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Feminist Philosophy of Religion

Philosophical reflection on religion is as old as Greek questions about Hebrew stories. Feminist philosophy of religion is a more recent development within Western philosophy that poses feminist questions about religious texts, traditions, and practices, often with the aim of critiquing, redefining, or reconstructing the entire field in light of gender studies. Feminist philosophy of religion is important to feminist and nonfeminist philosophy alike for providing a critical understanding of various religious concepts, beliefs, and rituals, as well as of religion as a cultural institution that defines, sanctions, and sometimes challenges gender roles and gender-inflected representations. It is equally important for feminist theory, which frequently neglects the academic study of religion, as for analytic philosophy of religion, which seldom takes into account gender or race or class. This entry considers the work of both critique and reconstruction as it has developed in feminist philosophies of religion over the last several decades.

In the present situation, most practitioners of feminist philosophy of religion and of feminist theology are agreed that their discipline cannot be limited simply to a sociological assessment or confessional narrative of what a particular religious group believes to be true, without consideration of the difference that gender makes. Because feminist philosophy of religion is philosophical , it can take as primary neither the datum of scriptures believed to be revealed and self-authenticating nor the self-privileging endeavor of intratextual theologies. Because it is philosophy of religion , a subject matter that encompasses a broad array of cross-cultural material, it cannot be concerned simply with themes or questions drawn from the Christian religion alone. And because it is feminist , it must promote the elimination of gender inequality and take into account the multiplicity of human bodies, desires, and differences that are mapped onto the site of religion. At the same time, it cannot presume that religion exists as some common universal underlying all the various traditions; only particular religions exist, and even the very concept of religion itself has come to be recognized as a modern and Western concept.

1. Introduction

2. feminist critique of traditional philosophy of religion, 3.1 feminist critique of traditional theism, 3.2 from images and symbols to concepts and ontology, 4.1 a process feminist proposal, 4.2 projecting a feminine divine, 5.1 feminist standpoint epistemology, 5.2 further psychoanalytic perspectives on the female symbolic, 5.3 corporeal subjectivity, 5.4 the webbed relations of language, experience, power, and discourse, 5.5 pragmatizing feminist philosophy of religion, 6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

To date, a much larger literature exists under the rubric of feminist theology than of feminist philosophy of religion. Four main reasons have been suggested for this (Frankenberry & Thie 1994: 2–4). First, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the perspective of white European males dominated the formative period of philosophy of religion to such an extent that it was hard to see how the distortions of this long tradition might be overcome. Second, in the twentieth century, once philosophy of religion was professionalized and gerrymandered within Philosophy faculties at universities, it was insulated both from the old Theology faculties and the new Religious Studies faculties created in the 1960s and 1970s; therefore, feminists interested in pursuing a Ph.D. had to choose between Philosophy (where philosophy of religion was not regarded as “real” philosophy during the ascendancy of the analytic movement) or Religious Studies/Theology which took philosophical concerns seriously and thus provided a more welcoming location for feminist theorizing on religion. Third, many feminist philosophers themselves have harbored either a suspicion of religion or an impoverished understanding of it, and so have been slow to develop a significant body of scholarship in this area. Fourth, the entrenched bias and resistance to feminism within mainstream analytic philosophy of religion, combined with the myth that its methods, norms, and content are gender-neutral, has impeded recognition of the relevance of work appearing under the rubric of feminist philosophy of religion. Feminist theology, on the other hand, flourishes in an academic field that for over forty years has been hospitable to a variety of liberation theologies, death-of-god theologies, environmental theologies, postcolonialist theologies, and queer studies. [ 1 ]

The maturing of feminist philosophy of religion as a field distinct from feminist theology was evident at the end of the twentieth century. It could be seen in the appearance of two book-length studies: Pamela Anderson’s A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief (1998), and Grace Jantzen’s Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1999). Another measure of the vitality of this field was the publication of such collections as Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly (Hoagland & Frye 2000), devoted to an assessment of one of the most original authors in the field, and Feminist Interpretations of Soren Kierkegaard (Leon & Walsh 1997), containing critical analyses by feminist philosophers of the “father of religious existentialism”. In addition, Volume 1 of Kluwer’s Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (Long 2000), a major reference work covering 1900–2000, concluded with a chapter on feminist philosophy of religion as represented by Mary Daly, Sally McFague, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Pamela Anderson, and Grace Jantzen. Finally, an anthology on Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings (Anderson & Clack 2004) exhibited the methodological range of the field in terms of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, postmetaphysical, and epistemological frameworks, and provided specialized treatments of such topics as divinity, embodiment, autonomy and spirituality, and religious practice.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, fresh collections are appearing more frequently as essays by feminists bearing on the philosophy of religion become available (see Anderson 2010; Alcoff & Caputo 2011).

To Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1885 it was evident that “History shows that the moral degradation of woman is due more to theological superstitions than to all other influences together” (1885: 389). To Luce Irigaray, writing one hundred years later, the becoming of women was premised on becoming divine, for

God alone can save us, keep us safe. The feeling or experience of a positive, objective, glorious existence, the feeling of subjectivity, is essential for us. Just like a God who helps us and leads us in the path of becoming, who keeps track of our limits and infinite possibilities—as women—who inspires our projects. (1987 [1993b: 67])

Scalding critiques like Stanton’s and reconstructive reflections like Irigaray’s have marked feminist philosophy of religion with a complex set of relations to the subject matter of religion, as well as to the discipline of philosophy. In the wake of a worldwide wave of religious resurgence at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many feminists find Stanton’s reasoning still persuasive: the Word of God is the word of man, used to keep women in subjection and to hinder their emancipation. For other feminists, especially those located within various communities of faith and resistance, gynocentric efforts to create a possible space for something “divine” hold considerable appeal.

As a form of critique, feminist philosophy of religion employs the practice described by Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (1989) of showing the limits of a mode of thinking by forging an awareness of alternative, more liberating, ideas, symbols, and discourses. Feminist philosophy of religion suggests ways in which gender as an analytic category and gender studies as a body of knowledge can not only challenge but also enrich and inform the methodological and substantive assumptions of philosophy of religion. This does not mean that gender hierarchy comprises a simple or exclusive category of analysis. Nor does it necessarily invoke a distinction between gender and sex that would allow naturalized assumptions about the sexed body to go unquestioned. Given the interflowing streams of class, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, ability, and nationality that shape the complex modalities of social experience, it is unlikely that gender or any other single factor could suffice as a single or unitary focal point. Women cannot be presumed to speak in a single voice or to share a uniform “experience”. Nevertheless, gender constitutes perhaps the most fundamental factor creating human difference, and it remains among the most ignored philosophically.

Gender bias as it operated in the history of the philosophy of religion shaped the ways in which the traditional problems and orientations of the field were constructed. Like the cultural phenomenon of religion itself, philosophy of religion not only originated in a male tradition of production and transmission, with a history of excluding and devaluing women, but it was also defined by many concepts and symbols marked as “masculine”, which stood in oppositional relation to those marked as “feminine”. Moreover, unlike the phenomenon of religion which was embedded in multiple cultural contexts, philosophy of religion was largely Eurocentric and Anglo-American in its orientation, such that in addition to gender bias, ethnocentrism constituted the second major weakness of the history of this field. For a long time, philosophy of religion was written from a standpoint not unlike that of Reverend Thwackum, the character in Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones , who announced:

When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England. (Fielding 1749: vol. 1, bk 3, ch. 3)

If not always the Church of England, it was for the most part Protestant Christianity that was conflated with “religion” in the modern period of philosophy of religion.

Undaunted by two such severe deficiencies—gender bias and ethnocentrism—the dominant Anglo-American analytic school of philosophy of religion proved surprisingly healthy in the last decades of the twentieth century. Whereas at the mid-point of the twentieth century philosophy of religion was virtually defined by the assumptions and methods of logical positivism and empiricism, in subsequent years new and technically rigorous contributions by religiously committed philosophers began to enliven old theistic arguments. After long decades of dormancy when logical positivism seemed to yield only negative conclusions in the philosophy of religion, a resurgence of interest in traditional theism occurred in mainstream philosophy of religion. Modal logic was used to formulate a more perspicacious version of the ontological argument, Bayesian models of probability breathed new life into inductive justifications of religious belief, rational choice theory ushered Pascal’s wager once again onto the philosophical stage, and language-game analysis offered a prima facie justification of religious language. Far from the days of wondering what Athens has to do with Jerusalem, philosophy and religion appeared to have entered a period of detente as comrades in arms. From the standpoint of feminist critique, however, analytic philosophy of religion has failed to engage the questions posed by feminist inquiry or to modify the androcentric elements of the traditional theistic model. Instead, in the work of such philosophers as Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, and William Alston, philosophy of religion was deployed in defense of the cogency of a standard form of western monotheism, in the service of a conception of “God” that was patriarchal, and in the vested interests of staunchly traditional forms of Christianity.

Feminists argue that philosophy of religion can hardly ignore questions of gender ideology when its very subject matter—religion—is riddled with misogyny and androcentrism. They point out that, historically, gender bias in religion has been neither accidental nor superficial. Elizabeth Johnson (1993) likens it to a buried continent whose subaqueous pull shaped all the visible landmass; androcentric bias has massively distorted every aspect of the terrain and rendered invisible, inconsequential, or nonexistent the experience and significance of half the human race. For philosophers studying the intellectual effects and belief systems of religions, the opportunity to critique and correct sexist and patriarchal constructions in this field is as ample as it is urgent, given the presence of gender ideology in all known religions. Not one of the religions of the world has been totally affirming of women’s personhood. Every one of them conforms to Heidi Hartmann’s definition of patriarchy as

relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women. (1981: 14)

All sacred literatures of the world display an unvarying ambivalence on the subject of women. For every text that places well-domesticated womanhood on a religious pedestal, another one announces that, if uncontrolled, women are the root of all evil. Religion has thus comprised a primary space in which and by means of which gender hierarchy has been culturally articulated, reinforced, and consolidated in institutionalized form. Religion is hardly the only such space, but it appears to have been a particularly effective way of undergirding and sanctifying gender hierarchy in the West.

Feminists charge that gender bias has permeated the way philosophy of religion has been written and has influenced how the field has been professionalized. They protest a series of common lapses: the dearth of female authors in the leading journals or standard textbooks; the almost complete absence of attention to feminist philosophy on the part of mainstream authors, male and female; the exclusively male-authored and monochromatic complexion of the standard anthologies of readings and editorial boards. They note that the use of inclusive language was remarkably slow in finding its way into the scholarly publications and conceptual patterns of this field. It is still not unusual to find articles that discuss concepts of justice and fairness at length, using throughout the male pronoun.

More difficult lacunae are located in the selection of the very topics, problems, and methods that have come to define mainstream philosophy of religion, chief among them the problem of God.

3. The Problem of God

Discussion of the problem of God is standard fare for all schools of philosophy of religion. Long a lynchpin holding up other structures of patriarchal rule, the concept of a male God has been judged by every major feminist thinker, including Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Naomi Goldenberg, Daphne Hampson, Judith Plaskow, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray, to be both humanly oppressive and, on the part of believers, religiously idolatrous according to the terms of their own theologies. Feminist philosophers of religion ask why a single set of male metaphors should be absolutized as though supremely fitting about the subject. Critical of the literary gesture of writers who hope to avoid sexist language by recourse to rhetorical disclaimers, feminist authors argue that it is not persuasive simply to declare that the concept of God transcends gender and, therefore, “he” is not literally male, and then to presume that all can go on as before. The problem remains that once the masculine is raised to the universal human, beyond gender, the feminine alone bears the burden of sexual difference.

Philosophers of religion have sometimes marked a distinction between the anthropomorphic language of myth and popular piety, on the one hand, and the conceptual and abstract categories of philosophy, on the other hand, as though when we repair to the metalevel of analysis we leave gender-inflected language behind. Feminist philosophy of religion points to all the ways the signifier “God” remains stubbornly gendered male in Western thought and subliminally envisioned as a male personage. Whether taken as real or unreal, inferred validly or invalidly, said to be experienced directly or only projected illusorily, the divine identity in classical theism and atheism is unmistakably male. This supreme, ruling, judging, and loving male God is envisioned as a single, absolute subject, is named Father, and is conceived as standing in a relation of hierarchical dominion over the world. In ways both implicit and explicit, this construct tends in turn to justify various social and political structures of patriarchy which exalt solitary human patriarchs at the head of pyramids of power. Drawn almost exclusively from the world of ruling class men, traditional theistic concepts and images legitimate social and intellectual structures that grant a theomorphic character to men who rule and relegate women, children, and other men to marginalized and subordinated areas. The discursive practices that have constructed the divine as male are intimately connected to the production of ideologies which devalue all that is not male; they have formed a constitutive element in the oppression of women and other “Others”.

The dominance of male signifiers for deity is only part of the problem of classical theism. Like a prism which refracts all the surrounding light, the gendering of God has skewed the way in which other problems in philosophy of religion have been traditionally constructed. The problem of religious languag e, for example, is frequently cast in terms of the meaning and use of metaphors and models, involving questions of reference and truth. But the metaphors and models employed by mainstream philosophers of religion often trade uncritically on intrinsically hierarchical patterns of relations. Metaphors such as father, king, lord, bridegroom, husband and God-“He” go unmarked. If an occasional female model or metaphor intrudes into this homosocial circle, it is immediately re-marked upon. Introducing female pronouns for God-“she” produces nervous laughter in most classrooms.

In the study of the so-called divine attributes , none has received more discussion in the literature than “omnipotence”, defined as some version of “perfect power”. Both the conceptualization of the nature of this power as well as descriptions of its effects embody sexism and androsexism. In twentieth century studies, the standard definition of perfect power ranged from “unilateral power to effect any conceivable state of affairs” to the more moderate notion of “self-limiting power”. But the kind of power in question was in principle one of domination, or power-over, as it has been persistently associated with the characteristics of ideal masculinity. In the eleventh century, Peter Damian could quote approvingly the biblical passage “O Lord, King Omnipotent, all things are placed in your power, and there is no one who is able to resist your will”, as he argued, contra St. Jerome, that divine omnipotence is even able to “cause a virgin to be restored after she has fallen” (1065 [1969: 143). Like the two favorite heroes of modern philosophy, the Cartesian cognitive subject and the Kantian autonomous will, an omnipotent deity reflects the mirror image of idealized masculinist qualities, according to feminist philosophers of religion. Among contemporary schools, only process philosophers of religion have explicitly argued against the attribute of omnipotence on the grounds that it is conceptually incoherent, scientifically superfluous, and morally offensive in its association of the divine with male controlling power (see, for example, Cobb & Griffin 1976; Suchocki 1988; Howell 1988).

Philosophical arguments on behalf of the concept of divine aseity or self-sufficiency reinforce the characteristic disparagement of reciprocal power relations found in other social and intellectual expressions of patriarchy. Divine existence is said to be completely self-sufficient and sovereign. It is what it is independently of any and all creatures, and its relations to these others are external relations only. But, according to feminist critics, in the absence of internal or constitutive relations that would affect or qualify the divine aseity, real relatedness to creatures is ruled out and a one-sided glorification of impassivity over change regulates the model of God and the world.

In a related way, the topic of theodicy has also been deeply shaped by male-defined constructions of power and interest. The very form of the question, How can an all-powerful deity permit evil? implies a meaning of “all-powerful” that is embedded in a discourse of domination. At the same time, the meaning of “all-good”, called into question by the power of evil, is defended by traditional theodicies in ways that either equivocate on the meaning of “goodness” or cast doubt on the moral attributes of the deity. Also exemplary are the types of evil simply overlooked in the many hypotheticals, counterexamples, and possible worlds that are generated in discussions of theodicy by male philosophers. Misogyny and rape rarely make the list of evils. The whole drift of theodicy as an intellectual exercise gravitates back to the question of God, and rarely to the world of cruelty and suffering (Thie 1994; for exceptions, see Farley 1990, and Sands 1994).

Philosophical debates on the topic of immortality have also been deeply shaped by androcentric interests—centering on self-perpetuation and individual, rather than collective, survival. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, arguably a foremother in feminist philosophy of religion, located an important gender difference in His Religion and Hers (1923). “Death-based” religion, she claimed, asks the question, “What is going to happen to me, after I am dead?”—a posthumous egoism. To this she juxtaposed a “birth-based” religion whose main question is “What is to be done for the child who is born?”—an immediate altruism. Many contemporary feminist philosophers of religion would find Gilman’s anthropology overly simple but her emphasis suggestive.

A still deeper critique involves the differentiation of embedded levels of bias and androcentrism in the crucial assumptions, methods, and norms of traditional philosophy of religion. Rooted in an ancient dualistic worldview whose philosophical inadequacy has been harder to detect until recently than its social and legalistic inequities, Western religious categories have been inextricably bound up with a certain metaphysical exigency. The metaphysical worldview that once supported the sacred canopy may have lost much of its cogency for the modern mind, along with the arguments of medieval scholastics that sailors cannot kiss their wives goodbye on Sundays, or hangmen go to heaven, but the dualisms associated with that worldview have continued to haunt the philosophical imagination. Beginning with Greek philosophy’s equation of the male principle with mind and reason and act, the female principle was associated with the contrasting identification in terms of matter, body, passion and potency. The subsequent history of Western philosophy, despite major conceptual shifts, displayed a characteristic logic and form. Taking the form of hierarchical opposition, the logic of binary structuring mutually opposed such elements as mind and body, reason and passion, object and subject, transcendental and empirical. As argued by any number of feminist philosophers, these hierarchical oppositions are typically gender-coded. Body, matter, emotions, instincts, and subjectivity are coded as feminine, while mind, reason, science, objectivity are coded as masculine (see Bordo 1987, Harding & Hintikka 1983, Irigaray 1977 [1985], Lloyd 1985). The specific link between this metaphysics and western conceptions of God is a complex chicken-and-egg question. Certainly it is fair to say that the Hellenizing of Christian theology from the second century C.E. on saddled classical theism with problematic philosophical valences. But classical theism in turn reinforced and sanctioned the philosophical valorization of mind, reason, and male over and against body, passion, and female. Some feminists would trace the cultural roots of this way of thinking to the phenomenon of “male bodily alienation” that arose in late classical antiquity’s asceticism (see Ruether 1983).

