I read an awful lot of textbooks for classes. I’m fortunate in that most of them are fascinating, but there does come a point where I feel like my brain is full, and I need a break. That’s when I pick up what I call my brain-candy reading: fun fiction that I can tear through…
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….
Women’s appreciation of embodiment is not new — simply (deliberately?) forgotten in a more androcentric world. As it slowly re-emerges within society as well as academia, women’s (and men’s) re-embodiment appears to be more frequently — and often more deeply — creatively realized in a wider variety of fields. Examples include aikido (as already demonstrated),…
Next is American Christian feminist theologian-scholar Rosemary Radford Ruether’s 2005 Goddesses & the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History. Ruether’s writing is clear and easy to follow as she elaborates her theorized connections between Neolithic and ancient Mediterranean goddesses, ancient and medieval masculine appropriations of women’s power, and modern spiritual feminist interpretations of the goddesses….
I have written previously (though not well) on Australian ecofeminist activist and intellectual Val Plumwood’s 1994 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. She offers a theorizing historical examination on the subject of ecofeminism which exemplifies a startlingly brilliant feminist logic. Her brilliantly lucid critique of Western ethics is a consistently theorized and tightly-written examination of…
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…
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…
Passing thoughts during the days which bubble up between readings: Crockpots Crockpots are incredibly cool! While I’m familiar with them, I’d never used them to any extent before. For fun and relaxation, and to improve my cooking, I’ve decided to make one crockpot meal and one casserole dish per week. Last week I made “Sunshine…
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…
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…