Transforming Knowledge – Feminism and Religion

This is part two of a post started yesterday. At the end of it I asked why a woman cannot be a follower of St. Ignatius and a Jesuit.

The days of separating religious communities because rape is a possibility should be behind us–as we all know separating the sexes does not prevent rape anyway. Let’s get real, if I can understand the Ignatian exercises, use them in discernment, prayer, and reflection, understand the concepts and gain the graces, through doing them in a similar fashion as male Jesuits, what’s the big mystery, what’s keeping me out of the Jesuits–except that that it is a male club that is exclusive. Exclusion of any kind is oppressive, whether it is for racist, sexist, or other reasons.

Communities based on separation and exclusion because of sexual temptation ignore the simple fact that all people need to be responsible for their own actions. Male religious in exclusivist communities are like the Iowa dentist who fired his assistant because she was “too” good looking. He said could not control his own urges, his own temptations. An all-male court was unanimous in upholding his right to fire his assistant of more than 10 years. Is not an all male court a biased court? The woman in question certainly did not get a decision rendered by her peers!

That such a trial could even take place is an aberration of colossal proportions and reeks of the male, misogynist, supremacist backlash that is going in society right now in America and everywhere. Continue reading “What Does Exclusivism Feel Like? Part II by Janice Poss”

In the last few weeks of 2012, a sister parishioner recommended I read Transforming Knowledge by Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich. Many in academia perhaps have already read this book, but I am just getting to know the world of scholars and have found this book refreshing. It puts its finger on the messy entangled core issues that we grapple with on this blog site.

Minnich enumerates errors prevalent the way we think, suggesting that we need to restructure knowledge traditions that privilege the few and create “higher/lower” thinking, categorical “kind” thinking, and hermeneutical circles of presuppositions that only get reinforced time and again. Such circles are never broken into by any other thoughts or ideas because they are believed to be epistemologically and ontologically normative.

Imbalances that start in academic disciplines and then trickle down to and through society at large in all areas, not just religion, must be brought into consciousness so they can be corrected with new thinking that no longer oppresses those outside these circles, but brings them into the dialogue so that new more creative thinking happens. The point is to level the playing field, but not to relativize knowledge. The goal is create a new way of thinking that is a diverse and pluralistic.

Much that currently passes for reasoning is based on four errors in thinking that Minnich identifies as:

faulty generalizations – thinking that uses the few to create maxims about the many;
circular reasoning – thinking that reinforces its major premise over and over again without evolving even in the view of new information that might refute the original thesis;
mystified concepts – thinking evolving out of circular reasoning by surrounding the idea in a mythical membrane of illogically, believed legends that endure;
partial knowledge – one-sided thinking that refutes impartiality never considering the whole picture. Continue reading “What Does Exclusivism Feel Like? Part I by Janice Poss”