Carol Christ's guest appearances

Carol Christ

Voices of the Sacred Feminine

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Breaking Down Patriarchy

Judith Plaskow

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Riane Eisler

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Dianne Lawson

Adam Gainsburg

Selena Fox

Phyllis Curott

Glennon Doyle

Jason Miller

Thomas Aquinas

Judith Butler

PMH Atwater

Nicholas Pearson

Jo Carson

OwlTail

Amy: Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy! I’m Amy McPhie Allebest. If you are a listener who loved our episode on The Gospel of Mary Magdalene or Mary, Mother of God, then you will love the texts we are discussing today: WomanSpirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, and Weaving the Visions:New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, both edited by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow. These books contain essays that were written in the 70’s 80’s and early 90’s, and they reflect a movement within feminism that was grappling with the patriarchal aspects of religion, and rather than rejecting religion altogether as so many feminists were doing at the time, these authors were working to retain the spiritual, the mystical, and the ritual parts of religion while still confronting and challenging patriarchy. As an introduction I’m going to read just a couple of sentences from the 1992 version of WomanSpirit Rising. It says that some feminists...“are convinced that religion is profoundly important. For them, the discovery that religions teach the inferiority of women is experienced as a betrayal of deeply felt spiritual and ritual experience. They believe the history of sexism in religions shows how deeply sexism has permeated the human psyche but does not invalidate human need for ritual, symbol and myth. While differing on many issues, the contributors to this volume agree that religion is deeply meaningful in human life and that the traditional religions of the West have betrayed women. They are convinced that religion must be reformed or reconstructed to support the full human dignity of women.” And no one better to discuss this issue with than the magnificent Maxine Hanks! Welcome back, Maxine.[Hi Amy -- thanks for inviting me to read this book with you, it holds a lot of meaning for me personally.This project has already been so enriched by your wisdom and experience! You’re an expert on many Women’s Studies texts, but my understanding is that in the tradition of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Letters on the Equality of the Sexes by Sarah Grimke, you are a person of faith and most at home in feminist theology. Is that right?Maxine:  Yes, I’m a feminist theologian and historian, focused on women’s studies and women’s history in religious culture, mainly in LDS/Mormon culture and in Christianty.  My spiritual path, personal faith journey and my scholarly path, scholarly work are very intertwined.   My work on recovering feminism in Mormon history and culture overlapped with my own personal work to find feminist voice in Mormon culture, and my own path through feminist theology, clergy formation and ministry overlapped with my scholarly work on feminist theology in Christian tradtion and LDS tradition.  So as I found my way in life and work as a feminist, I found my way as scholar in feminist work, the two were interdependant.  I’m a deeply spiritual person, I rely on my relationship with god for decisions about both my life and professional path. I’m a minister, chaplain, and theologian, historian, and I see spirituality as one lens, one approach, one hermeneutic method among others, so my work brings spirituality and scholarship together.  I think it requires multiple approaches, interdisciplinary work to adequately assess the situation of women in religion --  gender studies training, historical method, and theological/religious studies, so I trained, took degrees in all three to use in my work.Amy: If you’re comfortable, I’d be grateful if you could talk about your own journey as a feminist theologian, including your book, Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism, and the ensuing events after the publication of that book.Maxine: Sure, the main thing to mention about my work, my book and WSR, is that they parallel each other, taking a very similar approach, and with similar results, but ten years apart.  WSR came in 1979.  I began working on WA in 1988-89, published in 1992.   Yet in 1979,  a decade before I published WA, I had been working through the very same issues that Christ, Plaskow, et all were dealing with, and at the very same time.  In 1978-79, I was a feminist, who used that label for myself, and I was serving as an LDS missionary.  I noticed and was frustrated by the dominance of male voices and sexism re: women’s own experience, bodies, views.  I was also frustrated by how few Mormon women were willing to express their true feelings, frustrations and  feminist concerns or voices in Mormon culture.   The only exceptions were MERA and Sonja Johnson, and they were feared, shunned by most Mormons.  Sonia's excommunication in 1979 happened when I was on my LDS mission in the East and it impacted me deeply, as a feminist who was really hurting from the sexism in the mission. I keenly felt the need for validating our own women's and feminist  perspectives and our own female relationship to God and priesthood.  I felt that I had received some form of priesthood in the LDS temple and as a missionary -- I knew I was a valid minister, but I didn’t know how to defend that or document that in 1979.  That came a decade later with my book.  But I knew we had an inherent feminism or feminist traditoin in Mormonism; I had been aware of that since 1976 via the WE and EXII.    But I didn’t yet know where or how to find the sources, and present the evidence for our feminist history and theology, which came later, and I’ll describe that in a moment, later in the larger historical context of the role and effect of Woman’s Spirit  Rising.It’s important to understand how groundbreaking and vital Woman’sSpirit Rising was for its time in 1979 and what it accomplished.  