Minorities

To Tend and Befriend, part 3

Posted onSunday 9 June 2013Saturday 8 June 2013

The myths about male dominance and female submissiveness are not the only current social issues, however, that I believe merit thoughtful scientific consideration — or rather, already have been studied, but should definitely have the derived data become part of the general public’s knowledge base. For example, as mentioned in previous postings, there is currently…

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…

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 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…

Womanspirit Rising; the Bride of Death; & the Sacred Hoop

Posted onTuesday 28 May 2013Friday 24 May 2013

Written in the same year, Life’s Daughter/Death’s Bride by Kathie Carlson is an elegant example of both remembering and re-membering primarily the mother and daughter goddesses Demeter and Persephone, from the ancient Greek myth of the rape of Persephone. Carlson first deeply explores the myth in the most ancient and original forms she can find….

Three Perspectives on Ecofeminism

Posted onTuesday 21 May 2013Saturday 18 May 2013

In 1993 a book emerges which provocatively probes ecofeminism’s epistemology during its analysis of the historical roots of the oppressive conflation of women with nature. The collection of essays titled Ecofeminism, by Maria Mies & Vandana Shiva, is a biting critique of the colonization of nature, women, and the Third World by the white male…

Blood, Bread, & Roses — and Death of Nature

Posted onMonday 20 May 2013Saturday 18 May 2013

In a brilliantly re-creative intellectual thread, in 1993 feminist lesbian poet Judy Grahn re-members and reclaims the sacrality of women and menstruation in her Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. She notes with startling clarity that, “All origin stories are true” (7), as she offers us a radical new origin myth for…

Spiritual Transformation & Non-Violent Feminist Practice, pt. 2

Posted onThursday 21 March 2013Wednesday 20 March 2013

Reflecting on spirituality vs. ethics, I was fascinated to realize I’d made one of the mistakes the author notes: considering non-violence as equivalent to passive resistance — as nothing more than yet another tactical tool to be used in accomplishing social justice. Instead, Fernandes refers extensively to Gandhi, noting his belief that non-violence is a…

Spiritual Transformation & Non-Violent Feminist Practice, pt. 1

Posted onWednesday 20 March 2013

This is a review of Leela Fernandes’ Transforming Feminist Practice: Non-Violence, Social Justice, & the Possibilities of a Spiritualized Feminism. The title of the book was the basis of an interesting personal challenge: as a friend put it to me, why apply women’s spirituality to feminism or issues of social justice? For that matter, why…

Two articles: christianity & community

Posted onFriday 15 February 2013Saturday 9 March 2013

Finished a book and two articles so far; two somewhat disturbing and one very encouraging. M. Shawn Copeland’s article “Body, Representation, and Black Religious Discourse” I found disturbing for several reasons. For a single example, she has actual, chilling quotes from women, or relatives of the women, who were violently sexually abused as slaves. Like…