WATER Voices

Women and Children First

2012-01-10T15:20:00.000-05:00

By: Mary E. Hunt, PhD

Human trafficking is a mega-billion dollar global industry unregulated by any country or international body. It is a criminal activity ignored and/or tolerated with devastating consequences for the person involved, most of whom are women and children.

Trafficking ranks just behind drug and arms trading as the most lucrative forms of commerce. Religiously informed social justice groups need to add this unspeakable activity to our agendas and bring the resources of our religious traditions to the task of eradicating it. I only wonder why it has taken some of us this long to focus our attention on an all too common phenomenon.

It is no surprise that the vast majority of trafficked persons are women and children. Nor is it any shock that most of those who do the trafficking are men. That is simply the power configuration of patriarchy/kyriarchy with trafficking fitting the paradigm exactly, including racial/ethnic minorities being disproportionately represented. As such, trafficking is simply another way that women and children are pawns in an out-of- balance world. No wonder we do not even notice.

The United Nations estimates that between 700,000 to 4 million women (most between ages 18 and 24) and children are involved in trafficking. Their stories vary slightly but the outline is the same. They are moved around like chess pieces for prostitution, illegal labor, and drug-related activities. Most of them experience physical and/or sexual violence. Their vulnerability in the larger context of economic and sexual inequality leaves them ripe for this kind of exploitation.

Recruiters are usually strangers who make a persuasive case to women in need. But a large percentage of those who engage women in trafficking are actually relatives or friends of the family. One study of trafficking done in 2007 indicated that only one person was actually convicted for every 800 people who were trafficked. A logical conclusion is that trafficking is morally and legally trivial in an unjust world.

Trafficking works in such perfect synch with the larger system that most of us in the privileged West can ignore it without blinking because it never passes our screens. Yet it is a dimension of every war, flood, famine, hurricane, and earthquake when people are uprooted without regard for their safety or well-being. Unscrupulous agents take advantage of their situations, prey upon those who are young and vulnerable, and dupe those who seek to better their lots. The moral repugnance of trafficking is only outdone by its criminality.

A major reason why women are ‘willing’ to move from their country of origin to another country is the lure of a safer, more fruitful life for themselves and their children. Trafficking is a ‘natural’ part of the movement of peoples we call migration. In fact, many women respond to bogus offers of employment and help with immigration when in fact they are really assenting to their own servitude.

They find on the other end that they have been bound into prostitution, are raped and sometimes tortured by the same men they had trusted to help move their families to places where they were told there is work.

Rather than becoming legally employed as waitresses or domestic workers, these women end up in prostitution, where they face the added burdens of unwanted pregnancy, HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, and a negative social stigma.

Whether in Benin or Berlin, Minneapolis or Mumbai, the patterns are remarkably common.

Trafficked women are used to entice other women into the process. They are used as examples of people who have ‘made it’ in another country, can send money home, or seem to be living a more comfortable life. But the price they pay is higher than what their friends and family can see from afar. It is a debt their families will pay for generations to come.

Stories of trafficked women and children are hard to read, harder still to incorporate into an analysis of how to rid the world of this hideous dynamic.

Societies that dishonor women by keeping girls from education, by limiting reproductive choices (especially contraception and safe abortion), or by prohibiting women from certain jobs because of their gender should not be surprised when women are trafficked.

Poverty is a powerful motivator for parents who wish a better life for their children. When parents entrust their children to friends and relatives who claim they will enhance their children’s chances, parents unwillingly and unwittingly risk their children falling into the hands of traffickers.

The scope and ubiquity of the problem confound: from the smallest towns in Africa to the biggest cities of Europe, from the teeming streets of Asian capitals to the tranquil towns of the American Midwest.

Obviously trafficking has tacit support from some law enforcement officials, border patrols agents in many places, and perhaps even from corrupt governments. It is a product of organized crime and a by-product of gang activities. Yet the result is always the same —women and children harmed.

I stretch to find resources equal to the enormity of the problem. One promising font of insight and advocacy is a new anthology edited by MacArthur Award-winning historian Bernadette J. Brooten, “Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies.”

In her anthology, Dr. Brooten and her collaborators trace the history of slavery in order to show the vestigial ways in which it is still very much a part of our world. They demonstrate that the sacred texts of major religious traditions like Judaism, Islam, and Christianity have not been unequivocal in their condemnation of slavery. For example, Jesus never outlawed it. The gestalt of this project is to lay bare the scaffolding of slavery and provide tools for eradicating it.

Human trafficking is a close cousin of slavery. Though Dr. Brooten and her marvelous array of scholars, activists, and artists do not take it on directly, there is much to learn from, and their approach can be useful in the struggles to outlaw trafficking.

First, they take a deep look at the history and contours of slavery. This needs to be done in order to draw an accurate map of where and how women and children are moved about, in what regions and countries people are most at risk.

Second, they bring a multi-disciplinary approach to the topic including everything from religion to hip-hop music, from law and anthology to autobiographical accounts of slavery. Finally, they extrapolated from the historical data on slavery to contemporary ways in which women are mistreated, ways in which sexual play can mimic slavery. The same method would be helpful on trafficking. First- person accounts provide reality to what can remain an abstraction. A good play, even a musical that would educate audiences, remains to be written on trafficking. Some artistic ways of elucidating the painful reality might invite more outrage a la “The Vagina Monologues.”

A long look at human trafficking will reveal the ways in which it has been considered normal, the extent to which many women have no say in their whereabouts, no choice in their work, no control over how their children will be used/abused. In addition, legal studies and a review of government policies can reveal the many loopholes that allow trafficking to continue unchecked.

Women and children used to come first in the social order because of their perceived vulnerability. Regrettably, women’s movements around the world in recent decades did not bring an end to that vulnerability. Indeed, with increased distance between the moneyed and the rest of us, I daresay women and children are at more of a risk than ever.

With trafficking of women and children now a big business, eradicating it has to become a priority agenda item for all who seek justice, lest trafficking be considered “too big to fail.”

Carol Scinto: One of a Kind

2011-12-19T09:16:00.003-05:00

by Mary E. Hunt

December 16, 2011

On the occasion of what would have been her 86^th Birthday

Joe, Cathy, Blaise, Mia, and Tup, family and friends—good morning, and thank you for the rich remembrances already shared. My sympathy to each and all of you on the loss of Carol Blythe Murdock Scinto, one of a kind.

Several years ago, Carol asked me to speak at her memorial service. My response was an immediate ‘yes,’ qualified only by the fact that I was not prepared to do it any time soon. She honored her part of that bargain by living well beyond what medical science might have indicated—“What do they know,” she was heard to utter more than once—so I will honor mine. It is not easy to speak publicly about a person one loves as dearly as I loved my friend Carol. Nonetheless, knowing that you loved her as well makes it easier for all of us to accept her death and give abundant thanks for her many wonderful years among us.

We at WATER, the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual in Silver Spring, MD, think of Carol as our own because she was. In the 1980s, after some innings with the local Presbyterian church, an astute there, then Margee Adams, now Margee Iddings, suggested that Carol might want to explore a new place in town called WATER. It was run by women, Margee said, and featured programs and publications that Carol might find more compatible with her feminist theo-politics than the biblical fare offered in the congregation. Carol, ever one to explore and inquire, came by for a look.

It was love at first sight all around. Here was a smart woman whose brain and heart were deeply connected, a literate liberal with progressive tendencies, an editor looking for a manuscript, a volunteer in search of a place to invest her considerable talent. We at WATER were a fledgling feminist organization. We used to joke about changing our name to WINE: Women in Need of Everything. Then Carol came along as the answer to our prayers. She was one of a kind.

Year in and year out—at least 16 by my reckoning—Carol edited the WATERwheel, our newsletter, to a fare thee well. Once an innocent reader complained that, for the first time, she saw typos in our work—what was happening? I hastened to report that Carol and Joe were in New Zealand. Needless to say, it never happened on Carol’s watch. She was the deadline enforcer and even contributed some of her original artwork to WATER’s projects.

Carol busied herself with ordering copies of books we might consider for review. Publishers realized that ours was, as they call, a “hot list” in the field—our readers buy and read books—so they are always anxious to get books into our hands. Carol handled the whole enterprise. In so doing, she built what is now a 5000+-volume resource center in our modest office. We named it the Carol Blythe Murdock Scinto Library. With Cathy’s good suggestions, we even have it online where people all over the world can find an obscure title.

At the lunch table at WATER and over countless cups of tea that a proper Mrs. Scinto taught us to enjoy, we learned a great deal from and about Carol. As the biography read earlier makes clear, she came from the far west, went to college, and then to work as a journalist. Her time in England was perhaps the most formative of all—satisfying her yen for travel, her keen interest in the world, and indulging her passion for good literature. If the Queen had been astute, she would have invited Carol for tea.

Anyone who knew Carol even casually came to know the whole family. There were suitors along the way, but there was only one love in her life, an Italian Catholic guy from New York. By the time his mother and aunts got an up-close look at this WASP girl from the West Coast, what they thought was immaterial. Joe and Carol, AKA Loopy and Spud, began a partnership that endures well beyond death.

You, the daughters Scinto, were the pride of her life—each of you in your unique way. I’ve often thought that she should have written the screenplay for “The Lives and Loves of the Sisters Scinto”! She would have cast each of you in a delightful light—never forgetting the challenges you offered her, but always emphasizing your goodness. She loved you each, and your families, more than life itself.

Carol did not do Middle America very well. While she was as supportive a parent as ever lived, she was not one to let doctors, teachers, much less politicians get away with mediocrity. Those tough years of the 70s and 80s were challenging for her, which is why finding WATER must have seemed like an oasis of sorts.

