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The Fringe is Our Stronghold by Oxana Poberejnaia

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Women and historically other oppressed persons will often create their own spiritual traditions to stay sane, feel valued, survive.

Oxana Poberejnaia's avatarFeminism and Religion

oxanaRecently I have come across several stories of women’s fringe spiritual movements or practices. This made me think about the role of outsiders’ or minority views in religions and society.

Patriarchy pushes women and their issues to the margins of society and religion. It seems that there women sometimes invent their own spiritual practices. These allow women to stand their own ground in religious matters, to preserve self-respect and to keep the hope of the highest spiritual attainment.

Quite often these beliefs and practices seem shocking in their bizarreness and their stubbornness not to accept orthodox norms.

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Seed Banks–the Genetic Future

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

IMG_0877

Most of us think minimally about our food, where it comes from, the seed.  With a rapidly growing world population the genetic diversity of the seed from which we grow food becomes increasingly crucial.

The United States contains 20 gene banks:  three in California, one in each of the following states, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Hawaii, Texas, Iowa, Arkansas, Illinois, Wisconsin, Georgia, Ohio, New York, Maryland, Florida, and Puerto Rico and Washington D.C.  This system holds about 600,000 varieties.  The seed bank in Ames, Iowa, contains 53,000 genetic lines of maize (corn) and other crop seeds–1400 species.  The Illinois bank grows more than 2000 varieties of seeds per year.

Maintaining genetic integrity can be difficult.  Some crops like corn are particularly difficult because corn easily cross pollinates.  Researchers use these seeds to develop certain types of new varieties, e.g. varieties more resistant to disease, to drought.

Gene banks remain crucial to the future of agriculture and food even with the current controversies over GMO.  Some farmers note that any hybrid whether deliberate or by accident is genetically modified.  These modifications have existed since the beginning of agriculture.

A possibly more dire issue is the lack of wild relatives of key crops.  Global gene banks lack many of these.  The online journal, “Nature Plants” notes 1076 wild relatives of 81 crops were insufficiently safe-guarded.  Up to 300 species could not be located in any gene bank.  The lack of tropical crops in gene banks is particularly worrisome.  This is important for the future of agriculture and the world food supply.  Seed banks create safety nets for the future.

Perhaps the most remote and “safe” bank lies in Norway 800 miles from the North Pole.  The Svalbard Global Seed Vault can store seed for 25 years without power.  This vault stores seeds at -18 C and contains 825,000 crop varieties.

 

Note:  the photo is corn close to the Nile Falls near Bahir Dahr, Ethiopia

 

White Privilege: Confessions of a Poor White Girl by Cynthia Garrity-Bond

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Worth the read. I am a white mother with a 1/2 Nigerian daughter who is not very dark and who many think is Polynesian because of the way she looks. My grandson’s father is Mexican and Spanish. My grandson also is part Nigerian, Swiss German (from me), a little of other European, and Navaho. He has straight black hair, light skin, and obsidian eyes. When people ask what he is and he answers, they often think he is lying.  I did not grow up in poverty. My daughter is educated. She has a Masters Degree in Nursing and I have a Ph.D. Nevertheless, she has experienced discrimination and people have made comments to me such as, “Your daughter is really doing well for a Black girl”. Seriously!! In this country both class and race matter and get intertwined in all sorts of complex ways. No one says to an educated white woman with a good job, “You are really doing well for a white girl.”

Cynthia Garrity-Bond's avatarFeminism and Religion

cynthia garrity bondRecently FAR contributor Sara Frykenberg posted an article to Facebook that caused me to think again about the now-famous essay by Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” In “Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person,” Gina Crosley-Corcoran does an excellent job of including issues of class, meaning poverty, into the discourse about race and privilege using the theory of intersectionality.  If I am honest, the tensions between race and poverty have made the owning my white privilege challenging.

Like Crosley-Corcoran, I was raised in poverty. After my parents divorced in the early 1960s, our fall into poverty was pronounced.  My mother liked to move, so much so that I attended no less than 15 different schools before high school.  We lived in one house for two years without hot water. I learned early on the stigma of poverty, when even a Catholic school uniform could not…

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Religion, Politics, and the RNC: Separation of Church and State Anyone? by Marie Cartier

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

This blog post provides a number of well thought out issues and arguments to ponder regarding the upcoming election. Somehow a civil discourse needs to occur but sadly seems less and less likely.

