Volume
15, Number 1
EDITORS' INTRODUCTION
The
essays in this volume explore, from various perspectives, the ways in which
women (and men) are both situated and also seek to situate themselves in the
social and religious spaces of their communities. The articles by Carol Thysell, Anthony B. Pinn, Theresa S.
Smith, and Ellison Banks Findly range from sixteenth and seventeenth century
Europe to communities of color in the United States to early Pali literature.
Rufus Burrow Jr.'s review essay provides an overview of the evolution and
growth of Womanist ethics and theology. Paula
Cooey's editorial on dying uses the context of her mother's death (and the
difficulty of it) to explore the ways in which death can be extremely morally
and spiritually messy in U.S. culture, as well as our inability to deal with
this theologically and sociopolitically. The
bodily-textured poetry of Nancy Fitzgerald provides an apt transition from the
first sections of this volume to the last.
The final section, a roundtable discussion, "From Generation to
Generation," is a critical and self-critical look at the theoretical,
methodological, and political interplay between 'first generation' and 'second
generation' feminist scholars.
The
volume begins with "Unearthing the Treasure, Unknitting the Napkin: The
Parable of the Talents as a Justification for Early Modern Women's Preaching and
Prophesying" by Carol Thysell. This
essay explores how the parable of the talents was used in the early sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries by three women, Marie Dentière, Rachel Speght, and
Lady Eleanor Davies. Thysell shows
that Dentière and Speght provided defenses for women's public religious
activity as they argued for their right to preach and publish to mixed
audiences. Further, these women
appealed to the parable of the talents to contend for the right and
responsibility of all women to contribute to the common good of the social
order. Davies, however, did not
extend her claims to all women, instead employing the parable of the talents to
interpret her own vision and justify her personal situation.
Thysell argues that differing understandings of the biblical term
'talent' are at the heart of the different path Davies takes from Dentière and
Speght.
In
the next essay, "Religion and 'America's Problem Child': Notes on Pauli
Murray's Theological Development," Anthony B. Pinn advances Murray's
theological agenda as it influences her sense of community and social action.
For Pinn, Murray's theological insights, particularly those pertaining to
racism and sexism, have been neglected by scholars and students of the twentieth
century battle against structures of oppression.
Pinn places Murray in theological conversation with contemporary Womanist
theology through the works of Delores S. Williams.
Of particular import for Pinn in this conversation is the problem of evil
and the role of redemptive suffering in each woman's theological formulations.
Using historical method to recover and contextualize Murray's life based
on her own theological and social memory as well as her written artifacts, Pinn
seeks to include this under-explored thinker and the practices she used to
oppose injustice. Pinn's
theological methodology employs the concerns and liberation emphasis of Womanist
and Black theologies and a hermeneutic of transformation.
Next,
Theresa S. Smith examines the inapplicability of the Western social construct of
gender to Native American language and life in her essay "'Yes, I'm Brave':
Extraordinary Women in the Anishnaabe (Ojibwe) Tradition."
Departing from a more established approach of focusing on the way in
which Native American women understand themselves and the roles of
complementarity and autonomy that they choose to adopt and/or enact, Smith seeks
to develop a more fluid (and therefore more accurate) understanding of gender
and women's roles in Native North America.
As she argues that the sex-gendered roles of men and women exhibit more
fluidity, experience is the determinative factor.
Smith eschews such terms as "amazon" and "berdache"
as inadequate descriptors of Anishnaabe women who engaged in what were commonly
seen as male pursuits. She shows
that not one type of behavior, but rather a wide variety of behaviors marked
women as "braves," and that among the Anishnaabe, many women engaged
and continue to engage in these behaviors across a continuum.
For Smith, the term "extraordinary" in this context means being
outside the ordinary or mainstream. She
is also clear that the contemporary term "two-spirited," currently
being used to describe "extraordinary" persons, is not always
applicable to "brave" women because "two-spirited" refers to
sexual orientation. "Brave"
women were and are both lesbian and heterosexual, particularly in the case of
the Anishnaabe. The Anishnaabe
"brave" women stood and stand out, but they are not cast from the
circle of society, nor did they break the circle; rather, as Smith shows, they
made the permeable and fluid circle of society a bit larger.
In
the concluding essay, "Women and the Arahant
Issue in Early Pali Literature," Ellison Banks Findly argues that a closer
look at the culminant religious office of arahant
within Buddhism reveals a more complex picture than the one typically presented
as egalitarian in regard to gender issues.
Arahant marks the completion of
the religious quest, the attainment of meditational repose, and the fulfillment
of the standard of perfection for all conscious life.
The title is usually given to one at the end of an individual conversion
narrative in the Pali canon. Findly's
research shows that in the early Pali canon, the term arahant
was applied only to men, although there are a number of conversion narratives
for women renunciants. Theoretically
the Pali canon does not exclude women from becoming arahants, although there is also evidence to the contrary.
Findly explores this contested terrain by focusing on the Theragāthā
and the Therīgāthā to examine how several common elements
definitive of the arahant are present.
She finds that there are multiple standards for women in that although
women have experiences associated with arahantship,
no specific names of women arahants
appear. Findly concludes by
exploring the observation that although women and men are equally capable of arahantship
soteriologically, the lack of women given arahant
status appears to be sociologically based.
Rufus
Burrow Jr.'s review essay, "Toward Womanist Theology and Ethics,"
considers the emergence and development of Womanist theology and ethics.
Burrow begins with Alice Walker's contributions to Womanist thought and
the reasons Black women religious scholars found Walker’s term "womanist"
apropos to their work. He ends by
considering the relationships between Feminist, Black, and Womanist theologies.
