Mixing archival video with present day recollections, Plague tells the story of the AIDS advocacy group ACTUP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) and their decade long struggle to force the federal government to find an affordable and effective treatment for HIV/AIDS.  Comprised mostly of gay men and their lesbian allies, ACTUP fought for survival in an age in which many of their compatriots believed they deserved death.

Many also wished they would disappear.  Nearly 20,000 U.S.-Americans died of AIDS before President Reagan publicly mentioned its existence, nearly seven years after its virulent emergence.

In the nineteen eighties, many of the United States’ AIDS dead were gay men. Evicted from families and forced to flee hometowns, they sought refuge in the anonymity of big cities.  Their arrival constituted a type of re-birth; there, they re-incorporated themselves into families and friend groups.  Some lived lives of open flamboyance, valiantly defying mainstream desire that they blend in invisibly.  Others remained in the closet until disease or indignity pushed them out.  Their deaths were a whisper.

The dead bodies of AIDS victims were treated much like the living bodies of gay people: perpetually contaminating and hideously grotesque, they should be neither seen nor touched.  If possible, they should be erased altogether.

To this end, the bodies of AIDS victims who died in hospitals were put in black trash bags.  Many funeral homes refused to take the bodies of AIDS victims even though the virus died off a mere two hours after its host did.  Some encouraged kin to have their loved one’s ravaged body cremated and turned into ashes.  Others accepted bodies killed by AIDS but insisted on placing them only in closed caskets.

Gay victims of AIDS were denied wholeness in a further way.  So as not to offend the sensibilities of scandalized blood relatives, many gay men who died from AIDS received two funerals, one for their gay friends and allies, and one for their family.  Or sometimes the funeral parlor would hold one family but place each group in separate rooms.

Homophobia compels gay men and lesbians to split themselves in two, to sublimate or submerge their bodies’ desire for thoroughly embodied encounter with other bodies, to banish sexual touch, to walk through life ghost-like.  The dual funeral epitomizes this.  Even in death, gay people were forced to bear a fragmented self.

To protest the erasure of their bodies, many ACT-UP activists who died of AIDS held “political funerals.”  Though superficially secular, these funerals were often undeniably Eucharistic.  As gay activist and AIDS victim David Wojnarowicz explained, these political funerals aimed at “turning our private grief for the loss of friends, family, lovers and strangers into something public…one of the first steps in making the private grief public is the ritual of memorials.  I have loved the way memorials take the absence of a human being and make them somehow physical with the use of sound…I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of AIDS.”

Wojnarowicz recognizes the power of bodies that come together.  He posits the incorporation of social bodies as the only fitting response to the unmaking of individual bodies by AIDS.  Outlining the political power of the body made public, he wonders “what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend, or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to Washington  D.C. and blast through the gates of the white house and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps.”

As Mark Lowe Fisher expressed before his death, “I suspect—I know—my funeral will shock people when it happens.  We Americans are terrified of death.  Death takes place behind closed doors and is removed from reality, from the living.  I want to show the reality of my death, to display my body in public; I want the public to bear witness.  We are not just spiraling statistics; we are people who have lives, who have purpose, who have lovers, friends, and families.”

Many men dying from AIDS wanted their dead bodies paraded through the streets in this way.  One man wanted his corpse thrown over the fence of the White House.  Another man, Jon Greenberg, proclaimed, “I don’t want an angry political funeral.  I just want you to burn me in the street and eat my flesh.”

On the day of the unveiling of the national AIDS quilt in Washington, D.C. a group of people mourning the loss of loved ones staged another type of political funeral. Carrying in their hands boxes and urns filled with their beloved dead’s ashes, they walked slowly towards the fence that marked the edge of the front lawn of the White House.  Young men in their late twenties, a conservatively dressed mother in her early sixties, they strode together in silence. “There’s nothing beautiful about it,” one participant explained in anguish, “this is what I have left—a box full of ashes and bone chips…We are bringing them,” he continued, “to the person responsible for their death.”

“This is what our loved ones have been reduced to,” another man added.

When they reached the fence, they opened the boxes and urns they still cradled, and began throwing their beloved’s ashes through the fence and onto the White House lawn.  Once in the air, the ashes scattered and mixed with the ashes of all the others.  Those who no longer held them wept.  A man was crying, “I love you, Mike.  I love you, Mike.”

The documentary confesses the interruptive power of bodily presence.  All throughout the film, “people with AIDS [are] putting their bodies on the line”—getting arrested, staging protests, and storming buildings.  On one occasion, they enter the headquarters of a major pharmaceutical company involved in AIDS R&D.  Blockading its front office with their bodies, they refused to leave until their demands were heard.  A middle-aged employee, balding and befit with a pocket square, is sent to deal with them. HIV positive activist Bob Rafsky, who is sitting on the floor in front of him, shouts, “See this dark mark on my forehead? That’s Kaposi’s sarcoma.  It’s gonna spread, it’s gonna kill me. You coming to my funeral? Because you’re the man fucking responsible; you are my murderer, in your shirt and tie!” Rather than annoyed or angry, the man is transformed.  Confronted by the immediacy of their suffering bodies, he begins to cry.

More recent ACTUP protests in Philadelphia

For Christians who belong to the body of Christ by baptism and who take Christ’s body into their own ones every time they ingest the Eucharist, How To Survive a Plague’s meditation on the power of bodily presence carries ecclesiological import.  It forces us to more fearlessly interrogate what it means to be embodied members of the body of Christ.

As our treatment of people suffering from HIV/AIDS, especially those who are gay and/or poor, shows, we still have a hard time taking seriously the embodied character of Christ’s presence in human bodies.  Even though Jesus explicitly identifies himself with the deprived bodies of the suffering poor, we find it especially difficult to accept the reality of Christ’s presence there.

This confusion about bodies seems to have bothered the church for a very long time.  In the late fourth century, St. John Chrysostom preached:

“Do you want to honor Christ’s body? Then do not scorn him in his nakedness, nor honor him here in the church with silken garments while neglecting him outside where is he cold and naked.  For he who said: This is my body, and made it so by his words, also said: ‘You saw me hungry and did not feed me, and inasmuch as you did not do it for one of these, the least of my brothers, you did not do it for me.’ (Mat 25:34).”

Later in this homily he asks,

“Of what use is it to weigh down Christ’s table with golden cups, when he himself is dying of hunger? First, fill him when he is hungry; then use the means you have left to adorn his table.  Will you have a golden cup made but not give a cup of water? What is use of providing the table with cloths woven of gold thread, and not providing Christ himself with the clothes he needs? What profit is there in that?  Tell me: If you were to see him lacking the necessary food but were to leave him in that state and merely surround his table with gold would he be grateful to you or rather would he not be angry? What if you were to see him clad in worn-out rags and stiff from the cold, and were to forget about clothing him and instead were to set up golden columns for him, saying that you were doing it in his honor? Would he not think he was being mocked and greatly insulted?”

