Religion

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Needin’ some good vibrations

I think today I’m going to do a bit more venting on my dissertation blues… and then tomorrow talk about what I think might fix things a little. We’ll see how it goes. So at CIIS there’s something called the “Principles of Community.” They’re basically a list of suggestions to keep in mind when talking…

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Struggling with defining personal ethics

Some years ago I had a friend with whom I lunched on a weekly basis. At that time he was on a job team that had something particularly difficult and complex to accomplish. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal except that, frankly speaking, the manager was terrible. He wished to hear only that…

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Thoughts on V. Shiva’s “Staying Alive”

I’m reading Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, & Development for an on-line class on Ecofeminism which I’m TAing. The following are two comments made on the class forum at different times. While reading both the book and the forum comments, I was reminded of a study I read about many years ago (which means…

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The unexamined dissertation: not worth writing?

As some who read my blog may know already, I’m currently struggling with the process of writing my dissertation proposal. Despite writing being one of the things I do best and most easily, and for various reasons that aren’t important right now, I’ve had some nervous procrastination issues with writing this proposal. Thus my adviser…

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Woman in the Shaman’s Body

The apparently overwhelmingly powerful need to control women which some men appear to have is painfully expressed yet again in a form which is recorded by anthropology professor Barbara Tedlock’s research for her 2005 book Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion & Medicine. Granddaughter of an Ojibwe midwife and herbalist, and…

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Poetry is Not A Luxury & Mighty Be Our Powers

Closely examining our matrifocal past and present offers a solid basis from which to theorize a possible healthier future — one not damagingly based in androcentrism. Such a future will not come about on its own, of course; if women are to regain their rightful positions as cultural creators and leaders then they will have…

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Fascinatingly more on matrifocal societies

Both Sanday (reviewed by me here and here) and Du are anthropologically trained ethnographers researching indigenous societies. As previously noted, their work offers explicit epistemological modifications of great benefit for a more humane, feminized science. This is not the only valid methodology available, however, to a women’s spirituality scholar, as is demonstrated by the next…

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Blood Rites & the Rule of Mars

Interestingly, it is only recently that socially gendered coding and categorizations have been recognized, such that the biological condition of being male is not automatically conflated with the social production of masculinity. I believe the next book — white American feminist, award-winning columnist, independent scholar, and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites: Origins and History…

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Difficult & fascinating: Daly & Irigaray

My next selection to showcase here is Euro-American radical feminist philosopher, professor, and theologian Mary Daly’s fiery and iconoclastic Amazon Grace: Re-Calling the Courage to Sin Big. I believe the book is a fascinating exploration of Daly as shaman for her community of women. Deliberately written to occasionally flout standard (as in: patriarchal) rules of…