feminism and religion – Page 59 – Feminism and Religion

In the Face of Despair, Choose Life by Carol P. Christ

Yesterday I had a delightful swim with a friend in the cool Aegean Sea. In in the evening I met two dear friends at an open air restaurant for a delicious meal and good conversation. Last night a beautiful moon rose over the sea and a soft breeze caressed my skin. All of this made me very happy. However, the state of the world does not.

Michael Brown. Trayvon Martin. The Ferguson police. Hold your ground laws. Bombing in Gaza. War in Ukraine. War in Iraq. War in Afghanistan. War in Syria. Wars that are not on my radar. Rape as a part of war. Joe Biden threatening to chase ISIL “to the gates of hell.” Citizens United. A rash of laws restricting voting rights. A rash of laws restricting abortion rights. Police brutality. Police brutality that is racially motivated. Young men being sentenced to prision for minor drug offenses. The brutality of the prison system. A woman with children being paid $8.50 an hour working at McDonalds and not even knowing when she will be called in to work. Open carry laws allowing Americans to walk the streets with loaded weapons. And that’s just off the top of my head this morning.

When I was young and protesting poverty, racism, and the War in Vietnam, I thought that it would be a relatively simple matter to change the world. It turned out that I was not only wrong: I was very wrong. The world has changed all right, but not for the most part for the better. In fact, despite the diligent efforts of social justice activists, in many respects the world has changed for the worse. Continue reading “In the Face of Despair, Choose Life by Carol P. Christ”

Community: A Guided Meditation by Barbara Ardinger

Barbara Ardinger As I read the blogs posted here, I’m more and more interested in the comments. They show that we and our readers are turning into a real community. For this reason, I’ve decided it might be fun to reconstruct a guided meditation on community from my book Goddess Meditations, which was published in 1999. Goddess Meditations was the first book I wrote after I moved to Long Beach in 1996. I’m rewriting the meditation because I know more now and writer better than I did back then.

Yes, we here at Feminism and Religion are a community, and in my opinion there’s nothing better than community. Individuals come together to form small communities. Small communities come together to form larger communities. And so it goes. Hopefully we’re building up to a world-wide community.

Let’s begin. Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and take several deep, easy breaths. When you feel relaxed, call into your mind the familiar image of a fishing net. See a vast net that stretches up and down as far as you can see, every knot a sparkling star. See yourself in the center of this shining net, but know that each of us stands at his or her own center of the net. The stars revolve around each of us, they shine for each of us. This net has as many centers as it has knots that are shining stars. This net is our community. The Weaver of our net is the Great Goddess. Continue reading “Community: A Guided Meditation by Barbara Ardinger”

We Could Have Been Canadians and Other Thoughts about My New England Colonial Heritage by Carol P. Christ

My 2x great-grandparents Nathaniel Searing and Louisa Caroline Martin were pioneers who cleared the land and built a log cabin in Lyons, Michigan in 1840. They were descended from English Puritan Colonial settlers in New England. At least two of my ancestors are recognized by the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolutions. Other members of my family who were Quakers proudly refused to take part in the Revolutionary War.

My great-grandfather James Augustus married a woman of German descent, his daughter Lena Marie married a Swede, and my mother married a man who was German, Irish, and Scottish. As the descendants of Nathaniel Searing and Louisa Caroline Martin moved around the United States and married into the families of newer immigrants, the succeeding generations also lost touch with their history. Our family’s connections to the New England Colonists were not even mentioned at Thanksgiving! Continue reading “We Could Have Been Canadians and Other Thoughts about My New England Colonial Heritage by Carol P. Christ”

Facing Depression by Carol P. Christ

The suicide death of Robin Williams prompted me to reflect again on my own experience with depression and to share my story in the hope that it can help others.