Chrysostom concludes,

“No one has ever been accused for not providing ornaments, but for those who neglect their neighbor a hell awaits with an inextinguishable fire and torment in the company of the demons.  Do not, therefore, adorn the church and ignore your afflicted brother, for he is the most precious temple of all.”

An unfortunate thirteenth century inversion would further impede our ability to take Christ’s presence in human bodies seriously.  Prior to this era, the ecclesial body was understood to comprise the real body of Christ and the Eucharist its mystical incarnation.  Only after this shift could the ecclesial body be thought of independently from the Eucharist.

Unsurprisingly, we remain more comfortable with Christ’s embodied presence in an inanimate host than with His presence in the living bodies of human beings.

I identify ACTUP’s most controversial action, its 1989 demonstration within the walls of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, as a modern day performance of Chrysostom’s fourth century homily.  Protesting magisterial prohibitions against condoms and homosexuality, a few dozen activists entered the congregation mid-mass one Sunday morning and staged a die-in in the aisles.  Falling to the ground as though struck by death, they shouted, “Why are you murdering us?”  “Prayers won’t save the 1.5 million people infected with AIDS” others shouted.  Many were arrested, their bodies removed from the aisles on stretchers as though they were corpses.

The Statue of John Chrysostom Inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Like Chrysostom, these demonstrators attempted to interrupt the assembly’s liturgical complacence.  Why do you care more for the body of Christ lying on the altar when you neglect Christ’s AIDS-infected body, they asked.  While Chrysostom excoriated with his words, the ACTUP activists disturbed with their bodies.  By dying in the cathedral’s aisles, they forced the congregation to look at, hear, and maybe even touch bodies they preferred not to know about or come into contact with.  Chrysostom asked about the naked bodies of the hungry shivering just outside the church’s doors, the ACTUP activists brought these bodies inside.

Although a statue of Chrysostom sits inside of this beautifully adorned cathedral, it was the diseased, disturbing, and sexually grotesque bodies of protestors who made Christ’s body most real that day.

In front of this same cathedral in the year 2013, a Cardinal’s representative treats gay and lesbian Catholics with dirty hands like trespassers and orders their arrest.  Symbolizing their gayness, the Cardinal sees their dirty hands as a desacralizing stain that makes their bodies unfit to come inside of the cathedral. One cannot touch the Eucharist with dirty, that is, gay hands.  Only clean bodies, that is, straight or sexually inactive bodies, are capable of taking Christ’s body into their own bodies.

But Jesus was not so fussy about his own body.  He let himself be touched by a bleeding woman. He cavorted with women who had sex for a living.  Jesus’ body touched the bodies of the sexually unclean and the socially unwanted.  If Jesus did not keep his body from contact with the sinful and the unclean, why should we?

The Color Purple

“I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here. Amen, say Shug, Amen, amen.”

We were discussing this novel, and this particular passage, the other  morning in a course I took this past semester on Womanist/Feminist Ethics. As we were wrestling with questions around what resistance and even liberation look like at various points of the text, a very smart and wise colleague of mine pointed to this passage, and noted that, perhaps, the greatest act of defiance is to still exist. To risk stating the obvious and even perhaps sounding cliché, what profound claims, both by Celie and by my colleague! In Celie’s words, echoed and summarized by my colleague, we find a bold affirmation, a prayer, and an ethical assertion,  all wrapped up in one short statement.

Celie’s assertion was one I will never truly understand in a number of ways, but one that I nevertheless could not help but resonate with on some level. While I will never even begin to grasp Celie’s experiences, and never fully understand the privilege that comes with me being white, amongst other things, I can grasp a glimpse of that sense of feeling as though I perhaps shouldn’t be here. Here, in my context, being in the theological academy. At the risk of being even more autobiographical than I already have been, I’ll share that I grew up in a pretty uneducated family (I’m the first in my family to even go to college, let alone graduate school) in a working class neighborhood, in a conservative Pentecostal church. In the church I grew up in, people, and especially kids and adolescents, were often prophesied over and such. I never was. I was not the smart one, nor the pretty one, nor the athletic one. I was never one of the kids with “promise.” Rather, I was the socially awkward (some things never change, I supposed), hyperactive kid with the patchy family life that was smart but never focused enough (it wasn’t until I was in Divinity school that I was diagnosed with ADHD), who was always just a bit too whimsical and wild. I grew up thinking (and I’m pretty sure almost everyone around me grew up thinking) that my destiny was one of disciplined mediocrity and simplicity—and that was only if I could manage to follow God’s path and not get myself into trouble. Yet somehow, between the grace and goodness of God and of others in my life and a little tenacity—by showing up and by others showing up for me—life has been more (and assuredly far different!) than I ever would have imagined.

I can’t help, then, but find immense hope in, as my colleague put it, Celie’s defiance simply by virtue of her existence, let alone by her assertion of it. Part of the reason I’m so grateful for this blog, and am honored to be even considered to participate more fully in it, is it reminds me and affirms me that I exist, and moreover, that I don’t exist alone.

I was recently at a theology conference where  I was one of very few women present (let’s be honest, that’s true of most theology conferences I attend!) where I struggled for my voice to be heard, which of course meant that I struggled internally on whether my voice was valuable or even necessary, whether what I was arguing was relevant or “theological” or smart.  I suspect that I’m not alone, in this experience or this feeling.

One could turn to numerous sources to validate this premonition. For example, Church of Christ blogger and psychologist Richard Beck posted a graphic recently of the percentage of Ph.D.’s awarded in the U.S to Women in 2009, a graphic that demonstrates that religion and philosophy programs rank near the very bottom, only to loose to engineering, computer science, and physics. In past attempts at blogging, I’ve noted the dearth of women in the theological academy and the theological blogosphere, and recent conversations in the theoblogosphere regarding the Theology Studio and gender and Tony Jones’s blog have pointed to the lack of diversity in the academy and the resultant problems of such homogeneity.

Yet, at this particular conference, I struggled a little less than I have in the past, because of places like this blog, and because of the graduate school I attend, where I’ve been so incredibly lucky to have found colleagues and professors that said amen to and with and for me when I’ve simply said “I’m here.”

So, by way of introduction, I simply want to say I’m here, and, in the spirit of/with credit to a womanist liberationist methodology (see, for instance, Katie G. Cannon, Katie’s Cannon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community, and Stacy Floyd-Thomas,  Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics), that this is a starting place for my theological work: the realities of experience, of mine and others. I look forward to potentially participating more explicitly in this space where I can be encouraged in my existence, affirm others in theirs, and where together, we can continue to both hear and assert, in the midst of spaces in the theological academy and elsewhere that are often racist, sexist, heterosexist, ableist, ageist, etcetera, etcetera, that we exist, to learn from each others’ existences, and to imagine and enact spaces where we can not simply exist but flourish.

