theology

Theology of the Body

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:31:00 +0000

In Theology of the Body, Donora Hillard employs a variety of styles and structures to present a complicated picture of the body, desire, and heterosexual relationships. She makes use of the language of theology and an unrelenting physicality in order to create a sense of faith not beyond the body, but through it of a human divinity that is also at once diabolic. It is no accident that the opening epigraph comes from William Blake.

Within this sequence, Hillard manages to portray women with threatening sexualities as well as women who have been made victims. In portraying women’s surprising and, to some, disturbing strength, she does not erase the brutality. With the lines "You can see muscles/ in my legs from running/ after men like you," “Pursuit” is followed by “Remedy,” which concludes with a literal punch that the tight lines and simple imagery of the first two stanzas allow to have a particularly strong impact on the reader. Reading the last verse for the first time, I jerked back a little as if I had been punched. (This isn’t the only place where I reacted so strongly: take that as a trigger warning.)

The only thing that separates these two poems is a line from Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, taken out of context in order to be made into an opportunity for poetic production and imagination. “Remedy” and the other poems interspersed with lines from this same source do more than dramatize or respond to the line which precedes each: poems and statements interact, forming machines that produce new possibilities for the spirituality of the body. The possibilities, no doubt, would have been heinous to the Pope from whom Hillard so skillfully appropriates. The spirituality of the body, after all, is really just the body and living in it. No need for robes, psalms, or Churches: "Every woman, by virtue of the nuptial meaning of her body, is called in some way to be both a wife and a mother."

This quote from the old Pope is followed by a poem that changes the meaning of the final two terms beyond anything he would have recognized. “Wife” opens, "My husband was a shotgun made of candy./ I wanted to kill his former lovers, especially/ the Strawberry Shortcake-looking one." The only allusion to motherhood made comes a few lines later, "On our anniversary,/ we made love in a kiddie pool full of sugar/ and afterbirth."

This strange and joyful sweetness, interrupted by scars and knives with uncertain intents goes beyond the bounds of traditional and restrictive theologies. In doing so, it represents (particularly since it blends sweetness and at least potential pain) the peculiar strength of Hillard’s theology, whether you take it as a theology or not.

Cross-posted with Gender Across Borders

Written by: Elizabeth Switaj, June 29th 2010

A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religious Exploration

admin — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:35:00 +0000

By Rita M. Gross

University of California Press

Preeminent feminist Buddhism scholar Rita M. Gross’ A Garland of Feminist Reflections is an indispensable collection of her best collected writing from the past forty years. Drawing together theory, philosophy, and religious exploration, Gross’ self-selected anthology is deeply thought provoking and can serve as an introduction to her vital scholarship, or a necessary refresher on important concepts and ideas. Among the pieces she chose, Gross included several groundbreaking essays on methodology and theory. The collection also includes large sections of Gross’ writing on feminist theology and Buddhist feminism.

Gross’ writing is strikingly beautiful, though it is also a dense read—and a complicated one—for anyone not already deeply engaged with comparative religious studies or knowledgeable about Buddhism and gender in an academic framework. This isn’t a criticism, but speaks to Gross’ passionate relationship with her work. Some essays, such as “What Went Wrong? Feminism and Freedom from the Prison of Gender Roles,” offer more accessible insight into how gender affects our very existence. Thirty years after the beginning of the second wave of feminism, Gross argues that in many ways, we are no better off than we were before. Still confined to the prison of gender roles, we’ve only become more appreciative of the male gender and increasingly more competitive and materialistic than before.

While Gross’ academic work is reason enough to pick up this collection, the personal essay, which begins the book, highlights the unique challenges she continues to face as the most renowned feminist Buddhist theologian of our time. An introspective woman from a conservative home in Wisconsin, who came of age in the 1950s, Gross is the unlikeliest of comparative religious scholars. Her deeply moving personal essay, “How Did This Ever Happen To Me?” is heart wrenching and inspiring in its detail of her battles against the male-dominated academy, small school academics uninterested in intellectual debate, and a world simply unable to understand a radically peaceful woman much more interested in cultivating her mind than anything that could grow in her womb.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, June 22nd 2009

Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement

admin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:58:00 +0000

By Kathryn Joyce

Beacon Press

When I attended a production of Jesus Christ Superstar as a wee lad of fifteen, I marveled at the song-writing, vocal skills, and daunting cross that loomed amidst a gloomy set design. Being then (and now) agnostic, I was appalled by the religious persecution depicted. I have always been puzzled by the penultimate utterance of Jesus. In the Book of Luke (King James version) 23:34, it is written, “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

I can’t forgive the Christian patriarchy movement subjects of this superbly crafted and deeply troubling new book, for their bad faith, cognitive dissonance, and behavioral misdeeds carry heavy consequences. Whether or not they know what they’re doing remains an open question. Kathryn Joyce’s gripping new account, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, is about Christians who want literally to take over and remake the world by outbreeding everyone else, warping the minds of school-children, justifying bigotry with transparent illogic, and systematically denying civil rights. That most of the violence is committed quietly and privately against women and girls, most of whom accede to it with joy and penitence, will give even the most devoutly and egalitarian Christian reader pause. “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” Christian patriarchy movement members who feel imperiled by Jews, lesbians, Muslims, atheists, gay males, feminists, foreigners, and the less fecund seem conveniently to have forgotten these words.

