Theologians & feminism: religious booknotes

...The book ranges widely through fairy tales and myths of Greece and the Near East and is informed by Jungian and Freudian psychology...

...in other traditions, Jesus has a virginal conception or was the natural son of Joseph...

...Schaberg establishes even more concretely the themes of liberation from oppression and subversion of the patriarchal order...

...Where Daly uncovers the theme of the rape of the goddess, a theme which she says is almost universal in patriarchal myths, Schaberg thinks that the narratives mask the illegitimacy tradition...

...In the Gnostic tradition, Jesus has a nonhuman birth...

...It explores the relationships between sisters which, in Greek myth, are less visible than those between brothers or between child and parent...

...Rabuzzi analyzes how the decision to be a mother involves a change of physical and psychological identity for a woman...

...The first book, Journey Through Menopause, is a pioneering work on the subject, although it does not attempt to be either comprehensive or systematic...

...The theme had to be "repressed" because of its unsuitability in a culture which made paternity normative for social value and control...

...Carr uses her familiarity with the women's movement in other countries to illustrate her arguments...

...From the ancient world (the Near East, Southeastern and Central Europe, Egypt, and Crete), come statuettes, plaques, and texts...

...15:16...

...2 Kings 21:7...

...Hestia, whom Katherine Allen Rabuzzi invoked in her earlier book, The Sacred and the Feminine: A Theology of Housework, is the goddess Downing discovers to represent both the home-like and the unheim-lich (the uncanny or un-home-like) in her journey...

...Schaberg thinks it unlikely that the theme of illegitimacy could have been "passed down within a patriarchal form of Christianity...

...Berger works chronologically and geographically...

...She rejects, as both the Americans and French do, the masculine-feminine dualism which, in effect, values the work of the male and at the same time discounts the work of the female...

...Furthermore, our culture is generally comfortable with male-male bonding but ambivalent about women's intimacy with other women...

...Carr acknowledges that no specific individual has a "right" to be ordained...

...Rich with insight, Downing's book is a welcome sequel to The Goddess...

...The debate on women's ordination, for example, raises the question of identity: who are women that they can be excluded on principle from professional priesthood in the Roman church...

...2Chron...

...Finally, she asks how the experience of motherhood is shared by women and men who are not designated by that name...

...In Transforming Grace, Anne Carr restates several contemporary debates: ordination of women in the church, theology as a locus for scholarship on gender, changes in women's studies, and doctrinal matters...

...She suggests a consideration of the Christ of the Wisdom tradition instead of an exclusive preoccupation with the Christ of the Logos tradition...

...Several features of these "lives of saints" recur-the concern with purity, the use of sexual power to prevent rape, and the increase in the sower's crop...

...In her epilogue, Schaberg compares her position on the birth narratives with those of Mary Daly and Rosemary Ruether...

...Ruether does not question the interpretation of the birth narratives as virginal conception...

...2 Kings 17:9-10...

...Downing notices that menopause has been of interest primarily to medical professionals while feminists like Simone de Beauvoir have treated the subject only selectively...

...Ironically, the cultic aspect of religion is a source of much of the information we have about the mother goddess, who, as Pamela Berger writes in her book, The Goddess Obscured: Transformation of the Grain Protectress from Goddess to Saint, was known by different names in different cultures...

...However, the subtitle, A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives, is a clue to the solid scholarship informing Schaberg's thesis...

...Two books by Christine Downing, Journey Through Menopause: A Personal Rite of Passage and Psyche's Sisters: Re-Imagining the Meaning of Sisterhood continue the "soul work'' that the author introduced as a theoretical concept and as a personal reflection in The Goddess (1984...

...Carr cites feminist criticisms of cultural situations that deprive women of the "power of naming their own experience, or the male 'theft of the world.''' She recalls that the public recitation of the Magnificat is forbidden by some repressive governments in Latin America: as the words of a poor woman, the Magnificat has inspired revolutionary action...

...Downing's thesis is that "after menopause the polymorphousness of our sexuality reappears" that is, one rediscovers the continued presence of desires that one has not lived...

...Throughout the book Carr's voice is measured yet impassioned, persistent, and historically and politically informed...

...As evidence of goddess worship in northern Europe, Berger cites Gregory of Tours' account of Simplicius's destruction of the goddess Berecynthia...

...Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi's Motherself: A Mythic Analysis of Motherhood ventures into areas difficult to reflect on...

...Her reasonable voice prevails even when her claims become most urgent...

...She observes, from anecdotes that record the conflict between goddess religions and Christianity, that both groups believed in supernatural interventions in daily and seasonal events, in the acceptability of sacrifice as a way of moving the gods to action, and in the power of prayer...

...Downing reminds us of Freud's observation that our culture has made the parent-child relationship sacred but has left profane the relationship of siblings...

...Downing's second book deserves a wide readership...

...Nevertheless, she argues, "it is unjust to exclude an entire class of Christians from the opportunity of having their vocations tested- as unjust as it would be if blacks or Asians were excluded...

