This past weekend, Michael Brown – another young and unarmed black man, was murdered. By the police. In response, his community of #ferguson, Missouri responded en masse. The predominantly African American community has taken to the streets and given voice and body to the shared grief, indescribable outrage, and deep wounds suffered by African American […]
A version of this blog was posted previously on Gathering Voices a blog of TheThoughtfulChristian.com. Consider the following two experiments. First, if you are on Facebook, have you probably noticed that many of your friends are missing from your newsfeed. It isn’t because they don’t post updates. It’s because their updates don’t fit with your […]
If I were a member of Congress (now there’s an idea for a second career) I would hire a religion major on my staff. Actually, I would hire someone trained in feminist studies in religion because I think such people have a strong handle on what is happening around the globe. Consider recent world events, […]
By Patricia Miller The best part working on my book Good Catholics: The Battle over Abortion in the Catholic Church was learning about the “foremothers” of the Catholic reproductive rights movement. Some of these women, like Rosemary Radford Ruether and Mary Daly, are well known. Others less so. One of these women, Elizabeth “Betty” Farians […]
In the past, I’ve shared my thoughts about celebrating Mother’s Day. Today, I find myself considering very similar gender based issues on Father’s Day. In a single thought, I’m not a fan of Hallmark Holidays that reinforce gender divisions. Instead, I hope we can use these moments to reflect more deeply on the moral act […]
How fitting that we gather here at Grailville, the center that Janet Kalven helped to found, in this lovely barn turned Oratory on the land that Janet Kalven loved. As was evident in the “Circle of Remembrance,” we come not to mourn a tragedy, but to rejoice in the goodness of a life well lived. […]
Lately, it seems the news is plagued by stories of sexism and violence related to young women and girls globablly and in the U.S. While I think we all need to express collective outrage at such blatant and systemic acts of gender-based oppression and violence, we also need to see the daily impact of sexism […]
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 […]