religion

Omnipotence: The Ultimate Homage to Male Dominance as Control by Carol P. Christ

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

I follow Carol Christ for a variety of reasons including her words often make me think about ideas, concepts, controversies in new ways.

The concept of divine omnipotence is the ultimate expression of male dominance as control.  Divine omnipotence is the view that everything that happens in the world happens according to the will of a divinity, who is in control of everything that happens in the world. When someone dies or great suffering occurs, we are told, “everything happens for a purpose,” “it was meant to be,” or “everything happens according to the will of God—or Goddess.” In our recent book Goddess and God in the World, Judith Plaskow and I criticize and reject this view on both rational and moral grounds.

The doctrine of divine omnipotence is widely assumed, not only in Christian theologies, but in Islam and to a lesser extent in Judaism. Moreover, it is also to be found in western metaphysical and mystery traditions and in the many New Age and Goddess theologies based upon them. Thus…

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Springing Forward with the Wicked Witch by Barbara Ardinger

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

A story for our time!!!

Barbara ArdingerEl Presidente was enlarging his war against his citizens. This meant the roads were more crowded than before with refugees fleeing the capital city for safety among the farmers on the plains and up in the hills. Some of these refugees arrived, of course, at the farm of the wicked witch.

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Whenever a family arrived, the witch would put on her wickedest face and voice (she’d been practicing) and tell the children she was going to roast them and eat them with mashed potatoes and baby gravy. The children believed her for about a minute and a half, whereas their parents just smiled as each family was taken in hand by the senior refugees and led to rooms where there were new beds. The tenured refugees had (with the witch’s permission) taken charge and somehow found enough lumber to build two new rooms (lean-tos) at the side of the house…

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Meeting Phrike: Feminist Theology and the Experience of Horror by Jill Hammer

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Today, I planned to write my own blog post this evening after work. Just before I read this post, I mulled over topics, whether I wanted to share a recipe or write about so many disturbing as well as inspiring events I experienced or watched in the past week. Then today a student in one of my classes loudly questioned whether the Holocaust even occurred. This was followed by another student announcing that Jews are not people. As I read through my emails, this blog post appeared. It seemed especially telling given that experience. I refuse to tolerate comments that denigrate the religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference of anyone.

Myself, I saw the numb pools amidst the shadows; myself, the wan gods and night in very truth.  My frozen blood stood still and clogged my veins.  Forth leaped a savage cohort… Then grim Erinys (Vengeance) shrieked, and blind Furor (Fury), and Horror (Phrike), and all the forms which spawn and lurk amidst the eternal shades.

Seneca, Oedipus (trans. Frank Justus Miller)

Horror is not a cognitive but a physiological or affective extra-discursive state of being. Not unlike the state of, say, feeling nausea, horror is a state of being, whose manifestation, based on the etymologies of the Greek φρiκη [phrike] and the Latin horror, may be described, as Adriana Cavarero writes, as “a state of paralysis, reinforced by the feeling of growing stiff on the part of someone who is freezing,” and further, through her mythological reference to the prototypical figure of horror, Medusa, as a state of “petrification”…

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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.

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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“All Children Are Our Children” by Carol P. Christ

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This is a rather long read the gist of which is this: what if “we were taught to love and nurture and be generous to others” and these were the primary values in the world rather than the current values. “What if we were taught to open our hearts to the world? Would domination, violence, and war be possible?”

Carol P. Christ by Michael Bakas high resoultion“All children are our children.” As I was posting my recent blog about the shooting of black men by the police, these words came into my mind with the force of revelation. At the time I was looking at a photograph of Philando Castile, taken at his place of work. Yes, I thought, my heart opening: “he is my child too.” This widening of the heart is at the center of the maternal values of ancient and contemporary matriarchal cultures around the world. It is a feeling some of us who were mothered well enough or who mothered children—including children not our own—carry within us. Is this the healing balm our world needs today?

Maternal  values?  So many of us turn up our noses at such a “gendered” term. Perhaps we were not mothered enough in our families of origin. Perhaps we still feel un-mothered. Perhaps we don’t want…

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Ethiopian Journey–Ancient Churches of Lalibela

/ Juliana Lightle / 2 Comments

In the 12th century the king of Ethiopia decided to build a New Jerusalem.  Eleven churches were carved out of solid rock on the mountain top in the village of Lalibela.  A UNESCO World Heritage site, these churches remain intact and in use.

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They were all carved from the rock top of the mountain down into the earth so that they remain invisible unless the person is only a few feet away.  This protected them from the vision of potential invaders, usually Muslims from what is now Sudan.  The above is probably the most photographed of these churches and stands separate from the others.

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My friend is standing near where the stairs lead down to the bottom where visitors and worshippers can enter the church.  Visiting all these churches in one day is not an activity for the faint of heart or for one terrified of heights.

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This is the first church we visited.  It still mystifies many as to how such incredibly intricate structures could me carved by hand out of solid stone.  Even these columns are carved out of the rock.  The “official” Ethiopian Orthodox Christian story relates how angels helped the builders.