The book’s twenty chapters are divided into three gendered parts—“Wives,” “Mothers,” and “Daughters”—in each of which Joyce deftly explores the bizarre ideology and political-economy of feminine subservience. The resulting dystopian communities in real-time and on-line in cyber-space rival those depicted in novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale, George Orwell’s 1984, and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can't Happen Here. This ain’t fiction, however. As befitting their understanding and practice of “complementarian theology,” as opposed to the alleged unnaturalness and godlessness of egalitarian gender relations, men and women in the Christian patriarchy movement believe equally (but differently) in the inherent inferiority of Eve (the Original Sin), females (on biological and spiritual grounds), Jezebel (in terms of sex) and women (who have hearts and minds). Sisters are in the process brainwashed into becoming meek and quiet supporters of their brothers, wives are instructed to remain sexually available to their husbands 24/7 (and forego any contraception), and mothers who don’t home-school their children commit them to Satan. Insofar as submissive females require degradation—the more public, the better—virtually every page is painful to read.

Woe unto the woman who proclaims “domestic abuse” or reveals a less than godly husband. Quiverfull opens by recounting the attempted rehabilitation of the disgraced megachurch founder, Ted Haggard, whose initial denial and then avowal of his use of methamphetamine and male sex workers were ripe with possibility. “Complementarian” theology demands that it be not Haggard but Haggard’s wife, Gayle, who bears the brunt of Christian condemnation from low and high places.

Few books have so affected me. This is not the sledge-hammer account I might have written. With equal parts curiosity and compassion, Joyce explains how and why tens of thousands of American women have “chosen” forms of subservience that bankrupt and humiliate them, that crimp their mental development and that hurt them physically and lead sometimes to social leprosy. Each female interviewed firmly and confidently speaks her motivations and explains her anti-feminism while gleefully ignoring the Malthusian outcome of unfettered fertility.

My sole criticism is that Joyce praises the “openness, generosity, courage, and patience” of her key informants with whom she (sometimes, usually, inherently?) “sharply disagreed,” but without revealing any of those disagreements. Joyce’s secular feminist aesthetics and politics are “clear” enough in mind but not in body: how did she manage the flesh-crawling creepiness and awkward silences without every day saying “that’s obviously horseshit” or “I wouldn’t wish this lifestyle on the daughter of my worst enemy?”

That Quiverfull opens with Gayle Haggard’s exemplary case should rouse outside observers of this noxious fundamentalism not to sit on their hands. As she points out, “to follow these ideas to their conclusions can mean, in very real ways [as women], to disappear.”

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., June 15th 2009

Prostitution, Polygamy and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847-1918

admin — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:28:00 +0000

By Jeffrey Nichols

University of Illinois Press

My first publication, in 1987, resulted from a grad school term paper. Jeffrey Nichols’ highly readable monograph resulted from taking a Western History seminar. Thank Goddess for grad school! Big Love fanatics: listen up!

Nichols’ original paper sniffed at the documentary trailhead he explores by way of newspaper stories, photographs, court cases, church records and other forms of documentary evidence from mid-late nineteenth century Utah about prostitution. He tells of the exploits and exploitations of Mormon businessmen, their gentile partners and antagonists, the latter’s outraged wives, the Anglo female brothel owners, and the Anglo, African American, Japanese, and Chinese women who toiled sexually in different labor forms of prostitution. Nichols traces many decades’ worth of “fight over polygamy and the struggle for political, social, and economic power in [Salt Lake City].” He thus deepens considerably our understanding of the social history of sex and gender in the American West and of Mormon-Gentile relations. This text will go over poorly in Utah households and classrooms. (I can imagine a Quorum of the Twelve Apostles being convened in nothing but apoplexy.) Nevertheless, those who pursue the comparative study of sex industries will not be disappointed, although it represents the accounts of judges and politicians more than clients and purveyors of sexual services.

Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power is comprised of five chapters that, combining the usual marks of good scholarship with black-and-white photographs and maps and notes, bring this Frontier West sex industry to life. The title of Chapter 1, “'Celestial Marriage’ vs. ‘Polygamic Lascivious Cohabitation,’” suggests just how far apart were Mormon and gentile viewpoints about polygamy. Those who have read Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven will appreciate Nichols’ marshaling of documentary evidence not presented there.

Nichols lays out the structure and function and racial politics of Salt Lake City’s sex industry, examining in close detail not just the political-economy of prostitution during this time, but the madams, brothels, cribs, piano players, landlords, and politicians. He shows that the growing secularization of Salt Lake City was shaped less by Mormon theology than by the question of prostitution. Prostitution was “good” for business, both Mormon and gentile, which is to say, the judges, courts, landlords and policemen who profited so handsomely from it. Eventually, even the federal government joined forces with proto-feminist organizations to clamp down upon prostitution.

The absence of perspective on female sexuality is glaring. I wanted to learn about the sexual desire (or lack thereof) of monogamous housewives versus that of those sharing a husband with co-wives and “sister-wives.” Trading the search for meaning, feeling, and relational outcome for emphasis upon frequency, price and location doesn’t advance our understanding of what should also be an intimate social history. Nevertheless, Nichols has woven together archival and documentary evidence to write a compelling account of a little known period of American history. Neither capitalism, the Frontier West, the Latter Day Saints Church, nor prostitution itself, of course, are gender neutral, and on this contradiction is balanced a fascinating story.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., February 18th 2009