In my twenties, thirties, and forties, I suffered severe intermittent depressions. My life in those days was a series of ups and downs. When I feel in love and was having good sex, I was in love with the world and could literally feel energy radiating from my body connecting it to the world. When I was dumped, the energy retreated, and I crawled into a dark hole of despair and self-pity from which there seemed to be no escape. In the in-between times, I carried on my life with neither the highs or the lows.

In recent days, a number of people have tried to describe what depression feels like. Here is what it felt like to me.

It was as if my mind had a single track on which were repeated a few deadly words: “No one loves me. No one will ever love me. I might as well die.” I could not erase the track or jump to another one. The words repeated themselves relentlessly in my mind.

Although I usually managed to get up and go to work during those times, these words were ever present: they would take over when my mind wandered on the bus or the subway and whenever I was alone. I could go through the motions of life, but I could not connect to the wellsprings of my creativity.

In the low times, I thought often about suicide. Indeed the words “I might as well die” encouraged them. Thoughts of my mother usually stopped me.

One time I decided to slit my wrists (slightly) to see if committing suicide would hurt. When I found that it didn’t, I immediately called two friends and asked them to take me to their home for the weekend.

When I was depressed, well-meaning friends told me that “this too will pass” and assured me that “you will find someone else.” I didn’t believe them. When I was in the place of depression those words did not help at all.

In therapy I learned that depression often masks enormous anger. Sometimes I screamed out my rage at my latest boyfriend in the confines of my apartment. But when the depression had taken hold, this did not help either.

I also tried all kinds of spells and divination to see “if our love was meant to be,” “to bring him back,” and “to find my true love.” None of this worked. (Readers of this blog who have wondered why I put little faith in divination and spells have their answer: not from lack of trying!)

Just as I was coming out of my last serious bout with depression, a friend who had suffered in similar ways told me that she had resorted to anti-depressant pills. She explained to me that the pills seemed to move her mind away from her depressing thoughts. When she felt stronger, she weaned herself off of them gradually. She said that she would go back to the pills if the depression came back. I was elated to learn that there was something that could work, and I filed this information in the back of my mind.

I don’t suffer from depression any more. Yes, life has its ups and downs, and I sometimes feel lonely or under-appreciated. I never did find “the right” man. But my disappointments no longer spiral down into depression and not wanting to live.

What happened?

It was like a miracle.

When my mother died, I felt the room fill with love. From that day to this I have never doubted that there is enough love to go around and that I am loved.

Thinking about the change that “happened” in my life, I can now say that I was suffering from an “error in thought.” I had equated “being loved” with finding my “true love.” In the process I was discounting all the many other forms of love in my life—including the love of my mother and grandmothers that had sustained my childhood years, and the love of friends, family, animals, plants, and the universe itself that continued to sustain it.

Soon after that, I realized that I had compounded my suffering with a major “error in theology.” When I bemoaned my inability to find “true love,” I was blaming the universe. I was blaming the divine power.

When, years earlier, I expressed my anger at God for not “saving” women from patriarchy, I heard the words: “In God is a woman like yourself. She shares your suffering.” These words inspired my journey to the Goddess.

But I needed to take another step.

I was still angry at the universe for not giving me what I wanted and thought I needed in my life. I was angry at Goddess because I thought She could make my life better and She was not doing it!

When I finally expressed my enormous anger to Her, I learned that I had been making the “theological error” of attributing omnipotence to Goddess. However She sympathized with my suffering, She did not have the power to “send my true love to me” when I poured out my heart to Her.

“The path you are on is not easy,” She said to me, “but I will be with you all the way.” Reflecting on those words, I understood that Her power is not omnipotence, but omnipresence, not power over, but power with.

So what advice would I give to those are in the throes of depression. (I am speaking here to those who suffer as I did from “garden variety” depression, not its more serious forms.)

• I would tell them that I understand how they are feeling. I would tell them that I understand how bad it really can feel. Not: “oh come on, it’s not that bad.”

• I would recommend getting in touch with the anger and sadness that underlies depression with the help of therapy, spirituality, family, and friends. A depressed person often feels that whatever underlies depression is too horrible to be faced. Yet there is nothing that cannot be faced “with help” from someone who can listen. However, this might have to wait until the depression has lifted.