Carol Scinto was smart beyond measure. Recall that perhaps apocryphal story of the Encyclopedia Britannica salesperson arriving at the door of her family home to sell a set. One of Carol’s brothers is alleged to have asked, “Why would we need an encyclopedia? We have Carol.” I have come to think of Carol Scinto as what we did before we Googled. We simply asked Carol. Ninety-nine times out of 100 she was correct, a comma here or a comma there. Those in her book club will agree that she was one of a kind.

She loved to travel. So when WATER organized a trip to Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, Carol was among the first to sign up. It was a rigorous adventure visiting poor women and learning about our sister groups there. But Carol was stalwart and enthusiastic to the end because she could see the value of such intercultural sharing, even if the schedule was exhausting.

Travel went in two directions. In subsequent years, Cristina Grela from Uruguay sent her daughter Marianna to live in Rockville for a while. Sandra Duarte from Brasil was a Scinto surrogate daughter when she wrote her dissertation at WATER. Carol also befriended WATER’s visiting scholar Solveig Boasdottir and, later, her husband Baldur Baldurson who visited Rockville. Those two friends recently met the Scintos for a visit in New Jersey. Mrs. Scinto edited both of their doctoral dissertations, Solveig’s on feminist theology and violence, and Baldur’s on some new ideas in dermatology. Her scope was amazing.

Carol met Gwen Benjamin from Australia through WATER. Thelma and Louise had nothing on them. When Carol and Joe were Down Under, they teamed up with Gwen and her late husband Marcus in what had to be one of the world’s most enjoyable foursomes. Stories of their travel adventures are the stuff of legend—someone got locked in a hotel bathroom and had to be rescued by a bellhop if I recall correctly! Their friendship gave new luster to our Alliance.

Carol was as committed to justice as she was smart. Before we knew her, she chained herself to the White House fence with colleagues who were seeking the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Memo to Amanda and your generation: the ERA remains to be ratified. Later she joined me in a ‘pumps and pearls’ arrest in front of the Vatican Embassy to draw attention to the Roman Catholic Church’s discrimination against women. Pope John Paul II was in this country for a visit. To get his attention, a dozen of us unfurled a banner that read “Women’s Rights are Human Rights” before we were hauled off in the paddy wagon for a cameo appearance in the DC court system. Charges were dropped because it was indeed legal to protest that close to an embassy. Carol was justifiably proud of her rap sheet.

When their mothers died, Joe and Carol gave WATER a gift to start “The Mothers’ Fund” in 1992. The founding papers read: “This fund, initiated with a gift to WATER from Joseph and Carol Murdock Scinto in honor of their mothers, is intended to provide small but strategically focused grants to women seeking, individually or through organizations, to effect social change by combatting want, ignorance, and injustice experienced in their homes and communities.” Over the past two decades, many women have received help to go to a conference, to buy books, to replace a computer damaged in the Chilean earthquake, to finish a dissertation—always small grants in the spirit of the widow’s mite but enough to know that someone cared that they succeed. Carol did. One woman recipient wrote last year: “I learned from you folks in the Mothers’ Fund to be attentive to helping other women.” Indeed that was part of Carol’s legacy.

In recent years, and especially after her devastating diagnosis, Carol was slowed but never stopped. She continued to grace the office on occasion, always eager to meet the new interns and keep up with our efforts. She delighted in the fact that we never capitulated to religious patriarchy because she didn’t either. She was a woman strong of spirit but honest enough to say she didn’t believe most religious tenets. I admired her and agreed with her.

Carol died as she lived—on her own terms, surrounded by her family members who knew her wishes to die peacefully and without a lot of medical intervention. So it was, and she showed a grace and strength even then which her family matched.

We don’t expect to find another Carol Scinto. She was truly one of a kind. But the impression she left on friends, neighbors, colleagues, and most especially on her family means that we will see hints and glimpses of her goodness wherever we are.

Thank you, Carol, and blessed be.

Mary E. Hunt: Like Falling Off a Blog

2011-12-05T10:06:00.001-05:00

Check out Mary Hunt's featured post on the Feminist Studies in Religion blog!

http://www.fsrinc.org/blog/falling-blog

Mercy Oduyoye Writes a Letter to Her Niece

2011-06-27T16:47:00.002-04:00

Dear Maame Effua,

Here is the letter from Belem which I promised. You wanted to know why I travel so much and why to Brazil this time. As I always say, I want to join in saving the world. Here in Belem, people are concerned about working to save the world for you and your grand children. We do not want to leave you and them with plastic bags and a lack of ways of dealing with the toilet business. You know about planting trees from your school project. The people here are interested in ensuring that the will of God is done on earth. They are theologians like myself and they have taken the theme “Earth, Water and Theology: Another World is Possible.” My role here is simply to listen to what everybody says and then at the end tell them what I think should be followed through with. There are two others with me on this assignment. You saw that on the programme of the forum.

Maame, a lot is going on, but I shall leave it to the video to tell you about what the Amazon River looks like. I shall leave out the rituals and the mass media and the important people we spoke to and visited. It will be too long a letter. I shall also not tell you what I liked and what I did not like. I do not know what you will make of all this, but I know your love for words and the dictionary you are building for yourself, so let me just tell you what I have here. I am sure there would be lots of interesting words but again the letter will be too long. I shall bring you the key words when I return. You can imagine how much 600 people can say in three days especially people who are concerned with the future of the earth.

You see Maame, The people here cherish the hope to bring about “another possible world.” That is a world we would not be ashamed to leave to you. So there was an old man, all grey and full of theological wisdom to share with us how he sees us working on ecology if we want to see another possible world. He was from Latin America. There was a grandma from USA and an uncle from Africa and many, many others who spoke from the platform and debated and proposed issues towards this future. Many more spoke from the floor and even more in workshops and in the corridors. It was a veritable festival of words all aimed at saving the world. All who spoke shared their wisdom on how human beings see ourselves in relation to the rest of creation.

Maame, many speakers pointed out that we have placed human beings in the centre of our world view and our thinking and acting. This is called anthropocentrism. This anthropocentrism, they say, must stop if we are to see another world. Seen as a planet in space, we human beings and the earth are one, so we survive or perish together. They told us how human lifestyle is affecting the climate around us. You may not know this but in the 70 plus years that I have been on earth the climate has changed a lot. We used to be able to tell when the two rainy seasons and two dry seasons in Ghana would take place. Today all has gone haywire, and that is really disturbing. Why all these terrible floods? We are all puzzled. When there is a flood, all nature mourns.

This, Maame, is why we do not only have to see all creation as one family. As human beings we too are one. The crises we are going through, financial, challenges to healthy living, energy crises, shortage of potable water, and so on affect the whole world. Maame, you know about water shortage in Accra and load shedding which demands that we keep emergency lights and generators for electricity. Well, these things happen all over the world for different reasons and will get worse if we do not act quickly. We cannot go on, we have to change or we shall meet the same fate as the dinosaurs. We have to change our understanding of creation and our place in it. We have to try new ways of relating to creation and to one another as a human community.

Maame, we have heard again and again words like connectedness, uniqueness, and mutuality, multi-religious approach to our challenges, learning from indigenous peoples, working with people’s movements, and embarking on an inter-disciplinary approach in our deliberations on a ‘possible world.’ We even practiced this as we listened to others respond to the main speeches. We were reminded that experiences, visions, and practices of indigenous peoples are not for entertainment. Their analyses of situations have to be taken seriously and should help shape the world for which we yearn.

Maame, the long and short of all this is that if we want to live long, and have a healthy earth with healthy waters, we have to stop being self-centered. Life is stronger than us but life is also fragile and vulnerable in human hands. We are greedy and inconsiderate and so degrade the earth, the waters, and other human beings. If we are to leave a beautiful world for you and your grandchildren, we have to take seriously the fact that creation does not belong to us; we are part of creation. We cannot do what we like with earth, water, and other human beings. God expects us to keep the earth in good condition. The earth takes care of us and we have to take care of the earth and of each other. We are caretakers of creation for posterity.

Maame, we expect all—especially people of faith—to ensure that vulnerable people do not die out. Just as we say some plants and animals are endangered species, so are some human beings, either because of what they look like or where they live or some other things. We heard discussions on the ecological racism that saves some and lets others die. People who have less modern technology are the ones suffering because of our over-use and abuse of creation. Yet, they are people who have another way of living with creation that better suits our life together and may direct us to “another possible world,” the world we wish to leave you and your grandchildren. As Christian theologians our hope is that the church, for example, will listen and learn from “vulnerable people.” They will teach us ways of renewing creation with ritual that show respect to the rest of creation.

Maame, go on the Internet and check the number of people who claim to be Christian. If all of us care about the health of the earth, we can leave you and your grandchildren another world. Then if all people of faith were to do the same, we would surely reach our goal of “another possible world.” God has given us a choice on how to live on earth. We have a choice to be angels or devils. If we do not choose to be angels, then earth’s day is short and so is ours. If we do not choose to be angels, your grandchildren will curse us and we cannot stand that curse. We want to be remembered for good. Maame, we have learnt that the suffering of the earth is the suffering of the people. In fact, in the Bible, there is a statement to the effect that the whole creation groans while waiting for human beings to show their affinity to God.