In any case, insofar as Western monotheism has constructed the meaning of “God” in relation to “world” around binary oppositions of mind/body, reason/passion, and male/female, traditional theism remains complicitous with the very system of gender constructs and symbolic structures that underlie women’s oppression. In the binary opposition between “God” and “world”, the term “God” occupies the privileged space and acts as the central principle, the One who confers identity to creatures to whom “He” stands in hierarchical relation. Oppositional pairing of God/world has served in turn to organize other categories, such as heaven and earth, sacred and profane. The widespread distinction between sacred and profane, employed by many authors, thus comes already encoded with the hierarchical oppositions of male/female and masculine/feminine onto which it is mapped, along with the structurally related pairs, white/black and heterosexual/homosexual. The first term in each pair is sacralized, while the second is rendered profane. This set of themes can be traced in connection with the classic work of Durkheim and Weber in their theorizations of religion (Erickson 1993).

Contemporary feminist philosophy of religion is also aware that the relation between symbolic structures, on the one hand, and gender constructions, on the other hand, cannot be specified in terms of a single explanatory model. The power of symbolic orders to invoke and reinscribe implicit gender understandings works in varied and complex ways, as shown in studies by Bynum (1986), Fulkerson (1994), and Hollywood (1995, 2002). Because religious symbols are polysemic and multivalent, they hold different meanings for different people at different times. It is never a simple matter of sheer reflection of the given social order. The relation between society and symbol, or between psyche and symbol, is recognized as open-ended. Relations of reversal or inversion of actual social structures may obtain, making it risky for the interpreter to posit a single unidirectional cause-effect relation between symbol and social setting. As Bynum points out, meaning is not so much imparted as it is appropriated “in a dialectical process whereby it becomes subjective reality for the one who uses the symbol”, allowing for the possibility that “those with different gender experiences will appropriate symbols in different ways” (1986: 9).

It follows that no necessary correlation can be assumed between goddess-worshipping cultures and actual egalitarian social structures in the lives of females and males of that culture. Similarly, the male Father God may open up a range of different interpretative possibilities for both women and men. In culturally specific and historically unstable ways, religious symbols even of the male Father God have been useful in resisting and subverting the social order, not only reflecting and reinforcing it. In light of these considerations, most feminist philosophers of religions regard it as risky to generalize across cultures, religious traditions, or historical periods with respect to the different ways in which males and females appropriate or construct religious symbolism.

Mainstream philosophers of religion have so far failed to take explicit account of the gendered dynamics of religious thought, but for forty years a variety of other scholars, including biblical exegetes, theologians, ethicists, and feminist philosophers of religion, have produced an extraordinary explosion of research resulting in feminist thealogies, critical hermeneutics of suspicion, and woman-affirming writings on spirituality. In these, the problem of God appears as a crucial site of reconstruction.

The medieval theologian Hildegard of Bingen struggled to capture her vision of the Spirit of God with a cascade of vivid images and a mélange of metaphors. As rendered by Elizabeth Johnson in the following passage, Hildegard’s vision encompassed many of the themes that appear in the writing of twentieth century feminist writers. The divine spirit, Hildegard wrote, is the very life of the life of all creatures; the way in which everything is penetrated with connectedness and relatedness; a burning fire who sparks, ignites, inflames, kindles hearts; a guide in the fog; a balm for wounds; a shining serenity; an overflowing fountain that spreads to all sides.

She is life, movement, color, radiance, restorative stillness in the din. Her power makes all withered sticks and souls green again with the juice of life. She purifies, absolves, strengthens, heals, gathers the perplexed, seeks the lost. She pours the juice of contrition into hardened hearts. She plays music in the soul, being herself the melody of praise and joy. She awakens mighty hope, blowing everywhere the winds of renewal in creation. (paraphrase in Johnson 1992: 127–128)

This, for Hildegard in the 12th century, is the mystery of the God in whom humans live and move and have their being.

Eight centuries later, Paula Gunn Allen wrote in similarly provocative language of the spirit that pervades her Laguna Pueblo/Sioux peoples:

There is a spirit that pervades everything, that is capable of powerful song and radiant movement, and that moves in and out of the mind. The colors of this spirit are multitudinous, a glowing, pulsing rainbow. Old Spider Woman is one name for this quintessential spirit, and Serpent Woman is another…and what they together have made is called Creation, Earth, creatures, plants and light. (1986: 22)

In Ntozake Shange’s well-known play, a tall black woman rose from despair and cried out, “i found god in myself and i loved her, i loved her fiercely” (1976: 63).

In a frequently cited passage in The Color Purple , Alice Walker voiced a similar note as Shug recounted to Celie the epiphany that came over her when she learned to get the old white man off her eyeball:

It? I ast. Yeah, It. God ain’t a he or a she, but a It. But what do it look like? I ast. Don’t look like nothing, she say. It ain’t a picture show. It ain’t something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It (1982: 177–78).

In theological constructions, Rosemary Ruether (1983 [1993]) has worked with the unpronounceable written symbol “God/ess” to connote the “encompassing matrix of our being” that transcends patriarchal limitations and signals redemptive experience for women as well as for men. Modelling God for a nuclear age, Sallie McFague (1987) has experimented with metaphors of God as Mother, Lover, and Friend of the world, with the world conceived of as God’s own body. Correlating Paul Tillich’s notion of the power of being with the empowerment women know in freeing themselves from patriarchy, the early Mary Daly (1973 [1985]) posited God as “Verb”, a dynamic becoming process that energizes all things. Using process philosophy’s categories, Marjorie Suchocki (1982, 1988) has given new resonance to the meaning of Whitehead’s metaphors of God as “the lure for feeling” whose “power of persuasion” aims to effect justice and peace. Blurring the lines between psychological, somatic, and religious experiences, Ruether (1983 [1993]) has projected an image of “the feminine divine” grounded in the morphology of women’s bodies in all their multiplicity and fluidity.

In all these cases, contemporary feminist articulations of a relation between God and the world, or God and female subjectivity, depicts the divine as continuous with the world rather than radically transcendent ontologically or metaphysically. Divine transcendence is seen to consist either in total immanence or else in some dialectic between horizontal transcendence and immanence.

But images and metaphors are not philosophical concepts, and the reference range of “the divine” as it appears in these and other feminist writings is not always clear. While theologians are frequently satisfied to work imaginatively with symbols, images, and metaphors, without regard to the question what the symbols are symbolic of , philosophers of religion normally seek more precision and conceptual clarification.

4. Feminist Reconstructions of Transcendence

On the question of the meaning and reference of God-talk, two contemporary schools of philosophy of religion stand out as apparent resources for feminist reconstruction. Both (1) the tradition that employs the classical ontology of being, extending from Thomas Aquinas to Paul Tillich and the early Mary Daly, and (2) the tradition that employs an ontology of becoming, extending from Alfred North Whitehead to Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, Jr., David Griffin, Marjorie Suchocki, and Catherine Keller, afford systematic conceptual schemes for explicating the metaphors that appear in various contemporary writings concerning “the divine” and any of its variants, such as “the sacred”, “spirit”, “God”, “transcendence”, or “higher power”. Both traditions can be modified, moreover, according to qualifications suggested in this section. They can then be understood as converging in a single conceptual model, rendered as “creativity” in Whitehead’s system and as “being” ( esse ) in Aquinas’s. This model can be seen as a coherent way of reconciling the Whiteheadian and the Thomistic accounts, while also providing a conceptual alternative to anthropomorphic images of God as Loving Father, Cosmic Monarch, Creator and Intervener, and so forth.

The school of thought known as process philosophy rewrites philosophy of religion in a radically revisionist mode that accents evolution, organismic connectedness, and the primacy of becoming. Its theism is termed “panentheism”, or all-in-god. Process philosophers of religion were preeminent among those who labored in the twentieth century to construct a coherent philosophy of God that would also be consistent with scientific cosmology and evolutionary theory. They produced, in addition, a model relatively free of sexism and androcentrism. The underlying values of the process worldview are organic, relational, dynamic, and embodied. Whitehead’s elaboration of the idea that “it is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God” (1929 [1978: 348]) anticipated the themes of interrelatedness and mutual conditioning that feminist philosophy has developed in multiple ways in recent decades.

In the process paradigm everything comes into being by grasping or “prehending” antecedently actualized things to integrate them into a new actualized thing, its own self. Supplanting substance philosophy’s idea that it takes an agent to act, process philosophy proposes a model whereby agents are the results of acts and subjects are constituted out of relations. Throughout the entire universe, at both macrocosmic and microcosmic levels, quantum units of becoming achieve momentary unity out of a given multiplicity in a never-ending rhythm of creative process whereby “the many become one and are increased by one” (1929 [1978: 21]).

Creativity within each occasion is spontaneous, the mark of actuality, and free, within the limits determined by its antecedent causes. Creativity unifies any many and is creative of a new unifying perspective which then becomes one among the many. In a process ontology, creativity is ultimate reality not in the sense of something more ultimate behind, above, or beyond reality, but in the sense of something ultimately descriptive of all reality, or what the biologist Charles Birch and the theologian John B. Cobb, Jr. have called “the Life Process” (1982). As a category, creativity is the “ultimate of ultimates” in Whitehead’s words, but as such it is an abstraction, the formal character of any actual occasion. Creativity as concrete, however, signifies a dynamism which is the very actuality of things, their act of being there at all. Everything exists in virtue of creativity, but creativity is not any thing , according to process feminist philosophers of religion.

The idea that the category of the divine or transcendence can be correlated with the category of creativity in Whitehead’s philosophy marks a departure from Whitehead’s own notion of God as an actual entity in process of becoming at the same time that it joins with the Thomistic tradition that has employed the language of being, rather than becoming, to explicate the meaning of the divine. In its classical medieval synthesis in Aquinas, this tradition conceptualized the divine as esse ipsum , and held that in God essence and existence are one; that is, God’s very nature is esse , to be. Everything that exists was thought to do so through participation in divine being, or being itself. For Aquinas and classical thinkers, being was already concretized in a single source that was supremely actual. It is this crucial assumption, Frankenberry has argued, that undergoes modification in the shift from a substance metaphysics to one in which processive-relational categories are taken as ultimate (1993). The result is radical. De-substantialized and freed from static fixity in neo-scholastic metaphysics, being signifies the source and power of all that exists. Dynamized and pluralized according to the process paradigm, being does not repose in an originary source antecedent to every event; rather, it constitutes the very act of be-ing, of liv-ing, of ex-isting in the present moment as a new one emergent from an antecedent many. As such, being or creativity is inherently relational and processive. It is immanent within each momentary event as its spontaneous power; and it is also transcendent to that event of becoming in the sense that it is never exhausted by the forms in which it is found, but is always potentially a “more” that is “not yet” actualized. As long as being, like creativity, is not construed as something a being has but rather as what it means to be at all, the long identification of God with being in Western thought can be understood to point to sheer livingness or that which energizes all things to exist. Although no-thing particular in its own right, being is the very actuality of things, their act of being there at all. Nevertheless, Being-itself should not be construed as a particular being, thus ruling out pictorial theism’s anthropomorphism. Neither is it the sum of all beings, thus ruling out simple aggregation or totality. It is not a property of things nor an accidental quality, not a substance, and not a class of things. Instead, the religious symbol “God” can be understood to pertain to the creative ground of all that is—that which energizes all things—conceived as dynamic, immanent, and plural.

The philosophical concepts of creativity (as explicated by Whitehead) and of esse (as explicated dynamically) are useful for any feminist philosophy of religion that seeks to interpret the meaning of “divine reality”, “holy mystery”, “empowering spirit”, and a variety of other metaphors and symbols that abound in feminist theology. The concept of God as esse refers to the utter actuality of things, an act common to all things. Dynamic and living, be-ing is yet elusive. It signifies the moment to moment reality in virtue of which everything exists, a process that Whitehead’s category of creativity describes as the many becoming one, and as increased by one. Be-ing is no more real or unitary than beings, just as creativity in process philosophy is only actual in virtue of its accidents. As a model for feminist work, this notion of transcendence is dialectically related to immanence, neither dissolved into it as identical, nor divorced from it as wholly other.

A distinct alternative to the above appears in the feminist philosophies of religion of Luce Irigaray and Mary Daly. Both seek to project a “female divine” that would be fully immanental in and for the female Self (capitalized by Daly) and would provide what Irigaray calls a “sensible transcendental”. The different rhetorical strategies and cultural contexts of these two gynocentric philosophers sometimes conceal the similarity of their philosophies of religion. Both argue that the Father God is an idealized projection of masculine identity and that the process of women’s becoming divine is imperative. For Daly, the “divine spark” within the female Self is the ontological ballast needed by the feminist movement; similarly for Irigaray, the creation of a “female divine” is a condition of female subjectivity. Both Daly and Irigaray urge nothing less than an overturning of the symbolic order and of language itself. Both are first and foremost philosophers of the passions, seeking to encompass the elements of earth, air, fire, and water within their visions. Each in her own way has helped to forge a radical feminist consensus that spirituality is to be exalted above doctrine, and that patriarchal conceptions of God as any kind of objective reality must be deconstructed so that female subjectivity might become more expansive and free. Both reject reformist moves in the philosophy of religion as remaining inscribed within a phallocentric economy that evokes a god whose self-giving love is only accessible through fathers and sons and their representatives. In theorizing religion, both adopt a projection theory, classically rooted in Feuerbach’s claim that “theology is anthropology” and “God” a projection made in the image of “man”. However, far from relegating religion to the category of illusion, each issues an invitation to “make believe”.

4.2.1 In the American Context

The early Daly carved out a philosophy of religion largely consonant with the position cited in 4.1 above, as found in her Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973 [1985]). Ultimate reality is conceptualized not only as Verb, expressed in the present participle “Be-ing”, but as an “intransitive Verb” in which all being participates (Daly 1973 [1985]: 34; 1978: 23; 1984: 423). In these terms, Daly provides an ontological analysis of the urge toward transcendence, or participation in be-ing. Here the urge to transcendence is raised to the cosmic scale, and the vision of peace, justice, and ecological harmony that Daly projects bears a close resemblance to prophetic biblical texts. “Quintessence” expresses another metaphor for the be-ing in which we live, love, create, are. Daly says that Quintessence

is that which has been drawn on in my writing and searching. The quest for Quintessence is the most Desperate response I know to the call of the Wild. It means throwing one’s life as far as it will go. (1998: 4)

She analyzes Quintessence as the highest essence, above the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth; it is what permeates all nature, the Spirit that gives life and vitality to the whole universe. Although it can be blocked or partly destroyed by violence and pornography, poverty, racism, medical and scientific exploitation, and the threat of ecological and nuclear destruction, its apparent invincibility imparts an important measure of transcendence.

The later Daly’s trilogy developed a modified, more immanent, theory of the divine, beginning with Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), and continuing through Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (1984) and most of Quintessence—Realizing the Archaic Future (1998). Here the dialectic shifts subtly from the earlier balance maintained between immanence and transcendence, and tips in favor of a divine that is purely immanent within the female Self. Rather than being the divine milieu within which the self lives, the divine is only alive within the self. In GynEcology the emphasis is on the power “to spin” meaning out of women’s own divine orbs and to find the power of being within one’s self. By the time of Pure Lust , Daly has further modified the “power of being” to the pluralized “Powers of Be-ing”, a move that resolves the problem of the one and the many in favor of the many. Given Daly’s separatist ideology, the “divine” in question can only be wholly incarnate in the “many” female divine Selves. The gynocentric emphasis of Daly’s later writings will open her to the same critical questions posed about Irigaray’s woman-centered writings. Can they do justice to differences that figure in discussions of race, class, ethnic origins, and so forth? Do they reinstall sexual difference with old stereotypes left intact, trapping women once more within the parameters of their sexuality and physicality? Have they romanticized difference rather than theorizing it?

