One of my goals for the summer is to paint more. I find I can often say or think by a picture something that I am trying to work through in a formal, discursive way. Art functions as a methodological tool for my theology insofar as it helps me to articulate in one language something that I am trying to say in another. As my teaching career has lengthened, I’ve become more confident using images I have created to communicate my ideas. This no doubt has something to do with the liberty one gains in teaching as a performance exercise, combined with avoidance of repetition, and the desire to engage as well as to be entertained in one’s own right. Even more than just working out an idea, sometimes I also find making images to be a therapeutic tool. I can laugh, mourn, gripe, or celebrate through an image, and sometimes, I can even protest by one.
One area in which I feel inclined to protest is in those figures I describe as “storied women.” To me, this term refers to those outstanding figures in history or myth whose lives are rendered into legend, usually for a didactic or moral purpose. While occasionally such rendering is heroic, as in the cases of Esther or Joan of Arc, the story-ing is usually typological and flat. The woman(en) is used as a secondary element in a story, often for the purposes of advancing a primary narrative about men. Tamar, for example, is treated as a figure in and around whose body the action, succession, and political positioning of David’s sons are enacted. Bathsheba is also an exemplar of the storied women in the poet-king’s court, standing as one of the definitional temptresses of biblical history. Continue reading “Storied Women by Natalie Weaver”
Feminism and Religion 