Over the last twenty years women have spoken out with ever increasing strength and entered into a new dialogue. They have discovered themselves and each other; they have also developed an amazing ability to envisage alternatives. [1]

(Ursula King, 1985)

Three months ago I arrived in the South Pacific, preparing to join the faculty of a regional theological college. I had wondered about the status of women in the pacific churches, and was not surprised to learn that 95% of the student body were men. I was also aware before coming that the faculty were entirely male, and significantly older than I am. I thought I was prepared.

Like many Christian colleges, each morning commences with chapel. As most students live on campus with the partners and families, the worshipping community is quite large. The round chapel accommodates three seating sections; one for the women, one for the men (referred to as ‘the students’) and one for the faculty (the place where white bodies are found). On Friday’s Eucharistic service, it is the men who come to the table first, who all present themselves before the women stand. This is unannounced and I am told not ‘a rule’, nor the segregated seating arrangement, and yet it happens day after day, week after week. One day I sat with the ‘men’ and was well aware that a rule had been transgressed.

The faculty here are hardly conservative in their scholarship. Indeed, the institution is critiqued across the Pacific for being theologically liberal. And yet these practices, amongst others, do not seem to be challenged or discussed in any significant way. In a college where there are four mandatory ‘contextual theology’ classes in a master’s degree, the context of women seems irrelevant, or at least a cultural artefact that should be left alone; to use a classically Pacific term, taboo. Rather than cause me to think particularly about patriarchy in the Pacific, these months have led to greater reflection on theological pedagogy and what theological institutions look like in the south.

As a final semester PhD student, I come from an institution generally assumed to be most liberal theological campus in Australia. And yet there too, there were few female PhD students studying theology. Most women who do go onto doctoral studies are significantly older, often past retirement age. During the years spent researching in Sydney, it was hard to find women doing theological research anywhere; the institution I was enrolled at had no women on full time faculty and not a single college in the whole city had a woman teaching theology full-time!

Is this theology in the south? Left to be a discipline taught by men for the benefit of male students?  Many (most) of the south’s prominent feminist, postcolonial, and queer scholars end up in North American or European institutions. Currently, debate about these competing experiences and how they inform scholarship is going on in the context of biblical studies, with a clear division created between diaspora and @home scholars, and the commitments these particular social locations dictate.  Faith, Feminism, and Scholarship: the next generation, published in 2011, offered itself as a book of diversity, and yet every feminist scholar that contributed to the publication was educated and employed within the United States. A feature that made the final section – ‘Walking the Talk: Embodied Feminist Pedagogies’ –not particularly helpful to the next generation outside of the US.

The answer is not simple, and it is all too easy to dismiss the benefits of collegiality and resources found in larger American or English institutes with diverse faculty representation. But one must question the affect this has on the future of scholarship and the future student bases of the regions they leave.  Where are the female students, especially younger women?  If theological study is intended to expose students to critical learning, shouldn’t we expect to see diversity in faculty and student representation in the years following, say, ‘second wave feminism’, for example? What then, are the options for the scholar who represents and engages with those at the margin ‘down here’, scholars who want to work outside of North America and Europe? Is a woman – perhaps feminist – scholar relegated to a career of tokenism in the south? Is there really a whole range of alternatives -like Ursula King imagined almost thirty years ago – for those outside North American and Europe in 2013?

It seems the high aims of theological pedagogy and even the possibility of a feminist theological pedagogy are challenged by the painful reality for those beyond the centres of institutional power. Nearly all recent scholarship on feminist pedagogy approaches the question from the perspective of engaging female students; albeit in non-essentialising ways. It seems however, that more probing questions need to be asked about institutional power and the oligopoly of ‘minoritised scholarship’. In the commodification of theological education and scholarship, the ongoing claims of ‘global theology’ – that is, the drawing of minoritised scholars to the centres of power – begin to look more like economically motivated strategies of homogenisation than attempts to diversify voices.

I am not pushing towards prescriptive moves here; but I have found the move from student to teacher is making the situation clearer. The reality is far starker than I originally imagined.

Icon of Catherine of Siena by Robert Lentz, OFM

(I think she looks a little too wry for someone being crushed by an unimaginable weight, but, hey—who can resist a snarky-looking saint?)

This is a long post—about twice the length of the papers my students recently wrote, in fact. But it’s about what sustains me through the difficulties of being a critical Catholic woman, and I hope it’s helpful to some of you.

Last week, April 29, was the feast of Catherine of Siena, one of the four women included in the list of theologian-saints whom the Catholic Church recognizes as Doctors of the Church. (If you haven’t already, be sure to check out these brief and inspiring words from M. Catherine Hilkert, Professor of Theology at the University Notre Dame, with whom several WITs have studied). I’ve been thinking recently of her last reported mystical vision. Here’s how Paul VI relayed it in a general audience on April 30, 1969: 

Weak, exhausted by fasting and illness, she came every day to St. Peter’s, the former basilica. In the porch there was a garden, on the facade a famous mosaic, painted by Giotto for the 1300 jubilee, and called the barque (now it appears inside the porch of the new basilica). It reproduced the scene of Peter’s boat, tossed by the night storm, and it represented the apostle daring to move towards Christ who has appeared walking on the waves; a symbol of life that is always in danger and always miraculously saved by the divine mysterious Master. One day, it was 29th January 1380, about Vesper time, Sexagesima Sunday, and it was Catherine’s last visit to St. Peter’s; it seemed to Catherine, caught up in ecstasy, that Jesus stepped out of the mosaic and came up to her, placing the barque on her weak shoulders; the heavy, storm-tossed barque of the Church; and Catherine, collapsing under the weight, fell to the ground unconscious. Historically, Catherine’s sacrifice seemed to fail. But who can say that burning love of hers disappeared in vain if myriads of virgin souls and hosts of priestly spirits and of faithful and industrious laymen, made it their own; and it still blazes in Catherine’s words: “Sweet Jesus, darling Jesus”?

Catherine spent her next three months in agony, dying on April 29 after a three-day paralysis. She was 33.

That image—the Doctor crushed by her church—has been swirling around my head, along with the question at the heart of this post: What is hope for the Church? I suspect that many readers of WIT have your own reasons sometimes to struggle to have hope for the Church (I’m speaking particularly to our Catholic readers, but, mutatis mutandis…). I know that I’ve got a few. And I don’t only mean “the Church” in the sense of narrow ecclesiologies (though the institutional hierarchy can be a particular challenge). There are times I struggle to have hope in all of us: times I feel profoundly alone, and in need of far more support than I’m getting for this Christian journey, and times (truthfully, not enough times) that I’m profoundly conscious of the ways in which I fail to offer that support and solidarity to others in any truly meaningful way—particularly but not exclusively as it relates to my benefitting from racism and failing adequately to protest US violations of human rights.