Daly’s intent was to create a trans-cultural, i.e., metapatriarchal, myth, but her thinking was deeply indebted to one particular strain in the Western intellectual tradition. Using the words of the Marxist Ernst Bloch, one could call this strain “revolutionary Prometheanism” (Block 1956–1959 [1986] passim ). It goes back at least as far as the Stoic logos spermatikos , the “seed” that links every person with the divine reason. It is closely connected with the medieval mystic’s talk of a “ scintilla animae ”, the “spark of the soul”, frequently echoed in Daly’s books (e.g., 1978: 183: “the divine spark of be-ing in women”). Meister Eckhart could write:

I have said that at times there is a power in the soul which alone is free…. It is free from all names, and altogether unimpeded, untrammelled, and free from all modes, as God is free and untrammelled in Himself. (c. 1300 [1957: 137 as quoted in Pietsch 1979])

For the radical medieval mystic like Eckhart the knowledge revealed in the experience of this divine spark is utterly self-authenticating. Therefore, it need not be subjected to the judgment of an institutional church. So too Daly writes: “she knows that only she can judge her self” (1978: 378). Also important in this strain of thought is the theme of the dispossession/repossession of the true, divine self. It is a powerful theme in Hegel (who was influenced by medieval mysticism) and in Feuerbach, and it also pervades Daly’s philosophy of religion. Hegel decries human beings who let themselves be “robbed of freedom, their spirit, their eternal and absolute element” (1795 [1948: 162]) and who then take “flight to deity” (1795 [1948: 163]). He insists that now (ca. 1800) is the time for persons to “repossess the treasures formerly squandered on heaven” (1795 [1948: 159]). Feuerbach takes up this same motif and makes it the dominant theme of his whole critique of religion. Daly refers to “Stolen female energy” (1978: 367), to “our stolen original divinity” (1978: 41) and urges repossession. She does not say what this leaves for men, who have been living off women, the “generators of energy” (1978: 319). Finally, along with Feuerbach, Daly says simply “we are divinity”.

Daly’s philosophy of religion was plugged into the Promethean myth, but she also added an original contribution. She explicitly expanded it to include women. Then she performed a reversal, and restricted it to women—although this reversal, too, has deep roots in the Western tradition, specifically, Iranian and biblical apocalypticism. Daly conveys the impression that only a few women are able to undertake the “Journey” (1978) or to achieve “Quintessence” (1998). This is not because she was pessimistic about the female Self, which has “immeasurable unique potentialities” (1978: 382), but because she was acutely sensitive to the power of evil, that is, to the power of the male patriarchy to successfully co-opt women. At the same time, Daly could be rapturously optimistic about those women who do escape male power and begin to search and spin. These will find the “real source”, the “deep Background”, the “power of the self’s be-ing”, “the Wild Self”, and spin into a “new time/space”, a “new creation”, and will glimpse a “Paradise that is beyond the boundaries of patriarchal paradise” (1978: 13, 24, 49, 283, 423).

4.2.2 In the Continental Context

More than Daly, Luce Irigaray’s writings have proved to be a provocative stimulus for a number of feminist philosophers of religion (Anderson 1998; Deutscher 1994, 1997; Hollywood 1994, 1998; Jantzen 1999). Both a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, Irigaray aims to recuperate the repressed feminine. Her chief themes are (1) the “sensible transcendental”, which performs a similar function as Derrida’s “finite infinite”, (2) sexual difference as paradigmatic of difference in itself, and (3) divinity and spirituality as significant feminist requirements to ground female subjectivity. Irigaray conceptualises the female divine as a “sensible transcendental” that is both flesh and word (Irigaray 1984 [1993a: 115, 129]). Reversing traditional incarnational doctrine, she speaks of flesh made word instead of word made flesh.

But if the Word was made flesh in this way, and to this extent, it can only have been to make me (become) God in my jouissance, which can at last be recognized. (1977 [1985: 199–200])

Perhaps the best way to read Irigaray’s notion of the “sensible transcendental” is in terms of Mary Daly’s description of her own project: “The philosophy here unfolded”, Daly explained, “is material/physical as well as spiritual, mending/transcending this deceptive dichotomy” (1984: 7). Imagining both sexual difference and divine otherness, Irigaray coins the sensible transcendental to overcome the split between transcendence (mind or spirit) and sensibility (body). Unlike Daly, however, Irigaray argues that a spiritual relationship between women and men, understood as progressive energy transmission, can enable a harmonization of the human and divine dimensions separated under patriarchal distortions. A love that welcomes difference will be capable of recognizing the other as transcendent to the self. Each partner will be allowed access to her or his own divinization.

In “Divine Women” (1993b [first published 1987]) and “Belief Itself” (1993b [first presented 1980]) Irigaray’s approach to the topic of divinity is profoundly immanentalizing, compared to traditional theology and philosophy of religion, even as her interest appears concentrated on the meaning of (women’s) transcendence. Her reconstruction requires two dialectical movements. First, she must nullify the radical alterity of the Wholly Other God, arguing that this is a god produced by and for the masculine imaginary and therefore not suitable to women’s becoming. Second, she must elevate “woman” to the status of the divine, negating Simone de Beauvoir’s view that woman remains always within the dimension of immanence, incapable of transcendence. Mediated by a “god of her sex”, woman’s becoming (divine) is thus possible, and in turn makes possible for the first time an ethics that defines a genuine relationship between two subjects, male and female, who do not simply differ, but differ differently. In the final analysis, by “the divine” Irigaray means “sexual difference” itself, that is, a new form of ethical relationship that can exist between women and men, or, by extension, between women and any others, once women have attained their own subjectivity.

Shorn of his anthropocentrism, Irigaray’s philosophy of religion recalls the twofold ambition of Feuerbach’s philosophy of religion in 1841: to elevate “man” to the level of “God” in order to display the true essence of the species-being; and to dissolve “God” into the human essence more unequivocally than Hegel, who did not fully anthropologize the divine. Her relation to Feuerbach (and Hegel) is apparent in her account of the sensible transcendental as marking the fundamental materiality of spirit. Debates concerning Irigaray’s possible “essentialism” and “utopianism” also recall Marx’s critique of Feuerbach’s “species-being”, and repeated charges of the utopian quality of Marx’s own idea of unalienated humanity. Some feminists rebut the utopian charge by finding in Irigaray’s reflections on the element of air in the work of Heidegger a tangible example of materiality that transcends the limitations of embodiment without being any less material (Armour 2003). Others read Irigaray’s notion of a sensible transcendental as relying too heavily on western models of autonomy and self-determination (M. Keller 2003). Recently, Irigaray’s explorations of the meaning of spirit/breath as the elemental force of life have put her in touch with eastern religious traditions such as Hinduism (Irigaray 1999 [2002]).

A major question some feminists have raised about the “feminine divine” is whether the language of transcendence can be retained plausibly as a poetic probe when the object of belief is assumed to be unreal. Amy Hollywood’s analysis discloses why acceptance of a Feuerbachian projection theory of religion, in which God is the projection of human wishes, attributes, and desires, complicates any effort to construct a new “feminine divine”. Belief works, Hollywood says, only as long as the underlying dynamics that fund it remain hidden.

What Irigaray appears to forget is Feuerbach’s central claim (and the grounds for his hope that the hold of religion might be broken): for religious projection to function, its mechanism must be hidden so that its object might inspire belief. (Hollywood 1994: 175)

Irigaray recognizes that the “exposure” of this mechanism has not destroyed religion for many, and hence asserts the importance of adequate projections. But how is such projection possible or meaningful for those, like Irigaray herself, who assume that the object of belief is unreal? If Irigaray maintains a Feuerbachian human referent for her own projection of religious discourse in terms of female representations of the divine, the feminine divine, too, would seem to facilitate its own destruction. What possibilities does this leave for female transcendence? Can belief be simultaneously posited and deconstructed? Can the strong female subjectivity created in and by a mystic such as Teresa of Avila become available to women without Teresa’s acceptance of a transcendent Other who is the divine (Hollywood 1994: 176)? Because transcendence for Irigaray is associated with the “male” and a sacrificial economy, it is not clear how women are expected to claim the new subjectivity that she thinks religion, reconstituted, can offer. It may be the case that Irigaray herself is ambivalent about belief and transcendence, and this leads her “immediately to deconstruct the very deities she invokes” (1994: 176). It may further be the case that the gynocentric project in philosophy of religion creates distinctive tensions, leading even sympathetic critics to inquire

how far the immanent can be re-inscribed as the site of transcendence without returning to the logic of sacrifice and bodily suffering seemingly endemic to the incarnational theologies of Christianity. (Hollywood 1994: 177)

There is also the related question as to “whether belief can be mimed without re-inscribing women into a logic of the same such as that which Irigaray sees underlying Christianity” (Hollywood 1994: 177).

Irigaray can be interpreted as striving to create a religious language that leads neither to theism nor to atheism but rather to a dialectic of immanence and transcendence that does not in any way assume an “object of belief” along hierarchical lines of verticality (see Hollywood 2002: chap. 7). In comparison to traditional theological accounts of such a dialectic, however, the emphasis of Irigaray’s philosophy of religion is oriented to affirming immanence, rather than to escaping finitude, embodiment, and materiality. The divine is to be found in the space between two (human) beings who encounter each other face to face in the recognition of sexual difference. Transcendence for women hinges on the possibility of this radical, and relational, immanentizing of the meaning of divinity.

5. Immanental Themes and Methods

While revisionist, de-patriarchalized philosophies of God/ess continue to engage some feminist philosophers of religion, others are willing to see even that topic cease to be center stage. As new waves of historicism and anti-essentialism register among the generation of post-analytic philosophers of religion, dissatisfaction has begun to develop with the traditional topics. Traditionally, for nonfeminist philosophers, the tendency to assimilate questions about religion to questions about “belief in the existence of God” has led down a slippery slope that transformed philosophical reflection about religion into reflection on the existence of God, the rationality of belief, the validity of the proofs, and the coherence of the divine attributes. This slide was historically understandable in terms of the influence of natural theology on philosophy of religion in the West, but the real issue, as noted by Michael McGhee, “is whether such preoccupations should remain central to the philosophy of religion, and, if not, what should replace them” (1992: 1). This section samples several emerging directions that signal the new preoccupations of feminist philosophers of religion.

Epistemological questions constitute an important part of the agenda for feminist philosophies of religion. What has the status of knowledge in various religious traditions? What gets valorized as worth knowing? What are the criteria evoked? Who has the authority to establish religious meaning? Is religious meaning something distinct from or independent of ordinary linguistic meanings of words? Who is the presumed subject of religious belief? How does the social position of the subject affect the content of religious belief? What is the impact upon religious life of the subject’s sexed body? What do we learn by examining the relations between power, on the one hand, and what counts as evidence, foundations, modes of discourse, forms of apprehension and transmission, on the other? In view of the intimate connection of power/knowledge, how do we handle the inevitable occlusion that attends all knowledge production? What particular processes constitute the normative cultural subject as masculine in its philosophical and religious dimensions?

The work of feminist philosopher of religion Pamela Sue Anderson offers a good example of the feminist standpoint theory approach to religion and gender, unadulterated by any loyalty to Christianity. In the first book-length study to be entitled A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1998) Anderson set out to revise and reform philosophy of religion by using feminist standpoint epistemology as developed by Sandra Harding in philosophy of science. A feminist standpoint is not the same as a woman’s experiences, situation, or perspective but is rather an achievement of an epistemically informed perspective resulting from struggle by or on behalf of women and men who have been dominated, exploited, or oppressed. Applied to philosophy of religion, feminist standpoint epistemology involves thinking from the perspective of women who have been oppressed by specific monotheistic religious beliefs. Anderson challenges both the privileged model of God as a disembodied person and the related model of reason as neutral, objective, and free of bias and desire. Spinning new myths or devising new conceptions of a divine reality are not part of this agenda. There is only the double imperative: “to think from the lives of others” and “to reinvent ourselves as other”.

However, adequate understanding of the religious beliefs of embodied persons, according to Anderson, requires a deeper analysis of the multiple intertwinings between reason and desire than philosophy of religion normally shows.

But how are feminists to talk about the material content of female desire? At just this point feminist standpoint epistemology yields to poststructuralist insights and Anderson finds in the work of Irigaray, Kristeva, and bell hooks themes that are missing in mainstream epistemology and some feminist epistemology. She articulates her philosophy of religion around “yearning” as a cognitive act of a creative and just memory. As used by bell hooks (1990), yearning is a positive act that motivates struggle in the search for personal and communal justice. It shapes a spirituality. According to Anderson, yearning is the vital reality of human life which gives rise to religious belief. Therefore, philosophical analysis of and feminist concern with reason combined with desire, as found in expressions of yearning for truth whether epistemological, ethical (justice), or aesthetic (love or beauty), need to supplement standard approaches to philosophy of religion.

One must be careful, Anderson says, not to conflate yearning with only a disguised form of the philosophical aspiration to be infinite. Her analysis of the concept of the infinite reveals a corrupt striving to become infinite or “all there is” at work in both masculinist and feminist philosophy of religion. In place of this Anderson calls for an approach that would allow instantiating the regulative ideals of truth, love, goodness, and justice as conditions for any incorrupt craving for infinitude. Humans can yearn for truth or crave infinitude while at the same time acknowledging self-consciously held and embodied locations (Anderson 2001). This means that, as other philosophers have pointed out, there is no “God’s eye view”, no actual infinite (Aquinas’s “actus purus”); the notion of infinity pertains only to abstract potentiality, whereas concrete actuality is incurably finite.

Questions of the justifiability of religious belief have previously been center stage in philosophy of religion. Anderson does not consider this question per se , but instead analyzes the prior question of the rational construction of belief and the production of knowledge. She considers the ways in which an exclusive focus on justification of dominant beliefs excluded women’s beliefs and women’s role in reasoning by assuming that only certain privileged beliefs should be assessed for their truth. At the same time she argues against any swift dismissal of justificatory questions, as well as against a strict focus on the justification of theistic beliefs. The myths of Mirabai, the legendary Hindu poetess-saint, and Antigone, the mythical figure of insurgence in Greek tragedy, are useful in understanding the notion of yearning as a rational passion linked to bodily experiences (1998: chap. 5). Anderson finds the disruptive mimings of these myths helpful for challenging the narrow parameters of empirical realist forms of theism.

Grace Jantzen issues a radical challenge to other feminist philosophers who would make epistemology, rather than psychoanalytic theory, their point of departure in studying religion and its repressed underside. (Jantzen 1999, 2004). She argues that questions about truth and the justification of religious belief can be dismissed as categories of the masculine symbolic. Going beyond Luce Irigaray, Jantzen’s body of work at the time of her death in 2006 proposed nothing less than a new imaginary of religion, a feminist symbolic of “natality and flourishing” as an alternative to the category of mortality, verging on necrophilia/necrophobia, with which the western tradition has been saturated. Influenced by Hannah Arendt’s work on natality and Adriana Cavarero’s feminist reading of Plato, Jantzen believed that a preoccupation with death and violence subtends the masculinist imaginary. If feminist philosophy of religion is ever to transform the symbolic order which inscribes this imaginary, it is necessary to change the imaginary. For this purpose, a model of transformative change drawn from psychoanalysis and Continental philosophy of religion is more useful than a model drawn from Anglo-American adversarial modes of argumentation (Jantzen 1999: 78).

To demonstrate the extent to which the Western symbolic is saturated with violence and death, epitomized in the crucified Christ, Jantzen situated her philosophy of religion in relation to the psychoanalytic theory of both Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Their account offers a theory of one of the most important features of any religion: sacrifice. Sacrificial codes involve a forgetting/erasure of the complex role of the maternal, amounting to a “matricide” (Kristeva) at the foundation of religious practice. According to Irigaray in “Belief Itself”, the central figure of the western cultural imaginary is the unmourned and unacknowledged sacrifice of the (m)other’s body that Christianity masks under the Eucharistic sacrifice of the son. According to Kristeva (1977 [1987]) in “Stabat Mater”, the real symbolic association is not between women and birth, but between women and death, setting up men as cultural masters over and above mortality and its intimations in the bodies of women.

Jantzen corrected the matricidal assertion of Kristevan theory; she argued against thinking that the child’s need to separate from the mother in order to become an individual is what initiates a logic of sacrifice and violence in the western symbolic. There is no imperative to sacrifice the mother in order to commence formation of the self in the cultural realm. However important separation and individuation are in subject formation, they are not proportional to death and violence. If we were to attend to natality instead, Jantzen wrote, we would be better able to create a new imaginary based on birth, life, and potentiality (Jantzen 2003). Feminist philosophy of religion should try to follow the path of desire to/for the divine, and forego the preoccupation with the rational justification of beliefs and the evaluation of truth-claims. Feminist philosophy of religion can attend better to the symbolic impact of birth rather than death as a strategy for creating a new imaginary construct that emphasizes flourishing of life rather than sacrifice of it. The norms of moral or political adequacy replace those of epistemic adequacy (Jantzen 2004).

If one asks what the ontological status of the divine is for Jantzen, one could say that it is pantheistic (see Jantzen 1999, chap. 11). As the horizon of human becoming, the divine is transcendent in the sense of the other of the world, non-reducible to statements about the world’s physical characteristics. As immanent, the divine is this world; there is no other. What previously had been seen as a set of polarities now opens out into a play of diversities, bringing the divine to life through us.

Foundations of Violence , Jantzen’s final publication, synthesizes her analysis of the psychoanalytic, religious, and philosophical dimensions of death and violence in Western culture, culminating in a constructive alternative (a feminine symbolic) that celebrates beauty, desire, and the creative impulse. Thanatos , a death drive, far from being a universal of human nature, as Freud believed, is a gendered construction of Western modernity, according to Jantzen, with precursors in Christendom and classical antiquity. Homer, Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle provide the genealogy of violence in Western thought that Jantzen critiques here, while Plotinus stands in for all those other-worldly seekers who gesture toward release in another world. What was to be a six-volumed study on Death and the Displacement of Beauty in the western tradition can be comprehended in incipient form in Jantzen 1999.