So what is the way forward? What are we going to do in order to have the future we hope for? Here are some of the suggestions:

1. We have to change our way of thinking. We have to think about earth, not just people. We have to change our destructive ways of production. That way, we can make earth safer, more just, and more beautiful. Our scientific creations have to generate more life for all and not just for some while others die. We want to promote solidarity and co-operation so we should avoid competition. (I know you are very competitive so what I have to say to you personally is that, when we compete it should be in order to bring the best for all and not to engage in a game of conquering others, thinking that we alone are entitled to live, and so claim the privilege of doing so without a care for others.) But I promised not to comment, so let me go to the next point.

2. Maame, we have said so many beautiful words here. We want to celebrate life, the life of the whole universe. If we create and live by life-sustaining principles, the crises we now face will not end in tragedy. We shall jump out of it by caring and so enter the celebrative mode. We have said that all living beings have the same basis for life. We have said that life is one community linked together like a net. We want to live this reality. When we defend humanity we should do it as people who have to defend all creation. Maame, there is so much we want to do, so that we can look at the result and say “It is good,” as God did at the end of each of the six days of creation in Genesis 1. We know we are not to spoil the earth. Yet look at the mountains of waste around us, the human and nuclear waste we have yet to manage so they do not bring us death. We are going to work on them. Simple things like not throwing plastic bags around have yet to become our way of life. We are all responsible.

You and your younger sisters, too, have to learn this and practice and turn things around so they become good. We have the opportunity to live for the good of all living beings every day of our lives. Yes, we have time to save the earth, that is, if everyone becomes involved in this task. You, too, have to use water responsibly and have Mum and Dad put rain gutters on the eaves to harvest rain water for the garden. We have to learn to recycle all, including water. We all have to learn to live simply as we live before God, a God whose servants are given the duty of caring for what God created and declared Good. Find what has to be turned to good and work at it. Join all who want to do the same and together, we shall have another world.

You know, Maame, sometimes we meet people who think they are better human beings than others and they do things to hurt the feelings of the people they look down upon. Well, those of us at the theological forum say this must stop. In any case, if anyone tries to do that to you, refuse to accept it and say, “I am good and beautiful and can produce what is good and beautiful. God made me so and that is who I am.” Of course this means that you, too, will not be mean to others.

Here in Belem, we have promised to join all those who have been excluded. The world is large. Japanese have their stories; Africans taken to the Americas and the Caribbean have their stories. We must learn the stories and the wisdom of all peoples with whom we share this one house we call earth. You are reading “The Audacity of Hope.” Well, Obama was mentioned many times. The lesson we learnt is that one person can inspire communities to act together. All over the world we can dare to hope for another world. We must not label people evil but seek to understand their view and struggle to bring about the good as a whole human community. This is another possible world, a world of inclusiveness that has room for all.

Women theologians have been calling attention to the need to take women’s bodies seriously and to follow the new thinking that women have concerning ecology. Listen to some of what women here have been saying: human bodies are 70% water, so we have to ensure the health of our water sources. We are also earth and so we have living relations with both water and earth. They are our sister and we have to speak love to them and they will respond with love.

The women said when we think of God, we think of how we live. We think of the Spirit that makes creation go on continually. We cannot know and understand all about God but we know that theology is a way of life with God, a way of living with God. We know that God gives us divine power. This is not power to bully others, but power to work with others for good. God gives us power to speak our own words in our own language. It is necessary to be good in the English language but learn your Twi and Ga too.

The women advised that we must listen to our bodies. When issues are raised that concern our bodies we must not keep quiet and allow others to decide for us. The women theologians are saying when we want to talk about God we should begin with the words and lives of people we do not normally listen to or include among our friends and companions.

Again, there is something called sexism that women have been talking about for a long time. Sexism is what makes us say men don’t do this and women don’t do that. This often hurts both women and men. We need to think seriously about how to change our attitudes and our language and not hurt women and men by this way of thinking about human beings which obliges them to do what they do not want to do simply because they have been born male or female. We should do what makes people come alive and not what puts them down. The women said, and the men agreed, that what we need is more love, not hate; more community life, not divisions among people. We should always think of the needs of those who are unable to fend for themselves and work with them towards the coming of a better life. If the earth is destroyed, all of us will perish together, but we can together seek joy. So we have to “think big,” the women said, and then we can act effectively in the crises we face today. We have to act courageously. We cannot wait to be given permission to act—we just have to act if we are to achieve our hope of another world.

People who believe in God are being called to show that their belief makes lives that are good for the whole of creation. Everybody, including children, can do something. I know you already are, but there is no end to services that children can render as my generation struggles against leaving you an ugly world.

But Maame, there is much that I cannot write now. Some of what has happened in this liberation theology forum and what will happen next week in the Social Forum, in which some 80,000 people will participate, will appear in books that you can read. I also know that even before the books come out you can go on the Internet to find out more. There is a lot that I do not have the right words to talk about to you but on the separate sheet you will find some of the ideas.

The spirit of God the Creator has been with us and we are all fired up like the disciples at Pentecost. We shall go out to tell others that another world is possible. I hope you will also tell all your playmates, classmates, and schoolmates that a possible world of beauty is in sight.

Blessings,

Grandma Mercy

CLOSING PANEL/ GLOBAL VIEWS.

The assignment was to join analysis and global views of the activities, debates and different issues raised during the gathering…float seeds toward the future on this process.

The format of a letter to a nine year old is used to remind us that we cannot talk about the future without communicating with children and even more crucial, involving children in the reflections and the actions. Below is some of what I noted for further work.

ISSUES HIGHLIGHTED

>Re-orientation away from anthropocentrism.

>Diversity and sustainability; lifestyles that do not harm nature.

> How does liberation theology sustain and promote life?

>Community versus fragmentation.

>Sexual diversity and heterosexism; re-examination of masculinity and femininity.

>Procreative justice.

>Migration, displacement, multiple identities, search for community and search for meaning through religion.

>Climate change and global warming.

PARADIGM SHIFTS

>Focus on ecology and theology.

>Focus on the theology of embodiment.

>From patriarchal God to the Sophia paradigm.

>A new theological epistemology that involves speaking about the unspeakable, like sewage, same-sex relations and procreative justice.

>Create awareness of the price we pay to bring an alternative world and cleaner world, to generate a spirituality that accepts this sacrifice.

>Embark on a theology from the margins, for example, people who have disabilities together with those who are temporarily able-bodied.

>Narrative theology is in.

< Inter-religious dialogue is in.

SEEDS FOR THE FUTURE.

Ø A sustainable life which does not harm nature. Highlight Oceania where we dump our nuclear waste.

Ø Seek from indigenous people the meaning they give their celebrations.

Ø We cannot talk about environmental issues in the abstract… some human and other livings beings are already dying.

Ø We have to embrace and work with the possibility of regeneration and transformation. We can all deal with “the sewage” we have all created.

Ø When we stake a preferential option for the marginalized, we include ourselves.

Ø We do not need a license to do theology in the light of our current struggle to seek a just world. What we need is the courage to take the first steps and to keep on keeping on.

Catholic Church Targets Reformers

2011-04-12T20:59:00.002-04:00

Catholic Church Targets Proponent of Women's Ordination; Feminist Theologian

by Mary E. Hunt

As a senior official for Pope John Paul II, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger envisioned a leaner, meaner church, with conservative doctrine and compliant faithful. Now that he is Pope Benedict XVI, his dream is coming true. Other senior churchmen, apparently unaware of the scandal that pedophilia and episcopal cover-ups have wrought, go blithely about their business of disciplining priests, nuns, and theologians. What used to be a large tent of a church is now a tepee—soon to be a pup tent—if these gentlemen have their way. Catholics wonder where it will end.

Click here to read the full article by Mary E. Hunt. It appears in the online magazine Religion Dispatches.

Will Women Priests Change the Church?

2011-02-09T10:42:00.002-05:00

A New Documentary, "Pink Smoke Over the Vatican," starts the conversation...

Catholic women priests are an oxymoron for the Vatican. It considers them automatically excommunicated before the holy oil is dry on their hands. Other Catholics accept them as sacramental ministers and are delighted with the innovation. Still, others, myself included, want far deeper structural changes in the Catholic Church such that priesthood loses its baked-on charm and ministry becomes the expected task of adult members. This is an important theological conversation that the Vatican wishes would go away. Memo to them: it is just starting.

Read the full article by Mary E. Hunt on the online magazine Religion Dispatches.

The (Mostly Catholic) Anti-Abortion Roe v. Wade Schlep

2011-01-27T08:35:00.002-05:00

Why don’t they just call it the Catholic March for Life? I wonder this every year when I wander down to Capitol Hill for the annual commemoration of Roe v. Wade. Thousands of anti-abortion Catholics and a few friends gather in Washington, DC for an always-cold schlep to the Supreme Court. This year was no exception. Emboldened by the recent Republican anti-choice gains in the House of Representatives, the crowd was more hopeful than in recent years but otherwise largely unchanged. They were Catholics.

Read the full article by Mary E. Hunt here, as it appears in the online magazine Religion Dispatches.

WATER collaborates in Chile

2011-01-04T15:59:00.004-05:00

This new piece from the Women's Media Center includes our collaboration in Santiago, Chile.

EXCLUSIVE: In Chile, a Spiritual Space for Activism

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by Maxine Lowy

January 4, 2011.

Women who formed the backbone of the antipoverty and human rights work of liberation theology in Latin America have organized for women’s empowerment for decades.

Mary Hunt, third from right: "Every morning participants gathered for physical exercise around a spiral, signifying the ways in which our lives and commitments move."

Twenty years since Chile emerged from dictatorship, the legacy of faith-based activism against authoritarianism lives on among women who challenge traditional patriarchal notions of Christian religion. The fertile ground that in these two decades has nurtured women who seek full participation in their churches and society at large is the annual Women’s Theological Week, which convened most recently November 17 to 19 in Santiago, Chile.