The ease with which we ignore one another’s pain forms the starkest denial imaginable of our claim to be one Body.

Now, for many Catholics I know, the election of Francis has made hope far easier to come by, and I’m not immune to that excitement. There are many hopeful signs, among them the report that the prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Religious now feels free to critique publicly some operations of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, while previously he “didn’t have the courage to speak” (“Obedience and authority must be renewed, re-visioned. … Authority that commands, kills. Obedience that becomes a copy of what the other person says, infantilizes”—that’s a Cardinal commenting on the effect of choices made by the CDF.) But I think that if any of us are going to keep talking about Francis inspiring “hope,” then we need a clarification of terms. Those who know me might know what’s coming next, because it’s a point that I’m hammering fairly consistently: hope is not optimism. In fact, in certain cases (I suspect most of the cases where it actually matters) optimism can be a vice opposed to hope. An optimist can discount and ignore evidence against her conviction that things will right themselves. An optimist is threatened by others’ pain. But someone acting in hope—the conviction not that things will right themselves, nor that we’ll be able to right them, but that God’s power will work to overturn whatever wrongs our systems can devise—that person can face pain. Without denying pain or being swept away by it, she can face her own and others’ suffering.

I have been excited by Francis’ pontificate, I recognize within myself a desire to protect that excitement (as Francis said in his inaugural homily, “Being protectors…also means keeping watch over our emotions, over our hearts”). But we don’t protect hope by shielding it from others’ pain—not even the pain of those we think probably just need to buck up and stop being so negative. As my very wise friend  Fran Rossi Szpylczyn said (go check out her lovely blog!) to me about our shared and unexpected enamoration: “He’ll break our hearts, but he has captured them first, with love. Of course, what happens after they break will be most interesting. I suspect we are all in for many surprises.” That ability to admit that your heart will be broken, but to willing to learn what happens afterwards—that’s hope. We don’t protect hope by drawing in on ourselves and blocking others out; we protect hope by drawing closer to its source—and I’m enough of a Rahnerian to believe that there’s an ambiguity that makes that experience dark to ourselves. I’m enough of a Rahnerian, that is to say, to think that sometimes God’s Spirit is known “when despair is accepted and mysteriously experienced as assurance without any easy consolation” (“Experience of the Holy Spirit, TI 18).

Which brings me back to that image of Catherine and the barque of Peter. Paul VI draws our attention to the mosaic from which that barque emerges: Peter walking on water toward Jesus, “a symbol of life that is always in danger and always miraculously saved by the divine mysterious Master.” I’d like us to note the tensions in that image: Catherine is praying before a depiction of Jesus catching the sinking Peter and saving him from the stormy waters. But how is Jesus’ presence revealed to her? Not in similar fashion, not as someone who buoys her up and saves her from her fears—but as someone who lays Peter’s shelter on her shoulders as an agonizing weight, without even the consolation of seeing her pain bear fruit in the healing of the Church (and what an interesting gender contrast: Peter given shelter and comfort; Catherine given a painful burden). While I don’t claim this is an accurate description of Catherine’s life, focusing on the contrasts in this one image, I’m led back to Rahner (edited for gender):

Here is someone who is trying to love God, although there appears to be no response of love from God’s silent incomprehensibility, although she is not sustained by any feeling of enthusiasm, although she cannot confuse herself and her desire for life with God, although she thinks she will die of this love which seems to her like death and absolute rejection, which apparently calls her into the void and the wholly unknown: a love that looks like a terrifying leap into unfathomable depths, since everything seems to become intangible and utterly futile.

So what are we to do when our efforts to hope for the Church end up in “love which seems like death and absolute rejection”? I’m not offering a universal answer: I don’t think that’s possible or healthy. There are times people need to step (or walk) away, and part of facing one another’s pain is refusing to give in to the temptation to dismiss as narcissism or individualism what well may be a necessary act of spiritual self-care. But the theologian whom I, personally, most consistently find helpful in my own efforts to persevere in the Church is Delores Williams.

I’m deeply conscious of the danger of appropriating Williams’ work in a way that does violence to her own context and central concerns: Williams is a womanist theologian, and the ongoing racist oppression of black women is central to her work. When Williams talks about “survival” and “quality of life” (see below), she means these terms literally and concretely, in light of the ongoing manners in which white supremacy threatens the survival and flourishing of black women, children, and men. So when I say that her theology helps me live in the Church, the last thing I want to be saying is “Thank God the systematic violence, murder, and oppression of black people produces reflections that help me, a white woman, calm down when someone in the Catholic Church once again says that women will not be able to preach in mass!” But at the same time, I see it as a consistent problem in the theological academy that contextual theologies are confined to their contexts by white and/or Anglo and/or male and/or straight gatekeepers (see also this), rather than being received as genuine theology which should turn everyone’s attention to human realities in need of universal action with the power to reveal God.

So, what does Williams say is revealed about God?

Through a reading of the Hagar story informed by the experiences of black women in the United States, Williams develops a distinction between God’s action for human liberation, and God’s action for survival/quality of life. While Hagar acts courageously for her own liberation by running away from slavery and Sarai’s abuse, becoming “the first female in the Bible to liberate herself from oppressive power structures” (Sisters in the Wilderness 19), God’s intervention in Hagar’s life is not a liberating one. The angel of the Lord appears to Hagar, addresses her as “Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai,” and tells her, “Return to your mistress and submit to her” (Gen 16.9). Williams insists we reckon with the reality of the text: “The angel of Yahweh is, in this passage, no liberator God” (21). While God demonstrates concern for Hagar and her unborn son’s survival—no one can survive for very long in the wilderness without water, food, and shelter from the sun—”in this passage, God is not concerned with nor involved in liberation” (21).

The first time I read Williams’ Sisters in the Wilderness, I was profoundly disturbed by the centrality of this argument: shouldn’t we instead note that “God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion,” as Dei Verbum puts it (Williams is Protestant, but the point stands), and attribute God’s non-liberating intervention in Hagar’s life to the human limitations and prejudices of the writer? But reflecting on my own experience in the years since I first read this text, I’ve become more and more convinced that Williams captures a reality that needs attention.

There are times that we’re not able to liberate ourselves and others. There are times we do need to endure unjust situations rather than striking the prophetic blow for justice we wish we could. There are times that our experience of living in a storm-tossed Church is not one in which God pulls us out of the waters and calms the wind—but one in which God lays the full, painful, crushing weight of that Church on our shoulders, and in which God’s presence does not alleviate that pain. If we conceive of God only as one who sustains the suffering, we absolutely risk turning faith into an analgesic, and active hope into passive optimism… but perhaps if we conceive of God only as one who liberates the oppressed, we leave ourselves with no way to engage in careful discernment and practice the virtue of prudence. It’s easy to condemn that as false or cowardly—until you’re in a situation where speaking up for yourself could seriously impede your ability to be effective later.