Pushing with and against Lacanian and Freudian theories, Jantzen (2002), Armour (2002), and Hollywood (2002, 2004) offer three important readings of Irigaray’s essay “Belief Itself” (1980 [1993b]). These feminist readings rely on critical appropriations of psychoanalysis and Derridean reading practices to re-assess a topic that stands at the center of much modern philosophy of religion. Belief and its formation, they show, is implicated in the formation of the subject and sexual difference, as well as related issues of embodiment and presence and absence. The argument is not only the familiar feminist one that the object of belief is male-defined, but the more radical claim that the structure and discourse of belief itself is masculinist and in need of deconstruction. That is to say that the constitution of the normative (Western, bourgeois) subject of religion and philosophy depends on the association of the body with the mother and femininity and an always incomplete and ambivalent mastering, concealment, or denial of the mother’s body. Freud’s own account of the fort/da game (“gone”-“there”) played by his grandson, Ernst, exposes the relationship between belief and the little boy’s mastery of the mother’s presence and absence, concealedness and unconcealedness. Despite her apparent absence, she is there, the boy comes to believe, and in so believing he experiences his own power. For Irigaray (1993b), God, as the Father and the source of meaning, emerges as the object of a belief first articulated in the (male child’s) attempt to master the mother’s absence; the dismantling of the subject as master, then, implies a concomitant deconstruction of the object of belief. For Armour (2002), the implications of this reading on the other side of ontotheology entail a challenge to any narrow definition of ontotheology or too-easy hope that it might swing free of logocentrism and phallocentrism. The wound at the heart of normative masculine subjectivity, evident in Derrida’s display of his dying mother’s body in his essay “Circumfession”, is an effect of the current sacrificial economy on the mother/son relationship. As Armour suggests,

working from the recognition of a primordial maternal sacrifice (rather than belief in a transcendent Father God) requires confrontation with pain and loss, not compensation for them. (Armour 2002: 223)

For Hollywood, a further implication concerns the renewed attention to the place of ritual and practice in religion. Not only do religious rituals, bodily practices, and discursive performatives construct gender but they also construct the very objects of religious belief. Her proposal that, as constituted, gender and the objects of religious belief have a similar ontological status re-opens a crucial question that many feminist philosophers of religion have finessed. The ontological status of objects of belief, especially deliberately projected ones, cannot be fully understood without bringing back into the picture the body, emotion, and desire as shaped by ritual practices (Hollywood, 2004).

The body, a recurrent theme in a variety of recent interdisciplinary studies, figures as the material or symbolic basis for much feminist philosophy of religion, in contrast to the fiction of disembodied subjectivity that marks mainstream modern epistemology.

One such body-based study, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz’s work, God’s Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (1994), is indicative of a new alliance of philosophy of religion with gender studies and social theory, rather than with natural theology and speculative metaphysics. Dozens of feminist studies have explored the way in which male deities authorize male domination and undermine female experience in the social order. Left unconsidered was the question whether a male divinity generates certain dilemmas and tensions for the conception of masculinity, rendering its meaning unstable. Pursuing this question, Eilberg-Schwartz overturns the conventional assumption that Jewish monotheism centered on an invisible, disembodied deity. His analysis of numerous myths shows that ancient Israel did image God in human form, while at the same time veiling the divine phallus.

Two consequences in particular arise for masculinity in a religious system that imagines a male deity with a phallus. First, the dilemma of homoerotic desire is posed when men worship a male God in a culture based on heterosexual complementarity. Although the expression of divine-human intimacy is couched in the language of male-female complementarity, it is males, not females, who enter into the covenantal marriage with the deity. Collectively, Israelite men were constituted discursively as “she”, and said to be “whoring” when they strayed from monotheism (monogamy) into idolatry (adultery). Suppression of the homoerotic impulse in the divine-human relationship, however, could take several forms: hiding and veiling the body of God through prohibitions against depicting God; feminizing Israelite males so that they could assume the role of God’s wife; and exaggerating the way in which women are “other” so as to minimize the ways in which men are made into others of God.

The solution of imagining Israel as a metaphorical woman, in an exclusive relation to the divine maleness, may have solved the first dilemma of homoerotic desire only by generating another. The second major dilemma for masculinity, according to Eilberg-Schwartz, is posed by being made in the image of a sexless Father God in a culture defined by patrilineal descent. The sexlessness of a Creator Father God sets up major tensions for men who must pro-create. In contrast to the Christian religion, whose different logic of a God fathering a Son could render a human father irrelevant, Hebrew logic placed great importance on the human father, generating tension around a Father God who was thought to be sexless and therefore without a son. When the dilemma of homoerotic desire is posed later for Christian men in relation to a male Christ’s body, it, too, is avoided by speaking collectively of the Christian community as a woman.

Feminist philosophy of religion has yet to explore fully the question of how a male God is problematic for men’s conceptions of self, according to Eilberg-Schwartz. It has also left unthought the difference between God as male and God as Father. Strict focus on the ways in which a masculine image of God undermines female experience tends to conflate human and divine masculinities into one undifferentiated symbol. Eilberg-Schwartz differentiates between images of male deities and images of father deities, contending that the maleness of God may have different implications than the fatherliness of God. Fatherly images of God can and should be used, he argues, “but only if equally powerful female images are also celebrated” (1994: 239). Repudiating the incorporeal, distant God that helped to generate the hierarchical associations of masculinity and femininity, he favors an image of “a tender loving Father who faces and embraces the child”, in the apparent expectation that a loving and embodied God may support a different kind of masculinity, one more capable of intimacy and tenderness (1994: 240).

Poststructuralist criticism as it studies the webbed relations of language, experience, power, and discourse still leaves some open and untheorized space in the links among these terms. Mary McClintock Fulkerson’s Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist Theology (1994), fills those gaps and challenges three inadequate notions of language, gender, and power: (1) the idea that linguistic signs re-present the thing; (2) the Cartesian assumption of the subjective consciousness as the origin of meaning; and (3) the understanding of power only in terms of external, unidirectional, and negative oppression. Poststructuralist method also critiques the liberal logic of inclusion that appeals to “women’s experience” or “women’s religious experience” as though it is an unproblematic or uncoded content of some kind. All such strategies and methods, Fulkerson shows, fail to recognize and account for the multiplicity of differences among myriad subject positions. In contrast to the liberal humanist goal of accommodating as many “different voices” as possible, discourse analysis seeks a more radical reading of the ways “voice” itself is produced and knowledge is power. Taking into account the inextricable and multiplicative character of the link between knowledge and the social relations out of which knowledge emerges changes the question, as well as the subject, according to Fulkerson. The question is not, for example, whether a given religious belief system is oppressive or liberating to women. Such generic and wholesale frames need to be replaced by more complex appreciation of the construction of multiple identities according to different locations in the social formation of patriarchal capitalism.

Fleshing out the multiple orderings that create differences in women’s positions should result in a clarification of what is at stake in appeals to “women’s experience”, often taken as a “source” and/or “norm” for feminist thought in an earlier generation of texts. Rather than as a “content” that is representative of a natural realm of women’s consciousness, religious or otherwise, “women’s experience” should be understood as constructed from “converging discourses, their constitution by differential networks, and their production of certain pleasures and subjugations” (Fulkerson, 115) Experience is not the origin of (feminist) philosophy of religion in the sense of offering evidence for its claims, but the very reality that needs to be explained. Similarly, in theorizing the link, for example, between the maleness of divine imagery and the legitimation of male dominance, what needs to be explained is how the maleness of divine imagery gets distributed and interrelated with material realities, and how the discourse itself carries out the oppression of women.

Once the false universal of “women’s experience” or “human experience” is replaced with an “analytic of women’s discourses”, feminist philosophers of religion can begin to consider the specific productions of positions for women, asking such questions as:

What discourses construct the middle-class white churchwoman’s positions? The poor Pentecostal woman preacher’s? The liberal academic liberation feminist’s?

In her investigations of Appalachian Pentecostal women preachers’ discourse and of the discourse of Presbyterian women’s groups, Fulkerson sees two very diverse women’s subject positions wrestling with a religious tradition in ways both liberating and constraining. Approaching the world of faith as a system of discourses, rather than as representational interpretations or cognitive belief claims, she displays how women’s faith positions can be constitutive of their emancipatory practices. The call stories and worship performances of poor Pentecostal women ministers, accompanied by ecstatic and bodily displays of joy, produce particular forms of resistance to patriarchal constraints, just as the faith practices of middle class Presbyterian housewives produce other possibilities for transgression, pleasure, and desire.

One merit of this methodology for feminist philosophy of religion is its exposure of the complexity of gender discourse, the constraints and resistances found in faith practices, and the social conditions of signification. It creates space in which it is possible to ask what philosophy of religion has occluded from its angle of vision by virtue of the abstract and distanced discourse that has characterized it.

One drawback of poststructuralist accounts of discourse, according to some feminists, is that it rules out the possibility that claims can be validated outside of particular communities and their languages. Fulkerson appeals to nonfoundationalism, the position that eschews the search for justifying beliefs or experiences that can in turn support other beliefs derived from them. She says that she does not find it necessary to offer reasoned arguments for the faith claims she invokes. The pertinent discursive practices she analyzes are those of resistance, survival, agape, and hope—practices, she freely admits, that assume the existence of God rather than problematize it. What remains an open question for this avenue of feminist philosophy of religion is how far discourse analysis can go toward ever subverting the belief structures of Pentecostal women ministers or Presbyterian housewives, indeed, how it could even be theoretically possible for it to do so.

In the North American context, a convergence of feminist and pragmatist agendas has emerged, with important implications for feminist philosophy of religion. Indebted to the pioneering work of Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1996), and recent studies by McKenna (2001) and Sullivan (2001), pragmatist-feminist philosophy of religion is distinguished by several features. First, on its philosophical side, both pragmatist philosophy and feminism share a strong critique of scientistic positivism; resistance to fact-value dichotomies; reclamation of the experiential and epistemic import of aesthetics; analyses of dominant discourses in light of forms of social domination; linkage of theory and practice; interest in the theoretical primacy of concrete experience; repudiation of the spectator stance of philosophical indifference; and an interrogation of the social-political effects of the social sciences. Second, on its religious side, the pragmatist tradition offers untapped resources for feminist reconstruction, ranging from the explicit philosophies of religion in the classical writings of Peirce, James, Dewey, Santayana, and Mead, to the implicit ones in the current revival of pragmatism on both sides of the Atlantic. The religious import of American pragmatism in its first millennium is best understood as a naturalization of traditional notions of transcendence and spirituality rather than, as its critics charge, an abdication of any hopes of transcendence at all. According to one interpreter (Stuhr 2003), pragmatism has relocated traditional notions of transcendence within immanence, relocated spirit within nature, relocated absolutes within inquiry, relocated affirmation within negation, and relocated salvation within community, a description that applies equally to the relocation effort performed in feminist philosophies of religion. The end result of these combined naturalization processes should yield something new to philosophy of religion:

truth without the problems of certainty; justification without the problems of foundations; nature and access to it without the problems of supernaturalism or solipsism; values without the problems of absolutism or arbitrariness; and distinctively religious or spiritual experience without idealism, dualism, or institutional religion. (Stuhr 2003: 194)

Feminist scholarship in general has had a hard time with religion. And mainstream philosophy of religion until recently has had a hard time with feminist scholarship.

Going forward in the twenty-first century, three particular questions stand out. The most significant question on the agenda for future reflection concerns religious pluralism and the need to overcome the extreme ethnocentrism of Anglo-American philosophy of religion. Insofar as the field faces the challenge of encounter with traditions expressing practices and beliefs that are not predominantly associated with European, white, or male modes of understanding, it will be required to elaborate new models of interpretation, a broader theory of evidence, a cross-culturally adequate conception of human rationality, and a more complex appraisal of the norms applicable to cases of divergent, rival religious claims and disagreements. Insofar as feminist philosophy of religion studies the strictly intellectual interpretations of any religious tradition, it will encounter beliefs, symbols, and ideas that are embedded in specific socio-cultural power relations. New work is now needed that reflects on the dynamics of power relations, analyzes inherited oppressions, searches for alternative wisdom and suppressed symbolism, and risks new accounts of the tricky truth and justification questions in light of religious pluralism.

Taking seriously the striking plurality of human forms of religious life leads to a second significant question. What theorizations of religion are most adequate for feminists to work with? Before this question can be addressed with all the philosophical rigor its complexity demands, feminists must face up to the fact that religion is a potent dimension of the lives and desires of contemporary women around the world; therefore, philosophizing it away as superstition, reactionary ideology, false consciousness, irrational belief, or premodern, outmoded hangover simply calls into question, not the phenomenon of religion, but the grasp of feminist philosophy itself on its subject matter. In our time, the elementary forms of religious life cannot be critiqued along the same old lines that Western secular modernity has taken for granted. In the past, Marxians and Freudians could provide theoretical fuel for the critique of religion for generations of readers, but their general theory of religion as a function of projection (of class interests or of the father-image) is severely outdated. Since we cannot divide reality into what is “really there” and what is “humanly projected”, and since there is no clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties that are “in us”, projection theories of religion (or of anything else) rest on a purely suppositional basis. They lack explanatory value.

Finally, theorization of the meaning of “religion” in feminist philosophy of religion in a pluralistic age leads to a third area of unploughed feminist ground. In addition to thinking about the philosophy in religion, feminists need to think more deeply about the religion in philosophy. What is the significance to feminists of the “return to religion” found, for example, in Emmanuel Levinas or Gianni Vattimo? Theological conceptions abound also in the work of Martin Heidegger, Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum. The deconstructionist writings of Jacques Derrida offer another instance of secular writing in a religious key whose feminist relevance needs to be assessed. Although some outstanding and suggestive work has been done by Fergus Kerr (1997), John Caputo (1997), and Hent de Vries (1999) on the religion in recent philosophy, the feminist corner of the triangle religion-philosophy-feminism remains to be more completely configured.

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Most feminists argue along similar lines to functionalists and Marxists that religion acts as a conservative force, maintaining the status quo. For feminists, that status quo is a patriarchal society.

Simone De Beauvoir (1953) took a very similar view to traditional Marxists, only instead of seeing religion as assisting in the subjugation of the workers, she saw it as exploiting and oppressing women. She argued that religious faiths encouraged women to be meek, to put up with inequality, exploitation and suffering and doing so will bring rewards in the afterlife.

There are several ways in which religion can promote patriarchy:

• Through religious scripture / teachings
• Through religious ceremonies and practices
• Through the structure and power-relations of religious organisations

Examples of patriarchy in scripture and teachings

• In several religions, women are presented as temptresses who distract men from the serious business of worship. In the bible, it is the first woman, Eve, who disobeys God and then goes on to tempt Adam and bring about his downfall too.
• In many religious teachings across a wide range of religions, women are given the role of nurturing, caring and giving birth. While these roles are presented positively and as essential, they reinforce the gender norms in society and the patriarchal power structures. If women choose not to conform to gender stereotypes, they are not only deviating from gender norms and family expectations, but deviating from God’s will too.
• Religious texts are full of male Gods, male prophets, male saints and male heroes. The books are written by men and interpreted by men.
• The rules of religious organisations – which are often more about culture and custom than scriptures – include a lot of rules that restrict the freedom of women. Rules on abortion, contraception, etc. alongside unequal rules relating to marriage and divorce, all put significant restrictions on fundamental life choices for women that are not placed on men.
• The purdah in Islam, where religious women are secluded from society, including the wearing of veils, etc. is seen by some feminists as exemplifying and entrenching patriarchy.

Examples of patriarchy in ceremonies and practices

• In several religious organisations men and women worship separately.
• In many religions both menstruation and pregnancy are treated as impure or ungodly. For example, in Islam women who are menstruating are not allowed to touch the Koran. Jean Holm (1994) suggests that these various restrictions on the participation of women contribute to the devaluation of women in many contemporary religions.

Examples of patriarchy in religious organisations

• Although some religious organisations do have women in senior positions, they are certainly the exception rather than the rule, and in most cases this is the result of relatively recent reforms. In the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope, all the cardinals, archbishops, bishops and priests are men. Most branches of Islam do not recognise female Imams, although there is some debate among Islamic scholars about whether women can ever lead prayers and whether for female-only or mixed congregations. There have been female Rabbis since the 1970s but it is still condemned by orthodox Jews. Although there have been women priests in the Church of England since 1994, it took a further 20 years before there was a female bishop. Karen Armstrong (1993) argued that the exclusion of women from the priesthood exemplified women’s marginalisation in religious and social life. Linda Woodhead has suggested that the exclusion of women both from positions of authority and from some religious practices comes from a deep-seated resistance to women’s freedom and choice altogether.
• There is a traditional gender division of labour in many religious organisations with an expectation that women will serve tea and cakes after the service, for instance.

