The following is an excerpt from an article that originally ran on “Religion Dispatches”, a daily online magazine dedicated to theanalysis and understanding of religious forces in the world today, highlighting a diversity of progressive voices and aimed at broadening and advancing the public conversation. The full version of the article can be accessed at: http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/480/sarah_palin_and_the_clarence_thomas_factor. 

Sarah Palin and the Clarence Thomas Factor

Mary E. Hunt

Women tend to vote in higher numbers than men so women, and especially Catholic women whose cohort is considered important to electoral victory, are of special interest in an election cycle enlivened by the presence of a female candidate. What do many of us think and why are we not quitting our day jobs to work for her campaign?

The selection of Governor Sarah Palin as the Vice Presidential running mate with Republican Presidential hopeful John McCain took the world by surprise. Religious feminists were as shocked as everyone else.  “Never heard of  her,” “Google her,” and “How odd,” echoed in my office, a non-profit educational organization where we work on feminist issues in religion, a place one might reasonably expect women to be excited by a female candidate. As a non-profit we are by law non-partisan. But we can and do rejoice as the glass ceiling shatters and women join the political fray as equals.

Nonetheless, the selection of Sarah Palin shows how shallow the Republicans, and perhaps the world at large, consider feminism. They act as if female anatomy were enough to qualify for our favor. In fact, feminism involves a commitment to the well-being of women and dependent children in a world where they are too often treated as less than human. I know many male feminists who fit the bill more snugly than certain women. The whole point of feminism is to create a world in which people can make a variety of choices—not just any choices but choices that build community, embrace Earth, protect the most vulnerable, and create peace.

The selection of Sarah Palin is reminiscent of putting Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court as proof that racism has vanished  `. His long track record of opposing rights for many people now proves what opponents at this confirmation hearings tried to convey, namely that being black does not guarantee anti-racist views just as it is clear with Sarah Palin that being a woman does not guarantee feminist views. In both cases competence and experience are in question in delicate ways given racism and sexism. Such is the pernicious nature of oppression. Now Hillary Clinton and her supporters know how Jesse Jackson and company felt when the gains they made through long, hard years of struggle were answered by a Supreme Court justice who was as unsuited for his task as Governor Palin is for the one proposed for her.

Feminism is not simply about getting women into positions of power. It is about changing the fundamental power equation so that everyone thrives. I am hard pressed to understand from early glimpses of Governor Palin’s public policy how her candidacy does that. Cutting the state budget for housing of pregnant teens, hunting animals from helicopters and opposing protections for endangered species, suggesting that God wills wars like the one in Iraq, and signing on to the McCain economic policies that favor the wealthy with tax cuts inspire no confidence in me. It is not just that I long for Hillary Clinton’s passion for health care. It is that I will not be duped into confusing one woman with another, conflating feminist rhetoric with oppressive choices. I hope other voters will not be either. The Republican platform—with its emphasis on defense and intelligence, anti-immigration policies, reducing government spending on the common good, preventing relational equality, and many other life-diminishing dimensions—is anything but feminist.

What is at hand is a challenge to those who understand that adding a woman and stirring will not change the fundamental power equation in which rich, white men still make most of the world’s decisions. Nor will one more “God bless America” spoken by a woman who swallows and spits out the Republican rhetoric about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge answer our runaway energy needs.

Religious feminists know better. Hopefully, so too will the majority of American voters when it matters most in the voting booth.

Mary E. Hunt, Ph.D., is a feminist theologian who is co-founder and co-director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. A Roman Catholic active in the women-church movement, she lectures and writes on theology and ethics with particular attention to liberation issues.

Christian Animism

John Surrette

We are made of Earth’s clay. Earth is our home. If our Earthly home is to enjoy a sustainable future we humans need to experience not alienation or separation from it, but a deeper sense of embeddedness and belonging to it.

Our Christian tradition is somewhat problematic when it comes to nurturing this sense of belonging. With some notable exceptions, the tradition has generally presented us with a Divinity that inhabits an eternal and heavenly realm far removed from an intimacy with Earth and its human community. Of course, according to the same tradition, God did become incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Divinity did become embedded in human flesh. As wonderful as this Incarnation is, it was understood as being restricted to Jesus. The rest of us, and certainly the rest of creation, were not included. As a result, although we were urged “to find God in all things,” our religious imaginations encountered difficulties in doing so.

In 1990 I was speaking with now deceased Jesuit theologian Thomas Clarke. At that time he was wrestling with the inability of the Christian churches to speak and act in a  robust way in the face of the withering of our Planet. He suggested that what the believing community needs is a “Christian Animism.”

Animism is the belief that spirit permeates all things; that there is a spirit presence and action within the Universe. When I first heard the word “animism,” cultural fears of paganism emerged within me. I quickly remembered, however, that many Christian holy days are adaptations of pagan rituals, so why not a further assimilation of pagan wisdom? Why not an understanding and experiencing of God as a Creative Spirit animating the Universe about us and within us?

Such assimilation certainly can find some roots in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. According to professor of religion Mark Wallace (“Finding God in the Singing River”), God’s Spirit is depicted using the following earthly metaphors: animating breath (Genesis 1:2);  healing wind (John 3:6); living water (John 4:14); and cleansing fire (Acts 2:1-4). These texts, and others, depict the Spirit according to the primitive elements of wind, water, and fire. These metaphors speak to us of the Divine Spirit pitching her tent firmly within the phenomenal order of things.

A meditation on the Scriptures of the Universe reveals even more to those who are open to a Christian Animism. Cosmology, the study of the emergence and unfolding of the Universe and the human role in this mysterious process, has much to teach us. We 21st century believers are being invited to re-imagine and re-shape our relationships to the Divine in ways suggested by modern cosmology, which presents us with a cosmogenesis, with a Universe that is a restless creative adventure. The adventure is an irreversible sequence of transformations that have been occurring for some 13.7 billion years. In the past, many believers looked to static things in their efforts to discern the Spirit. Now they are invited to look to evolutionary and changing things as they seek the presence and activity of that same Spirit.

