Stephanie May works and lives at the intersection of parish ministry and intellectual inquiry. As a minister, she serves as the First Parish in Wayland, a Unitarian Universalist congregation west of Boston. As an academic, she has written about ethical and cultural issues of gender, family, food, and domesticity. A 2012 graduate from Harvard Divinity School, Stephanie's dissertation was entitled, "Contesting the Theo-ethical Rhetoric of Home: Feminist and Postcolonial Politics of Space." Stephanie is a former managing editor for JFSR. She has also taught courses at Brandeis University and Boston College.
Later this week, the Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc (FSR) boards will be meeting at a preconference in Chicago to discuss the opportunities and challenges that media poses for feminist studies in religion. To help begin this discussion, I want to share some reflections on where FSR has been and to raise some questions on […]
In recent years, you may have noticed bumper stickers asking “Who’s Your Farmer?” Over the last few months, I have been a farmer. Last January, I faced a final push of completing my dissertation that would keep me anchored to my desk and indoors. Longing for summer, the outdoors, and working with my hands, I […]
“It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal.” So begins a recent article in the New York Times. According to a new report, more than half of births to women under the age of 30 now occur outside of marriage. Of course, the story is more complicated with birth rates ranging widely by […]
What does it mean to be a feminist parent? In a JFSR roundtable last fall, a group of feminist scholars in religion addressed this question from a range of perspectives. The complexity of raising a son as a feminist parent was made evident in essays by Judith Plaskow, Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, Fawzia Ahmad, Kate Ott, […]