Evaluating feminist views on the role of religion

• Not all feminists agree that religion is essentially patriarchal, arguing that many early religions featured prominent goddesses and other female figures. Instead they argue that patriarchal societies have changed religions in order to ensure they reflected and reinforced patriarchal values.
• Karen Armstrong (1993) argues that it was the development of monotheistic religions, with their all-powerful male Gods (such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam) which imbued religion with a patriarchal and sexist core. She points out that various goddesses and priestesses were replaced with male prophets.
• Nawal El Sadaawi argues that religions are not the direct cause of women’s exploitation and oppression (though they are often the tool employed to this end) the cause is a patriarchal society. She argues that powerful men reinterpreted religious beliefs and ideas in order to benefit themselves.
• Linda Woodhead argues that religion is not necessarily sexist or patriarchal and writes of a “religious feminism.” For example, she argues that the veil, in Islamic societies, has been misinterpreted by some western feminists. She argues that many Muslim women choose to wear a veil and see it is a positive and liberating choice. In very restrictive patriarchal Middle-Eastern societies, women have used face veils to allow them to enter society, obtain employment and in other ways empower themselves. In western countries, some women have chosen to wear veils in order to escape the male gaze. However, Nawal El Sadaawi has described the veil as “a tool to oppress women.”
• Others have suggested that religion is becoming increasingly female-dominated, particularly in western democracies. Attendance at religious services is much more common among women, for instance. However, feminists like De Beauvoir would argue that that is because women are the intended audience of the ideological messages being promoted: that women should cook, clean, have babies and tolerate inequality and oppression in exchange for rewards in the afterlife.
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Women, Gender, Religion

• © 2001
• Elizabeth A. Castelli

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Contemporary Encounters in Gender and Religion: Introduction

Revisiting Gender and Religion

• anthropology
• gender studies

Table of contents (27 chapters)

Front matter, introduction, women, gender, religion: troubling categories and transforming knowledge, categories of analysis and critique: “gender,” “religion,” “feminism”, what’s in a name exploring the dimensions of what “feminist studies in religion” means.

• Miriam Peskowitz

Weaving the Fabric of Our Lives

• Carol P. Christ

Unweaving: A Response to Carol P. Christ

“gender” for a marxist dictionary: the sexual politics of a word.

• Donna J. Haraway

The Translation of Cultures: Engendering Yorùbá Language, Orature, and World-Sense

• Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

Snakes Alive: Resituating the Moral in the Study of Religion

• Robert A. Orsi

Transnationalism, Feminism, and Fundamentalism

• Minoo Moallem

Origins, Identities, and Appropriations

Sexuality, sin, and sorrow: the emergence of the female character, sacrifice as remedy for having been born of woman.

• Zakia Pathak, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

A Question of Origins: Goddess Cults Greek and Modern

• Helene P. Foley

On Medicine Women and White Shame-ans: New Age Native Americanism and Commodity Fetishism as Pop Culture Feminism

• Laura E. Donaldson

Gender and Religious Experience: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Margery kempe answers back.

• Carolyn Dinshaw

'Working the nexus of several volatile categories-women, gender, religion-these essays explore both theoretical and practical occasions on which these terms must be mutually interpreted. From the perspectives of diverse disciplines, the authors take up the most important and difficult challenges to feminism. Each essay is fascinating and instructive. Together they expose and explore the state of the discourse at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is the essential book for feminist studies in religion.'

'These stimulating and sophisticated essays combine to create an essential

collection of feminist studies in religion.' - Margaret R. Miles, Dillenberger Professor of Historical Theology, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley

'An excellent basic text for an academic introduction to the field.' - WaterWheel

'This collection will prove an invaluable, if demanding, text for those undergraduate and postgraduate courses in religion and gender which aim to be multi-traditional and cross-historical...no serious student of the discipline should ignore its manifold challenges to understanding.' - Melissa Raphael, Modern Believing

About the authors

Bibliographic information.

Book Title : Women, Gender, Religion

Book Subtitle : A Reader

Editors : Elizabeth A. Castelli

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04830-1

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan New York

eBook Packages : Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies Collection , Social Sciences (R0)

Copyright Information : Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2001

Softcover ISBN : 978-0-312-24030-1 Published: 07 November 2001

eBook ISBN : 978-1-137-04830-1 Published: 01 January 2001

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XV, 550

Topics : Anthropology , Gender Studies , Religious Studies, general , Feminism , History, general

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1st Edition

Feminism and Religion in the 21st Century Technology, Dialogue, and Expanding Borders

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Description

This anthology of brand new essays will explore the new directions of conversations occurring in relation to feminism and religion, as well as the technological modes being utilized to continue dialogue, expand borders, and create new frontiers in feminism. It is a cross generational project bringing together the voices of foremothers with those of the twenty-first century generation of feminist scholars to discuss the changing direction of feminism and religion, new methods of dialogue, and the benefits for society overall.

Table of Contents

Gina Messina-Dysert, PhD, is Dean of the School of Graduate and Professional Studies at Ursuline College and co-founder of the blog Feminism and Religion. Rosemary Radford Ruether, PhD, is Professor of Feminist Theology at Claremont Graduate University and Claremont School of Theology.

Critics' Reviews

"This is an exciting collection of essays from some of the best feminist voices in religion of our current era. The writers explore the profound effects that technology has on how we communicate and the myriad ways we do so globally as well as locally to probe enduring social inequalities, reshape religious conversations, inspire social justice activism, expand our sense of religious communities, breaking down restrictions of language and space, transform education, find ancestors, and explore embodiment. Rather than see us as captive to technologies’ expansions, these writers point us toward the possibilities of technologies’ positive transformations as tools of justice-making and sustaining." Emilie M. Townes, Vanderbilt Divinity School, USA "For anyone interested in how feminism and religion intersect with blogging, open source, life broadcast, social media, virtual community, and activism in cyberspace, this text is a must-read. Feminist scholars and activists need to catch up with cyberfeminism or become obsolete!" Kwok Pui-lan, Episcopal Divinity School, USA "Drawing on diverse methods and theories, the contributors to Feminism and Religion in the Twenty-First Century explore how online forms of communication and community are—and aren't—challenging exclusionary, authoritarian, and patriarchal religious institutions and ideas." Kecia Ali, Boston University, USA "This fascinating collection of essays by diverse authors explores a multitude of possibilities for women’s use of social media in religious reflection, community building, and activism. The essays are informed by both theory and practice and engage a range of religious traditions, settings, and topics to enhance our understanding of contemporary feminism and religion." Pamela K. Brubaker, California Lutheran University, USA "This collection of provocative essays on feminist theology speaks to our world that is increasingly immersed in technology as a way of living. The book stands at the intersection of feminist theology and feminism lived out pedagogically to illuminate an emerging, creative, cutting edge way of being woman.　The reflections span issues of social media, alternative communities, and technology. These essays provide delightful views of new and burgeoning areas of reflection and practice on what it means to do theology for women in our world today, with blogging, hashtags, and social networking." Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Georgetown University, USA "A compelling exploration of technology's effects on the field of feminism and religion through essays by a varied group of theologians. The collection makes a stunning case for how technology fosters expanded dialogue, spreads the feminist revolution, and shapes the future of the movement." Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual

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Troubling Essentialism: Studying Religion and Feminism

• October 13, 2016

Secular feminist scholars would benefit from understanding ‘religion’ as a category without set boundaries, and from studying religion as 'lived' within fluid contexts.In her interview with the Religious Studies Project, Dawn Llewellyn gives a succinct and well-considered account of the ‘tricky relationship’ between feminism and religion. Tackling two such wide-ranging topics, their various definitions, Share this response

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Sammy Bishop is a PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, under the supervision of Dr. Arkotong Longkumer and Dr. Steve Sutcliffe, studying women's Tantra groups in the UK.

Sammy Bishop

Religion and Feminism

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In her interview with the Religious Studies Project, Dawn Llewellyn gives a succinct and well-considered account of the ‘tricky relationship’ between feminism and religion.  Tackling two such wide-ranging topics, their various definitions, and the intricate interactions between them is a vast undertaking, and Llewellyn provides an excellent first interview on the topic to the RSP (and hopefully there will be many more to come!).

Usefully, considering the Religious Studies-oriented audience of the RSP, Llewellyn begins by describing the most popular representation of the feminist movement: the wave metaphor. In her description, she skilfully lays out the various components and trends within feminism, whilst simultaneously ‘troubling the waves’, highlighting how the wave metaphor is itself essentialising and limiting.  Indeed, confining certain trends within feminism to chronological waves ignores the variety of work that has always gone on throughout the feminist movement, whilst implying that feminists of a certain age will think according to trends of a certain wave.  Llewellyn’s interview (and recent book) contributes to recent work aiming to add nuance to how feminism is represented.  This extends research such as that of Amanda Lotz (2003), who despite working with the ‘third wave’ classification, makes attempts to identify the diverging contemporary strands.  Such work is valuable in adding nuance to how feminism is understood, and will hopefully help to prevent general and uncritical uses of the wave metaphor.

One important topic that the interview touches upon is what the study of ‘Feminism and Religion’ entails.  This could refer to a plethora of activities, including (but certainly not limited to): the work of religious feminists and feminist theologians; research on various religions’ perceptions of the feminist movement and vice versa; the study of women’s experiences of religion; and the implementation of feminist theory within Religious Studies.  Although these can all be considered under the heading of ‘Feminism and Religion’, each aspect will require a different approach and will produce different data.  Part of the task of scholars within this area is to clarify their approach to these wide-ranging concepts. A vital part of this is explaining what the terms ‘religion’ and ‘feminism’ refer to in specific contexts, in an effort to avoid essentialised and generalised assumptions about each term.

It is these essentialised representations of both feminism and religion that lie at the heart of Llewellyn’s interview, and she clearly conveys how these play a large role in explaining their awkward relationship.  Within the academic context, Llewellyn distinguishes between secular feminism and religious feminism, and identifies a disconnection between the two.  This can be attributed to two main causes: 1) the overtly confessional nature of religious feminism, sometimes seen by Religious Studies scholars and secular feminists as more appropriate to a theology department, and 2) the perception of secular feminist scholars that religions are monolithic and inherently patriarchal.  From this perspective, religious feminists are seen as suffering from a form of false consciousness and have yet to realise the oppression that their religion subjects them to.  It is this second aspect that I am most interested in addressing, and that scholars within Religious Studies can attempt to exert some influence upon.

It is fairly easy to see why secular feminist scholars see religious feminists as suffering from this false consciousness.  Research by Kristen Aune found that feminists are less likely to be religious – that is, identify with a ‘world’ religion.  Suggested reasons for this include feminists challenging Christian-centred discourses of ‘ideal’ femininity, and the tendency for religious organisations to condemn homosexuality (40% of the women who participated in the survey were not heterosexual).  When this is combined with feminist critiques of religious texts and rituals, as well as negative accounts from women within religious organisations which maintain patriarchal power structures, it seems obvious that feminists would be less religious – and serves to confirm the suspicions of secular feminists that religion is ‘the last bastion of patriarchy’.  Problems arise when these accounts are generalised to suggest that all religious organisations or teachings are necessarily patriarchal, and that all religious women have similar experiences.  Generalising experiences of religion in this way strips agency from individuals who identify as both religious and feminist, and silences or trivialises individual interpretations of traditions by religious feminists.

This brings us back to the oft-discussed topic of how to convey to those outside of Religious Studies that ‘religion’ is a fluid category, thus assumptions of an entire religion’s attitude toward women, and women’s experiences within this, will be inaccurate.  Secular feminist scholars would benefit from understanding ‘religion’ as a category without set boundaries, and from studying religion as ‘lived’ within fluid contexts.  Once religion is conceptualised as such, academic feminists can analyse particular understandings or expressions of ‘religion’ within a context, and relate this to their specific feminist interests.  Religion, understood with nuance (and not as necessarily negative), can then be critically considered as part of the wider matrix of power relations with which feminist work is concerned.

It is clear that essentialised representations of religion and feminism within academia must be broken down in order for more productive work to take place.  Perhaps optimistically, I believe that this deconstruction within the subject areas of Religious Studies and academic feminism is inevitable.  This is partly thanks to contemporary feminism’s focus on intersectionality which must surely increasingly include nuanced understandings of religion, and partly due to the trend in Religious Studies toward ‘lived religion’, which can recount the specific, contextualised experiences of individuals who identify as both religious and feminist.  Religious Studies scholars have been working for a long time on conveying the lived experiences of religious women, and this work can be valuable in communicating to secular feminist scholars the ways in which feminism and religion might be reconciled. Communicating this work is key.

In the wider field, it remains important to highlight the experiences of women within different religions (and within contexts outside of organised religions), and to critique the gendered power structures evident in these.  Religious feminists and feminist theologians will continue to revise and reconstruct elements of their own traditions, providing important resources for women and men desiring alternative expressions of that tradition.  Excellent work is already occurring within these areas.  However, I believe that it is also important for feminist work within Religious Studies to increasingly go further than this, to apply a gendered lens to well-known tools and theories in order to expose any bias.  Some examples of this are Eeva Sointu and Linda Woodhead’s (2008) suggested alterations to Charles Taylor’s theory of the self, and Erin White’s (1995) critique of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics.  Studying women’s experiences is increasingly done, but engagement with feminist theory is less so.  Similarly, feminist scholars must not shy away from analysing and critiquing those new resources produced by feminist theologians and religious feminists.  One can sometimes sense a reluctance on the part of scholars to critique these newer, more female-friendly resources.  However, when one form of gendered power is rejected, another can be unintentionally reinforced and can even strengthen unhelpful gender binaries – for example, forms of Goddess Spirituality in which femininity is highly valued, but is constructed in a specifically emotional, sensitive, maternal way. Constructive criticism must remain front and centre to those feminist scholars committed to working towards positive change.

Another point that Llewellyn touches upon is the inclusion of feminism within university curricula.  I am in complete agreement with her, in that it certainly does not help that many departments of Religious Studies introduce ‘Religion and Feminism’ only as a separate optional third or fourth year course (whilst others don’t include the topic at all).  It is perfectly possible to include feminist approaches to Religious Studies in introductory courses on theory and method, thereby presenting feminist approaches as another critical tool to add to a student’s skillset.  Indeed, including feminism within a core undergraduate curriculum for Religious Studies could produce closer relationships between academic feminism and Religious Studies, avoiding the misinterpretations and generalisations that later arise.

It is possible to see how a close relationship between academic feminism and Religious Studies can be mutually beneficial.  Whilst Religious Studies can benefit from using critical feminist lenses in research, academic feminism can develop further using increasingly nuanced understandings of what ‘religion’ refers to, as well as lived experiences described by work within Religious Studies.    Finally, I would encourage Religious Studies scholars within all sub-disciplines – not only those within Sociology of Religion – to explore and experiment with feminist theory in their own work.  This exploration can reveal as-yet unexplored perspectives within Religious Studies, as well as guarding against any unintentional reinforcement of gendered power structures.

Aune, K, 2011.  ‘Why Feminists are Less Religious’.  In: The Guardian, 29 th March 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/29/why-feminists-less-religious-survey

Lotz, A, 2003.  ‘Communicating Third-Wave Feminism and New Social Movements: Challenges for the next century of feminist endeavour’. Women and Language , 2003, vol. 26 (1), pp.2-9

Sointu, E, and Woodhead, L, 2008. ‘Spirituality, Gender, and Expressive Selfhood’.  Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion , 2008, vol.47 (2), pp.259-176

White, E, 1995. ‘Religion and the Hermeneutics of Gender: An Examination of the Work of Paul Ricoeur’. In: King, U.,1995.  Religion and Gender . Oxford: Blackwell, pp.77-100

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Feminist Theology

Other essays.

Feminist theology claims to seek the equality, justice, and liberation of women from what it perceives to be oppressive male systems of power and domination in religion.

Feminist theology is theology and biblical studies done using feminist methodologies and theories of interpretation. Feminist theology seeks the equality, justice, and liberation of women from what are perceived to be patriarchal or androcentric systems of power and domination that have shaped the church, the history of the translation and interpretation of the Bible, and the Bible. It does not typically regard the Bible as the authoritative Spirit-inspired Word of God. There is not one “feminist theology” but many, each reflecting different historical, cultural, and global settings, particularly using intersectional analysis. Feminist theology, like feminism more broadly, seeks revolutionary change and its effects have been far-reaching, and provide the context for contemporary evangelical ministry.

Overview of Feminist Theology

Feminist theology has developed both alongside and in dialogue with secular feminism. While the word “feminism” might suggest a comprehensive monolithic ideology or movement, it is more an umbrella term for many different feminism(s) that use differing methodologies, address different concerns, and advocate different views, some of which are mutually exclusive. The same is true of “feminist theology.” There is not one “feminist theology” but many, each arising from different historical, cultural, and global settings. This state of flux and diversity is a defining feature of current feminism and feminist theology and is regarded positively as reflecting feminism’s ideological commitments. 1 Feminist theology is not so much theology and biblical studies done by women, but theology and biblical studies done using various feminist methodologies and theories of interpretation. Generally speaking, feminist theology seeks the equality and welfare of women by opposing and dismantling what are seen as patriarchal or androcentric (male-centered) systems of power, domination and exclusion.

Feminist theologians believe these systems of male power and privilege have shaped the history of the church, the history of traditional biblical interpretation—and sometimes even the content of the Bible (written by men for men)—and have justified and resulted in the oppression, silencing, and exclusion of women in all areas of life, including the church. In its search for liberation of women from these structures, feminist theology is informed by and usually considered a form of Liberation Theology.

Intersectionality

In recent years, the concerns and methodologies of feminist theologians have broadened from a focus on women and gender relations to include the compounding effects of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, (dis)ability, post-colonialism, and what are perceived to be other dynamics of power and privilege. The interconnected, overlapping nature of these social categories is known as “intersectionality.” Intersectional analysis seeks to identify and deconstruct the way that different experiences and dynamics of marginalization intertwine and multiply the harmful effects of each other. It is a feature of third and fourth wave feminism.