Williams does not interpret God’s acting for survival/quality of life as condemning Hagar’s own actions of self-liberation: God is with her in both the suffering and the freedom of the wilderness. Indeed, “Hagar is the only person in the Bible to whom is attributed the power of naming God” (23; emphasis added). Hagar rejects the way that God has been named by those who enslave and harm her, trusts the power of her own experience of a God who sees her and empowers her own sight, and names God El Roi, in “a strike against patriarchal power at its highest level” (26).

In the bible translation Williams uses, the meaning of the name El Roi is related to Hagar’s saying, “Did I not go on seeing here, after him who sees me?” In the NRSV, the explanation of this name focuses on Hagar’s amazement that she has seen God and lived: “‘Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?”; the NAB version of Gen 16:13 translates El Roi: “To the LORD who spoke to her she gave a name, saying, “You are God who sees me”; she meant, “Have I really seen God and remained alive after he saw me?” To develop this story in accord with Williams’ interpretation, I think it’s appropriate to emphasize both the “sight” Hagar names in calling the LORD “God of seeing” and Hagar’s own sight which endures after their encounter. Not only has she survived; she has survived to “see.” Hagar survives and the validity of her own sight and self-interpretation is upheld.

While God does not liberate Hagar from injustice, God and Hagar together free her from seeing herself and God as Abram and Sarai see them. That’s a particularly important point to me in living the tension of feminist Catholicism. Williams further develops this point in her reading of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: “As long as [Celie] lives in transcendent relation to her own experience, she is content to image God as male, old, and white. But when Shug helps Celie begin her process of self-discovery, Celie starts to understand that her notion of God must change, because ‘you have to git man off your eyeball before you can see anything a’tall.’”

So that’s what I’ve got. I don’t have optimism that anyone will transform all that I find excruciating and unbearable in the Church. But I have faith that God is present with all of us. And I have hope that God—and not, say, those who think this blog is written by a bunch of heretical radical feminists in states of mortal sin—is the one who sees me. And I am trying to persevere in the faith that God upholds my own sight.

Historically, Catherine’s sacrifice seemed to fail. But who can say that burning love of hers disappeared in vain if myriads of women and men made it their own; and it still blazes in Catherine’s words: “Sweet Jesus, darling Jesus”?

This is a reflection I offered for “Storm Sunday,” from the Season of Creation, on Job 28:20-27, 1 Corinthians 1:21-31, and Luke 8:22-25.

For the past 4 weeks of this series on creation we have spoken of many beautiful and awe-inspiring aspects of the natural world—flowers, animals, woods, water—and today’s topic, storms, is no different.  Storms—rainstorms, thunderstorms, snowstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes: these all have a certain beauty to them and can often be awe-inspiring, but their beauty often stands at our expense.  They threaten us—our homes, our families, our sources of food, the very infrastructures that make life possible (especially as we expect to live it).  As much as storms are beautiful and awesome, they are horrific. 

I grew up in a beach town in Southern New Jersey and I have this very strong memory of walking along the boardwalk with my mom and my brother after the worst of the Halloween Nor’easter of 1991 had passed—this was also termed the “Perfect Storm” if you have heard anything about it.  Waves up to 30 ft in height hit the shoreline and my town, Ventnor is only 3 feet above sea level .  I would have been in 1^st grade then.  We were only three out of what seemed to me at the time to be 3,000 people walking on the boardwalk.  I saw most of my classmates with their families, the parish priest, the owners of the corner store near our house.  We had all gathered to marvel at the high tides which had swallowed the entire beach (normally about 350 feet wide).  We were all drawn there.  Water shot up through the planks of wood below our feet to high up above our heads without any notice.  On one side of us as we walked along the boardwalk, water as far as you could see; on the other side, dangerously close to the water’s edge, were the houses of my friends, small businesses, city hall.  And using what powers of reasoning that were available to my 7 yr old brain, I couldn’t tell whether the water level was slowly falling or slowly rising.  It was beautiful, alarming, amazing. 

This experience made such an impression on me that ever since then I’ve had the same reoccurring dream that I’m living on an island which has been engulfed by a huge tidal wave and I must figure out how to save myself and my brother.  Storms allure us even as they might assault us. 

The question that presses on me this morning is, where is God in the storm?  Does the experience of the storm reveal to us something about God and God’s wisdom?

In the excerpt from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians we read this morning, we hear him riffing on God’s wisdom.  We hear that God’s wisdom is unlike human wisdom.  Paul uses language of gradation here—whatever human power is like, God’s version of it is better: God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom; God’s weakness  is stronger than human strength.  But it’s not just that God’s wisdom or strength is simply a bigger and better version of ours, but rather that God’s  wisdom and strength is wholly different sort of wisdom or strength than ours is.  And, this other sort of wisdom or strength helps to challenge conventional human ways of valuing strength and wisdom.  We get a sense of this when Paul says that God’s choices of Jesus’ disciples reveal what God’s wisdom is like to us.  God doesn’t choose the strong and the educated to lead the early church.  God chooses people we wouldn’t have thought to choose.  So, what Paul is trying to express here is that God is not what we think he is, she is.  God’s wisdom is not like human wisdom, yet it is difficult for Paul to put into words what it is like.  He can only really say, rather mysteriously, that Jesus is God’s wisdom for us. 

What about Jesus reveals God’s wisdom to us?  What about Jesus reveals who God is?  And, is there anything about Jesus that can specifically speak to the question of where God is in the storm?

In the passage from Luke’s gospel we read this morning, we get some hints about the way that Jesus reveals God to us and we get something of the same kind of message Paul was trying to communicate:  God isn’t the kind of God we expect. 

Jesus is in a boat with his disciples when they find themselves in the midst of what appears to be a fatal windstorm.  The boat has already begun to fill with water and is starting to sink when the disciples decide to wake up their sleeping leader.  A lot of commentaries suggest that this might have been rude to wake him up with frivolities, but I think it is rather considerate to wake up someone who is about to drown and at least give him the news.  And, in fact, it proved to be a good idea to wake him up because he halts the storm.  Luke describes the response of the disciples to Jesus’s action as both one of fear and amazement.  This is understandable because this kind of ability, to quiet storms, is something totally unfamiliar.  Does it mean their leader is holy or demonic?  Does it mean he can save them or destroy them?  Is he a human being or a god?  How to make sense of this?  And Jesus, noticing this, asks them: “Where is your faith?” 

Where is your faith?

I don’t imagine this as an accusation, like “Where is your faith?” suggesting that if they were truly faith-filled people they never would have had any emotional reaction to the storm at all. 