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This and most of the other churches are connected by “waterways” where in the rainy season a sophisticated system of drainage keeps all of them from flooding and makes it possible for visitors and worshippers to walk along from church to church.

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Everything in the Christian churches in Ethiopia  symbolizes something related back to Jerusalem and the Bible.  Even though the guide explained it all in detail, keeping up with all the symbolism proved a daunting task.  Notice the swastikas.  They are ancient symbols of the eternal circle of life and death.  Hitler turned them backwards and into a totally different meaning.  There are also many different styles of crosses there, two of which can be seen in the windows of this church.

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This is a fertility pool.  In the past a priest got in the water–it is very deep–with a woman who could not conceive and bless her in the water.  At one point when it began to fill too much, they cleaned out the bottom and found many treasures buried there, apparently dumped into the pool to protect them from enemy invaders.

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The inside of the churches are intricately carved and sometimes painted.

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Two types of basalt exist on this mountain, soft and hard.  Churches carved out of the soft basalt have begun to deteriorate and as a consequence are covered.  As can be seen here, people still come to these churches to pray and attend services.

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Our guide lead us from church to church through these narrow passageways which are, as previously mentioned, used to drain water away from them in the rainy season.  If Ethiopia had a national color, it would be white.  It is not only worn to go to church and for religious purposes but in daily life as well.  It mystifies me as to how they keep whites so very white.

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The slit dug in the rock is part of the system of drainage.  The grass in the foreground grows out of a pool of holy water.  While we were there, a boy filled a plastic bottle with the water and left.

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St. George and the dragon are everywhere, not only in churches but also on beer.  He is the patron saint of the country, symbolizing the triumph of Christianity over paganism as symbolized by the dragon.

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The carving in many of the churches reveal a sophisticated knowledge of how to work in stone.  It is difficult to believe that this was carved by hand downward into solid basalt centuries ago.

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The road to Lalibela is rather daunting, climbing  higher and higher with no guard rails, nothing.  As you can see from this photo, patchwork quilt  fields cover even the mountainsides.

 

 

To learn more about Lalibela, see detailed information and explanations of their River Jordan and other religious symbolism, go to my blog posts from August 2014.

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.

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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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Gratitude by Esther Nelson

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Here in the USA I hear so much complaining even about trivia and so little gratitude. I have also come to realize that gender still defines so much, limits what girls in particular think they can accomplish; girls still try to, as this essay notes, “make nice”, often failing to accomplish all they can be. It remains remarkable and a puzzle, as this essay notes, how some people can rise above negative circumstances while it destroys others.

esther-nelsonI’ve been in the midst of moving for almost a year, yet am still not finished with that onerous task.  My youngest son and family recently moved into the place I’ve called home since 1980.  I bought a small house in the vicinity and have just settled in after spending four months painting, cleaning, and hauling box after box to my new dwelling.  At the same time, I’ve been traveling back and forth to New Mexico busy with painting, cleaning, and remodeling my “retirement house.”

I’m tired.  Am also experiencing emotions that I thought I was impervious to.  I never perceived myself as somebody having an attachment to place, but a month or so before moving out of my old home, I began to feel nostalgic.  There was so much I didn’t want to leave behind–the woods, birds nesting in bushes around the property as well as on top of…

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Garden of Eden Retold by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

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A delightful, grown-up retelling of the old story.

Trelawney bio pictureToday, I came up with a less patriarchal Garden of Eden story:

Endelyn (age 7): “When I think of my soul, in my name “fire-soul,” I think of a powerful wind.”

Me: “That makes sense, since one of the names in the Bible for God/ess is Ruach, which means “breath” or “wind”, but we call it the Holy Spirit. God/ess is also symbolized by the other elements: fire, air, and earth – like when she shaped Eve and Adam out of clay.”

Endelyn, “What? I don’t remember that story.”

Me: “Oh, ok, I’ll tell you.” ……

Here’s the part where I froze momentarily, thinking “how can I tell my children that misogynist failed mentor story? how? how?” <deep breath>

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Feministing Sarah and Hagar by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

This resonates with me in part because I am working on a set of poems written from the viewpoint of these and other Biblical women rather than from the viewpoint of the males who “wrote” the Bible.

sarah_hagarOne story that has marked my life as a feminist is that of Sarah and Hagar. This is a story of pain and enmity among women under patriarchy that despite its age, is still relevant to illustrate the negative effects of the androcentric socialization. But it can also hold an inspirational feminist reading that leads us towards a reflection on the amazing possibilities of a shift in the way we women look at each other.

Feminism is a political practice, an ethics for living based in an option for women. It is not or should not be a Diploma, a chair where to work from 9:00am to 5:00pm, or an excuse to act from our own privileges against other women. In private and in public, in academia or in the street, in sexual, cultural, intellectual and religious affairs, a feminist is a feminist, without excuses or regrets.

This year I was part of…

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