As
a recurring feature, one member of the JFSR
editorial board contributes a brief editorial on a topic of her own choosing.
In this volume, Paula M. Cooey provides the pithy "The Messiness of
Dying." Cooey begins with
reflections on her mother's catastrophic stroke, lingering suffering, and
self-inflicted death through starvation. This
whirlwind of tragedies is compounded by the fact that, as Cooey notes, most
cultural analyses, theorizings, and theologizings about death obliterate the
messiness of the ordinary and the political.
Cooey calls on us to confront the full tragedy of dying (as well as the
possibility for spiritual or moral transformation) and acknowledge the politics
of dying from theological or thealogical perspectives.
Cooey's editorial is followed by Nancy Fitzgerald's three poems, which
explore the relation between spirit, prayer, and the body of woman as vessel.
We
would like to thank Deborah Whitehead, the JFSR
managing editor, for the incredible work she has done in organizing the
roundtable discussion for this issue. The
speed with which this roundtable came together and the depth of the critical
reflections in it are a testament to Deborah's hard work and her ability to jump
in with both feet as the new managing editor of the journal.
This roundtable discussion, "From Generation to Generation,"
begins with Emily Neill's essay "Horizons in Feminist Theology or
Reinventing the Wheel?" As a
third generation feminist scholar, Neill observes a disheartening trend among
some second generation feminist scholars of religion.
This trend involves an attempt to historicize the field in such a manner
that the works of first generation feminist scholars of religion are judged
theoretically unsophisticated whereas more recent feminist scholarship in
religion is judged more progressive and theoretically complex.
Neill sounds a cautionary word against both the acritical adoption of
theory without understanding the resultant political implications, and the
selection of methodological and theoretical stances without considering the very
frameworks used and the spaces to which feminist scholars may apply them.
Such a separation of theory from practice in feminist studies in
religion, she fears, could well foster the loss of intellectual space within the
academy from which to engage in sustained analyses of systems of oppression and
domination, and therefore to provide the much needed critique of the academy and
the social order in which it is situated.
From
her perspective as an assistant professor of political philosophy, Marla
Brettschneider resonates with the generational conflicts Neill names, as she
notes that this conflict among Jewish feminist scholars appears to be an
unconscious re-play of first and second generation tensions among Jewish
immigrants to the United States. Brettschneider
argues that the work of the second generation continues (and does not break
with) a tradition of shaking the foundations and shaping a creative vision for
change begun by the first generation.
Regula
Grünenfelder responds from her perspective in the Swiss academy and women's
liberation movements to explore what she sees as a long tradition of political
amnesia that can be found within feminism and women's studies and the inner
crisis of political feminisms. Grünenfelder
wants to live and work in the creative tension between the academy and feminist
politics.
Grace
Ji-Sun Kim, a Korean North American scholar, does not share Neill's perspective
that there is a progressivist trend, but sees a dialogical partnership approach
that builds on the work of earlier feminist scholars. Because experience and context are important factors in
theological reflection, Kim argues, the questions and answers of younger
scholars will be different from those of earlier generations.
Patricia
A. Martinez is a Malaysian activist who was in the first Women's Studies program
in Southeast Asia and will be the first Malaysian woman to earn a Ph.D. in
religion. She notes that Malaysian
women scholars disrupt the epistemological purity of categories and cohesion
that she finds to be features of U.S. feminist discourse.
Martinez argues that it is important to combine political activism and
theoretical work, and she resists Neill's totalizing categorizations of first
and second generation feminist scholars as she stakes her claim for the
importance of theorizing in her own work.
Kirsten
Witte, a German scholar, takes exception with Neill's position as she finds
Neill's interpretation dualistic. She
does not believe that a critical look at epistemological questions means an
inevitable dismissal of the work of first generation feminist scholars.
Witte emphasizes the importance of an open atmosphere for critical debate
through a dialogical model.
Neill's
essay raises questions regarding the canonical status of certain feminist works,
the concern for consensus, and the overall structure of the field for Jane Naomi
Iwamura, a doctoral student working on issues of the romanticization of Asian
religions in American popular culture. Iwamura finds that both Neill and the second generation
theologians she critiques (in particular, Sheila Greeve Davaney) have a
conservative dimension in their work, pointing to the possibility that feminist
theological knowledges are stratified and that this stratification continues to
create a silencing of some women's voices.
Finally,
Debra Washington, a womanist scholar, begins by asking a series of unanswered
questions of Neill's critique of the work of second generation feminists,
particularly related to womanist scholarship and the place this may or may not
hold in Neill's analysis. She
shares some of Neill's sensibilities, but sees a different agenda in the key
work of second generation feminist scholarship Neill singles out for critique, Horizons
in Feminist Theology: Identity, Tradition, and Norms.
Washington argues with several other respondents that these essays add to
feminist scholarship by including theoretical reflection as another category of
feminist work.
In
Neill's final rejoinder to these and other issues raised by the respondents, she
acknowledges the helpful reflections and constructive critiques that have
emerged out of this roundtable discussion.
Neill voices the hope that this will be only the beginning of a very
fruitful interchange among third generation women scholars in religion who seek
to both theorize and work for change from a variety of social locations and
contexts. The JFSR also hopes that this important conversation will continue, and
we invite further discussion on generational issues in feminist, womanist, mujerista,
and Asian women's scholarship in religious studies and theology.
As
the contributors in this volume show, the place of women remains a contested
space with theoretical, political, and social realities, leaving much room for
us to continue to grow our scholarship and our commitments large in the various
spaces we live, resist, and find our being.