Spirituality

Societies without God: immoral hell or egalitarian health? pt. 2

Posted onMonday 1 July 2013Sunday 30 June 2013

Zuckerman writes a fascinating book with a great deal of startling information in it, and I greatly enjoyed reading it. However, after pondering the book for some time, I believe the author has missed the true revelation which his data offers. He considers himself a nonbeliever/agnostic (7-8), and so this Scandinavian lack of religiosity appears…

Societies without God: immoral hell or egalitarian health? pt. 1

Posted onFriday 28 June 2013Saturday 29 June 2013

(all the numbers in brackets within this posting are citations which reference the stated page numbers within the book Society Without God by Phil Zuckerman) A common trope amongst the devout is that morality is derived from religion, and therefore a society lacking strong religious beliefs would be an utterly immoral, un-free, irrational society which…

Two fascinating examples of women’s resistance to oppression

Posted onSaturday 15 June 2013Monday 10 June 2013

An excellent historical example of increasing patriarchal domination of women, and their ensuing resistance, is feminist historian and professor Ulrike Strasser’s “Bones of Contention: Catholic Nuns Resist their Enclosure.” The Pütrich nuns of Munich were established in the 13th century. Like all nuns at that time, they were not cloistered and therefore served extensively in…

The pain behind Fire Eyes

Posted onFriday 14 June 2013Monday 10 June 2013

Trigger warning: this documentary review covers female genital mutilation. Don’t read further if you are easily squicked, please. ~ * ~ *~ *~ *~ * ~ We see activism as it happens in Soraya Miré’s short 1994 documentary film Fire Eyes. As a victim of the practice who has chosen to become a survivor, her…

Wisdom worth listening to: Daughters of Mother Earth

Posted onThursday 13 June 2013Monday 10 June 2013

Daughters of Mother Earth: The Wisdom of Native American Women, edited by Barbara Alice Mann, offers us a view of ecofeminism rooted in indigenous women’s teachings (one caveat: when I use “we,” I am recognizing that I, like the Whites being written about, am speaking from a position of social privilege which is and should…

Women & World Religions comps booklist

Posted onThursday 6 June 2013Tuesday 10 September 2013

Later edit: This bibliography has been seriously revised and updated due to professorial input. Check out the new version here. There! That’s all the reviews of all the books on my booklist for last semester’s Ecofeminism comps class. I figured posting the original versions, before they were edited down to fit into the comps…

Relational Reality & Tending the Soul’s Garden

Posted onWednesday 5 June 2013Monday 3 June 2013

Subtly weaving the suggestion to always perform right action — based on the sometimes unrecognized fact of personal relatedness with all life — into one’s daily living patterns is one of the most powerful culture-changing tools I am aware of. In this vein, two of the most significant works on praxis within the category of…

Reweaving the World

Posted onMonday 3 June 2013Wednesday 29 May 2013

While Merchant never uses the word ecofeminism in her book, a decade later ecofeminist professors Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein deliberately embrace it in order to thoroughly explore its effects and meaning. Their Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism not only exposes the ideological links between the oppressive exploitation of both nature and…

Two by Starhawk: Spiral Dance & Earth Path

Posted onSunday 2 June 2013Wednesday 29 May 2013

The potential and promise of post-patriarchal spirituality is reflected in Starhawk’s 20th anniversary edition of her pivotal, bestselling, and now classic 1979 work, The Spiral Dance. Included in this version are the initial book release, the ten year anniversary notes, and an added section for the 20 year anniversary Introduction and notes. Starhawk’s original text…

Two by Carol Christ & one by Susan Sered

Posted onSaturday 1 June 2013Wednesday 29 May 2013

In 1998, ecofeminist thealogian Carol P. Christ’s Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality presents a living and embodied, woman-centered thealogy of Goddess based equally in philosophical reflection, academic historical research, and personal experience. Christ, one of feminist spirituality’s founding mothers, espouses deliberately eschewing modern society’s dependence on classical dualism, asserting that Goddess…