So I’d like to share some larger historical context about femininst theology in American culture first, to situate WSR.  Then I can circle back to say how W&amp;A and my work fits into that context and relates to WSR.HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR WSRContext -- WSR arrived at a crucial shift in 2nd Wave feminism (like Sexual Politics embodied the arrival &amp; shift in feminism from the '60s to '70s), WSR captured the arrival &amp; shift in feminist theology from '70s into '80s feminism -- the last of the 3 decades in the 2nd Wave.  '60s feminism formed the theories, goals of feminism then '70s feminism took it wider to the public, popular discourse, workplace, homes, media, but still new, struggling to prove itself, persuade the public of its truth. Then in the '80s feminism arrived, found mainstream acceptance, validity, normalcy, not freakish, an integral feature in colleges, media, workplace, breaking the glass ceilings (movie Working Girl).          Feminist theology was one decade behind feminism. The major religions were patriarchal, thus much slower than secular culture to deal with or accept feminism, including their own inherent feminism within those religions.  So we didn't see very much feminist theology or books in the '60s, it begins in the 1970s with books emerging mainly from Catholic and Jewish feminists, like Mary Daly, Rita Grosss, Elaine Pagels, Merlin Stone, Carol Christ, and Judith Plaskow, then in the '80s it continued with these authors and increased with more work by women like Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Riane Eisler and others. In the 80s it widened out with more work and bigger exposure -- just like feminism itself had done in the 1970s. Yet in the 70s and early 80s, very few college courses or programs dealt with feminism in religion or feminist theology.     Women's studies departments and programs were growing and thriving in colleges in the 1980s (like the UU program and Weber State and USU), but there were very few courses or programs on women in religon or feminist theology. (We had one course at the UU in 1980s-90s, taught by Vella Evans).  The Harvard WSRP was the first program to focus on study of women and religion in 1973. So women's studies in religion was emerging  in the major schools and Ivy League in the 70s like femnism had in the 60s, but very few programs in the 70s; that began taking hold in more colleges, courses, programs, and majors in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when programs emerged at more schools, like Claremont and others.     One important point here -- is that secular feminism itself. arose from religious women, who took their spirituality into society and politics, their Christianity into social reform. Anne Braude's book, Radical Spirits, explores how the women's rights movement and women's spiritualism were intertwined -- the role of religion in women's history and the women's rights movement. So feminism began in religion, in the 1800s, and moved outward into society, but it took a long while for feminism to come back home and find itself accepted in its own roots --other than a few faiths like the Quakers who were feminist all along.   We see this in Mormonism, which was a leader in feminist innovations within the Church in the 1830s &amp; 40s, 10-20 years before Seneca Falls, and Mormon feminists took that testimony  of women's agency,  authority and equality into the larger social sphere and communities in the 1850s-1890s as pursuing vocations and careers outside the home in medicine, education, nursing, especially via suffrage as pioneers in the suffrage movement -- due to having gotten  the vote themselves in the Church in 1830.    Yet they lost ground within the faith in the 19th century and had to re-emerge  in the 1970s-80s-90s, which brought conflict and backlash, so only in this century is Mormon feminist theology in our own origins finally finding wider understanding, recovery and acceptance within the Church.    I chronnicled this in my book W&amp;A on Mormon feminist theology, which I compiled in the 1980s-90s -- but more about that in a minute. So, in 1979 -- Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow looked at the pioneering work  of feminist theologians emerging in the 1970s and wanted to capture and summarize it -- to map the main approaches, gather the major voices, and make them more available by editing an anthology of writings.   This was SO needed at that time, to make the few groundbreaking voices in feminist theology of the '70s more known and available.  So that's what they did, with Woman's Spirit Rising  --they created a reader that would bring the key pioneers and their pioneering work on feminist theology forward, and legitimize it, make it known and useable more widely to help educate and inspire more women and work.   They succeeded immensely.  Women's Spirit Rising was a watershed moment in American feminist theology, concretizing that subfield of both women's studies and religious studies and their intersection, and letting women everywhere know -- this work was real, and happening and needed.  It inspired so many women in so many religions to engage that work in their own cultures and studies. As a result, the 1980s saw an explosion of feminist work on religion and theology, in schools and in church cultures. Female clergy were emerging in the 1970s &amp; 1980s in Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Anglican and Community of Christ churches but articles and books took hold in the 1980s.  In 1989 at the Scientific Study of Religion conf. a panel of Roman Catholic, Sikh, Jewish, southern Baptist, and Mormon women found a consensus: that women were no longer waiting for approval from male religious leaders but moving ahead with feminist theological investigations. That consensus was reaffirmed in a 1992 book Megatrends for Women which predicted that feminists were reaching a critical mass within traditionally male-dominated religions and would make significant changes in the 1990s and beyond.       