The gathering has been organized since 1991 by the Diego de Medellin Ecumenical Center (CEDM, its Spanish acronym), an institution that channels faith to address pressing social issues. Women’s Theological Week brings together Catholics and Protestants, theologians and grassroots community organizers, nuns and Pentecostals under the multi-hued banner of feminist theology.

In Latin America, feminist theology springs from the liberation theology that was born as a theological commitment to the poor in Latin America in the early ‘60s and came into full maturity when military regimes took the continent by assault in the ‘70s and ‘80s. During the 17 years (September 1973 to March 1990) Augusto Pinochet held Chile in his grip, from under the protective wings of the Catholic Church arose neighborhood health committees, human rights groups, soup kitchens, crafts coops and an array of mutual aid groups, with majority participation by women, to resist the authoritarian political and economic policies.

Liberation theology taught how to read and analyze the Bible in light of the repression Chileans were witnessing. But by the mid 1980s when secular women took to the streets demanding “democracy in the country and in the home,” women’s empowerment gave way to a sense of marginalization even in the progressive but male-dominated liberation theology circles.

Women’s Theological Week coordinator Doris Muñoz, a CEDM staffer who during dictatorship participated in the Catholic-led Sebastian Acevedo Movement against Torture, exemplifies this itinerary. “My political conscience is embodied in the Christian ethic of giving sight to the blind.” When, in 1988, she entered a Chilean seminary renown as a place for reflection on liberation theology, she perceived “levels of discrimination” and realized that it “was not the same to study theology as a woman, or to study theology as a layperson.” Today Muñoz considers herself a feminist theologian or, more precisely, an eco-feminist, because “the patterns that degrade the environment are the same as those that subjugate women.” She insists, “We need a change in cosmovision because androcentrism dominates the world and we as women suffer as a result.”

The roadmap for that paradigm change is described in the book Espacios Abiertos: Caminos de la Teología Feminista (Open Spaces: Paths of Feminist Theology) launched by theologian Ute Siebert in the context of the Women’s Theological Week. Siebert, a co-founder of the women’s ethical and spiritual collective Con-spirando, describes how in Latin America “Biblical interpretation from a woman’s eyes has been much more difficult than reading the Bible from the vantage point of the poor.” The scant references to women, she explains, often convey explicit messages of discrimination or outright aversion. The search for new names, images and metaphors for the divine without the connotation of power, obedience or symbolic violence has been a lodestone for the process of constructing feminist theology.

In Chile, the powerful influence of the Catholic Church and its Evangelical brothers on sexual and reproductive health public policy, as well as traditional concepts of family embraced by the country’s conservative president, encroaches upon the lives of all women, believers and non-believers alike. For Mary Hunt, co-director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER, of Silver Spring, Maryland), who was featured speaker at the first Women’s Theological Week and returned for this year’s twentieth convocation, “Seeing how religion plays such a key role in preventing women from making their own decisions, preventing women from being who they want to be, I think it is rather short-sighted if you want to make social change but don’t want to deal with religion.”

More than a hundred women attended this year’s Women’s Theological Week retreat and roundtable discussions

(left to right) Pastors Neli Maske and Natalia Salas and CEDM staff members Maria Palma, Doris Muñoz and Loreto Fernandez.

on “Women Making Memory, Sharing Transformations, and Building Gender Justice.” In former years, the event has focused on feminist interpretations of the Bible, images of women and the divine, environment, encrypted violence against women, celebration of body and creation of ritual.

Although seminar participants come from a diversity of ecclesiastical practices and life experiences, the points of convergence, specifically, what Mary Hunt calls the “dynamics of religion,” overshadow their differences. “Top-down leadership, a single my-way-or-the-highway approach to reading Scripture, and the exclusion of women from ordained ministry cross religious lines. In twenty years, women who normally would have been in their own silos—the Baptist silo, the Pentecostal silo, the Catholic silo and Jewish silo— are now in waves together. Because of the rise of religious fundamentalism, you now have waves of progressive Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims who are working on some of the same things and treating their religions in the same ways.”

At La Trinidad Lutheran Congregation in Santiago, a woman is in the pulpit men had occupied during the first 30 years of the parish’s life. Pastor Neli Maske grew up in Brazil active in both the Lutheran Church and the Worker’s Party, but credits her years in Chile as fundamental to discovery of a theology from a woman’s perspective. She attended the first Women’s Theological Week as a student and participated in the most recent as ordained pastor. “I came from a society—Brazilian and Lutheran—where these issues are fairly resolved. In Chile people look at you as if to ask, ‘Who are you to wear a clerical collar?’”

Yet many Catholic women have been drawn to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Chile, headed by a woman president, attracted by the openness, opportunity for greater participation, and trust exuded by women pastors, especially in the eyes of victims of domestic violence reluctant to confide in their priests or male pastors. La Trinidad Congregation once hosted a forum on sexual and reproductive rights, in which Maske posed her belief in a woman’s right to choose.

Neli Maske observes that the greatest strides achieved by women of all faiths are in regards to leadership. “I know women who two decades ago were completely submissive as persons, and today coordinate women’s spirituality nationally. But these women leaders are still invisible in church structures, and the challenge that lies ahead is to give visibility to women and women leaders.”

Married and a mother of two children, she is a positive role model. Yet she confides, “Many in the ecumenical world marvel at how I unite all these roles. You look at yourself, and, frankly, it clashes with a machista society. And, sometimes, I just feel exhausted. I admire nuns because they have the freedom to develop themselves fully, without raising children and running a home.”

As Stephany Diaz, a 25-year-old religion education student who traveled to the Women’s Theological Week retreat from southern Talca, put it, “After twenty years, I think feminist theology in Chile is still in diapers. It is very hard, but, for me, it opens up a whole new way of thinking.”

The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author alone and do not represent WMC. WMC is a 501(c)(3) organization and does not endorse candidates.

Ask, Tell - DREAM

2011-01-04T09:33:00.003-05:00

Episcopal Divinity School recently launched a new blog, 99 Brattle: Progressive theology and critical thinking to transform the world. This new form of communication and engagement will help EDS and its bloggers to "share our ideas about how progressive Christianity can transform the world."

Mary E. Hunt is among the first contributors, with a piece which highlights three reasons to get behind the DREAM Act. Read it here: http://99brattle.blogspot.com/2011/01/ask-tell-dream.html and let us know what you think!

Mary E. Hunt reflects on "Renaissance man" Rustum Roy (1924-2010)

2010-12-21T09:35:00.007-05:00

Rustum Roy: Science, Society, and Healing
Mary E. Hunt
October 18, 2010

Religion and science lost a phenomenal man this season when Rustum Roy (1924-2010), an Indian born materials scientist, 33rd generation Brahmin and progressive Christian, passed away in State College, PA, where he worked for more than fifty years. He was phenomenal because he combined a world-class scientific mind with a deep commitment to liberal unto liberationist religion, and topped it off with an ever-deepening conviction about body, mind, and spirit connections. What he brought to the science-religion conversation, unlike so many scientists who are religiously conservative, was a mind as open, critical, and learned about religion as he was skeptical, rigorous, and data driven in science.

The easiest way to describe Rustum is to call him the Renaissance man that he was in every sense of the term. He was classically educated in India where he met Gandhi who came to his house for tea with Rustum’s father who was a high government official. He earned a U.S. PhD and returned briefly to India to work. But given that the pace of research was slow in his native land, Rustum returned to his alma mater, Penn State, to engage in basic scientific research.

He was trained as an earth scientist. He was among the first to see the need for interdisciplinary work among geologists, applied chemists, physicists, even engineers, to name just a few of the intersecting disciplines that make up Materials Science. What is now a well-established field was an idea that Rustum Roy pioneered. He invented and patented with the best of scientists, wrote more that 800 scientific papers, consulted for Bell Labs. In essence, he was a scientist’s scientist. But he also knew and loved the arts, adding a gallery to the Materials Research Lab at Penn State. Science policy became his forte as he helped to shape the way government and industry allocate resources for research and development, always weaving social values into the equation.

At the same time, Rustum helped create a small Christian base community, the Sycamore Community, in State College, PA. He preached regularly at the innovative Church of the Savior in Washington, DC, chaired the board of Kirkridge, a progressive conference center in Bangor, PA, and served on the board of the National Council of Churches. Somehow he found time for voluminous correspondence, dozens of phone calls a day, and a vital family life with his wife, children, and the extended Roy clan. Rustum worked tirelessly, often returning to the office after a family dinner to burn the midnight oil on one of several journals he helped to found, or simply to support a graduate student whose thesis needed some tending.

The man was amazing in his production and in his enthusiasm for new ideas. Of course, like many gentleman of a certain age, he could not have done it all without the many (mostly women) support staffers who made his plane arrangements for the hundreds of national and international meetings he attended, kept his appointments straight, and polished up his countless articles, books, chapters, and scientific papers. It was not unusual to get a late night phone call; Rustum had a new idea he just needed to share and assess with his fifteen closest colleagues who knew about the topic.

Believe it or not, the man was much more than all of this though I find the thought of it dizzying. He made the garden-variety workaholic look slothful. He never missed a chance to combine work and pleasure, often finding time during his Washington, DC visits to gather friends for a simple meal and stimulating conversation. He replicated that dynamic around the world.

More than a Renaissance man, Rustum Roy was a phenom. As Wikipedia would have it, a Phenom is at once a kind of electron microscope, a progressive rock group from Bangalore, India, a computer processor, and a television show. Yes, this is getting closer to the man I knew who left the Renaissance in his dust.