Marie Cartier's avatarFeminism and Religion

MarieCartierforKCETa-thumb-300x448-72405When you read this Feminism and Religion community, we will have just finished the televised portion of the Republican National Convention (RNC), which as I write this Wednesday, July 20 has announced that Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee for president of the United States.

Last night the first night of the RNC we witnessed the emerging platform of the party going far to the right.

From the New York Times:

Republicans moved on Tuesday toward adopting a staunchly conservative platform that takes a strict, traditionalist view of the family and child rearing, bars military women from combat, describes coal as a “clean” energy source and declares pornography a “public health crisis.”

The platform demands that lawmakers use religion as a guide when legislating, stipulating “that man-made law must be consistent with God-given, natural rights.”

It also encourages the teaching of the Bible in public schools because, the amendment…

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Book Review by Mary Sharratt: ESTHER by Rebecca Kanner

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

I am reblogging this because it fits with my next book project: poems from the viewpoint of the ancient mother goddess and others from the viewpoint of women in the Bible.

Mary Sharratt's avatarFeminism and Religion

esther

We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust. This is not your fault or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed into the keeping of men, who had no way of knowing. That is why I became a footnote, my story a brief detour between the well-known history of my father and the celebrated chronicle of my brother.

-Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

To a large extent, women have been written out of history. Their lives and deeds have become lost to us. To uncover the buried histories of women, we must act as detectives, studying the clues left from ages lost.

At its best, historical fiction can write women back into history and challenge our misconceptions about women in the past. Anita Diamant’s novel, TheRed Tent, became such an…

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Meet the Artist–the Writing Process and Poetry

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

This evening I am the artist at a local Meet the Artist event in Amarillo, Texas.  This event occurs bimonthly and past presenters have included musicians, photographers, and painters.  While I sing and take photos, my presentation will include reading poems from my book, “On the Rim of Wonder” and new, unpublished poems and talking about the writing process.  While I honestly thought few would be interested in the latter, several people have asked me specifically to discuss this.

Although I consider myself a writer, I do not sit down on schedule and write every day like many writers.  Inspiration, thoughts, come to me sporadically.  I write creatively exactly like I used to write college papers, magazine articles, etc.; I look like I am doing nothing, but in reality, all these ideas run through my head and finally gel.  Then I sit down and write it all at once.

The following is one of the poems from my book which I plan to read this evening:

 

Aging

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”  Dylan Thomas

Custom says, “Age gracefully.”

Are they crazy, dumb.

Who wants to look

old

wrinkled

grey?

They lie.

All of them.

Who wants a broken mind

confused

unfocused

lost?

Shoot me!

Burn my bones.

Scatter them

in the desert sands

to feed

desert willow where

rattlesnakes lie

searching for shade.

Dealing with Despair by Carol P. Christ

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

This blog post also notes that cities and small towns use traffic tickets for minor violations to fund their governments. Immediately, I thought of a tiny town on the highway from Amarillo to Dallas that rakes in huge amounts of money this way. Then this morning I just read of another incident where police killed a black man who, instead of having a gun as police claimed, had his hands up in the air–from a surveillance camera nearby. The police officers in question had on body cameras–that footage has not yet been released. I am quite sure we will hear more about that one even if it has not been on the national news yet.

Carol P. Christ's avatarFeminism and Religion

Philando Castile, school cafeteria worker, killed driving while black Philando Castile, school cafeteria worker, killed driving while black

In a state of shock after the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, I turned to my Facebook feed, looking for community in my grief and hoping to make sense of what had happened. The statement, “He would not have been shot if he had been white,” referring to Philando Castile, appeared several times. The first time I saw it, I responded, “He would not even have been stopped if he had been white.” Think about it if you are white: how many times have you been pulled over by the police?

I can answer that question: in the United States, only once, and that was because I made a second illegal U-turn at the same stop-lighted intersection as a teenager.  The policeman issued me two tickets, stating that he had been willing to let the first offence go…

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