In Constance FitzGerald’s article Impasse and Dark Night,* she draws from sixteenth century Spanish mystic and reformer St. John of the Cross-and his Dark Night of the Soul. FitzGerald moves from the individual’s experience of impasse to a larger societal impasse. By impasse she means those experiences that bring life as you know it to a stand still, where every attempt of extracting the self from suffering is a lost cause. In what is known as the principles of “first order change”—reason, logic, analysis, and planning, do not work to move the self forward and out of impasse. In other words, the skill set you have come to rely upon to move you out of the grip of darkness no longer works. Continue reading “Feminism, Impasse, and the Redemption of Hugo Schwyzer by Cynthia Garrity-Bond”