I met Rustum in 1984 when a mutual friend, Anne Stewart, a United Methodist minister, invited both of us to lecture at a conference she was coordinating on friendship, sexuality and the church. Rustum and his wife, Della, also a materials scientist, had published a book called Honest Sex in 1968, in which they had opened up the possibility of married people having additional intimate friends. Needless to say, they knew a lot more about the topic than I did and we became friends and colleagues instantly.

Rustum pioneered Science, Technology and Society as a field, starting an organization and a journal, as was his wont in new endeavors. He realized that by networking the right people and publishing the key articles (before and in the early days of the Internet!) the multiplier effect would take over. Religion, of course, was an integral part of society.

His interest in religion went back to his family of origin, Protestant Christians in India. When he arrived in the U.S. he had early connections to progressive Protestants. He eventually fell in with Jon Oliver Nelson and the merry band at Kirkridge who practiced the “Picket and Pray” spirituality with roots both in the Social Gospel and the rigorous spirituality of the Iona Community in Scotland. His religious professional friends included Bishop John A. T. Robinson of Honest to God fame, Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, and Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, all innovators in their respective circles.

Rustum gave the prestigious Hibbert Lectures, nonsectarian treatments of theological issues, in 1979, later published in a book entitled Experimenting with Truth. He joined the Hibbert company of luminaries that now includes William James, Josiah Royce, Albert Schweitzer, James Luther Adams, and Karen Armstrong among others. He argued that the basic scientific work of our time was finished. There would be more applications, but the nuts and bolts were all there by the 1970’s. It was time, he urged, to see how the “end of science” could mean the beginning of something new.

Rustum was a scientific and religious contrarian. Just as he rejected the sacred cows of science, so too did he reject the popular neo-orthodoxy and liberalism in religion in favor of liberation theology, feminist theology, and other less well-accepted theological approaches. He worked hard to defeat the Superconducting Supercollider, a move the U.S. House made in 1992, effectively ending the gravy train for scientific research that Roy was honest enough to say was not necessary. In religion, he was an early supporter of rights for same-sex lovers.

What was ahead? The science-religion conversation that the John Templeton Foundation began funding in the late 1980’s out of what is now a $1.8 billion endowment was of little interest to Rustum. He preferred to emphasize science and religion in more organic ways. For example, he saw to it that science was part of the conversation in the revival of Parliament of the World’s Religions. He insisted that progressive religious voices be part of the dialogue with scientists. He was skeptical of the conservative framing of so much of the science-religion discussion that left engineering out of science and ethics out of religion. Rustum realized that such framing was the death knell of any useful collaboration.

Eventually he went in a different direction—even more applied—into the area of “whole person medicine.” This was somewhat surprising to me in light of his socially responsible faith—did I mention that he was on the board of the Calvert Group, the socially responsible investment firm well into his 80’s—which seemed a far cry from the seemingly fuzzy healing crowd. But I was wrong.

Rustum met and worked with Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra on the intersection of the physical, mental, and spiritual components of healing. In his retirement years he taught in Arizona where a lot of this work goes on. He was a big supporter of the Qigong movement, a Chinese approach to healing and exercise. I should have known that he would bring his usual rigor and style to the work of healing.

True to form, he set up a non-profit, “Friends of Health” to bring the right people together http://www.wholepersonhealing.org/. The group’s first accomplishment, rather on the order of basic science, was to establish “whole person healing” as the preferred term, replacing “alternative medicine” and other lesser explanations for what is increasingly popular approach. Another move by the group was to explore the nature of liquid water to show, with the help of insights from materials science, that homeopathic medicine can’t be written off as scientifically untenable. This was the among last of his scientific forays http://www.rustumroy.com/Roy_Structure%20of%20Water.pdf but I predict it will have future ripples.

Just as he was decades ahead of the curve in science, I suspect that he was decades ahead of the curve in the whole person healing work. It does not matter. The world eventually catches up with Rustum Roy. But his life demonstrates that science and religion, far from being odd bedfellows, are really interesting conversation partners, especially among people who bring the same critical apparatus to both.

After Rustum Roy, whom I loved as a friend and respected as a colleague, I expect such rigor on both sides of the fence of the science-religion nexus. The fact that he could play both sides so well only ups the ante for a conversation that is as impoverished by his passing as it was enriched by his participation.

What does it take to get a red hat these days?

2010-10-22T15:31:00.013-04:00

Pope Benedict XVI announced on Wednesday the election of 24 new cardinals, including two Americans: Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl of Washington DC and Raymond L. Burke, prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest judicial authority of the Catholic Church. Their appointments to cardinal necessitate a forthright examination of their respective paths to the red hat - paths filled with discrimination, abuse of power, and staunch efforts to preserve the patriarchy. Click here to read Mary E. Hunt's article "Vatican Pitbulls Make Cardinal" for a look into the Vatican's election (read: reward) system and see just what it takes to get a red hat these days. The article appears in the online magazine Religion Dispatches.

WATER's Feminist Conversations in Religion Series Presents-

2010-10-20T16:42:00.005-04:00

An Hour-Long Teleconference
"Trans Gifts: A Conversation with Virginia Ramey Mollenkott"

Wednesday, November 10, 2010
1:00PM-2:00PM EST

Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is professor emerita in English at William Paterson University of New Jersey. She is the author or co-author of 13 books, including several on women and religion. Perhaps the best known of her books, written with Letha Scanzoni, Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? A Positive Christian Response (HarperCollins Publishers, 1994) remains a classic in the field.

She is a longtime member of the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus and a leading Christian feminist voice on transgender issues.

Virginia’s focus in this WATER conversation will be on the specific gifts that trans people can offer to religious congregations and other groups. Virginia will share her extensive experience on the topic, which readers will find in her book Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach (Pilgrim Press, 2001). She will also reference her chapter “Trans-forming Feminist Christianity” in New Feminist Christianity: Many Voices, Many Views (edited by Mary E. Hunt and Diann L. Neu, SkyLight Paths, 2010). Order your copy of the book here.

Virginia is a stalwart proponent of women and LGBTQ people, a longtime friend and supporter of WATER. We are delighted to share her with a wider group of colleagues! Gather some friends for lunch and take this special opportunity to learn and speak with one of our pioneers.

How to Register
Email waterstaff@hers.com with the words "register me" and you will receive dial-in information. Please register by November 8. We encourage you to make a donation to WATER. Thank you!

The Feminist Conversations in Religion are open to all. These hour-long live teleconferences highlight the latest issues addressed by WATER. In addition to the teleconferences, you can go to our website to listen to an audio version at your convenience.

_____________________________________________

The Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER)

8121 Georgia Avenue, Suite 310

Silver Spring MD 20910

301-589-2509; Fax 301-589-3150

water@hers.com; www.hers.com/water

Faith leaders respond to Carl Paladino's divisive remarks

2010-10-18T16:34:00.003-04:00

On October 11, 2010, a response to Carl Paladino's tumultuous comments about homosexuality was issued by the National Religious Leadership Roundtable, convened by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Paladino stated that children should not be "brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is as equally valid or successful an option [as heterosexuality]." He continued on to criticize his opponent Andrew Cuomo for marching in New York's gay pride parade with his daughters. The Task Force blog has more information, including a video from Rev. Rebecca Voelkel, faith work director.

Mary E. Hunt of WATER contributed the following:

The last thing the governor's race in New York State needs is homophobic comments from anyone. While the Roman Catholic hierarchy will not step up to the plate on this one, let it be known that many Catholics consider homosexuality "an equally valid and successful opetion" for loving, committed, and generative relationship. Suggestions to the contrary reveal either ignorance of contemporary theological work, homo hatred, or both. Ample resources from Catholic social justice teachings prove that disrespect for human persons and their choices has no place in Catholic circles. The work of groups like Dignity, New Ways Ministry, Fortunate Families, Call to Action, and Women-Church Convergence is testimony to the fact that Catholicism can and should be inclusive, welcoming, and supportive of the variety of ways people choose to love, partner and generate families.

Mission of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Foundation
From their website
The mission of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is to build the grassroots power of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. We do this by training activists, equipping state and local organizations with the skills needed to organize broad-based campaigns to defeat anti-LGBT referenda and advance pro-LGBT legislation, and building the organizational capacity of our movement. Our Policy Institute, the movement’s premier think tank, provides research and policy analysis to support the struggle for complete equality and to counter right-wing lies. As part of a broader social justice movement, we work to create a nation that respects the diversity of human expression and identity and creates opportunity for all.

Stay Connected on Facebook with WATER and The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force!

State of Belief

2010-08-01T20:26:00.001-04:00

Tune in this weekend to Interfaith Alliance's weekly radio show and podcast State of Belief to hear
- Vickie Stangl, of the Great Plains chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, on the secular invocation offered at a recent Wichita City Council meeting.
- Kathy Miller, the President and Executive Director of the Texas Freedom Network, on new polling data related to the controversy over the new social studies standards approved by the Texas State Board of Education.
- Mary Hunt, co-founder of the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual, on Argentina's decision to legalize same-gender marriage and her experience teaching at an ecumenical seminary in Buenos Aires in the 1980s.
Plus, Rev. Gaddy shares his thoughts on the disturbing anti-Muslim sentiment that is still plaguing our country.

Listen now at http://feeds.feedburner.com/stateofbelief.

Where God Has Placed a Comma

2010-07-28T10:35:00.003-04:00

As part of our internships at WATER, Ikhlas, Elizabeth and I took a “field trip” to the United Church of Christ DC headquarters this summer, where we met with the Rev. Dr. Mari Castellanos, an esteemed member of the UCC church and social justice activist, who is policy advocate for domestic issues at the UCC.