On this analysis, the perspective and needs of the marginalized take priority over those of the privileged—among whom are white, well-educated, middle-class, Western, female feminists—and the gender essentialism that characterized much (Western) second-wave feminism, which assumed the experience of all woman was the same (e.g., poor and rich; Western and non-Western), is also deemed problematic. Accordingly, gender essentialism, and sometimes (counter-intuitively) even a binary view of gender, have been replaced by post-modern subjectivism and diversity .

Feminist theology now employs a wide range of methods and perspectives reflecting the varied experiences of women around the globe; including African-American women (womanist theology); Hispanic-American women ( mujerista theology); Korean women ( minjung feminist theology); low-caste Indian women ( dalit feminist theology); African and Asian women; women in post-colonial cultures; differently-abled women; and those from the LGBTIQ+ community—including trans-women (biological males).

Despite this diversity, most approaches are interested in the nature and implications of women’s embodiment, and suspicious of body-soul dualism as well as theories that associate women with bodily existence and the natural world, and men with the “higher” world of rationality. The complementarity of men and women portrayed in the Bible and until recently widely accepted in historic, orthodox Christianity is typically rejected. Instead, feminist theology stresses the value and experiences of women’s embodiment as both the source and goal of theological reflection, and the corresponding need for women’s bodies and the experience of female suffering to be acknowledged and present in sacramental ritual and liturgy.

Ecofeminist Theology

Feminist theology often also embraces ecological or environmental concerns , which take various forms that reflect different underlying theologies. For example, one form arises from intersectional concerns for justice and poverty relief, and a commitment to local and global economies, and the environmental conditions necessary to sustain production. Another arises from the belief that male notions of hierarchy, domination and exploitation are responsible for degrading the created world and must be replaced by a feminist approach which upholds the mutuality of humanity and the creation, seeking to achieve their mutual flourishing. Another arises from the rejection of what is regarded as the patriarchal God of the Bible (i.e., God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit of the Father and the Son) and of all hierarchical and/or dualistic distinctions between the divine and the created world, and instead embraces either panentheism or a feminine deity or Creator Spirit.

Evangelical or Biblical Feminism (Egalitarianism)

Since the early 1970’s, some evangelicals have sought to bring feminist thought to bear on the study of the Scriptures and church practice. Initially, they formed the Evangelical Women’s Caucus (EWC), eventually splitting over the issue of homosexuality in 1986, and forming the EWC and Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE)—with the former affirming homosexuality, and the latter rejecting it. The EWC is now aligned with liberal feminist theology.

Evangelical feminists recognize the authority of the Bible as divinely inspired. However, for a variety of reasons, they do not accept that Scripture teaches there are different roles and responsibilities for men and women in the family or the church or alternatively argue that these differences do not apply today. They seek identical roles for women and men in ministry and also within marriage.

Feminist Hermeneutics

For all their differences, feminist theologians usually approach the text of Scripture with similar convictions about its interpretation that determine their understanding and application of the text. The articulation of this hermeneutic varies but usually includes: a hermeneutic of suspicion, a hermeneutic of retrieval, and a hermeneutic of reconstruction. 2

A hermeneutic of suspicion involves reading against the text rather than with it. Instead of uncritically accepting the inspiration, authority, inerrancy, and wisdom of the entire text of Scripture, a hermeneutic of suspicion assumes the male patriarchal/anti-women bias of Scripture (written by men for men), and critiques and deconstructs the text and/or the tradition of translation or interpretation associated with it. Not all Scripture is regarded as “the word of God,” and so there is a canon within the canon. Only that which conforms to feminist beliefs should be proclaimed in the church (cf. “hermeneutic of proclamation”).

A hermeneutic of retrieval seeks to recover and venerate the lost history of women in the Bible and the history of the church. It also involves remembering the suffering of women in Scripture, especially victims of violence and injustice (e.g., Hagar , Tamar , the unnamed concubine , and the daughter of Jephthah ), 3 and questioning the place of these accounts in Scripture and their continued use in the church (cf. ‘hermeneutic of remembrance’).

A hermeneutic of reconstruction seeks to revise traditional (male-dominated) approaches to the Bible and historic Christianity and replace them with women-centered approaches. In so doing, the Bible becomes a resource for the liberation of women, and feminist theory leads to changed praxis (cf. “hermeneutics of creative ritualization” or “actualization”).

These hermeneutical principles are reflected in a statement produced by feminist authors meeting at the 2010 conference of the Society of Biblical Literature. They determined that “feminist” work—

• must challenge/destabilize/subvert the subordination of wo/men, rather than strengthen or reinforce it;
• must reflect appreciation of and respect for wo/men’s experience by acknowledging wo/men’s capacities and agency; […]
• must have as its consequence far-reaching changes in religion and society, as well as political and revolutionary significance. Hence, it must be practical, this-worldly, transformative, renewing, and transitional. 4

In short, feminist theology is not a theoretical academic pursuit, but is a means to an end: namely, to bring far-reaching revolutionary changes to the lives of women, the church, and wider society.

Theological Language

The critique of language is an important part of this revolutionary change. Most feminist theologians regard the masculine theological language of the Bible and the perceived masculine bias of traditional theological language as problematic, believing that “if God is male, then the male is God.” 5

At the more radical end, some feminist theologians use “G*d” or “God/dess” or Sophia rather than “God,” which is thought to be irretrievably linked to male patriarchal images of God; and “the*logy” or “thealogy” rather than “theology” (cf. Greek word theos is a masculine noun; thea is the feminine form). Other feminists use both male and female names, pronouns and images for God or gender-neutral names like Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Re-naming and re-imaging God is a key project for feminist theology, and these linguistic moves reflect significant departures from historic Christian doctrine.

Less radically, some major English Bible translations have adopted a gender-inclusive or gender-neutral approach, both in order to render the original languages more accurately in modern English, and to respond to changes in language that are the result of feminism. The principles of sound translation, and Bible translation in particular, are complex, and some of these translations have been less reliable than others—sacrificing accuracy for the sake of intelligibility or the avoidance of offence. 6

Irrespective of whether feminist convictions are accepted, the changes that feminism has brought to everyday language are a consideration for contemporary Bible translations, and the preaching and theological reflection that make use of them. For example, while the English Standard Version ( ESV ) retains the use of the generic “he,” it also points out in footnotes that the Greek word adelphoi (translated “brothers” in the main text) may in the New Testament “refer either to men or to both men and women who are siblings (brothers and sisters) in God’s family, the church” depending on the context. 7 Thus, while the ESV has not replaced “brothers” with “brothers and sisters” in the main text (cf. NIV 2011), the addition of these footnotes recognizes both the effect of feminism on language meaning and on readers of the ESV .

Engaging with Feminist Theology

These changes in everyday language are evidence of the far-reaching effects of feminism. The central premise of feminist theology—that the church, the Bible, and even the God of the Bible, are misogynistic and bad for women—has been accepted by many if not most people in the secular West. Hence, a resistance or hostility to the biblical gospel and historic Christianity provides the backdrop to most efforts at evangelism and outreach and impacts regular Christians in their daily lives.

Most denominations have faced debates about women’s ordination and the ministry of women, and many have conceded ground to feminist principles and exegesis. Even within denominations that have not changed their polity, individual churches and households can be divided on the role of women in the home and the church. An understanding of feminist theology and its effects are therefore necessary for effective ministry in most cultural settings.

However, there is some common ground between Bible-believing Christians and feminist theologians. For example, beliefs or practices that undermine the dignity and equality of women (e.g., unequal pay, pornography, domestic abuse, and sexual harassment) should be as abhorrent to Bible-believing Christians as they are to feminist theologians—even if we do not agree on the root cause of, or solution to, these problems.

At the heart of both feminist theology and evangelical theology is a question: What is the Bible? The feminist answer is that the Bible is a collection of fallible or at best unreliable human words that must be sifted and read with a hermeneutic of suspicion if they are to be good for women. The answer of the Bible itself is that the Scriptures are the Spirit-breathed authoritative life-giving true word of the living and true God (2Tim. 3:16), and that while the church may err, Scripture does not. 8

Further Reading

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This essay is part of the Concise Theology series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

Radical Feminist Perspectives on Religion

Last Updated on July 3, 2024 by Karl Thompson

Radical Feminists emphasise the patriarchal nature of some mainstream religions such as Catholicism and Islam. They argue that such religions have developed in patriarchal societies and have been ‘hijacked’ by men. Men have interpreted religious doctrines in order to justify their positions of power.

Radical Feminists also believe that religion often serves to compensate women for their second class status within religion and society more generally. For example, by providing psychological rewards if they accept their role as mothers and limit their horizons to fulfilling that role well.

However, Radical Feminists do not necessarily see religion as inherently patriarchal. Historically, for example, Goddess religions have celebrated the creative and nurturing power of the feminine. It is really men hijacking religion and downplaying the role of women in the development of some religions over the past couple of thousand years which is the problem.

Four Feminist Perspectives on Religion

The mind map below summarises the following Feminist perspectives on religion. Please click the links below for more details:

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Submissions

The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion welcomes a variety of contributions that further feminist and womanist theory, consciousness, and practice. The editors are interested in material that examines how categories of identity such as gender, race, sexuality, class, age, ability, ethnicity, nationality, and structures of inequality are mutually constituted and must be understood in relation to one another.

The JFSR welcomes material from and about all religious traditions—literate or nonliterate, traditional or contemporary, as well as articles that question the category of religion or consider religion from secular perspectives.

The JFSR is not restricted to any one conception of feminism and seeks to represent the widest possible range of feminist perspectives on religion. However, the editors are interested in publishing material that does not just focus on women but has  a clear feminist framework .

• What is a feminist publication?  
• Article guidelines
• Poetry guidelines
• Resources and guidance for academic writing
• Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
• Contact the submissions editor

Submit your manuscript

What is a feminist publication?

Feminist publications in the JFSR will be critical, intersectional, and transformational:

• Critical : The article will approach religious texts, symbols, practices, etc. with an awareness of the power relations that they reflect, reinforce, or challenge. It will interrogate or critique constructs/categories of “woman,” “feminism,” “religion,” or other central terminology. It will demonstrate critical self-reflection about the positionality of the scholar in relation to their subject of study. If the article deals with some aspect of women’s religious lives or practices, it will address them in their particularity without generalizing or stereotyping “women.”
• Intersectional : It will demonstrate an understanding of the unequal power relationships among and between peoples, aware that categories of gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality, etc. are mutually constitutive. It will critically engage with traditions of feminist theories and methods, especially as they produce cross-cultural knowledge, and it will be in conversation with other feminist scholars, approaches, and ideas.
• Transformational : It will show interest in the transformation of the academy/ the field of religious studies and/or the transformation of society. It will produce transformational—i.e. anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, etc.–knowledge. It will be concerned with liberation and justice for all women and for all people. If the author is not comfortable with the construct/category “feminism,” the submission should articulate how the scholarship supports the full humanity of people, especially women.

Article Guidelines

• Manuscripts submitted should not be under consideration elsewhere or previously published. 
• Manuscripts should be typewritten in Times New Roman font (including any non-Roman characters), double-spaced, around 7,500 words (including footnotes). Articles that are significantly longer or shorter will not sent out for review. Please do not include a bibliography.
• Articles must include a 150 word abstract . 
• Form should follow the footnote style in The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 
• In order to protect anonymity, no identifying information should appear anywhere in the document, including footnotes.
• We ask authors to transliterate foreign languages in the manuscript. If authors wish to use a non-Unicode font and the article is accepted for publication, then authors will be required to pay any extra fees associated with typesetting. 

Article Review

All submitted articles are initially screened by JFSR editors to determine whether a) they clearly focus on both feminism and religion, b) demonstrate scholarly excellence and c) incorporate some consciousness of the geopolitical context of the feminist and religious issues discussed. Papers that meet these criteria and are potentially appropriate for publication will then be sent out anonymously to at least two reviewers, on whose judgment the editors rely heavily. Authors will be notified once editorial and review decisions have been made. The average time for review is currently 4-6 months.

Manuscripts that include images

If an article includes images or artwork, the author is responsible for acquiring permission to publish forms for these images prior to publication. If the artist requires fees in order to publish the image, the author is responsible for those fees. Additionally, all images must be saved as high definition files (jpeg, etc.), and should not be included in the text of the file but saved separately. See the JFSR’s Style Sheet for more information. Click here for the art permission form which must be completed before publication.

Poetry Guidelines

Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but please inform JFSR immediately if a submitted poem is accepted elsewhere by emailing [email protected] .

Writing that is in any way sexist, racist, homophobic, or otherwise discriminatory will not be accepted.

All poetry is subject to editorial modification.

All poetry appropriate for the JFSR will be sent out anonymously to at least two reviewers, on whose judgment the editors rely heavily. Reviewers are asked to evaluate creative pieces not only on the basis of their poetical mechanics but also on the basis of their religious content, contribution to feminist theory, their acquaintance with significant issues in the women’s movement, and their vision of social and/or religious change.

Resources and Guidance for Academic Writing

The JFSR is an academic journal, and it is important that submitted articles locate themselves in the context of larger scholarly conversations. In making their arguments, authors should demonstrate familiarity with the scholarly literature on their topic and support their claims by citing such literature where appropriate.

The editors recognize, however, that the structures of global academic life make access to resources deeply unequal and that different regions of the world have their own scholarly sources, feminisms, styles, and standards. What matters most is that articles offer critical or constructive, nuanced arguments. To that end, we suggest keeping the following points in mind:

• Rather than making sweeping or vague claims, be specific and give textual references. Cite particulars of scripture, commentaries, traditions, legal texts, or social scientific data. A scholar of Judaism, for example, rather than saying, “Judaism says X or Y” should give textual references. Instead of saying “According to Jewish law,” s/he should define which periods, places, texts, or authorities are at issue. Consider whether you are discussing ideals, realities, or the complex interplay between them.
• With any religious tradition, always be aware of complexity. It is rare that all persons of a particular faith are in agreement on all issues or practices, and it is typical that there is great diversity. Across historical periods too, particularly when the subject is women or gender, the range of past and present views can be staggering. When did some people come to hold the view you are describing? What social shifts may have facilitated or accompanied the development of this view?
• When disagreeing with existing studies, fairly cite those with whom you disagree, and provide clear reasons for your alternative view. Academic conversation moves forward through articulation of one’s own views in careful conversation with the views of others. For instance, a scholar of Islam might say, “Although Ali (2010) argues that early Muslim jurisprudence denies wives’ sexual rights, slightly later texts (cite them) shows that Jurist X and Jurist Y in fact provides avenues for unsatisfied wives to complain.”

When authors lack access to recent, relevant scholarship through libraries, or their access to common online sources is limited, we suggest several other ways to get a feel for recent scholarship:

• google.com/books , a site which allows one to search books for key words and topics. Usually there are limits to how many pages you are able to read, but you may still get ideas and current information from this site.
• scholar.google.com , where you can search topics, scholars, or keywords, and often are able to access pdf or book files.
• academia.edu , where scholars (you can search by name or keyword) may post their own forthcoming, recently published, or work in progress.
• writing directly to scholars to request copies of articles of interest.
• the Program Book for the American Academy of Religion and Society for Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, which lists unit sessions, or AAR and SBL websites.
• Following the work of bloggers on https://fsrinc.org/efsr and feminismandreligion.com .
• guest writing for the JFSR blog and soliciting comments from informed readers.
• contacting current co-chairs of relevant AAR/SBL program units to see whether they have a listserv and how to join.

Read our Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement :

Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Contact the Submissions Editor

All correspondence related to the submission of manuscripts should be sent to: Brigid Dwyer, Submissions Editor, [email protected] .

All manuscripts should be submitted via the online system.

*If you would be willing to review articles for JFSR, please email [email protected] with your name, institutional affiliation, and reviewing interests or areas of expertise.

Click here to begin the process for electronic submission of materials.

Women, Religion, and Feminism Essay

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• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Quran sanctioned dress code for women, problems and issues of hijab.

Religion is a powerful tool whose practices, beliefs, and traditions influence the way in which people live and relate with each other.

Part of the reason why religion enjoys greater influence and power than any other practice worldwide derives from such integral components as the rituals, values and beliefs, sacred texts and scriptures, symbols, history, as well as the presence of authority figures, and the continuous participation in collective meetings, among many other components.

The greatest influence of Islam, for instance, among its female believers is the tradition of wearing veils or head scarves. These veils commonly referred to as hijabs have, however, caused many other problems to the Muslim women, particularly in other regions of the world, such as North America, where Islam is relatively a minority religion.

This paper undertakes a research to compare, as well as contrast the traditions and beliefs of three major religions in the world, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. This research focuses on the women believers of the three religions and elaborates on some of the challenges that Muslim women encounter by virtue of their belief and tradition.

The Quran is the official holy book used by Muslims for their respective religious teachings and guidance. The holy book cites numerous guidelines that can be summarised into four basic rules that determine how women are expected to dress.

The First Rule

The first rule identifies the best garment for women. It defines the best garment as one that does not reveal a woman’s body to the others, but one that is decent.

Muslim women, thus, are expected to cover their bodies completely to avoid any sections from being revealed to other people. This gives the idea of hijab as a perfect dress code that can cover the entire body of a woman (Bigger, 2006). The hijab is freely designed piece of cloth, sometimes adorning special designs, that protects the hair, head, bosom, as well as the neck of the wearer.

On the other hand, the Bible, which is the holy book of teachings among the Christians, also identifies modest dressing as appropriate for women believers (Piper & Grudem, 2012). In particular, the Bible calls on women to dress in a distinctive style that makes it easy to identify them from men. Nevertheless, the Christian traditions and practices on women dress code are not as compelling as those practiced by Muslims are.