I had the same idea as Christ and Plaskow in  Woman's Spirit Rising, the same approach and inclinations --- but my work began  before I had seen their  book. So we were operating from a similar vision, 10 yrs apart.  We both wanted to validate feminist theology.    I wanted to make our own feminism and feminist theolgoy more known and  available -- as inhereent in our own tradition and history, and not some secular agenda that feminists were imposing on the LDS Church.  I wanted to recover our own unique home-grown feminism and feminist theology-- and that has remained true to hte present day and my work now.           So I researched Mormon feminism and feminist theology in LDS history to the present, for 3.5 years, and selected major voices, texts, and excerpts, and commissioned some new articles on current work at that time on needed topics, then pulled together all this work in one book. It was gutsy, a whole lot of new cutting-edge, overt feminist work and recovery on topics that had been feared and repressed for so long-- it shocked people. It was a bombshell, so the reactions were intense.          In the 1980s very few Mormons, even very few feminists were using the word "feminism" which had been tainted by Sonia's excommunication.  And nobody was using the term feminist theology.  My book was the first book to reclaim Mormon feminism in word and concept, validate it as real and inherent in our own tradition, and recover it as American feminism. And my book was the first to use the term "feminist theolog."   I was the first to advocate the need for that in LDS culture and studies -- at the 1990 Sunstone Symposium panel on the Current State of Mormon Theology, in a paper titled “Toward a Mormon Feminist Theology.” .  I said then, that the most lacking and most important area of  needed work in Mormon theology on the horizon was feminist theology.   I was working on my book at the time, which I published in 1992.            Even liberals and feminists, were a bit freaked out by my assertion then -- most of them advised me not to use the word "feminsim" or the term "feminist theology" because it would frighten too many people away, but use other terms. I was tired of feeling stifled and censored, I felt it was time to own our feminism, call it was it was, not hide it any more behind terms like "sisters."           So I just put it all out there and let it confront the fears and do its work -- and it did.  It dissolved the stigma and fear of feminism and helped it go mainstream, enabled it to be engaged, used, by members, leaders (the RS Pres. each had a copy and told me they used it regularly) and also by scholars outside the faith in colleges across the country, in Wm Stds programs, incl. at Harvard. So other religious feminists and scholars of feminism in religion could see what the Mormon women were doing.            So W&amp;A functioned just like Woman's Spirit Rising did -- which was a wonderful coincidence and discovery, since I didn't discover Woman's Spirit Rising and its writers and works until I was nearly done pulling together my own book, b/c I was immersed in Mormon studies and recovering our own voices. I wish I HAD seen it before I started my book -- it would have helped me so much and made my work easier, far less stressful.  I was figuring it out on my Own.  But WSR coming along at the end of my project was a huge boost of validation and confidence that I needed at that time, to get me through what I was facing after the book came out. .         WSR came along a a time in American feminism when  feminist theology and women's studies in religion were not widespread but were emerging as another movement within feminism and within academia, and among women within religions.   WSR gave all of us-- a giant boost of validation and inspiration to do our work. Amy: Thanks so much for providing that context! So let’s introduce the EDITORS of these books and then we’ll dive in!Carol Patrice Christ was born to a Protestant Christian family, in California in 1945. She obtained her PhD from Yale University and has served as a professor in universities such as Columbia University and Harvard Divinity School. Her best-known publication is "Why Women Need The Goddess", which was initially a keynote presentation at the "Great Goddess Re-emerging" conference" at the University of Santa Cruz in 1978. This essay helped to launch the Goddess movement in the United States and other countries, and it discusses the importance of religious symbols in general, and the effects of male symbolism of God on women in particular. Christ calls herself a "thealogian" with an a - "thealogy" is derived from Ancient Greek θεά (theá, “goddess”) + -logy.  Her work has helped to create a space for the field of theology to be far more inclusive of women than has historically been the case.She is the director of the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual, where she conducts pilgrimages to sacred sites in Greece (mostly Crete, as listeners will remember from our episode on The Chalice and the Blade), and she lives on the Greek island of Lesbos, which was the home of the poet Sappho. Judith Plaskow was born to a Jewish family in New York in 1947. Throughout junior high and high school, Plaskow dreamed of becoming a rabbi, even though women rabbis were unheard of and opposed by many, including her own rabbi. However, even she had reservations: she wanted to be a trailblazer but wasn't absolutely certain that she believed in God. She says that her life changed one day during closing services on Yom Kippur when she realized she could get a doctorate in theology instead. Had she become a rabbi, she would have been only the second ever female rabbi, but she says she was "born a theologian" and is sure she made the right choice.Plaskow earned her doctorate at Yale University,...