Dr. Castellanos welcomed us warmly with a stream of information about the church: commercials, literature, inclusivity, focus on social justice, all of which impressed me with their broad welcome, clearly stated core beliefs and progressive outlook. “God is still speaking,” as the UCC unofficial motto goes.

A few days later, I saw UCC principles in action at the wedding of Sue, my godmother, and her partner Claire in Chicago. The ceremony was held at Wellington Church in Chicago: we were invited to “come as you are.” Like the UCC church, the wedding incorporated many different traditions, including Cherokee poetry, readings from the Bible, Cris Williamson songs, Shakespeare sonnets, and the poems of Khalil Gibran. An impassioned call that the marriage, though not recognized in the eyes of the state of Illinois, was legitimate in the eyes of UCC was met with cheers from the congregation.

The progressive interpretations of the Bible, combined with a welcoming community, illustrated to me the importance of women’s theology, ethics, and ritual. We lit candles on the altar, sang songs, and responded to the call to worship. The brides’ vows were even different from the usual I do’s and reflected their belief systems.

I was reminded of the unofficial UCC creed: never place a period where God has placed a comma; I was also reminded of the other UCC phrase: God is still speaking; indeed, everyone with a voice who wanted to contribute may speak in the UCC church.

New Book from WATER!!

2010-07-27T15:25:00.004-04:00

New Feminist Christianity: Many Voices, Many Views
edited by Mary E. Hunt and Diann L. Neu

Feminism has brought many changes to Christian churches. From inclusive language and imagery about the Divine, to an increase in the number of women ministers, churches will never be the same. Yet, even now, there is a lack of substantive structural change in many churches and a certain complacency within denominations.

The contributors to this book are the thought leaders of the future who are shaping, and being shaped by, the emerging directions of feminist Christianity. They speak from across the spectrum, and from the many racial and ethnic groups that make up the Christian community. Taken together, their voices offer a starting point for building new models of church and society.

Issues covered include:

Feminist Theological Visions
Feminist Scriptural Insights
Feminist Ethical Agendas
Feminist Liturgical/Artistic Frontiers
Feminist Ministerial Challenges

A must-read for anyone in Christian ministry, as well as religious feminists in and beyond the Christian tradition, and church-based study groups. (SkyLight Paths Publishing, 300 pages, $24.99 plus s+h).

To order book click here.

WHO ARE THE INTERNS?!

2010-07-27T12:36:00.010-04:00

Elizabeth Speigle

I love the color green. I also love water, and WATER! I am a sociology major with women’s studies and religion minors at Goshen College (IN), entering my final year this fall. I have many, many ideas about what to do afterwards… and will take forever making a decision, as per my personality. Women’s choir is my absolute favorite activity in college, though doodling in class would be a close second. I’m from Harleysville, PA, and grew up in the Mennonite church. I also love photography, reading Barbara Kingsolver, and giraffes.

Nellie Beckett

I am a rising first year at Smith College in picturesque Northampton, Massachusetts. I plan to study English, political science, religion and women's studies. During my time at WATER, I have not only engaged in critical feminist theology and social justice but perfected my cake-baking, coffee-making and table-setting skills.

Ikhlas Saleem

I'm a senior at Wellesley College majoring in Religion with a focus on development and social justice. I'm from the Islamic tradition. Like Elizabeth, I'm scattering to formulate post grad plans, which I hope will involve some type of travel! When I'm not "working" on future plans I enjoy watching Mad Men, reading historical novels and walking around the city. As I'm from Atlanta, Ga, Summer is my favorite season of the year and my time at WATER has made it that much dearer to me.

Updates at WATER!

2010-07-22T16:12:00.005-04:00

The WATER office has been busy, busy, busy this summer updating and revamping our social networks to keep YOU better connected. We hope you have found the posts to Mary E. Hunt's articles and other information on our blogs helpful and convenient.

WATER intern Elizabeth Speigle, Diann Neu and Zelinda Fouant have been working diligently for weeks on updating and reorganizing our website, www.hers.com/water, and creating our eNewsletter which you should have received yesterday.

These social networks help to keep you connected with WATER, but we also want to hear from you! So, indulge us and follow us on twitter @WATERvoices, become a fan of our fbook page http://www.facebook.com/WATERwomensalliance. It's up to you, choose your medium.

Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, Cry For the Catholic Church

2010-07-22T15:45:00.005-04:00

Argentina's legalization of gay marriage is a defeat of the Roman Catholic church every bit as much as the political opposition.

By Mary E. Hunt

Two women drinking coffee together in a Buenos Aires café during the dictatorship (1973-1983) could have been arrested merely for being together. Today they can marry. What a difference a few decades can make. Eva Peron was right in her address to her people from the balcony, as crooned memorably by Madonna in the movie Evita: “The truth is I never left you/All through my wild days/My mad existence/I kept my promise/don’t keep your distance…”

To continue reading article click here.

Catholic Prof Teaches that Same-Sex Marriage is Violation of ‘Natural Law’

2010-07-14T12:25:00.001-04:00

By Mary E. Hunt

Kenneth Howell, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was not rehired for the Fall 2010 semester. He claims that his right to free speech was violated when he taught a course on Catholic theology that included the notion that same-sex relationships are in violation of natural law. He made no secret of the fact that he agreed with the institutional Catholic Church’s teaching and by all reports offered no other Catholic positions on the question.

Predictably, the institutional Church is unhappy, conservative media including the local Fox affiliate are all over the story, and Dr. Howell is being supported in his efforts at redress by the Alliance Defense Fund. The Fund was created in 1994 in response “to the urgent need for the legal defense and advocacy of religious freedom” by religious leaders including Bill Bright, Larry Burkett, and James Dobson, among others. “Their prime concern was the dramatic loss of religious freedom in America’s courts and the resulting challenges to people of faith to live and proclaim the Gospel.” It is a good guess that a court case is in the offing.

To continue reading article click here.

Vatican to Equate Women’s Ordination with Priest Pedophilia?

2010-07-14T12:15:00.002-04:00

A document to be released later this summer is reported to include the ordination of women in the same category as sexual abuse by priests.

By MARY E. HUNT

While Protestant churches like the Presbyterian Church USA have their annual gatherings in the summer, the institutional Roman Catholic Church, with no such meetings to worry about, uses the season to issue documents from on high. According to published reports, the Vatican is soon to release new norms that govern matters of sexual abuse by clergy. (Ho hum—but wait, there’s more.) They are expected to include the ordination of women under the delicta graviora, the same category of grave sin that governs sexual abuse by priests. Cue the music of doom!

To continue reading article click here

Summer Teleconferences

2010-07-12T15:25:00.008-04:00

Here at the WATER office this summer we have continued our series of teleconferences, this time featuring speakers from our upcoming book, New Feminist Christianity: Many Voices, Many Views, edited by Mary Hunt and Dianne Neu, due to be released this July. So far, we have had teleconferences with prominent scholars Victoria Rue and Rosemary Radford Reuther. Listed below are brief summaries of the discussion topics and links to listen to the teleconference. There is also a reflection by Laura Downton, a recent graduate of Princeton Seminary, who came to visit the WATER office for the Rosemary teleconference. Please enjoy and feel free to continue the discussion on the blog or any thoughts you may want to share. We look forward to having you join us for our next teleconference on September 15, 2010 1 p.m. EDT with Professor Tracy West of Drew University.

WATER TELECONFERENCE WITH VICTORIA RUE

Thanks to Victoria Rue for a wonderful conversation on “This is My Body: Feminist Ministries at the Grassroots.” Victoria talked movingly and insightfully about her hospice work (“a chance to love”), her liturgical work as a Roman Catholic woman priest at the Sophia in Trinity Catholic Community in San Francisco and her theatre work as a writer and director where she weaves life journeys with justice concerns. Feel free to listen to the conversation, use it for teaching or discussion. It is on our Web site under the heading "Monthly Teleconference Series":www.hers.com/water.

Victoria has suggested the following resources:

• www.victoriarue.com; her Web site
• www.sophiaintrinity.com; the site for her ministry
• www.romancatholicwomenpriests.org; the site for the RCWP organization

Among her publications are:

• CancerBodies: Women Speaking the Unspeakable, Feminist Theatre Enacts Feminist Theology (Doctoral dissertation, Graduate Theological Union, 1993).
• Acting Religious: Theatre as Pedagogy in Religious Studies (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2005).
• Victoria Rue, "This is My Body” forthcoming in New Feminist Christianity: Many Voices, Many Views edited by Mary E. Hunt and Diann Neu. (Skylight Paths, 2010).

• She also recommends: Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. 2001).

WATER TELECONFERENCE WITH ROSEMARY RADFORD REUTHER

Thanks to Rosemary Radford Ruether for leading our conference call. It was a wonderful chance to hear her sweeping overview of the field of feminist theology. Much of that part of her presentation can be read in her chapter entitled “Feminist Theology in Theological Education” in the forthcoming (this month) volume New Feminist Christianity: Many Voices, Many Views edited by Mary E. Hunt and Diann L. Neu, available through WATER.

Rosemary mentioned a number of resources. Two that she singled out are:

1. African Women, Religion and Health: Essays in Honor of Mercy Amba Ewudziwa Oduyoye, Isabel Apawo Phiri and Sarojini Nadar, editors, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006.