The modern-day Christian woman worshipper is allowed to go to church with the dress code of her own choice and worship with others without any restraint. The Christian tradition appears to be an evolution as it has failed to retain the original dress code that was the fashion during the biblical times.

The Christian tradition mostly adopts modernity, with women being allowed the free choice of determining what is effective for them to wear.

Like Islam, the Jewish teachings and laws also stipulate on a special dress code for women believers. Women and girls are required by law to cover their main body, as well as cover up their legs and arms, particularly when they are in public or with individuals who are not their immediate family members (Gurtner, 2006).

The strict law on women dressing does not provide room for women to change their style because of prevailing customs or other changes, such as modernity. This contrasts with the Christian tradition. Despite having a modest dress code during the Biblical times, the trend in Christian tradition has since changed as worshippers cite modernization and changing life conditions.

The Second Rule

Muslim traditions and beliefs consider it mandatory for women to veil their bosom, which is also regarded as the second dress code rule in the religion (Ssenyonjo, 2007). The hijab becomes the most ideal clothing that women can be used by women in the effort to cover their bosoms and protect them from being revealed to the public.

According to the religious teachings of Islam, exposure of a woman’s body part may turn out to be the origin of sinning, particularly the sin of adultery (Ssenyonjo, 2007). Muslims refer to the fact that the Quran has mentioned about hijab more than five times to emphasise the fact it is God’s wish and demand that women have to use this piece of cloth to cover their bodies as a measure of protection against falling into sin.

In comparison to the Jewish traditions, women believers are required to cover their heads and bosom and protect these parts from being revealed to others. Jewish religious teachers insist on women to cover their heads as a way of perpetuating the traditional practices that were exercised in the past.

This has prompted Jewish women to continue with the practise, particularly while in the synagogues, at religious festivities, or even while attending weddings (Freziger, 2009).

However, unlike Islam, the Jewish culture of women covering their bosoms and head is not one that originated from their religious practise. It was a society practise that existed before the founding of Jewish religion and only adopted later as an acceptable practise among the women.

It, thus, instructs the reasoning that although wearing of hijab among Jewish women is a common practise that continues to date, the practise has no religious ties and has only been integrated as part of the dutiful practices.

Several other Christian denominations and beliefs have their women cover their hair with headgear to protect them from revealing their hair to other people. Among the catholic nuns, for instance, the practise involves covering the head throughout, whether in attendance of a religious function or not.

This tradition among the nuns, however, does not extend to the other women believers who are not nuns. Catholic women can go to church and attend other religious functions without necessarily having their heads covered with a piece of cloth or headgear.

The Third Rule

The Quran mentions a third rule on the manner of dressing that Muslim women are required to observe and adhere. According to the Quran, God has instructed all women to conceal their adornments or beauty spots.

This instruction has in turn influenced the use of hijab among the Muslim women since the piece of cloth is used to conceal a woman’s beauty, particularly the face, hair, and neck as per the instructions of God (Ssenyonjo, 2007). Like in all instances where women are required to cover their bodies, the main objective is to minimize the chances of men getting sexually attracted to the women, which may in turn lead to adultery.

The greatest adornment in a Jewish woman is her hair. Thus, Jewish women have to equally cover their hair in order to protect it from being revealed to other women (Freziger, 2009). A hijab is perfectly suggested and won among the Jewish women as a way of ensuring that their important adornment remains concealed.

However, as already noted earlier on, the hijab wearing among the Jews is a practise that has only been incorporated into religion. This dress code is traditional among the Jews, and therefore was easily included as part of a religious doctrine. The holy Bible mentions about women veiling their heads during prayers. It also mentions further about their hair and the need to keep it concealed.

According to the Bible, failing to cover the head during prayers is tantamount to dishonouring one’s own head. It equates such an act to having one’s head shaven. However, the Bible teachings appear to provide women with alternatives about covering their head, where those not willing to do as per the instructions can still have their heads shaven. This account is covered in the first epistle to the Corinthians in Chapter 11, verse 5 and 6.

Although a majority of the Christian denominations do not emphasise on their women members to veil their heads when in church, a section of them follow the teachings to the latter (Piper & Grudem, 2012).

The Christian traditions and belief appear to contrast greatly with the strict Islam doctrines and to an extent even the Jewish teachings on veiling for women. Although the Bible has instructed women to cover their heads when praying or prophesying, these requirements do not seem to be conservatively applied by Christian women.

Equally, the church and its leadership, to a greater extent, do not seem to emphasise on the need for women to follow the dress code rule strictly. It is possible that the Bible account itself introduced this laxity and freedom by giving women the alternative to either cover their heads or shave their hair (Piper & Grudem, 2012).

The Fourth Rule

Another critical verse contained in the Quran instructs Muslim women to lengthen their garments as a way of gaining recognition and evading molestation (Ssenyonjo, 2007). The idea of lengthening women’s garments has particularly influenced the use of hijab among Muslims. Religious teachers see it as a way of adhering to God’s teachings and have over the ages emphasised on the need for Muslim women to veil themselves.

The lengthening of garments for female believers has seen women being required to cover all parts of their bodies, including their hands, legs, and feet. Among the Muslims, women find it agreeable to wrap themselves totally in huge clothing as they see it as a religious command that has been issued by God himself.

It is evident from the Quran accounts that there have been numerous attempts towards interpreting the lengthening of garments. However, Ssenyonjo (2007) indicates that the use of hijab as an additional clothing to conceal body parts is acceptable as a Godly practise.

The Islam tradition on wearing hijab, although cited in the holy Quran, also receives greater emphasis from religious leaders. Equally, the greater Muslim community strengthens the adherence of religious traditions through emphasising on particular practices (Ssenyonjo, 2007). Thus, it is not easy to see a Muslim woman attend prayers at the mosque without veiling her head.

The rest of the worshippers will openly rebuke such an act, even before the religious teachers notice. Such strict traditions, however, are not witnessed among Christians. While the religious teachers may be responsible for leading their congregations, their roles do not seem to go beyond offering teachings and rebuking their members for failing to adhere to certain teachings.

This explains why such a practise is not a common occurrence among Christian women, despite the Bible mentioning on the need for women to cover their heads when praying or prophesying in church (Piper & Grudem, 2012).

The Jewish traditions have a closer resemblance to the Muslims and their practise, particularly where emphasis by the religious leaders is concerned. The religious teachers among the Jewish emphasise on the need for women to always use hijabs to cover their head and bosom and to help avoid sinning via adultery.

This emphasis has helped in creating a strong and deeply rooted tradition as women feel as though the practise is part of their responsibility. They do not need to be reminded about wearing hijabs because the tradition has been engrained in them (Freziger, 2009).

The hijab is the strongest symbol of Islam, particularly in regions such as North America and Europe where other religions, apart from Islam, are practised more (Ameli & Kharazmi, 2013). At a time when global terrorism has become an issue of great concern, the hijab has met great resistance in this region of the world with the Muslim world being considered to be the greatest source of terrorists (Ameli & Kharazmi, 2013).

Terrorists, for instance, have targeted the United States of America in the recent years in what the dissidents say is an effort to punish the country for its anti-Islam crusade.

The Al-Qaeda terror network successfully wrecked havoc in the US in September 11, 2001 when terrorists allied to the group hijacked passenger aircraft and crash-landed them on significant landmarks in the country, including the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the US’s military headquarters.

As such, most American’s view Islam as an evil practice whose main teachings and traditions are trained on killing and tormenting others, more so Americans (Bell, 2003). Such negative thoughts have had far-reaching consequences on Islam and its traditions, symbols, as well as practices in the country (Haddad & Smith, 2002). Women on hijab in the country continue to face open discrimination and mistreatment.

The hatred that is pegged on stereotype has seen the non-Muslim communities in America utter obscenities and other uncomfortable words at veiled women, and sometimes physically insulting the women.

Instances of religious discrimination against Muslim women have been rife in institutions of learning, with the female staff and students being denied their right to practice their religion. The Muslim communities in these institutions have been agitating for the right to wear hijabs rather than the official dress codes observed in the institutions (Gurbuz & Gulsum, 2009).

However, the common reaction from the administrators of such institutions has been unwavering, with the Muslim students and members of staff required to observe the laid-out dress code rules strictly.

In some instances, as Gurbuz and Gulsum (2009) note in their article, the affected Muslim communities have sought for legal redress in their attempt to compel the administrators of such institutions to give them the leeway to wearing the hijab as their religion demands.

Feminist groups in North America have equally been fighting the hijab, which they see as a form of discrimination against Islam’s women believers. The hijab is particularly viewed as a conservative garb whose main aim is to deny women the freedom to choose their dress code without such a choice being compelled by such forces as religion (Russo, 2006).

The feminist groups are not in disagreement with the choice of religion that Muslim women have opted to confess their beliefs too. However, the main cause of disagreement is on the strict religious rules and laws, which they say seek to undermine the rights of women.

The feminist groups demand that women have beautiful bodies that they need to show off to others as an appreciation of whom they are rather than covering the bodies in the hijabs throughout their lifetime.

The fact that Islam does not allow for women leadership offers yet another dimension upon which feminists are taking issue with the hijab. The religious laws that condemn women into wearing hijab are particularly fronted and stressed upon by men, something the women’s right bodies are taking exceptions over (Russo, 2006).

Racial and religious discrimination has also been cited by hijab wearing women in North America when it comes to seeking public services (American Civil Liberties Union, n.d.). Visitors entering North American countries when wearing hijabs, particularly the USA, are looked at with a lot of suspicions and treated as second-class citizens.

In the US embassies and consular based in foreign countries, women on hijab have reportedly found it difficult to secure visas to the country. Often, the reason for instituting such complex barriers for Muslim women seeking to enter the USA has been supported by the authorities, who consider it as a security measure aimed at curbing the spread of terrorism in the country.

Women and girls who wear hijab are sometimes denied entry in public places such as shopping malls, public buildings, and even swimming pools. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (n.d.), such women are usually sexually harassed by being subjected to search by male guards.

In some other instances, Muslim women wearing hijabs are given the single option of removing their headgear before being allowed access into the facilities.

With the increasing mistreatment and discrimination that women wearing hijabs continue to suffer in Northern America, there has been a growing tendency among Muslim women to stop wearing their veils when in public (Reeves & Azam, 2012).

The suffering that the women endure has prompted quite a majority of them abandon their veils, albeit against their wishes and beliefs, in order to reduce their susceptibility in the hands of a hostile society. However, these decisions go against the Islam teachings and to an extent force the women to sin, which is against their beliefs.

In other words, the hijab, which is a religious outfit, is being forced into oblivion as the Muslims in Northern America attempt to dispose of any physically visible religious symbols in order to stay safe from heinous acts being directed at them (Reeves & Azam, 2012).

Different religious beliefs and practices have varying doctrines, especially on how women are supposed to dress. While these doctrines may appear different in certain aspects, there are several similarities that apply across board. Islam requires that women cover their bosoms and heads with hijab as a way of preventing men from getting attracted to women and ending up sinning through adultery.

The hijab has been mentioned severally in the holy Quran, which highlights God’s strong preference for the garment. A woman’s body is only supposed to be revealed to her husband and not any other strangers because that is an avenue through which sinning can be condoned. The Jewish religion, on the other hand, equally prefers the use of hijab particularly among the women in order to conceal their heads from strangers.

Unlike in Islam, the Jewish religion does not have any special mention on the hijab, despite the religious leaders and teachers emphasising on its use. The hijab was part of the dressing code which women used to veil women and conceal their bodies from being exposed to strangers in the traditional Jewish culture, prior to the advent of religion.

The practise among Christians is, nonetheless, not pronounced as a majority of the women do not veil themselves when in churches or attending to religious events. However, Catholic nuns strictly cover their hair and heads every time. Hijab’s have been the greatest source of attacks and discrimination directed towards Muslim women, particularly in Northern America.

The spread of global terrorism and its perceived association with Islam has seen non-Muslim communities target women on hijab in America. Muslim women also complain of discrimination, especially being perpetrated by institutions of learning. Muslim women accuse these institutions of refusing to grant them the permission to wear hijabs.

Ameli, S. R., & Kharazmi, Z. N. (2013). American virtual colonialism and the Islamophobia politics: Muslim/Iranian Women’s “Hijab” at “YouTube” international Journal of Women’s Research, 3 (1) 5-22.

American Civil Liberties Union (n.d.). Discrimination against Muslim women . Web.

Bell, W. (2003). How has American life changed since September 11? Journal of Futures Studies, 8 (1), 73-80.

Bigger, S. (2006). Muslim women’s views on dress code and the hijaab: some issues for education. Journal of Beliefs & Values, 27 (2), 215–226.

Freziger, A. S. (2009). Feminism and heresy: the construction of a Jewish metanarrative. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 77 (3), 494-546.

Gurbuz, M. E., & Gulsum, G. (2009). Between sacred codes and secular consumer society: the practice of headscarf adoption among American college girls. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 29 (3), 387-399.

Gurtner, D. M. (2006). The veil of the temple in history and legend. JETS 49 (1), 97-114.

Haddad, Y. Y., & Smith, J. I. (2002). Muslim minorities in the west . Oxford: Altamira Press.

Piper, J., & Grudem, W. (2012). Restoring biblical manhood and womanhood: a response to evangelical feminism. New York, NY: Crossway Books.

Reeves, T. C. & Azam, L. (2012). To wear hijab or not: Muslim Women’s Perceptions of Their Healthcare Workplaces. Journal of Business Diversity, 12 (2), 41-51.

Russo, A. (2006). The feminist majority foundation’s campaign to stop gender apartheid: the intersections of feminism and imperialism in the United States. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 8 (4), 557–580.

Ssenyonjo, M. (2007). The Islamic veil and freedom of religion, the rights to education and work: a survey of recent International and national cases. Chinese Journal of International Law, 6 (3), 653–710.

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• Mary Wollstonecraft’s Achievements in Struggles for Gender Equality
• Women and Their Acceptance of Feminism
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Exploring the F-word in religion at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and community.

Category: Narrative Essay

Keeping an open heart: my ode to father ted by janet maika’i rudolph.

***Trigger Warning: Discussion includes sexual violence***

In early 1977 when I was 21 years old, I was followed into a building and attacked with a knife. I was raped. It is hard to express the rent in your soul when something like that happens.  And yet it is a common trauma in our patriarchal world, used as a weapon of war and, in general, to control women’s bodies. When I think of Israeli women being raped even as they were murdered, I don’t even know how to process that level of evil. As for myself, I was an easy mark as victim because I had been groomed to be meek by childhood abuse.

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The Crone of Winter, by Molly Remer

Just for right now, let the swirling soften. Exhale into the day, wherever you are, whatever is happening. Allow a cloak of comfort to settle across your shoulders and enfold you with peace and restoration. Draw up strength from the earth beneath your feet. Settle one hand on your belly and one hand on your heart. Feel the pulse of the sacred you always carry within. Breathe in and know you are loved. Breathe out and know you are free. Trust that you are carried and enfolded as you go along your way.

A chill is in the air and Winter’s Queen has spread her gray cloak across the land. She has stilled the leaves and frosted the hills, has quieted the scurrying, and placed her fingers firmly on the pause. In this waiting place, hushed and chilled, we remember the preciousness of the light of renewal, we remember how essential the warmth of connection. Just as the earth does, let us, too, lay aside what is unnecessary and draw close to one another once more, rekindling the fire of community, offering one another what nourishment we can. Let us enter a time of deep restoration with intention. Let us listen to the call of contemplation that twinkles in these dusky hours of replenishment and renewal. Let us pause and wait with grace.

Heat Wave by Marie Cartier

The heat wave was real. Suzie squinted into the afternoon light glinting off her pink ’69 VW. How was that still running , she thought, rebuilt and rebuilt? Work?

That’s how. And that’s how she’d keep running. Work. You just had to not freak out . You just had to not over heat.

But it was 125 degrees in Bakersfield. And she, like everyone else, had no air conditioning. And it wasn’t supposed to get better—it was supposed to get worse. She got in her VW and drove with the windows down—no AC– but a breeze was better than nothing. She pulled into the parking lot and waited for a spot to open up. She turned off her car to wait. Ten minutes but it was worth it. Six p.m. – it was a good time to have come. She walked out and got into the cart area.

Barely inside the supermarket she stood and let the air wash over her—air conditioning. Conditioning the air. The security guard asked if she was a buyer or a browser. Browsers could be in the front area with the carts, as long as there was room. Buyers could enter and walk up and down, and down and up—the breeze lifting the sweat from their skin.

Crumbs of Our Souls, by Molly Remer

So, what trail of crumbs has your soul been dropping for you? And how might you savor and kiss these fallen crumbs, rescuing them from where they’ve been kicked under the table?

Something that I keep coming back to in recent years is accepting the reality of our lives as they are right now , really inhabiting where we actually are. To be clear, this does not mean settling for injustice or not taking action—it does not mean settling into apathy or turning away from suffering, it means inhabiting our own lives in full, in the present.

