration as the women prepare for their annual rummage sale. Charlotte Crowley, an over bearing kleptomaniac who wraps men around her little finger while antagonizing most of the women, has always led the effort. But with only a few days to go before the sale begins, Charlotte is found dead in the basement, smothered by a plastic dry cleaning bag full of coats.

Though the police declared the death to be accidental, Lucy Way, an older woman with a bit of faery blood and white curls she is very proud of, has her suspicions. Lucy sets out to solve the crime with the help of a cast of characters associated with the church: the Reverend Gerald Bradley, the church minister with a love of drink; Anne Bradley, his wife who doubts the existence of God; Katherine Bradley, their fanciful seven year old daughter; and Katherine’s sworn blood brother, Frankie Lomangino Jr., son of Frankie Lomangino an ex-con who becomes the prime suspect. Continue reading “Murder at the Rummage Sale: Book Review by Judith Shaw”

The Refugee Crisis: Through the Eyes of the Children: Review by Carol P. Christ

The Refugee Crisis: Through the Eyes of the Children by Robert and Robin Jones. Santa Barbara, CA: Blue Point Books, 2016. $19.95. Website: http://www.throughtheeyesofthechildren.com

Arriving in Molivos, Lesbos for a summer break, Robert and Robin Jones quickly became caught up in the refugee crisis engulfing the island that had been their second home for over forty years. Initially Robin and Robert provided water to weary refugees walking along the roads of Lesbos, grateful to have arrived in Europe. Soon, Robin, an artist who holds a certificate in art instruction, began providing marking pens and paper to recently arrived refugee children awaiting transport to processing centers at the other end of the island.

The children’s drawings are the centerpiece of this moving book, while Robin’s photographs and Robert’s words set them in the context of one of the many humanitarian crises of our time. “According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 1,000,573 refugees and migrants arrived in Europe from the Middle East and North Africa during 2015. Of these, some 850,000 landed on the Greek islands. Of these, 49 per cent were Syrian, 21 per cent Afghan and eight per cent Iraqi.” 573, 625 arrived in the island of Lesbos between January 2015 and February 2016. Continue reading “The Refugee Crisis: Through the Eyes of the Children: Review by Carol P. Christ”

Moving Forward and into a New Season by Elise M. Edwards

It’s only been a month and I am still reeling from the US presidential election. I feel like I’m just beginning to emerge from the sense of loss and futility that has cloaked me. But I am beginning to move forward.

I don’t feel better. I’m still confused and discouraged about why people voted for Donald Trump. I’m very concerned about his cabinet picks and his proposed policies. But I am actively seeking a path forward and a path of resistance. I’m finding support in my spiritual practices and communities.

In the Christian calendar, we are in the season of Advent. Advent carries profound symbolism, and this year it is especially poignant for me. The word advent bears meanings of arrival, birth, and emergence. It’s the beginning of the Christian year, which is patterned on the life of Christ, but the year does not begin Jesus’ birth. That celebration is observed at Christmas, four weeks into the church year. The weeks preceding Christmas are a time of preparation and reflection on the need for the Incarnation. The Incarnation of God in the Christ Child may be a distinctly Christian doctrine, but I believe the need for it–even the idea of it–is found in other spiritual and religious teachings.

Continue reading “Moving Forward and into a New Season by Elise M. Edwards”