Spirituality

Two male authors: on indigenous women & permaculture

Posted onThursday 30 May 2013Monday 27 May 2013

In a thought-provoking example of Talamantez’ urging to learn from indigenous peoples, East Asian scholar and religious professor Jordan Paper’s 1997 Through the Earth Darkly is a deliberately cross-cultural comparison of multiple non-Western, indigenous perspectives and reflections on women as the embodiment of the sacred, and the ensuing cultural “meaning and significance to females of…

Womanspirit Rising; the Bride of Death; & the Sacred Hoop

Posted onTuesday 28 May 2013Friday 24 May 2013

Written in the same year, Life’s Daughter/Death’s Bride by Kathie Carlson is an elegant example of both remembering and re-membering primarily the mother and daughter goddesses Demeter and Persephone, from the ancient Greek myth of the rape of Persephone. Carlson first deeply explores the myth in the most ancient and original forms she can find….

Embodiment through dancing & drumming

Posted onSunday 26 May 2013Wednesday 22 May 2013

Women’s appreciation of embodiment is not new — simply (deliberately?) forgotten in a more androcentric world. As it slowly re-emerges within society as well as academia, women’s (and men’s) re-embodiment appears to be more frequently — and often more deeply — creatively realized in a wider variety of fields. Examples include aikido (as already demonstrated),…

Two books by Rosemary Radford Ruether

Posted onFriday 24 May 2013Wednesday 22 May 2013

Next is American Christian feminist theologian-scholar Rosemary Radford Ruether’s 2005 Goddesses & the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History. Ruether’s writing is clear and easy to follow as she elaborates her theorized connections between Neolithic and ancient Mediterranean goddesses, ancient and medieval masculine appropriations of women’s power, and modern spiritual feminist interpretations of the goddesses….

Feminism, the Mastery of Nature, & Humane Livestock Handling

Posted onWednesday 22 May 2013Saturday 18 May 2013

I have written previously (though not well) on Australian ecofeminist activist and intellectual Val Plumwood’s 1994 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. She offers a theorizing historical examination on the subject of ecofeminism which exemplifies a startlingly brilliant feminist logic. Her brilliantly lucid critique of Western ethics is a consistently theorized and tightly-written examination of…

Three Perspectives on Ecofeminism

Posted onTuesday 21 May 2013Saturday 18 May 2013

In 1993 a book emerges which provocatively probes ecofeminism’s epistemology during its analysis of the historical roots of the oppressive conflation of women with nature. The collection of essays titled Ecofeminism, by Maria Mies & Vandana Shiva, is a biting critique of the colonization of nature, women, and the Third World by the white male…

Blood, Bread, & Roses — and Death of Nature

Posted onMonday 20 May 2013Saturday 18 May 2013

In a brilliantly re-creative intellectual thread, in 1993 feminist lesbian poet Judy Grahn re-members and reclaims the sacrality of women and menstruation in her Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. She notes with startling clarity that, “All origin stories are true” (7), as she offers us a radical new origin myth for…

Aikido & Art as a Spiritual Path & a Beautiful Necessity

Posted onSaturday 18 May 2013Friday 17 May 2013

The first movements into spiritually inspired re-embodiment which I discovered came (unsurprisingly) from men, and originated outside the United States. Morihei Ueshiba, the now-deceased creator of aikido, envisioned his martial art through the process of several spiritual awakenings: as a spirit of loving protection which is to protect and cultivate all beings in nature. Ueshiba…

Coming down to the wire at a gallop…

Posted onThursday 25 April 2013

On schoolwork Only two and a half weeks left in the semester, and my comprehensive essay is coming together nicely — thank goodness. I’ve got the Conclusion roughed out, the Introduction mostly done, and only four book reviews out of 36 left to write. Go, me! Considering that it’s getting a little frenetic here, though,…

Spiritual Transformation & Non-Violent Feminist Practice, pt. 2

Posted onThursday 21 March 2013Wednesday 20 March 2013

Reflecting on spirituality vs. ethics, I was fascinated to realize I’d made one of the mistakes the author notes: considering non-violence as equivalent to passive resistance — as nothing more than yet another tactical tool to be used in accomplishing social justice. Instead, Fernandes refers extensively to Gandhi, noting his belief that non-violence is a…