Where unfolding and change are taking place there is chaos but also creativity. In its more comprehensive dimensions the Universe story is primarily a story about creativity. It is about a movement from lesser to greater complexity and from lesser to greater consciousness. Consider the creativity required to bring forth hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing some hundreds of millions of stars. Consider the creativity required to form the chemical elements within the furnaces of some of these stars. Consider the creativity needed to form life in Earth’s early ocean, a life that contained the potential of evolving into unimaginable diversity. Consider the creativity manifest in the emergence of us humans who have become the Universe’s way of knowing and celebrating itself.

An increasing number of Christian theologians are doing theology within this cosmological context and are pursuing a line of investigation and contemplation that moves in the direction of a Christian Animism. Australian theologian Denis Edwards (Breath of Life: A Theology of the Creator Spirit) writes: “The Spirit can be understood as the immanent divine power that enables the evolutionary emergence, continually giving to creation itself the capacity to transcend itself and become more than it is. The Breath of God breathes life into the whole process of an emergent universe. The Holy Spirit is the immanent divine principle drawing creation toward an open future.”

This is indeed good news. No longer need we separate the sacred from the secular, the supernatural from the natural, the holy from the profane. As we rediscover the Creative Spirit as a pervasive presence within the Universe, we might even rediscover that we are blessed to live our lives in an enchanted place!

John Surette, SJ, is co-founder and editor of “Spiritearth” (www.spiritearth.org). This article was taken from August 18, 2008, volume 18, number 4 of  that publication.

Associates of C:WED:

Eleanor Rae, Ph.D., founder

Anne Andersson, editor

Giles E. Rae, publisher

Representatives at the United Nations:

      New York:     Lina Gupta, Ph.D.

                                   Alayne O’Reilly, Ph.D.

              Vienna:        Susanne Schaup, Ph.D.

Mission Statement

The Center for Women, the Earth, the Divine is dedicated to exploring the parallels that exist between the imaging and treatment of women and of the Earth, and how our images of the Divine are related to these parallels.

We began by exploring these relationships within the context of our own tradition— the Christian. While we continue our exploration in this tradition, we have also engaged people of other traditions such as the Buddhist, Goddess, Hindu, Indigenous, Jewish and Muslim. Our work is made available through talks, workshops, writings and retreats. The immediate purpose of the Center is educational, while the ultimate goal is the healing of the Creation.

The founder of C:WED is Eleanor Rae, Ph.D., author of Women, the Earth, the Divine, President Emerita of the Network Alliance of Congregations Caring for Earth and founder of the Earth Values Caucus at the United  Nations.          

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Report on Hutchinson River Restoration Project (HRRP)

Eleanor Rae

On September 30, 2004, I attended a meeting of WOW (Women on the Way) on City Island. As it                                                                          turned out, all the women there, myself excepted, were struggling artists of one kind or another. As a thealogian and author, I felt rather out of place. This would have been my last meeting with WOW except for a chance happening. While in the process of breaking up to go home, the woman next to me, Toby Liederman, caught me up in conversation with her interest in Anne M. Hutchinson. Until that point in time, my knowledge of Anne was basically limited to knowing that she was the woman for whom a parkway and river in Westchester County and the Bronx had been named.

Many explorations and meetings later, a group of us—women and men—are now in the process of becoming a not-for-profit organization so that we can obtain funding to restore this most polluted river as a living memorial for our Pilgrim Mother. Here, for both the short and the long term, are our plans for this project.

For the short term, we plan to concentrate our efforts solely in the Bronx by working with local organizations and authorities. Our goals include making boat tips up the river as far as it is navigable (at least to the Westchester County line) to take water samples and investigate the shoreline for activities that lead to water pollution. We then plan to contact the New York City Department of Environmental Protection office about extending into the Bronx itself the water quality measurements that have already been made on the river north of the borough. In addition, we hope to make investigations on foot to see and document the condition of the banks. We will also continue community outreach in the Bronx by having a booth with educational materials during the local fairs, by working with the administration of Pelham Bay Park in such activities as the shore cleanups and by making presentations at Co-op City, the huge residential complex that borders the Hutchinson River. To help us in our outreach efforts, we plan to launch a web site and to design and print a brochure with information about our organization and its mission.

In the long term, we plan to make contact with those who live along the Hutchinson River in Westchester County and with the municipalities they live in, including Pelham Manor, Mount Vernon, Pelham, New Rochelle, Eastchester and Scarsdale. Our aim will be to begin action that could clean up that part of the river and make its banks pleasant and accessible for all who dwell in the river, along its banks or journey to it.

Autumn Equinox—Amy Hannon

                    Marigolds and lavender,                                                                                                 Shifting of the climate,

                    wild turkeys, deer,                                                                                                         karma of our deeds,

                    delicate gleaming daylight,                                                                                              rising seas, tornados

                    steams crystal clear                                                                                                       heedless of our needs

                    Golden apples of the sun                                                                                                We enter now a darkness

                    heavy on the bough                                                                                                       not knowing what will come

                    dawn later every day                                                                                                     except a simpler life

                    Autumn comes now                                                                                                      a slower beating drum

                    Gather round to give away,                                                                                           Surrender to the darkness

                    gather round and pray                                                                                                   let its wisdom heal

                    to the four directions and the heavens                                                                           dying part of living

                    with thanks for each day                                                                                             on the great turning wheel

                    Honor also Earth,

                    wild mother and source,

                    whose power now we witness

                    changing course

11/1/2008

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