As many reading this blog may have already heard, Dr. Ada María Isasi-Díaz passed away in the early morning on May 13, 2012. While there are many other more qualified scholars, colleagues and friends to write a memorializing blog than I, I take up the task with humility and responsibility. I have known Ada since […]
Wednesday, May 9, 2012 might just turn out to be a historic day: a day in which a sitting president of the United States of America claimed his (at least personal) support for gays and lesbians (but not bisexual or transgendered people?) to have legal access to marriage. Certainly, for at least some LGBTIQ organizations […]
The following lines of poetry, first breathed by Sufi mystic Rumi and later masterfully translated into English by Coleman Barks, inspire both my theological locus and the way in which I make art. Rumi writes: Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.[1] […]
Academic and professional mentorship opportunity provided by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Religion and Faith Program and the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality at Vanderbilt University. HRC’s Scholarship and Mentorship Program for Religious and Theological Study nurtures and promotes promising theologians working in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer studies through an intensive […]
“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 […]
Feminist studies in religion are a hot commodity in the current political turmoil. So-called women’s issues are front and center in the debates. The long settled question of contraception has been snatched from mothballs for conservatives’ purposes. But there is such a dearth of feminist religious voices, so little room in masculinist journalist and clerical […]
In the initial wake of coverage related to the healthcare mandate to cover contraception, media outlets concentrated on “religious communities” opposition to the requirement. From a theological and doctrinal perspective, the only major Christian denomination to oppose use of contraception is the Roman Catholic Church. Other conservative religious leaders chimed in to support what they […]
Making new year’s resolutions and writing them down in my diary was one of the joys I cherished while growing up. I stopped making new year’s resolutions after going through two major surgeries (open heart and brain) in my late twenties because it seemed pointless to make yearly resolutions in the face of what I […]
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, […]
I have long agonized over how to live out my feminist values with respect to my vocation. Imagine those cartoons with the angel on shoulder and the devil on the other . . . the two arguing sides are not archetypal opposites in my story, though at times they feel that way. On one shoulder […]