Amy: Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy! I’m Amy McPhie Allebest. If you are a listener who loved our episode on The Gospel of Mary Magdalene or Mary, Mother of God, then you will love the texts we are discussing today: WomanSpirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, and Weaving the Visions:New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, both edited by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow. These books contain essays that were written in the 70’s 80’s and early 90’s, and they reflect a movement within feminism that was grappling with the patriarchal aspects of religion, and rather than rejecting religion altogether as so many feminists were doing at the time, these authors were working to retain the spiritual, the mystical, and the ritual parts of religion while still confronting and challenging patriarchy. As an introduction I’m going to read just a couple of sentences from the 1992 version of WomanSpirit Rising. It says that some feminists...“are convinced that religion is profoundly important. For them, the discovery that religions teach the inferiority of women is experienced as a betrayal of deeply felt spiritual and ritual experience. They believe the history of sexism in religions shows how deeply sexism has permeated the human psyche but does not invalidate human need for ritual, symbol and myth. While differing on many issues, the contributors to this volume agree that religion is deeply meaningful in human life and that the traditional religions of the West have betrayed women. They are convinced that religion must be reformed or reconstructed to support the full human dignity of women.” And no one better to discuss this issue with than the magnificent Maxine Hanks! Welcome back, Maxine.[Hi Amy -- thanks for inviting me to read this book with you, it holds a lot of meaning for me personally. This project has already been so enriched by your wisdom and experience! You’re an expert on many Women’s Studies texts, but my understanding is that in the tradition of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Letters on the Equality of the Sexes by Sarah Grimke, you are a person of faith and most at home in feminist theology. Is that right? Maxine:  Yes, I’m a feminist theologian and historian, focused on women’s studies and women’s history in religious culture, mainly in LDS/Mormon culture and in Christianty.  My spiritual path, personal faith journey and my scholarly path, scholarly work are very intertwined.   My work on recovering feminism in Mormon history and culture overlapped with my own personal work to find feminist voice in Mormon culture, and my own path through feminist theology, clergy formation and ministry overlapped with my scholarly work on feminist theology in Christian tradtion and LDS tradition.  So as I found my way in life and work as a feminist, I found my way as scholar in feminist work, the two were interdependant.  I’m a deeply spiritual person, I rely on my relationship with god for decisions about both my life and professional path. I’m a minister, chaplain, and theologian, historian, and I see spirituality as one lens, one approach, one hermeneutic method among others, so my work brings spirituality and scholarship together.  I think it requires multiple approaches, interdisciplinary work to adequately assess the situation of women in religion --  gender studies training, historical method, and theological/religious studies, so I trained, took degrees in all three to use in my work. Amy: If you’re comfortable, I’d be grateful if you could talk about your own journey as a feminist theologian, including your book, Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism, and the ensuing events after the publication of that book. Maxine: Sure, the main thing to mention about my work, my book and WSR, is that they parallel each other, taking a very similar approach, and with similar results, but ten years apart.  WSR came in 1979.  I began working on WA in 1988-89, published in 1992.   Yet in 1979,  a decade before I published WA, I had been working through the very same issues that Christ, Plaskow, et all were dealing with, and at the very same time.  In 1978-79, I was a feminist, who used that label for myself, and I was serving as an LDS missionary.  I noticed and was frustrated by the dominance of male voices and sexism re: women’s own experience, bodies, views.  I was also frustrated by how few Mormon women were willing to express their true feelings, frustrations and  feminist concerns or voices in Mormon culture.   The only exceptions were MERA and Sonja Johnson, and they were feared, shunned by most Mormons.  Sonia's excommunication in 1979 happened when I was on my LDS mission in the East and it impacted me deeply, as a feminist who was really hurting from the sexism in the mission. I keenly felt the need for validating our own women's and feminist  perspectives and our own female relationship to God and priesthood.  