• I would encourage exercise, singing, and dancing. Sometimes moving the body can also move the mind off the fixed track that leads to depression.

• I would suggest anti-depressant drugs not for the long-term, but for their short-term power to move the mind off a fixed track.

• After the depression has lifted, I would ask if “errors in thought” led to the conclusion that life is not worth living. I would urge them to open new tracks in their minds that lead to different conclusions—while they are healthy enough and strong enough to do so. Repeating a mantra like, “my true love is me,” “life is worth living,” or “life is a gift” just might help.

• I would also ask them to examine their “theology”–even if they think they don’t have one. Feelings that “God” could make things right, but in “this particular case” chooses not to, are one of the pathways to depression.

• I would urge them to be open to miracles.

Carol is looking forward to the fall Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete–$150 discount for the next two women to sign up for the fall 2014 tour–www.goddessariadne.org. Carol can be heard in a recent interviews on Voices of the Sacred Feminine, Goddess Alive Radio, and Voices of Women. Carol is a founding voice in feminism and religion and Goddess spirituality. Her books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and with Judith Plaskow, the widely-used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions. Follow Carol on GoddessCrete on Twitter.

A Radical Conclusion: We Are Our Own Authorities by Carol P. Christ

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza articulated a widely held tenet of feminist theology when she stated that feminism places a question mark over all inherited texts and traditions. This means that feminists cannot and must not accept any teaching or traditional way of performing religious acts simply because “the Bible [or the Koran or the minister or the priest or the rabbi or the imam or the guru] tells me so.”

Instead, feminists must question every text and tradition and the words of every religious leader to see whether or not they promote the full humanity of women. The implication of this is that we must acknowledge and take responsibility for becoming our own authorities—as individuals and in communities.

A tongue –in-cheek letter that began circulating on the internet in 2000 under the title “Why Can’t I Own a Canadian?” makes the point that even those who claim to be adhering to every “jot and tittle” of the Holy Book are in fact choosing to accept some aspects of tradition while rejecting others. Continue reading “A Radical Conclusion: We Are Our Own Authorities by Carol P. Christ”

Transcendence, Immanence, and the Sixth Great Extinction by Carol P. Christ

In my recent blog “The Flourishing of Life and Feminist Theology” I discussed Grace Jantzen’s view that theology should focus on “natality” or birth and life, rather than life after death or life apart from this world. This week Tikkun magazine published its summer issue with a feature called “Thinking Anew about God.” In it two male thinkers, one Buddhist and one Christian, argue for a similar turn toward the world in their traditions. Their calls for religions to focus on this world were published the same week scientists warned that the world stands on the brink of the sixth great extinction.

I have come to believe that any religion espousing cosmological dualism (devaluing this world in favor of a superior reality such as heaven) and individual salvation (the idea that what ultimately happens to me is disconnected from what ultimately happens to you) is contributing to our world’s problems rather than offering a solution. … [Religions should] stop emphasizing the hereafter and focus instead on how to overcome the illusion that we are separate from this precious, endangered earth. –David Loy, Buddhist, writing in Tikkun Summer 2014

My aim in this regard is to reawaken in each of us an emotionally felt and primordial sense of spiritual belonging within the wider natural world. In turn, my hope is that this deep sense of belonging to the earth — to God’s body, as it were — will en-flame our hearts and empower our wills to commit us to healing and saving the earth.—Mark I. Wallace, Christian, writing in Tikkun Summer 2014 Continue reading “Transcendence, Immanence, and the Sixth Great Extinction by Carol P. Christ”

The Flourishing of Life and Feminist Theology by Carol P. Christ

I first encountered the image and concept of “flourishing” in Grace M. Jatzen’s feminist philosophy of religion, Becoming Divine. For Jantzen “flourishing” is a symbol of a theology of “natality” or birth and life, which she contrasts to the focus on death and life after death in traditional Christian theologies.