2. Taiwan’s Buddhist Nuns by Elise Ann DeVido, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, June, 2010.

Among Rosemary’s many publications is the invaluable three-volume Encyclopedia of Women in North America, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006. It is 1,464 pages and not inexpensive, but every institutional library should have it for a comprehensive look at and interpretation of the various topics covered.

Rosemary also spoke of her recent experiences in Taiwan. What a fascinating scene it is with Buddhist nuns growing in number and influence, feminist theologians teaching and organizing, students being exposed to feminist work in their regular studies. It is about time we organized some sharing trips so that lots of women, in addition to scholars, can find ways to exchange information and experiences. Three of our colleagues—Audrey Lockwood, Donna Quinn, and Ikhlas Saleem—raised variants on the question of how to involve/include young people and those who are not privileged educationally.

Another topic was whether male scholars (and, I would add, activists) “get it” when it comes to feminist theology. This is a hard question, but one that remains to be discussed as efforts to be inclusive as often met with resistance or simply being ignored.

We are grateful for Rosemary’s continued stalwart leadership.

REFLECTIONS FROM A FRIEND OF WATER

By Laura Markle Downton, M.Div

I was first introduced to the WATER network through Diann L. Neu's contribution to Dissident Daughters: Feminist Liturgies in Global Context (ed. Teresa Berger) entitled “Come, Sophia Spirit,” just before beginning my first year at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Hungry for a connection to women-church and for spiritual resources to accompany me on my feminist journey, WATER was a welcome discovery! Since that time, as a result of the information sharing on the WATER listserv, I have attended gatherings such as the “Women, Religion and Globalization” conference sponsored by the MacMillan Center at Yale University last fall, and received a scholarship to attend the “Women and Power: Connecting Across the Generations” conference hosted by the Omega Institute.

Recently I relocated to Silver Spring, MD and discovered that the WATER office is literally around the corner from my home. This has enabled me to be a part of the monthly WATER meditation and just this week, to join the WATER network in teleconference with Rosemary Radford Ruether. While discussing the future of feminist theology in theological education, Ruether swept us into the presence of the vibrant and liberating work of Buddhist and Christian feminists in Taiwan with whom she has more recently been working.

During the call, Mary Hunt pulled down a mountain of Ruether's books from the shelves of the WATER office library, creating a visual representation of Ruether's prolific contributions to the field of feminist theology. This visual reminder is one that will remain with me for its exposure of the absurdity of theological programs or discourses that treat womanist, feminist, or mujerista theologies as an intellectual afterthought rather than as a rich, complex field of scholarship.

As a result of WATER, these opportunities have expanded my imagination as I have encountered a chorus of voices of women from diverse locations, generations and traditions redefining power relationships to build a world of inclusion and wholeness. I am grateful to WATER for building these invaluable global bridges of connection that make a new world possible.

Resources for further information on the conferences can be found here and here.

Ikhlas Saleem, Elizabeth Speigle, and Nellie Beckett (Summer Interns, L-R) with stack of Rosemary's publications:

Marriage: Sacraments and Politics

2010-07-12T10:14:00.003-04:00

Mary E. Hunt

Catholics have sacramental understandings of marriage and ordination to which they are entitled. But the institutional church is not entitled to foist those on the rest of the population. On ordination they do not even try. On marriage I suspect they will fail.

Marriage is a many-splendored thing. There are myriad definitions of what is a dynamic and changing phenomenon. It is not hard to recall when women were considered inferior partners in marriage, when marriage between persons of differing racial groups was not allowed, indeed when rape was permitted in marriage. Social institutions change, but the need for community and the imperative of finding loving, just and generous ways of organizing ourselves as a society remain constant. Marriage is one among several ways to do that.

Read the full article by Mary E. Hunt in the National Catholic Reporter.

Women Deliver: 2nd Global Conference 2010

2010-07-09T13:43:00.004-04:00

By Ikhlas Saleem, Summer 2010 WATER Intern

As an intern for the summer with WATER, I had the amazing opportunity to attend two days of the three-day Women Deliver conference commencing on June 7-9th in Washington, DC. The conference featured several speakers, including former CNN chief international correspondent and anchor Christiane Amanpour, actress Ashley Judd, Arianna Huffington, Melinda Gates (who pledged 1.5 billion) and of course we musn’t forget the 3,200 participants, women and yes, a few men, that traveled from around the states and 146 countries to share their experiences and contribute to the MDG5. In addition to the participants, five UN heads participated: UNFPA, UNDP, UNICEF, WHO, and UNAIDS.

There were a multitude of workshops and panels devoted to maternal and newborn health, family planning, HIV and AIDS, development and empowerment, etc., but what was most intriguing is Women Deliver’s awareness that for these concerns to even be realized, it requires addressing the cultural and religious norms that exist for women living in various regions. Our own Mary Hunt presented at a panel on “cultural agents of change delivering for women.” The main purpose of the panel was to bring forth the perspective of different cultural agents of change, taking into account regional and gender balances, and how they deal with maternal mortality. Here, Mary discussed the need for us to begin deconstructing prevalent dominant patriarchal theology and gives shape to a society where women are continuously mistreated and left with few options to assume control of their own health. Other panels explored young women and their environments, delving into issues of their physical environmental conditions as well as economics and family and societal pressures. There was also a discussion on the negative response from the religious right, both in America and abroad, resulting from the post-1994 Cairo conference.

The Women Deliver 2010 Conference reminds us that women have delivered and are continuing to deliver solutions for girls and women around the world. Thus, the focus of the conference was not only developing ways in which to fix problems with women’s healthcare, but rather on sharing the contextual solutions that already exist, making sincere connections, overcoming the barriers and challengers to women’s health and determining sources of funding that can assist in promoting and advancing these solutions. Countless stories have shown us that when women are provided adequate resources and support, women deliver.

American Nuns Under the Vatican Microscope

2009-12-03T12:39:00.005-05:00

The Vatican is up to its old tricks, investigating US women religious. Its “divide and conquer” technique pits the nuns who conform to male clerical expectations against those who assert their own moral and spiritual agency. But at the heart of the matter is the power to be “publicly” Catholic, something the men have long reserved for themselves. Now that Catholic women, including nuns, are saying “this is what Catholic looks like,” there is trouble in Vatican City and a new day for Catholicism.

Read the full article by Mary E. Hunt in Religion Dispatches.

Vatican's Come-Hither to Anglicans: A Theological Scandal

2009-10-29T14:32:00.003-04:00

The Vatican’s new scheme to lure unhappy conservative Anglicans into the fold might have caught the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams off guard, but Catholics are not surprised by anything Rome does to shore up its market share. Conservative clergy, whose opposition to the ordination of women and LGBTQ people motivated them to split from the Anglican Communion, are now welcome to switch to Catholicism.

Read the full article by Mary E. Hunt in Religion Dispatches.

Faithful and Fabulous: Dignity on the Road at Forty

2009-07-24T12:52:00.003-04:00

Mary Hunt was featured as the keynote speaker at Dignity USA's 2009 Convention. Read her address here.

Pink Menno calls for an inclusive and welcoming church

2009-07-09T16:42:00.012-04:00

LGBTQ activism and inclusion in the church can look a host of different ways. For the Mennonite assembly gathered in Columbus, Ohio last week, the look was pink.
The "pink presence" at the Mennonite Church USA Convention was initiated by a campaign called Pink Menno, which began a few months ago in response to an open letter written to Mennonite Church USA by pastors calling for LGBTQ inclusion in the church. Pink Menno supporters wore pink as a way to be a visible presence of LGBTQ people, friends, family, and allies in the Mennonite Church. At an essential level, wearing pink was a way of reopening dialogue about how the church is called to be an inclusive and welcoming body.
Momentum for Pink Menno grew on the website, http://www.pinkmenno.org, prior to convention, and continued to spread as the week went on, culminating with a "sea of pink" in the center of the Columbus Nationwide Arena, where 4,000+ Mennonites gathered to sing at the traditional convention-wide hymn sing.

The mid-week prayer service and press conference drew a crowd of over 100 people, and the story was picked up by several local news services and the Associated Press. By 9:00pm that night over 150 sites had picked up the story, like the Washington Post.

Needless to say, a success like this coverage was thrilling. But simpler graces were just as thrilling -- the packed workshops and film screenings we led (in a hotel across the street since Pink Menno was banned from the convention center); the "pink demand" that rid us of all our shirts, bandanas, and bracelets and sent us to Goodwill to buy out their pink gear; the positive, welcoming spirit which the whole movement embodied. Opposing forces expected radical protest and disruptive disobedience; instead they got Pink Mennos singing hymns outside the worship hall, meeting for prayer, sharing communion, engaging in dialogue.

The Mennonite Church has a long way to go. There are many who don't want to go there. But Pink Menno's presence and movement at Columbus ensures that the Mennonite Church cannot ignore this issue any longer. Church leaders are now coming to us, asking us to help them deal with it. People are talking. Baby pink steps forward.

--Anna B. Roeschley

Online Recordings from WATER's Creative Feminist Ministers Institute

2009-06-25T12:18:00.010-04:00

WATER is abuzz with creative feminist ministry. Over the course of two days last week, we held a series of conversations via live interviews and conference calls, connecting feminist ministers and offering training and education they need to do their work more effectively.
In efforts to make these much-needed resources more widely accessible, and to broaden the scope of our conversation, we recorded the sessions for use online. We hope you will view/listen to them, connect from afar, and continue the conversations by posting comments to this blog. We invite you to donate to WATER as you use these resources.
Click on the links below to download. If the download does not begin automatically, right-click and choose "save target as" in order to start the download, which may take some time given the size of the video.