I felt that I had received some form of priesthood in the LDS temple and as a missionary -- I knew I was a valid minister, but I didn’t know how to defend that or document that in 1979.  That came a decade later with my book.  But I knew we had an inherent feminism or feminist traditoin in Mormonism; I had been aware of that since 1976 via the WE and EXII.    But I didn’t yet know where or how to find the sources, and present the evidence for our feminist history and theology, which came later, and I’ll describe that in a moment, later in the larger historical context of the role and effect of Woman’s Spirit  Rising. It’s important to understand how groundbreaking and vital Woman’sSpirit Rising was for its time in 1979 and what it accomplished.  So I’d like to share some larger historical context about femininst theology in American culture first, to situate WSR.  Then I can circle back to say how W&amp;A and my work fits into that context and relates to WSR. HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR WSRContext -- WSR arrived at a crucial shift in 2nd Wave feminism (like Sexual Politics embodied the arrival &amp; shift in feminism from the '60s to '70s), WSR captured the arrival &amp; shift in feminist theology from '70s into '80s feminism -- the last of the 3 decades in the 2nd Wave.  '60s feminism formed the theories, goals of feminism then '70s feminism took it wider to the public, popular discourse, workplace, homes, media, but still new, struggling to prove itself, persuade the public of its truth. Then in the '80s feminism arrived, found mainstream acceptance, validity, normalcy, not freakish, an integral feature in colleges, media, workplace, breaking the glass ceilings (movie Working Girl).           Feminist theology was one decade behind feminism. The major religions were patriarchal, thus much slower than secular culture to deal with or accept feminism, including their own inherent feminism within those religions.  So we didn't see very much feminist theology or books in the '60s, it begins in the 1970s with books emerging mainly from Catholic and Jewish feminists, like Mary Daly, Rita Grosss, Elaine Pagels, Merlin Stone, Carol Christ, and Judith Plaskow, then in the '80s it continued with these authors and increased with more work by women like Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Riane Eisler and others. In the 80s it widened out with more work and bigger exposure -- just like feminism itself had done in the 1970s.  Yet in the 70s and early 80s, very few college courses or programs dealt with feminism in religion or feminist theology.     Women's studies departments and programs were growing and thriving in colleges in the 1980s (like the UU program and Weber State and USU), but there were very few courses or programs on women in religon or feminist theology. (We had one course at the UU in 1980s-90s, taught by Vella Evans).  The Harvard WSRP was the first program to focus on study of women and religion in 1973. So women's studies in religion was emerging  in the major schools and Ivy League in the 70s like femnism had in the 60s, but very few programs in the 70s; that began taking hold in more colleges, courses, programs, and majors in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when programs emerged at more schools, like Claremont and others.      One important point here -- is that secular feminism itself. arose from religious women, who took their spirituality into society and politics, their Christianity into social reform. Anne Braude's book, Radical Spirits, explores how the women's rights movement and women's spiritualism were intertwined -- the role of religion in women's history and the women's rights movement. So feminism began in religion, in the 1800s, and moved outward into society, but it took a long while for feminism to come back home and find itself accepted in its own roots --other than a few faiths like the Quakers who were feminist all along.    We see this in Mormonism, which was a leader in feminist innovations within the Church in the 1830s &amp; 40s, 10-20 years before Seneca Falls, and Mormon feminists took that testimony  of women's agency,  authority and equality into the larger social sphere and communities in the 1850s-1890s as pursuing vocations and careers outside the home in medicine, education, nursing, especially via suffrage as pioneers in the suffrage movement -- due to having gotten  the vote themselves in the Church in 1830.    Yet they lost ground within the faith in the 19th century and had to re-emerge  in the 1970s-80s-90s, which brought conflict and backlash, so only in this century is Mormon feminist theology in our own origins finally finding wider understanding, recovery and acceptance within the Church.    