Janet Kalven, Grail member and feminist pedagogue, died April 24, 2014 at the age of 100. She was a veritable force of nature—a feminist who shaped the field of religion by providing various spaces for women to meet, learn, write, and strategize. See my WATER remembrance of her here. Her memoir, Women Breaking Boundaries: A Grail […]
I was in front of the Supreme Court on March 25, 2014, on a snowy spring morning when the justices heard oral arguments for the Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby case about the provision of birth control as part of health care. Maybe it was the miserable weather with wet snow flakes the size of silver […]
As a daughter of a molecular biologist who was also a faithful tither to her church, I grew up in a world that saw no clear separation between science and religion. It was in the air I breathed and the way in which I learned to see the world. For my mother, scientific exploration could […]
Teachers need vivid imaginations to keep students interested and materials fresh. Kathryn D. Blanchard and Jane S. Webster demonstrate creative pedagogy and innovative scholarship with Lady Parts: Biblical Women and the Vagina Monologues (Eugene, OR: WIPF and STOCK, 2012). This is a unique project both in content and method. It is bound to generate others […]
One of the most pleasant aspects of feminist studies in religion is the willingness of many colleagues to help one another. Unlike some cutthroat fields, religion has tended (with notable and scandalous exceptions) to be a place that welcomes new scholars and nurtures budding activists. That was my experience as a student and young person, […]
Valentine ’s Day has been civilized and capitalized, hallmarked and disneyfied, all in an attempt to clean up love and signify sexuality into a compartmentalized relationship standard, tied nicely with an over romanticized bow. As a cradle Catholic, the veneration of saints has been part of my religious heritage. I still remember elementary school projects […]
I like the action-driven courage of the bare-breasted Femen women. Their radical feminism reminds me of how many of us feminist academic types have retreated into the “do-able,” the “tenure-able,” “promotion-able,” and “adaptable” versions of gender practice in our work lives and lives overall. The “lean-in” women who are trying very hard to make it […]
Women writers face danger every time we put something in print. I have added “protection in print” to our to-do list of justice work. I suspect that this perceived but unspoken danger is what keeps many women from writing at all, what causes others to have writer’s block, and still more women to self-censor. These […]
I’ve been following the uproar and then tamping down of the remarks Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson made in a recent GQ interview that equated homosexuality with bestiality, homosexuals as terrorists, and Black folk being happy in the pre-Civil Rights South. Later, Robinson issued a statement to explain his remarks: I myself am a product […]
by Katey Zeh Having grown up in a Protestant tradition, I had never really given Mary much thought. If anything, I saw her as a kind of troubling figure for women, embodying passivity, purity, asexuality. But now, as someone who spends her days thinking and praying and theologizing about maternal health, I realize that there […]