Jantzen argues that the focus on death and life after death is a rejection of birth. Birth is rejected because birth through a body into a body implies finitude. Birth ends in death. Jantzen argues that embracing natality means embracing finitude and death.

Jantzen is not arguing that motherhood is the highest calling or saying that all women must be mothers. Rather she is calling us—women and men—to embrace finite life in the body and the material world as the final and only location for spirituality. Defending pantheism as an alternative to transcendent theism, she argues further that divinity is to be found “in” the physical and material world—and nowhere else. Though she speaks of natality, Jantzen is no essentialist. Rather she is a metaphysician making claims about the nature of life. Continue reading “The Flourishing of Life and Feminist Theology by Carol P. Christ”

Survivorship to Thrivorship in Sedna’s Ocean by Carolyn Lee Boyd

These past three months I have learned the wonderful, important word “survivorship.” At the cancer center where I receive care, “survivorship” means life’s physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, economic, social, and political aspects affecting the quality and quantity of life after treatment.

“Survivorship” also perfectly describes what I have seen over and over working with older women, especially those who have made their lives masterpieces of this art. The deaths of loved ones, the loss of home and country, devastating illness and lifelong disability, violence from family and discrimination and hate from strangers – through it all they have found a strength and power that they have used to make their lives and that of others more meaningful and impactful. In fact, almost all older, and many younger, women I know have been transformed by their own kind of survivorship into someone beyond who she imagined she would ever be.

Survivorship also describes the courage, persistence, strength, wits, guts, intelligence, and wisdom of the global community of women necessary to overcome the trauma, violence, violation and repression of at least the past several thousand years. It is what has brought women through to where we are now. Women’s spirituality as a force and a movement is also a heroine of survivorship. Through millennia of being repressed and dressed up in the garments of patriarchal practices to suit their needs, the traditions and spirit of the Female Divine have survived and we now see Her reclaiming Her place in our spiritual lives, theology, and world history.

Continue reading “Survivorship to Thrivorship in Sedna’s Ocean by Carolyn Lee Boyd”

Good Theology is Feminist Theology by Carol P. Christ

Judith Plaskow and I are just now completing the draft of the manuscript of the book we have been working on for the past 2 ½ years. It has a new title: Two Views of Goddess and God for Our Time.* I have been thinking of little else for the past few weeks. An editor who is considering our book said that she was hoping we could address our book to an audience larger than the feminist theology community. Thinking about this, a light dawned: if feminist theology is right that traditional theology denies the full humanity of women, then good theology must be feminist theology. Our work is not tangential to the theological mainstream, but is at its center.

We have revised the Introduction and Conclusion to the book with the assumption that our work should appeal not just to other feminists, but to a wide range of intelligent readers and thinkers. The fact that we were asked to participate in a dialogue about the nature of God in Tikkun magazine’s Summer 2014 inspires us to hope that we are right that feminist theology is becoming part of the progressive theological mainstream.

We began our new book because – though we agree about many things – we disagree about God and Goddess. After working together for decades with shared commitments to feminism, justice, the environment, and the flourishing of life, it was a bit of a shock to come face to face with our differences on such a major theological issue as the nature of divinity. We began our discussion with a shared critique of the God of Biblical traditions as a dominating male other. We agreed that this God has justified not only male domination of women, but other forms of domination as well, including myriad forms of injustice and war. We questioned the theological doctrine of divine omnipotence in light of the holocaust, the on-going domination of one half of the human race, and other oppressions including slavery, colonialism, and war.

But as we articulated our own views of divinity in light of this critique, our views diverged: Judith concluded that God is an impersonal power of creativity that is the ground of all being and becoming, including all good and all evil. Carol understands Goddess as the intelligent embodied love that is the ground of all being and becoming, a personal presence who cares about the world and all individuals it, but who does not have the power to intervene with a mighty arm to set things straight.