I chronnicled this in my book W&amp;A on Mormon feminist theology, which I compiled in the 1980s-90s -- but more about that in a minute.  So, in 1979 -- Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow looked at the pioneering work  of feminist theologians emerging in the 1970s and wanted to capture and summarize it -- to map the main approaches, gather the major voices, and make them more available by editing an anthology of writings.   This was SO needed at that time, to make the few groundbreaking voices in feminist theology of the '70s more known and available.  So that's what they did, with Woman's Spirit Rising  --they created a reader that would bring the key pioneers and their pioneering work on feminist theology forward, and legitimize it, make it known and useable more widely to help educate and inspire more women and work.   They succeeded immensely.  Women's Spirit Rising was a watershed moment in American feminist theology, concretizing that subfield of both women's studies and religious studies and their intersection, and letting women everywhere know -- this work was real, and happening and needed.  It inspired so many women in so many religions to engage that work in their own cultures and studies. As a result, the 1980s saw an explosion of feminist work on religion and theology, in schools and in church cultures. Female clergy were emerging in the 1970s &amp; 1980s in Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Anglican and Community of Christ churches but articles and books took hold in the 1980s.  In 1989 at the Scientific Study of Religion conf. a panel of Roman Catholic, Sikh, Jewish, southern Baptist, and Mormon women found a consensus: that women were no longer waiting for approval from male religious leaders but moving ahead with feminist theological investigations. That consensus was reaffirmed in a 1992 book Megatrends for Women which predicted that feminists were reaching a critical mass within traditionally male-dominated religions and would make significant changes in the 1990s and beyond.       I had the same idea as Christ and Plaskow in  Woman's Spirit Rising, the same approach and inclinations --- but my work began  before I had seen their  book. So we were operating from a similar vision, 10 yrs apart.  We both wanted to validate feminist theology.    I wanted to make our own feminism and feminist theolgoy more known and  available -- as inhereent in our own tradition and history, and not some secular agenda that feminists were imposing on the LDS Church.  I wanted to recover our own unique home-grown feminism and feminist theology-- and that has remained true to hte present day and my work now.           So I researched Mormon feminism and feminist theology in LDS history to the present, for 3.5 years, and selected major voices, texts, and excerpts, and commissioned some new articles on current work at that time on needed topics, then pulled together all this work in one book. It was gutsy, a whole lot of new cutting-edge, overt feminist work and recovery on topics that had been feared and repressed for so long-- it shocked people. It was a bombshell, so the reactions were intense.          In the 1980s very few Mormons, even very few feminists were using the word "feminism" which had been tainted by Sonia's excommunication.  And nobody was using the term feminist theology.  My book was the first book to reclaim Mormon feminism in word and concept, validate it as real and inherent in our own tradition, and recover it as American feminism. And my book was the first to use the term "feminist theolog."   I was the first to advocate the need for that in LDS culture and studies -- at the 1990 Sunstone Symposium panel on the Current State of Mormon Theology, in a paper titled “Toward a Mormon Feminist Theology.” .  I said then, that the most lacking and most important area of  needed work in Mormon theology on the horizon was feminist theology.   I was working on my book at the time, which I published in 1992.            Even liberals and feminists, were a bit freaked out by my assertion then -- most of them advised me not to use the word "feminsim" or the term "feminist theology" because it would frighten too many people away, but use other terms. I was tired of feeling stifled and censored, I felt it was time to own our feminism, call it was it was, not hide it any more behind terms like "sisters."           So I just put it all out there and let it confront the fears and do its work -- and it did.  It dissolved the stigma and fear of feminism and helped it go mainstream, enabled it to be engaged, used, by members, leaders (the RS Pres. each had a copy and told me they used it regularly) and also by scholars outside the faith in colleges across the country, in Wm Stds programs, incl. at Harvard. So other religious feminists and scholars of feminism in religion could see what the Mormon women were doing.            