Growing up as a Christian, I was familiar with this story from the Bible.  I’m sure most of us were.  And, I’m not sure if I got this idea from the pulpit or whether this was my own reasoning, but I thought (growing up) that this was mean to be a story about how the disciples get all worked up about this storm, Jesus yells at them for being worked up, saves them, and they realize that being worried at all was a reflection of their lack of faith in Jesus’ ability to take care of everything.  The moral of this story, I thought, was that if we truly have faith we can be confident that God will protect us from evil.  And, I reasoned even further, if we do experience horrible things it is because either  (A) God is letting them happen to us for a reason—to teach us something.  In other words, God’s purposes are sometimes accomplished through human tragedies, OR (B) horrible things happen because people don’t have enough faith in God’s protective powers.  But, I don’t think that either one of these explanations do justice to the loving God who Jesus reveals to us. 

And, neither one of these explanations can be supported by the portrait of God in the passage we read from Job this morning either.   In the passage from Job we hear God explaining to Job that it is God who decides where rain will break forth and where thunder will clash, and that we may not understand this, but it is accomplished according to God’s wisdom.  Job’s friends, who appear earlier in the text, but who we don’t read about today, provide the antithesis of God’s wisdom:  suffering comes to those who deserve it.  God always rewards good and punishes evil.  But, this is not how God works .  God’s wisdom doesn’t operate lie this and Job is living proof of this reality for his friends: he is an innocent man and yet he experiences extreme suffering.  So this passage, that we reflect on together today, suggests that though the earth operates on the basis of divine wisdom, rain doesn’t fall on the evil, while the faithful are preserved from the storm.  Both the faithful and the unfaithful are vulnerable to the destructive powers of the earth.  Both are threatened by its storming.  Piety is no protection from the storm. 

In the passage from Luke in the boat on the lake, I imagine Jesus not as chastising the disciples for any lack of faith, but rather as asking a legitimate open question as a teacher is apt to ask his students: where is your faith? 

Where is your faith?

If your faith is in God, what kind of God do you have faith in?  Do you have faith in a God who protects you from evil?  one who saves you from suffering?  one who won’t let you die a tragic death out on the waters?  Do you?

Do you?

These questions are posed by this short passage in Luke, but not the answers.  We learn later in Luke’s text, in his second volume, that all faithful followers of Jesus don’t die peacefully in their beds in old age.  Though this storm doesn’t end up taking their lives, many of the disciples of Jesus end up dying violent and tragic deaths anyway. 

Jesus doesn’t save his followers from suffering or from catastrophic deaths.  He doesn’t always calm the storms in our lives.  Despite my childhood impression of this story, this story is not mean to suggest that Jesus always protects us from lethal storms.  The disciples survive this deadly force only to be killed by the lethal force of the Romans.  And, the same could be said for Jesus as well. 

Where is your faith?  The God of Jesus Christ does not reveal herself, himself to be one who protects those who love God from evil.  God doesn’t prevent suffering.  God doesn’t save one from a tragic death.  God doesn’t promise any of these grand, fantastical things to humanity.  Instead, the promise of God is more subtle and, I think, more powerful. 

God promises Godself.  The gift of God is herself, himself.  This is grace: God’s presence, intimacy with God.  Nothing more and nothing less. 

This subtle and powerful gift of intimacy with God is what allows for the transformation of suffering and death from an ultimate end into another opportunity for relationship.  The storm, though not a test from God, is transformed into another opportunity for relationship with God.  This gift of intimacy with God ensures that suffering and death cannot hold us. 

As Paul states, in the passage from this morning, “we proclaim Christ crucified,”  not the Christ who could not die, not the Christ who did not suffer, but Christ who did suffer and die and yet death could not hold him. 

Christ came, Paul states, to be “righteousness, sanctification, and redemption,” in other words, to make us right with God, to bring about our healing and our restoration.  Healing restoration doesn’t consist in erasing suffering—not in erasing our past sources of pain and suffering, nor is avoiding future sufferings.  The healing that Christ brings consists in the gift of God’s presence with us, in our boats.  This presence can give us the strength to endure suffering and the peace of God’s promise that love survives death (the peace that not all is destroyed).   We can walk in dangerous places and our faith is not that we will come out unharmed, but rather that we will not be destroyed. 

My childhood town, Ventnor, New Jersey, where my memories of the Halloween storm of 1991 come from was one of the worst affected by the recent Superstorm Hurricane Sandy.  Even though I joyfully call South Bend my home now, as the storm was progressing this past October I found myself compelled to follow the media coverage.  I looked at the pictures on the internet of my childhood home overwhelmed by water and I cried.  I mourned its flooded streets. 

We don’t know what the future holds for us, for the city of South Bend, for us as a people, us as individuals.  It seems like our ability to live comfortably is further put into question each year: the summers are growing hotter, oil for heating and transportation and growing is running out, clean water perhaps will be soon rationed and sold to the highest bidder, we don’t know how to survive if we had to provide our own food, fuel, shelter, and heat. 

Where is your faith? 

I want to suggest that our Christian faith doesn’t ensure that these realities won’t cause us great suffering or even kill us.   It is surely good and holy to engage in action which may lessen the chances of environmental destruction.  To the extent that we act on behalf of the good of the earth and the good of our human community, these efforts are certainly blessed by God.  Yet, God’s blessing does not ensure its success.   In other words, we don’t engage in such good and holy action because we have any assurance that our efforts will be effective.  It may be the case that many harmful environmental consequences may be too far underway to be reversed at this point and that our time on earth as a species living in relative comfort is quickly passing.  Yet, God is still with us.  All we know and value may be disappearing, yet we can be assured that love will remain.  We will die, we know this for sure, but death cannot hold us. 

Where is your faith?  Here.  In this subtle and powerful promise of presence.  We celebrate God’s presence with us today in the bread and the cup, the mundane realities of daily subsistence transformed, ritualized as a reminder that God is here with us as we move through our days, as we struggle to survive, as we eat together, as we gather in community, as we feed each other.  In the wake of the storm, it (communion) is a reminder that everything won’t be alright, but not all can be destroyed. 

We’d like to say first that when we put out a call for new bloggers back in February, we actually weren’t sure that we would get any applications, so it felt like a risk. But we were pleasantly surprised to receive upwards of twenty-five applications from smart, interesting women dedicated to the task of doing Christian theology well and with women’s voices at the forefront.

We wish that we could take everybody right now, but we do hope that WIT will expand over the years, and we would love to have those women reapply at those expansion points. In any case, we ourselves have now seen proof of the need for women in theology to have spaces online to dialogue critically and creatively, with and for each other.

So without further ado, we’d like to announce that we are adding the following women:

Amaryah Shaye, Brandy Daniels, Janice Rees, Maria McDowell, and Elissa Cutter. As you’ll see below, each of these women brings her own particular area of expertise and interest, which we believe will really enhance WIT’s Christian feminist mission.