We both can give reasons for our views, and in the course of our theological discussion in our book, we give many. Our different views of Goddess and God are significant both theologically and personally. Is God or Goddess good? Or does the divine power include both good and evil? Does Goddess or God care about the fate of the world and our individual lives? Or are love, care, and understanding qualities that are not appropriately attributed to divinity? Is there someone listening to us when we worship, pray, or meditate? Or is addressing Goddess or God a metaphoric way of speaking that inspires feeling in individuals and communities but not in a divine individual? Is the notion that Goddess is love likely to inspire us to love the world more deeply and to promote its flourishing? Or does the notion that God includes both good and evil remind us more clearly of our own capacities to do both?

The fact that we could not agree about the nature of Goddess or God despite our many attempts to persuade each other with rational arguments, led us to conclude that the philosophical, theological, and moral reasons we give in justification of our views are only part of the story. All of these reasons are situated in our individual bodies and in communities and histories. We do not believe there is any simple link between experience and theological views. On the other hand, our experiences form the matrix from which we all begin to think theologically. As we develop our theological views, we constantly test them against our experiences, asking if they ring true, if they help us make sense of our personal, communal, and social lives.

In the first chapters of our book Judith and I locate our theologies in the contexts of our lives. We not only articulate our views of Goddess and God, but also situate them in community. Judith is committed the feminist transformation of Judaism, while I am one of the early voices of the feminist Goddess movement. In the concluding chapters we probe and query each other’s views–from experiential, rational, and moral perspectives. We are hoping to model the kind of feminist dialogue we would like to see more of—one that crosses religious boundaries and is not afraid to probe the differences in standpoints and theological views.

We also hope that our book will inspire a lively feminist–and wider–dialogue about the nature of divinity—something that has been oddly missing heretofore in feminist theology. Engaging in a thoroughly open and honest theological debate is not always easy—even among friends. But we can both testify that doing so has not only illuminated important issues in feminist theology, but also has strengthened our friendship.

*Much this essay is adapted from a draft of the book.

Carol P. Christ is looking forward to the fall Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete which she leads through Ariadne Institute. Space available. Carol can be heard in a recent interviews on Voices of the Sacred Feminine, Goddess Alive Radio, and Voices of Women. Carol is a founding voice in feminism and religion and Goddess spirituality. Her books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and with Judith Plaskow, the widely-used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions. Follow Carol on GoddessCrete on Twitter.

Exhaustion and Inspiration by Ivy Helman

Wading in the waters of Prince Edward Island.

Change takes time. If society takes years to change, religious institutions seem to take decades, maybe centuries. That ubiquitous intersection of religion and feminism seems neck high in mud and muck. Some religious institutions claim divine inspiration for keeping their chins down, jaws clenched and footings strongly moored in damaging sexist ideologies. This is wrong. But I’m tired. I feel as if the feminist movement is draining too much out of me for not enough change.

Perhaps an example will clarify. This Tuesday I taught the first session of a six-week long summer course entitled, “Theology through Women’s Eyes.” An odd title that could mean many things, right? It does not even imply a feminist approach to religion and the college’s course description did not either. I learned from my department’s chair that the last professor to have taught the class shied away from the course having any specific reference to feminism as she was a practicing Catholic theologian and she worried about the effects of that association for her professional career at Catholic universities.

Are you kidding? We are stuck there? Still? I personally know a great number of Catholics in academia and outside of it who wear their feminism proudly like Margaret Farley, Lisa Sowle Cahill, and Rosemary Radford Ruether to name just a few. Obviously, not everyone does. Yet, when religious institutions threaten to and actually excommunicate those who dissent from their teachings, I can see genuine issues with being an “out,” so to speak, feminist. At the same time, I’ve always thought that the minute someone censures me I’m finally doing something right. I’m being heard by my intended audience. Thank G-d, right? Those are the people who need to listen anyway. That is my measure of success. Continue reading “Exhaustion and Inspiration by Ivy Helman”