Liberation Beyond Borders: Dalit Feminist Hermeneutics and Four Gospel Women
A conversation with Surekha Nelavala and Mary Kate Birge, Download video here.

Challenges for Feminist Ministers
A conversation with Cindy Lapp and Mari Castellanos, Download video here.

Theological Education for Feminist Ministry
A conference call with Emilie Townes, Download audio recording here.

Feminist Ministry and Sexual Violence
A conference call with Marie Fortune, Download audio recording here.

This inaugural series was a success, and the exciting part is that it is just beginning! Stay tuned for future opportunities to connect, cooperate, and learn together on issues surrounding feminist ministry.
-- Anna B. Roeschley

Keep it Catholic, Catholics

2009-06-16T10:45:00.005-04:00

Keep it Catholic, Catholics: A Response to Michael Sean Winters' Attack on Frances Kissling in America

I debated in Catholic high school and Jesuit college. We practiced by taking positions other than our own so we would understand the ins and outs of our opponents’ ways of thinking. We were taught that gratuitous slams at the other side were never acceptable, and that they certainly were no substitute for reasoned arguments. We were coached to avoid ad hominem (in those days we did not imagine ad feminam) arguments at all costs since they insulted our worthy opponents and made clear that we were out of ideas to bolster our own positions. In the rough and tumble of real world debates, it is training that has stood me in good stead.

Imagine my surprise to read on the Jesuit magazine America’s blog a recent post by Michael Sean Winters in which he violated all the rules. His attack on Frances Kissling and her recent article in Salon began with a gratuitous slam.

(Read the rest of the article by Mary E. Hunt posted on Religion Dispatches.)

Post to our blog and see FSR, Inc.

2009-06-09T14:24:00.003-04:00

WATER’s blog is a place for your thoughts on topics of common interest to feminists in religion. Please feel free to jump into the conversation whenever you wish. We welcome you!

Another place to discuss feminist issues is http://fir-publicvoice.blogspot.com/ which is sponsored by Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc. The two groups have collaborated on several projects over the years.

Your voice is important. Raise it here.

Mary E. Hunt

Feminist Theology 101

2009-06-05T17:19:00.004-04:00

Mary Hunt and Judith Plaskow discuss feminist views of God and women in the Bible, in an interview on Interfaith Voices radio, http://www.interfaithradio.org

The Unsung Speech at Notre Dame, A Postmortem

2009-05-27T16:51:00.003-04:00

President Barack Obama spoke persuasively at the 2009 University of Notre Dame commencement, pulling off a graceful if somewhat jocular address befitting the sports-school ambiance. The president cushioned his pro-choice position with a crowd-pleasing homage to Notre Dame’s legendary president, Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC, a.k.a “Father Ted.” He hitched his wagon to the star of the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, champion of the “seamless garment” approach that connects ending abortion with the eradication of poverty, war, and the death penalty (among other issues), despite the fact the most women’s clothes have plenty of seams.

Read the full article by Mary E. Hunt on Religion Dispatches.

Article of Faith

2009-05-15T16:48:00.004-04:00

See Mary Hunt's "Article of Faith: Here we go again — Catholic bishops overstep their bounds," written for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force:
http://www.thetaskforce.org/press/releases/pr_aof_051409

Mother's Day 2009: What She Means to Me

2009-05-04T13:10:00.006-04:00

Think of an amazing woman you know. How has she touched your life? What has she done to be healthy, empower others, seek justice, bring about change?

Share a story in her honor this Mother's Day. Tell us what she means to you by posting a comment below.

Spring Lobby Days in DC

2009-04-30T11:18:00.008-04:00

The Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) sponsored a congressional briefing this week on Religious Support for reducing Unintended Pregnancies and Sexually Transmitted Infections among Youth. WATER was among the co-sponsoring groups.

Speakers included Debra Haffner of the Institute who provided an overview of the issues and Bill Smith of SIECUS who explained the importance of passing REAL Sex Education, the Responsible Education About Life Act (S.611, H.R. 1551), which would provide the first federal money ($50 million) for sex education. The $1.5 billion (yes, billion) in federal and state money for abstinence-only programs of the previous administration failed utterly to teach young people how to be sexually responsible.

Ann Hanson of the United Church of Christ (UCC) informed the staffers and others present about the Our Whole Lives religious education curriculum that the UCC and Unitarian Universalists have developed with great results. Emily Goodstein of Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice brought the wise voice of young women to the table. Cedric Harmon of City of Refuge Church added pastoral insight from within communities hard hit by HIV/AIDS. Ignacio Castuera, the first National Chaplain of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, spoke of the need for sex education within Hispanic communities.

The message of the day was that progressive religious groups are foursquare behind federal funding for sex education and also perfectly wiling to let those whose religious views keep them from supporting it to opt out of programs for their own children. In a democratic society that seems like a fair and prudent way forward.

I walked across the Capitol lawn to Union Station on a gorgeous sunny day to return to the office. I ran into the protest by ADAPT, dozens of people in wheelchairs lined up across busy Capital Hill streets on both the House and Senate sides of the area. They seek passage of legislation to make more choices available to people who receive disability funding (Community Choice Act, S. 683, H.B.1670). They want to be able to live at home rather than have to go to nursing homes or other institutions. Almost 200 people were arrested and hundreds more scaled the steps of the Capitol, some leaving their chairs below, to dramatize their views (http://www.adapt.org/freeourpeople/cca09/report04.htm).

At the same time, colleagues from the third annual Transgender Religious Leaders Summit, co-sponsored by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in religion and Ministry (CLGS) and the National Center for Transgender Equality were lobbying their representatives for trans rights. I could not help but think what a new day it is in DC, how there is hope in the air that some of these basic justice issues will be solved in the near future. Ah, spring in a new era.

-- Mary E. Hunt

Feminist Studies in Religion Blog

2009-04-30T10:57:00.001-04:00

Our colleagues at Feminist Studies in Religion have started a blog. http://fir-publicvoice.blogspot.com/ which is intended to be a place of feminist dialogue across traditions, generations, nations, and perspectives. I have put a couple things on it and encourage WATER readers/bloggers to go there and join in the conversation.

-- Mary E. Hunt

A Radical Act of Presence in the Face of Femicide

2009-04-02T13:35:00.007-04:00

What do we do in the face of statistics that tell us one in two Congolese women have experienced sexual violence, reports that say that in the past ten years more than 200,000 Congolese women and girls have been raped, an average of forty women per day in the province of South Kivu alone? How do we respond to a situation where thousands of women’s and girls’ insides are being ripped apart because militias are systematically demolishing communities, where the planned methodological destruction of women’s reproductive capacities is being used as a tactic of war?

What are we to do in the face of femicide?

Last night, people in the WATER community responded in a radical act of presence. Our gathering was small, no more than fifteen of us, but we were present nonetheless. We came from around the Washington, DC area on a damp and drizzly night to say, through our gathering, that gathering matters; to say, through our coming together, that we know the horrific injustices done to women in the Congo and we are not silent.

Stories were read and heard, candles were lit, prayers were prayed. Our silence was sacred and our solidarity was shared. What stands out to me, though, is the reminder that presence is powerful. Solidarity is no small thing. In the face of something as hopeless and overwhelming as femicide, sometimes the act of gathering is all we can muster. Let us find hope in what is radical about such an act, not in what is lacking.

We are reminded that we do not gather alone. Our circle of solidarity at WATER is part of a broader campaign called the Congo Sabbath Initiative, an effort to engage faith communities in educating people about sexual violence in the Congo. Services, teach-ins, programs similar to ours are being held across the country between January and April 2009. Money raised goes to build a greatly-needed center for survivors of rape and torture in Bukavu.

I hope that radical acts of presence will continue, small and simple may they be. May our solidarity speak loudly in efforts to end sexual violence in the Congo and around the world.

To learn more and get involved, visit the V-day website.

--Anna B. Roeschley

Pro-Life Tempest Over Obama’s Notre Dame Speech

2009-03-30T14:11:00.005-04:00

The band is playing and it is all happening on the gridiron. Where is Knute Rockne when we need him? Right-wing Catholics and their blogging companions have their knickers in a knot over the fact that President Barack Obama is scheduled to be the May 2009 commencement speaker at the University of Notre Dame. Given the virulent responses led by the Cardinal Newman Society, perhaps the Four Horsemen will have to come back to escort the president to the dais.

(Read the full article by Mary E. Hunt at ReligionDispatches.com.)

Excommunicating the Victims

2009-03-10T11:34:00.003-04:00

While the family of a 9-year-old incest victim’s abortion is excommunicated, the perpetrator never even made it to the ecclesial radar screen. Let this case signal the end of any credible claim to authority of bishops and the dawn of a new era when local communities determine their own members. I daresay the world will be a safer, kinder place.

(Read full article by Mary E. Hunt on Religion Dispatches.)

New Administration, Old Initiative

2009-02-19T14:43:00.006-05:00

Mary Hunt offers her critique of faith-based initiatives in an article by Sarah Posner this week on The American Prospect.

Liberation Theology is Alive and Well

2009-02-19T14:26:00.006-05:00

Liberation theology is alive and well in Belem, Brazil. Where? Did you say Davos, Switzerland, where 2,500 economic movers and shakers recently concluded their annual meeting of World Economic Forum at a cost of a quarter million dollars apiece? (Pricey vacation in these troubled times.) No, I said Belem, Brazil, where the World Social Forum, the antidote to Davos, gathered over 100,000 social activists and academics for 1,500 workshops and presentations in late January.

Get out your map: Belem is in the north of Brazil... (read full article by Mary E. Hunt on Religion Dispatches).