My word of the year for this year is attend and with that I mean, pay attention to where you are , pay attention to your life right now, not what you think your life should be, not what you think other people’s lives are, not what you want to pretend to be, but what is your life right now? Can we take an actual unflinching look at the reality of our lives, right now? I invite you to take a brief pause and let yourself inhabit your own life right now, as it is, no need to change anything about it. It is what it is. For example, I hear the distant sounds of my brother mowing. I hear birds. I am looking at full-leafed trees and the drippy little fingers of green pollen on the oaks, the long, green flowers on the mulberry trees. This is the first sunny day and blue sky that I’ve seen in what feels like several weeks (possibly exaggeration). I feel a tightness in my shoulders, but here I am. And, here you are. What do you feel where you are? What do you see where you are? What are you hearing where you are? What is your life like right now ?

I feel at strange, tender, and tentative point of reemergence this summer. I know that the pandemic experience has been very different for different people according to your geographic region, according to the culture and climate of the state in which you live, and according to your type of employment or your life’s structure. Many people who are employed in some kind of service industry did not have the luxury of just stepping out of society and retreating to their homes during the pandemic years. For people like me who work at home and who already school their kids at home, it wasn’t that big of a stretch to just further close off my life and just stay home and not go places. It took me practically two years to even miss doing things outside my house externally with other people. So, acknowledging that there are some people who never had the choice of just retreating to their homes and stepping out of society, people who had to keep riding public transportation, people who had to work at restaurants or in stores or in health care, people who are students and had to go to classes. There wasn’t the option to step out and away for some of us. For others of us, the last two years have been almost a kind of hermitage where you’re suddenly just withdrawn from everything and in a type of waiting place. For me, I have in many ways appreciated this withdrawal in its own way, the opportunity become small and closed in. And, now, at the cusp of summer, I’m also starting to recognize that becoming so small and closed in is now beginning to feel tight and confining. As we consider reemergence, we may find it is time for us to decide: What do we want to step back into and what do we want to stay out of?

In Jennifer Louden’s Oasis program (of which I am a long-time member), she spoke of reemergence as a theme and one of the things she noted that I found really powerful is that we may have in some ways forgotten how to exercise our “no” or our boundaries, because we’ve had an automatic built-in, “oh, it’s a pandemic. I’m not going to do whatever.” Now, as we re-emerge, we have to actually say, “No, I still don’t want to do that.” Or, “Yes, I do, let’s try to rebuild that.” What I’m recognizing in myself is that it’s very hard to tease apart what I still actually want to do and what I’ve actually just gotten out of the habit of doing and so actually feel some type of trepidation or anxiety about doing again. For some things that I haven’t been doing, it is not that I truly don’t want to do them again, it’s that I am also holding some kind of fear of stepping back into it. And, these things may be all rolled up together. For example, I am unsure whether I really do not want to have a big summer solstice ritual this year, or whether I just feel nervous about it, because it’s been several years since I’ve had a bigger group ritual and so I’m afraid I don’t know how to do it anymore. Which is it? When is it really your heart or intuition saying, “I laid this down and I want to leave it laid down.” When it is your heart or intuition saying, “This is something I want to pick back up.” What is obligation telling us we should pick back up when inside we know we no longer want it? And, what is fear making us afraid to pick back up that we really DO want to pick back up?

One of the books I just finished this year is A Woman’s Book of Soul by Sue Patton Thoele. It is a book of daily meditations that is a little more Christian in orientation than I usually prefer, but it also has some interesting things in it too. In a section called savoring our souls, Thoele writes: because the demands of day to day life have a way of dulling our spirits and cutting us off from our hearts, it’s essential that we find ways to reinstate solitude into our lives and through it experience the beauty of heart and soul. One day while suffering from solitude starvation, I ran across a poem in which the poet talked about wandering alone through his house savoring and kissing the ‘fallen crumbs’ of his soul. I smiled as I read the poem because it validated the feelings I often have when home alone. I wander. Touching, appreciating, remembering, singing, gathering, and kissing the fallen crumbs of my soul. Very often, this is the time I choose to change the symbols in the miniature Zen Garden given to me by my son, a simple task taking only a few minutes at the most, but nonetheless, a richly replenishing ritual in which I savor my soul. If your soul has been dropping a trail of crumbs as it accompanies your body through its days, how would you like to savor and nourish it? Can you arrange for some solitary time at home in which you sweep up and kiss your soul crumbs? Gently close your eyes and imagine a time in your own home when you are blessed by the renewal of solitude. Cherish it. Wander or sit quietly. Give yourself the gift of enjoying the solitude in ways that warm your heart, fill your spirit, and revitalize your soul. It is a sacred assignment to rescue the crumbs of our souls that have been kicked under the table by too much activity and too little aloneness, to collect and kiss them all better.

The affirmations at the end of this section are: I need and deserve time alone and I am adept at balancing time alone and time with others.

Deep breath, a hand on your heart, let yourself settle into center and then perhaps you may wish to read this prayer aloud:

I dedicate myself to the full living of my own life in all its joys and complexities. I dedicate myself to walking my path. I dedicate myself to being present. I dedicate myself to brave and joyful wholeness. May you nourish the crumbs of your soul.

Molly Remer, MSW, D.Min, is a priestess, teacher, and poet facilitating sacred circles, seasonal rituals, and family ceremonies in central Missouri. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses at Brigid’s Grove . Molly is the author of nine books, including Walking with Persephone , Whole and Holy ,  Womanrunes , and the Goddess Devotional . She is the creator of the devotional experience #30DaysofGoddess and she loves savoring small magic and everyday enchantment.

Rituals for Our Sons, Part 2, by Molly Remer

Five years ago, I wrote an essay for Feminism and Religion musing about rituals for our sons. I wondered aloud how we welcome sons in manhood, how we create rituals of celebrations and rites of passages for our boys as well as our daughters. I have been steeped in women’s ceremony and ritual since I was a girl myself, watching the women wash my mother’s feet and crown her with flowers at her mother blessing ceremony as she prepared to give birth to my little brother when I was nine years old. Her circle of friends honored us too, crowning their daughters with flowers and loosely binding their wrists with ribbon to their mothers as they crossed the threshold into first menstruation.

At 24, I then helped plan the rite of passage for my youngest sister, then 13, as she and her friends gathered into a wide living room, flowers on their heads and anticipation in their eyes as we spoke to them of women’s wisdom and the strength of, and celebration of, being maiden girls on their way to adulthood. I knew then that I would have a ritual for my own daughter, yet unconceived, one day. I birthed two sons and lost another son in my second trimester. I led a circle of mothers and daughters through a series of nine classes culminating in a flower-becked coming of age ceremony while newly pregnant with the rainbow baby who would become my own daughter.

Summer Magic, by Molly M. Remer

We take a slice of honey cake and a pottery cup of grape juice and leave it by the rose bush as an offering, arrayed on a bed of petals and topped with a single daisy and a ring of wild raspberries. We make some wishes in the dusty air, kneel down with our palms upon the warm earth and sing for rain. We walk under a half-moon sky beside a blood-red sun, the sound of coyotes rising into the night as a silent deer watches us, head a triangle of alertness, black eyes staring across the heat-weary field. We catch fireflies, winking above the wildflowers sparks of yellow-green, and find a plump brown toad waiting in the path. Then, we stand quietly together, mosquitoes beginning to cluster around our legs, our heads tilted back watching carefully for fairy silhouettes against the deepening gray of the midsummer sky. 

It is summer here in the Northern Hemisphere. Deep summer. Dusty summer. Thirsty summer. Humid summer. In central Missouri, it is the type of thick, wet heat that soaks into you and saps your strength and enthusiasm about life. Life can feel faded, dull, and magic hard to see. The woods, where I find such solace, renewal, and enchantment, become closed to me as poison ivy, thorns, ticks and chiggers, resolutely bar my way. So, I walk on the road these days, in the mornings and at sunset, seeing what I can see from my vantage point on a dusty gravel road. Deep summer I find offers an opportunity to look around to see what flourishes of its own accord, to see what grows without tending, to see what rises wild and unfettered from the natural conditions in which they thrive.

Sometimes as humans we become used to controlling as much of the world as we can control and as much of ourselves as we can control. Sometimes we get focused on what we can cultivate and grow and intentionally tend. So focused on this conscious tending may we be, that we may even rip up or destroy or change what is naturally growing in our own little ecosystem, our own little biome, what is growing right where we are. We may even pull it up and put something else in its place that we think is prettier, or nicer, or even more beneficial or useful. I encourage us to consider summer as a time in which to pause with, appreciate and look at, savor and explore, learn about and discover, what really grows right where you are, what thrives right where you stand, without the need for you to manipulate or control or change it. And, I invite you to also consider how this might apply to the growing and thriving in your own personal life? How or what are you perhaps trying to manipulate or change or control in yourself or with the people in your life? Perhaps it is time to take a step back, to sit back, and to see what is already growing. What is already there? What is thriving in your world? What is thriving for you that doesn’t require wrestling with or changing or trying to make it fit in a certain way? I encourage you to soften and see. Perhaps the mulberry trees are green and spreading in your world. Perhaps the clover is in bloom. Perhaps there are daisies. Perhaps there are monarch butterflies still bravely persistent on the milkweed in the field. Perhaps there are wild onion scapes, with their little purple heads. Perhaps there is yarrow, white, and waiting, and interwoven in its own curious way with the health of your own blood and body. Perhaps that book you want to write is bubbling right behind your fingertips, waiting for your pen to be set against the page. Perhaps that project that sings your name is waiting for you to pause to see it.

We doubt sometimes our place in the natural world. And, yet these plants that surround us, that spring up around us, that grow right where we are, are here and growing, just like we, ourselves, are growing where we are. These plants are intertwined with the health of our own bodies. That is amazing and enchanting and wondrous to me.

My youngest son, Tanner, is six and we are working together on an earth science class, studying planets and the earth and geology and the universe. He came to me saying: “Mom, did you know, there’s real iron in us! There’s real iron in us .” And I replied, “there’s real iron at the core of the Earth too. Isn’t that amazing? The earth has iron in it and so do we.” He looked at me and asked then, “is magic real?” And I replied, “yes, honey, we walk around inside of it every day.” I pause here in the hot exhaustion of summer to marvel that so it is. In truth, it is not only that we walk around inside of it every day. We walk on top of it every day. We walk with it every day. It beats in our veins every day. We live with it every day. If we carry an awareness of this embodied magic with us, then every day becomes enchantment. Every day becomes sacred space in motion. Every day becomes the opportunity to fully inhabit our own living magic as we literally walk around within it each and every day.

So, what is growing for you? What is blooming for you? What is flourishing and healthy, just of its own accord, asking nothing else from you, but witnessing?

The earth is made of days beyond count and roots beyond question. The fire in your belly is that which whirls worlds into being. There is iron in your blood, iron at the planet’s core, iron in the stars, iron in beak of hawk and eye of crow, and iron in the red rocks beneath your feet. This air you breathe is river woven, lightning laced, tear salted, iron eyed, earth kissed, raven winged. Wait, let this breath expand your chest and know: here you are, today, in-dependence with all things.

Molly Remer, MSW, D.Min, is a priestess, writer, and teacher facilitating ritual, making art, and weaving words together in central Missouri. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses at Brigid’s Grove . Molly is the author of nine books, including Walking with Persephone , Whole and Holy ,  Womanrunes , and the Goddess Devotional . She is the creator of the devotional experience #30DaysofGoddess and she loves savoring small magic and everyday enchantment.

Finding the Antler, by Molly Remer

Seven years ago, I did a drum-guided meditation in which I journeyed deep into the forest. On my head as I walked, antlers grew, curving above me. As I followed the sound of drums and the glimmer of firelight, I kept raising my hand to check to see if they were still there, firm beneath my hand. I reached the fire and met the Goddess there, she reached up and took the antlers off my head and cast them into the flames, where they twisted and glowed until they became a golden ring, which she removed and placed on my finger, antlers now wrapped around my index finger. In waking life, I scoured etsy and two years later located a bronze antler ring extremely similar to my vision, which I bought and placed on my own finger in the woods as a symbol of my earth based path, my priestess vows, and some kind of unspoken dedication, felt within but not able to be fully verbalized at the time.

Restoration by Molly Remer

This moment, this snapshot of maternal priestessing, has recurred for me many times over the last few years, a wondering of why I could not permit myself to be the tea-drinker instead of the hostess, the person to enjoy instead of the person to teach, the person to rest instead of the person to create experiences. Continue reading “Restoration by Molly Remer”

October Magic, by Molly Remer

In was in October that my last grandmother died , my last living grandparent. As the leaves turn to red and gold once more, I wake thinking of her each morning. I wake thinking of my maternal grandmother too, who died seven years ago , in springtime as the iris bloomed. I dream of my husband’s grandfather, he stands shoulder to shoulder with my oldest son, white hair and smile flashing as he compares their heights and laughs.

We’ve just returned from a two week long trip to Florida and have arrived back in Missouri to a life in full swing, books to write, projects to plan, new products to develop for our shop, old requests waiting for our attention. But, the leaves will only be this color for a moment. The air will only be this sweet and pleasant for a moment. The sun will only glint across the cedar branches in this way that brings my soul to life right now, the colors of the day so sharp and vivid, clear and bright to my eyes, that it is almost like stepping into another reality. We have only this moment to join hands and slip off into the woods beneath the early morning sun, stepping past pools of slowly dripping water, over sharp and uncertain stones, soft green moss, and carpets of fallen leaves. It is only this moment in which we will hear the hawk’s cry ring out across the trees. Only now in which we will turn over leaves and discover shining mushrooms, gleaming in the October sun.

We set off along a stony gully that bisects the land of my parents, pausing by a series of small pools and gazing through the backs of dogwood leaves turning to rich red with veins of green still lightly tracing through their round centers. Suddenly, the scent of cedar filled the air and I crouched beneath the tree to see the ground beneath it littered with small snippets of evergreen, strewn across a thick blanket of brown oak leaves and yellow maple, glowing in a stained glass impersonation in the perfect touch of the sun upon their surfaces. My breath made a fog in the air and I looked up into the tree to see that it, too, was breathing in this cool morning, steam lifting off its trunk and rising into its thin fingered branches. There are small blue juniper berries brightly laid against the wet green moss beneath the tree and I turn to see the peachy-rose globes of persimmons hanging on thin branches against the sky. I have the sensation that they are watching me there, kneeling on the wet ground, caught between rays of sunlight and enchantment.

We continued picking our way carefully across the lichen-laden gray stones until we came to fallen tree, carpeted with a beautiful array of fungus. Small brown knobs that look like new potatoes spring from what was once the top of the trunk and a panoply of beautifully spiraled whorls of turkey tail mushrooms form small cups which hold last night’s raindrops.

As we descended into the gully, the view opened up before us, slabs of stone forming a naturally terraced series of platforms dropping lower and lower into the round stone pools. The trees are yellow here, sun gleaming on the leaves, forming a temple bower of golden branches. I felt full of delight and joy, so pleased that we had chosen to lay aside the to-dos and come on this ramble together. I asked my husband to take a picture of me in the trees and stones telling him with a smile that this is the only moment in which the leaves will be this color and in which I will be this fabulous.

I have wondered if I try too hard to make my life be magical, to make it meaningful and then I realize, if you look for evidence that the world is made of magic, for evidence that your life is magical, that you will find it everywhere . This isn’t wrong. This is beautiful and powerful and real. Yes, my life is magical. So is yours. The whole world is magical. We need only step right up to it and look, to see that we are surrounded by magic, woven right into the threads of it.

The stones were slippery with water and moss as we skirted our way carefully to the bottom of the gully, where a wide, curving, bowl-shaped basin has been formed of rock and rain and time. Gazing at it, tranquil and still, gently rippled rocks forming the sides and leaves filling its bowl, I said aloud:  “When I die, you can leave me curled up here and I’ll be happy.” For a crisp moment I could clearly see my own bones lying nestled, smoothed and ivory, across this bed of leaves and sunbeams.

Something bright red caught my eye then, looking at first like the domed half of a large cherry tomato partially covered by brown leaves and I squatted down to discover a burst of crimson mushrooms grouped together and bright against the decaying foliage.

Molly Remer’s  newest book of poems,  Sunlight on Cedar , was published in March. Molly has been gathering the women to circle, sing, celebrate, and share since 2008. She plans and facilitates women’s circles, seasonal retreats and rituals, mother-daughter circles, family ceremonies, and red tent circles in rural Missouri. She is a priestess who holds MSW, M.Div, and D.Min degrees and wrote her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create  Story Goddesses , original goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, mini goddesses, and more at  Brigid’s Grove . Molly is the author of  Womanrunes ,  Earthprayer ,  the  Goddess Devotional ,  She Lives Her Poems , and The Red Tent Resource Kit and she writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at  Patreon,   Brigid’s Grove,   Feminism and Religion, and   Sage Woman Magazine.

Nourishing Wholeness in a Fractured World, by Molly Remer

List for today:

It is easy to become exhausted and overwhelmed by the volume of things there are to say, the things there are to think about, to care about, to put energy into, to love, to be outraged about. I want to invite you, at the moment of this reading, to breathe it out, to let yourself come into your body right where you are this second, and put one hand on your heart and one hand on your belly. Remind yourself that you’re whole right here, right now. There is suffering and there is fear and there is pain and there is joy and there is beauty and there is life, and we can hold it all. Let yourself settle and feel , present in this moment, in this unfolding. And, with whatever you feel, whether you feel hopeless or joyful or angry or happy or thrilled or enthusiastic or creative or drained, whatever it is, with your hand on your heart, accept those feelings as okay right now: how you feel, is how you feel; where you are, is where you are; who you are, is who you are. Continue reading “Nourishing Wholeness in a Fractured World, by Molly Remer”

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