Earlier this month, in a quiet, upper middle-class neighborhood in Istanbul, the body of Hande Kader, a trans*woman activist for LGBTQ justice in Turkey, was found mutilated and burned after she had been reported as missing for a couple of weeks. Kader’s murder is another in a country where the highest number of trans*persons are murdered […]
By Robyn Henderson-Espinoza. As someone who lives on multiple borderlands and always betwixt in/between male and female, race, class, ability, and religion, I have experienced a deep struggle in dominant trans literature that has largely surfaced throughout the academy for not having space for someone like myself. I am certain there are others who have similar […]
By Siobhan Kelly. The field of feminist studies in religion has failed to live up to its liberatory potential when it comes to trans* inclusion and liberation. As a young scholar of religion whose gender differs from its binary assignment at birth, feminism, to me, is supposed to be a place to find home; its […]
By Jacqueline M. Hidalgo. As a student and teacher of religion, I must wrestle with the way that religious discourses and practices have been deeply implicated in settler colonial violence and gendercide, undertaken in the name of “doing good,” of doing what is construed as divinely right and natural. In late eighteenth century colonial New […]
In the wake of the passing of HB2 (“Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act”) in North Carolina, the ongoing discussions regarding the rights, safety, and discrimination against trans*persons have come to the fore. Many have weighed in on the controversy including those who cite their religious beliefs as reasons to support the law or demand […]
In this Presidential election season, it is especially important to recognize how the rhetoric of the Bible still shapes our religious and political imagination and the American political discourse. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first woman to have secured the nomination as a major party presidential candidate in US history, is consistently characterized as untrustworthy by […]
By Rosemary Carbine. The Workgroup on Constructive Theology recently produced a video titled Fear Not!, which encourages Christians to respond in faith to the dangerous public discourse of the current U.S. political season, which has featured prominent public figures who endorse Islamophobia, racism, anti-immigration policies against refugees, and so forth on religious grounds. Inciting a […]
I have been pondering how to respond to the events of sexual harassment, theft, and rape in several major cities in Germany on New Year’s Eve of 2015. Did the gangs of men, looking “North African” and “Arabic” to the mostly female German victim-survivors, indicate a failed integration policy in Germany or deeply ingrained patriarchal […]
Recent comments by the presidential candidate Ben Carson on Muslims in the United States, and the controversial beef ban in India that has led to the murders of Muslims, causes one critically analyze the word “secularism” with regards to the Muslim identity living in a globalized world. In a world that is quickly and increasingly […]
A curious thing happened last week regarding female Orthodox rabbis. When the umbrella organization for Orthodox Jewish congregations denounced female clergy for the third time in five years, they actually accepted that there are, in fact, female Orthodox rabbis. Eighty years ago, Regina Jonas of Berlin was the first woman ordained as a rabbi, but […]