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 […]
A hand-written message entitled “How are you?” was posted on a South Korean university campus by a male student on December 10, 2013. In his posting, the student asked if anyone can truly be okay under the current social, political, and economic situation in South Korea: no apology over the National Intelligence Service’s interference with […]
Like many others, I was shocked and dismayed at the recent news of José Esteban Muñoz’s untimely death (on December 4), at the early age of 46. (See also the notices here, here, and here.) I always thought there would be time to meet Muñoz in person, having spent so […]
“They will come and rape the men before the women, that’s what these infidels will do. They will rape the men before the women. God make us victorious over them!” According to an article in the international section of the New York Times, two men belonging to a group called “Jihadists from the Islamic State […]