We’re staggering the inclusion process a bit since expanding well takes time, energy, and prudence, so Amaryah, Brandy, and Janice will start blogging in May, and Maria and Elissa will start in November.

Here are their bios!

Amaryah Shaye graduated from Candler School of Theology with a Masters of Theological Studies and a love of interdisciplinary scholarship. From systematic theology to critical race theory, urban planning to French philosophy, and queer theory to anarchism she enjoys creating new thoughts from a wide array of intellectual companions. Currently, she is reading various theological and non-theological writings on place and thinking about how Christian articulations and practices of desire cultivate affective capacities for intimacy with places. She is curious about how, in modernity, these Christian articulations and practices of desire collide with and lend themselves to White supremacist aims–particularly through racialized arrangements of space (think segregation, gentrification and displacement, incarceration)–especially in how cities get planned and rearranged, how rural and semi-rural land gets claimed and reclaimed, and how suburban “placelessness” gets constructed… all depending on their desirability to whiteness. For Amaryah, these topics raise questions of how the spatial ramifications of Christianity’s collision and complicity with White supremacy take on a particularly erotic and gendered nature by virtue of the racialized desire White supremacist (re)arrangements of space depend on for their success. In addition to reading, writing, and thinking, she  is also a burgeoning techie, long time gamer, songwriter, typesetter and ebook developer, liminal Catholic, and black quasi-anarchist queer.

Brandy Daniels is a Ph.D. student in Theological Studies at Vanderbilt University, where she is also in the fellowship program in Theology and Practice. She has just finished her second year in the program which means she has finished coursework (finally!) and has begun the process of studying for her comprehensive exams. She has an M.Div. (with a certificate in Gender, Theology, and Ministry) and an A.M (Comparative Literature, African American Studies) from Duke University. Her research interests center around questions of theological anthropology at the intersections of systematic theology, critical theory, ethics, and identity. More specifically, she is interested in exploring ways in which theological discourse has operated as a site of knowledge production towards problematic constructions of gender, sexuality, and race and how, in light of such constructions, theological discourse can be liberative. Some of the other/related theological interests and questions she is passionate about are the state of feminism in the theological academy;  kinships structures in contemporary Western culture, in Christian ecclesial contexts, and in marginalized communities; and in the works of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. She is also under-care for ordination with the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church). Oh, and when she’s not studying, she likes to run and ride her bike (she’s currently training for an Ironman), hang out with friends, and drink good beer, especially good IPA’s.

Janice Rees is a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at Charles Sturt University (Sydney) and is due to complete her dissertation in July 2013 (phew!).  Her research is focused on the relationship between systematic theology and feminist theology / gender theory. She is interested in exploring the ways historical Christian faith provides resources for responding to the complex contemporary questions of gender and difference. In particular, she seeks to highlight the significance of classical doctrine –such as the doctrine of creation, sin, and the Trinity – in responding to contemporary philosophical challenges. She is very much interested in the theology of Sarah Coakley, Kathryn Tanner and Rowan Williams. However, Janice is not simply interested in defending ‘systematic theology’ against the many charges levelled against the discipline (which she believes are more often than not, accurate) and she spends many hours lamenting the indifference she encounters to the questions she believes are at the centre of whatever ‘systematic’ might mean. As an ordained minister in the Salvation Army, Janice pastored two churches over the past six years and in July will take up a position as lecturer in systematic theology at a regional college in Fiji (where she now lives). She loves to run, swim, dance, and make up whimsical tales with her two vivacious children (aged 6 and 2).

Maria Gwyn McDowell holds a doctorate in Theological Ethics from Boston College. She is feminist, a student of liberation theology, and a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is her life-long participation in Orthodoxy that motivates her to advocate for the ministry of Orthodox women, in particular, their ordination. Orthodoxy is her home, her joy, her love, and her abiding frustration, which is why she remains Orthodox and chooses to speak from within. Along with her commitment to more abstract theological discourse regarding gender, sexuality and women in the church (and various other topics that tickle her fancy), she is highly committed to ensuring that her god-daughter knows that she too is fully made in the image of God. In addition to all the requisite spiritual and theological education, this entails impressing upon this youthful spirit a deep and fanatical love for the Rose City Thorns, offering ongoing instruction in appropriate heckling and side-line coaching at all available home games. When not attending soccer matches (the Timbers are an acceptable second to the Thorns), reading, writing or engaged in gainful employment she may be hiking the Columbia Gorge, drinking snooty micro-brewed beer at her favorite watering holes, or spending time with her lovely family.

Elissa Cutter is a doctoral candidate in historical theology at Saint Louis University who focuses primarily on seventeenth-century French Catholicism. In particular, she first became interested in the movement known as “Jansenism” after reading the Pensées of Blaise Pascal in a French literature class while studying abroad in Strasbourg, France. Presently, her research looks at the writings of Angélique Arnauld, the abbess of the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal, and argues that her sacramental and ecclesiological contributions qualify her to be considered a theologian just as much as the more well known male figures of the movement (e.g., Cornelius Jansen, Blaise Pascal, Antoine Arnauld, etc.). While initially resistant to being pegged as another woman theologian studying female figures, in her dissertation work she’s fully embraced the efforts of feminist theology to recover female theologians of the past. Of course, in examining Mother Angélique as theologian, her work also touches on the metaquestions of “what is theology?” and “what makes someone a theologian?” Although trained historically, Elissa is interested in wider questions related to ecclesiology, authority, sacramentology, and religion in France (in this case, especially in church-state relations, both historically—in the early modern period through the French revolution—and today). In her teaching, Elissa tries to emphasize the relevance of understanding theology for popular culture, through literature, movies, and music (drawing on everyone from Madonna to Joan Osborne to Lady Gaga). In her free time, Elissa frequently goes hiking and rock climbing with her husband. She also loves to cook. While working on her M.A. her grandmother suggested she purchase a slow cooker and since then she’s found slow cooking to be especially suitable for the graduate student lifestyle.

Please give these women a warm welcome and wish us well in this new phase of collaboration!

…And not like a girl who is unsure of herself and her ideas, as Julia so clearly put it recently.

(By the way, for those who are curious about the above image: when I first started looking for photos to put in this post, I wryly google-imaged “confident women” and was inundated with close-ups of thin women in business suits on their cell phones or with their arms crossed. So I had to switch to a different tactic and actually google-image a particular woman whose work and poise has inspired me: Toni Morrison. And in such a fascinating shot. –Apropos of Sonja’s last post.)

As I am wont to do, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the academy, the growth from graduate student to scholar proper, and the act of gradually coming to claim one’s authority, especially if one is a woman.

