By Miriam Moster. Watching My Unorthodox Life on Netflix, a reality tv series that showcases Julia Haart’s successful fashion career as she and her family grapple with leaving the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community, there were many things I could relate to, raised as I was in a similar community to the one Haart left behind. The […]
By Mia McClain. “And then there are all those prophets who would lead us out of the wilderness—into the swamps!” –Beneatha Younger, A Raisin in the Sun Last November, I prepared a special dinner and excitedly sat down to watch the highly anticipated film version of August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Released on […]
By Holly Hillgardner. I played a game with Yaa Gyasi’s second novel that helped get me through the demands of the fall 2020 semester. If you teach, perhaps the game might be somewhat familiar? A certain number of graded assignments resulted in my indulging in a treat: sometimes chocolate, sometimes five minutes of TikTok; but, […]
By Michal Raucher. Deborah. Bruriah. Yalta. The Maiden of Ludmir. Osnat Barzani. Regina Jonas. Gluckl of Hameln. Sarah Schneirer. Blu Greenberg. Belda Lindenbaum. At the annual graduation ceremony for Yeshivat Maharat, an Orthodox Jewish seminary in the United States, someone often mentions one or several of these women as pioneers in the field of women […]
By Jamie Lee Andreson. Matriarchy, understood as Black women’s leadership, has been a central criterion in public debates on leadership, race and gender in the West African derived Candomblé religion in Brazil. In Candomblé, matriarchy expresses a counterpoint to the explicit historical patriarchy of the Brazilian Catholic Church. The female leadership of Candomblé priestesses of […]
By Jennifer T. Kaalund. We are born and have our being in a place of memory…We know ourselves through the art and act of remembering. Memories offer us a world where we are sustained by rituals of regard and recollection. bell hooks For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. […]
A Letter To: The White House, Local Governments, the American Academy of Religion/ Society of Biblical Literature, and the Association of Theological Schools We are Black Presidents and Deans serving at schools of theology, departments of religion and African American Studies across the nation. Our co-signers include but are not limited to Black faculty and administrators […]
By Jacob Perez and Zebulon B. Hurst. The escalating spread of COVID-19, the ways it has disrupted and transformed our communication and interactions with one another, reveals eschatological dimensions within our responses—our spiritual and embodied desires. Prayers for an end to the pandemic are filled with yearning, longing for a time when it will be […]
By Leah Elizabeth Comeau. My research is situated at the intersection of the fields of religious history and of material culture. Geographically, I work in South Asia, especially Tamil South India and I utilize an intersectional feminist framework to approach modern and medieval expressions of religion. In my work, I routinely encounter scholars of anthropology, […]
By Katherine Dugan. Unplanned: What She Saw Changed Everything is the newest pro-life film to hit mainstream movie theaters. Released in late March 2019, Unplanned follows the young adulthood of Abby Johnson. Abby is depicted as a bright-eyed woman who wants to, as she puts it, “do good in the world.” Based on her memoir, […]