...Although Asherah is translated in rabbinic commentaries and the King James version as "grove," today scholars agree that the word has something to do with a goddess...

...By the second century, belief in the virginal birth became dominant and the theme of illegitimacy had been by and large "erased" in the mainline tradition...

...She compares the hero with the mother to show how motherhood is an experience of the sacred...

...In the early church, the notion of illegitimacy was theologized minimally as the begetting by the Holy Spirit...

...What follows is a fascinating account of the transformations of the mother goddess or earth mother figure in art, history, hagiography, and folk literature...

...For example, Asherah, one of the three major female deities of the Syro-Palestinian region, is referred to several times in the Hebrew Testament (1 Kings 15:13...

...Berger traces the transformation of the grain goddess into Christian and folk figures: Radegund, Macrine, Walpurga, Milbur-ga, Brigid, Bessey of Plow Monday, the crazy mother, and even one male figure-Blase...

...As constructive theology, her book revitalizes basic issues, such as God, Christology, "salvation" of women, and feminist spirituality...

...2 Kings 23:7...

...For those who might be scandalized at the thought of Jesus' illegitimacy, Schaberg argues for the high probability that the notion originated in historical tradition before the Gospels were written and that Matthew and Luke, in novel and different ways, attempted to "minimize the potential damage of that tradition and maximize its power...

...17:2...

...But from the ministerial view of the church, there is no crisis since the number of persons involved in all forms of ministry, according to Carr, has increased...

...Berger notices that while contemporary scholars prefer the name "great mother" for the different female personifications of' 'growth energy" (her term), the figure originally represented more than the image of motherhood...

...she builds on the Lukan association of pregnancy and liberation...

...From these stories Berger shows how the "grain miracle," a subject that recurs in medieval art and folklore, is transferred to the Virgin Mary in the story of the flight from Herod into Egypt...

...There is also the suggestion that, should the officials of the church not respond to the invitation, it will be their loss rather than that of the church as a whole...

...In the last chapter, "Theft of Women's Mysteries and Boons," Rabuzzi considers patriarchy's attempts to rob women of the ability to give birth...

...Together these books are important tesserae in the world that is taking shape-a world that becomes ever more possible both in spite of and because of our newly known past...

...Berger does for these materials what Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza does for early Christian texts...

...Although hers also is principally an interpretive book, Berger distinguishes her work from that of other art historians isolated from the disciplines of anthropology, folklore, and psychology...

...She cautions women against giving up the prerogative of being a "motherself,'' should human reproduction ever become technologically possible outside the womb...

...In the last paragraph of the book, Schaberg acknowledges that she has tried to "break the silence of the 'silent night''' and to make it possible to read the texts with new understanding of the profundities of birth and death which surpass any structures constructed for their protection or control...

...Whether the reasonableness of this imperative has made a "bloody entrance" into our consciousness or a gradual transition-whether the conviction is borne by a flood of relief or fear-the demand for change in religious and ecclesiastical structures cannot indefinitely continue to be met with what the Washington Post recently called a "molasses-like silence...

...The dearth of vocations can be taken as evidence of decline in the cultic view of the church...

...Rabuzzi revalorizes the signs, status, and work of the female-here, the phenomenon of being a mother...

...Contemporary liberation movements are modeled on Sophia, Carr explains, when they specify literacy among the disenfranchised as a crucial step toward enhancing self-image and "responsible historical agency...

...She urges the present officers of the church not only to respond to the challenge of an authentic community of equal disciples, but to lead the way into this renewal...

...Berger links the earth goddess festivals, cited in Tibullus and Ovid, with the Christian Observance of Rogation days, which date from the fifth century, and argues that such festivities were one way of redirecting "peasant veneration from pagan deities to Christian figures...

...1 Kings 18:19...

...The letters of Pope Gregory provide a record of the instructions given to missionaries regarding pagan idols and temples...

...The very question of women's ordination symbolizes the absence of women in the official life of the church, a symbol of women's exclusion from all significant decision making...

...With its fifty-nine aptly placed illustrations, the book makes it possible both to see and to hear female elements-and to understand them meaningfully-in contexts where they were previously overlooked or obscured...

...She is aware that these texts frequently call for a "hermeneutics of suspicion" since they often reach us "only through the distorting pens of unsympathetic intermediaries...

...She calls the women's movement "a powerful moment of grace for the church...

...Logos has "one-sidedly rationalistic connotations" whereas Sophia is dynamic, performative, leading to an emphasis on mutuality and reciprocity...

...Berger's contention is that although the records of events and cults may have no "significant" artistic merits, they yield important information about rural life in antiquity and about people who remained marginal to the dominant culture...

...She is closer to the French feminists in their focus on the fact and experience of gender than to the American feminists in their work on the cause of the meanings of "man" and "woman...

...The title of Jane Schaberg's book, The Illegitimacy of Jesus, appears sensationalist...

...Theologians & feminism Mary Gerhart Some people have been saying it for a long time: The women's movement is the most important intellectual event of our time, and it requires that we rethink everything we have taken for granted about gender...