So W&amp;A functioned just like Woman's Spirit Rising did -- which was a wonderful coincidence and discovery, since I didn't discover Woman's Spirit Rising and its writers and works until I was nearly done pulling together my own book, b/c I was immersed in Mormon studies and recovering our own voices. I wish I HAD seen it before I started my book -- it would have helped me so much and made my work easier, far less stressful.  I was figuring it out on my Own.  But WSR coming along at the end of my project was a huge boost of validation and confidence that I needed at that time, to get me through what I was facing after the book came out. .          WSR came along a a time in American feminism when  feminist theology and women's studies in religion were not widespread but were emerging as another movement within feminism and within academia, and among women within religions.   WSR gave all of us-- a giant boost of validation and inspiration to do our work.  Amy: Thanks so much for providing that context! So let’s introduce the EDITORS of these books and then we’ll dive in! Carol Patrice Christ was born to a Protestant Christian family, in California in 1945. She obtained her PhD from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_University" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Yale University</a> and has served as a professor in universities such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Columbia University</a> and Harvard Divinity School. Her best-known publication is "Why Women Need The Goddess", which was initially a keynote presentation at the "Great Goddess Re-emerging" conference" at the University of Santa Cruz in 1978. This essay helped to launch the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goddess_movement" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Goddess movement</a> in the United States and other countries, and it discusses the importance of religious symbols in general, and the effects of male symbolism of God on women in particular. Christ calls herself a "thealogian" with an a - "thealogy" is derived from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Ancient Greek</a> θεά (theá, “goddess”) + -logy.  Her work has helped to create a space for the field of theology to be far more inclusive of women than has historically been the case.She is the director of the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual, where she conducts pilgrimages to sacred sites in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Greece</a> (mostly Crete, as listeners will remember from our episode on The Chalice and the Blade), and she lives on the Greek island of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbos" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Lesbos</a>, which was the home of the poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Sappho</a>. Judith Plaskow was born to a Jewish family in New York in 1947. Throughout junior high and high school, Plaskow dreamed of becoming a rabbi, even though women rabbis were unheard of and opposed by many, including her own rabbi. However, even she had reservations: she wanted to be a trailblazer but wasn't absolutely certain that she believed in God. She says that her life changed one day during closing services on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Yom Kippur</a> when she realized she could get a doctorate in theology instead. Had she become a rabbi, she would have been only the second ever female rabbi, but she says she was "born a theologian" and is sure she made the right choice.Plaskow earned her doctorate at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_University" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Yale University</a>,...

WomanSpirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, edited by Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow

We certainly know the values that seem to permeate society today - greed, exploitation, selfishness, anti-intellectualism and tribalism - to name a few.  We can set a different tone and change the narrative to that which is more in alignment with Goddess Spirituality.  Tonight Carol Christ is with me and we'll discuss at least two of those sacred feminine values - gratitude and sharing.  We must be the wayshowers.  We must help change the narrative in the world toward nurturing, caring, sharing and gratitude.  Tune in tonight and get a dose of inspiration and maybe some interesting food for thought as we also discuss unlikely allies in messaging and how important the messages we get are, and why there might be an agenda to keep us from being connected and in solidarity.

Gratitude & Sharing - Principles of Goddess Spirituality w/Carol Christ

Carol Christ, president of Smith College, speaking on the occasion of being awarded the Wilbur Cross Medal by the Graduate School. Ms. Christ received her PHD from Yale in 1970.

Carol Christ reflects on the importance of a Liberal Arts education