Let me back up for a second. I’m somewhere in the murky middle of my dissertation, making progress slowly and steadily. Still, I often find myself caught in the throes of writing blocks and stagnation for periods of time. This probably happens for a variety of reasons, but, if I had to sum it up, I would say that, whether I explicitly admit it to myself at the time or not, I feel overwhelmed. The project is good, and my commitment to it hasn’t changed, but there’s such a heftiness to it that can feel suffocating at times. The careful work that is always required, along with the increased sense of accountability to the broader theological academy (rather than just to a professor at the end of a semester), can be a burden to bear that takes some getting used to. Sometimes this feeling of being overwhelmed manifests in a fixation on doing chores (avoidance) or outlining my ideas repeatedly and with ever-more detail (a more subtle form of avoidance). And because I have a lot of unstructured time with distant deadlines, I can often “spin out,” so to speak, longer than I would if I were forced into a structure, such as with coursework. Having talked to a lot of my colleagues about this, I don’t think I’m alone.

So recently, when I hinted around about some of these (I suspect common) writing issues to my friend Jenny at Notre Dame (who has successfully completed her doctorate and is now professing full time) she recommended a book to me: Robert Boice, Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing. Stillwater, OH: New Forums Press, 1990.

I have been going over this book for a few days now and I think it could really help. Even though the book is dated, it alerted me to certain common realities of the academy of which I had been unaware. For example, apparently the vast majority of academics would describe themselves as having trouble writing in a satisfactory or consistent way (Boice 1-4; 7-8). A minority of academics are doing the majority of the writing. Whaaa??

Even more, the reasons that academics struggle to write successfully varies notably, which surprises me since I thought that academic writing was just obviously “unpleasant” most of the time, except those rare times when it’s awesome, inexplicably. But apparently it breaks down even further than that.

For example, though all of these issues are related and can overlap in any given person, Boice distinguishes a few distinct causes: censors (your harsh, internal editor throughout the writing process); fears of failure (when your internal critique aggressively gravitates toward just telling you that you suck and are going to fail); perfectionism (when the self-critique keeps you from rendering the verdict of “good enough” on a finished piece); procrastination (which is probably fueled by some combination of anxiety and poor work habits); a terrible early experience learning how to write (where you were never really taught how to see the joy and fun that can characterize the writing process); diagnosable mental health issues (it’s the academy, so, you know, there are some notable correlations between academia and mood disorders, for whatever reason, and it’s not difficult to understand how a mood disorder would greatly diminish one’s ability to write); having a certain personality type (where very social, gregarious people tend not to be as productive at writing, for example); and poor work habits and attitudes (where one binge-writes sporadically and without discipline or consistency) [Boice 8-14]. At other points, importantly for our purposes, Boice also talks about the problem of lacking confidence (23-24), which I am certain underwrites and informs many of the other types.

I find this breakdown really intriguing and helpful; for one, it helped me realize that it will benefit me in the long run to change my work habits. Specifically, because I tend to be excruciatingly thorough-bordering-on-impractical when it comes to crafting my arguments, I put off the writing as long as possible, until I feel “ready” to write. And that has usually led to binge-writing, usually under Threat Of Imminent Deadline. You know, that point at which the anxiety of getting so close to the wire such that you are faced with the very real prospect of not turning anything in actually FORCES you to overcome the anxiety that comes with trying to produce quality work. The deadline forces one anxiety to cancel out the other, and that’s where papers come from.

…It is not good to work this way (for me, anyway). One major thing I have noticed about transitioning into being an advanced graduate student/scholar, as opposed to an earlier graduate student, is that the important deadlines are usually not imminent. (And when they happen to be, I still meet them very well, which is telling.) But much of my professional life is no longer like that; for example, I plan to get a chapter in to my advisor in the next couple months, or I have an article to work on that is due to the editor in three months. So am I going to do what I would have done in coursework and write ALL of these pieces in the 24 hours leading up to their deadlines? Are you kidding me, self?

Living life deadline by deadline is no longer optimal, and what has to replace it is a willingness to become more comfortable with writing on a daily basis, or at least very consistently. Some of my colleagues have gone this way earlier and more easily, and they have told me I need to move away from spurts of binge-writing after periods of intense, heady preparation sans words on paper. To be honest, I have always thought in the past that writing so calmly on a daily basis sounded very boring, mechanical, and domesticated — writing isn’t a science! But Boice claims that academics who write a little consistently on a daily basis write noticeably more (of quality, no less) than their binge-writing colleagues. So I guess I was wrong. Boice has very concrete suggestions for becoming more fluid and comfortable with writing, and perhaps I will provide updates if those prove to be illuminating.

This transition is, in some ways, very quotidian: old habits have to die to make room for new ones, ones that I will be enacting on a daily basis. So at some level it’s about developing new techniques and cultivating an openness to change. It’s as simple as that.

And yet, at the same time, more is going on. And now I am done backing up. I’ve returned to where I started, thinking about professionally growing in the academy and claiming one’s authority qua Woman.

At various points in his diagnosis of the problematic, Boice suggests that women noticeably struggle more with certain facets of academic writing then men do. Men tend to mass-produce writing more than women do, and women tend to be seen as more professionally “silent” in their personalities and perfectionistic in their writing (12-13). Women tend to have more difficulty putting negative reviews of their work behind them than men do, they struggle more with feeling conflicting commitments that compromise their writing time, and they perceive themselves as being treated more harshly in their work than men are (14). In making these points in the year 1990, Boice also eludes to the changing landscape of the academy, and he thereby suggests that conditions will gradually even out as more women enter the academy. To some extent, perhaps certain things have improved in the past 23 years. I would like to think so.

At the same time, however, Boice’s gendered distinctions felt all too true to me, still. This isn’t to say that men don’t have writing struggles, but, at least based on my own empirical observations, many women (myself included) in the theological academy do seem particularly stressed out about making contributions and claiming their own theological voices and authority. We seem to have gotten listening down pretty well, but it’s speaking that still seems troubled. This circles back around to the problem of self-confidence that Boice identified and the way that I think that issue in particular affects women. In the classes that I took as a graduate student, I often noticed that the women were quieter than the men, and that, as Julia pointed out in her blog post about this, they tended to qualify their statements with delimiting modifiers so that they didn’t appear as though they were “presumptuously” claiming more knowledge than they had. This seemed to be not as serious a problem with my male colleagues (including my husband, with whom I had many a class). The performance of epistemic mastery seemed to come much easier to the males, even if they actually didn’t know what they were talking about (which they often didn’t). And I imagine that this dynamic probably has a stranglehold on our ability to publish (i.e., WRITE), no? We may get older as we go through the program, but do we get wiser and more conscientized?

I know for myself that I do not have most of the writing problems that Boice identified, but I do have one of those problems in spades: I lack confidence in my writing, my voice. It’s professional but it feels very personal at the same time. And it’s not really logical: I’m verbal, I’m in a good program, I’m ambitious, I’m a feminist and I should know better. And yet, especially as I have moved into the realm of publishing (as opposed to doing coursework papers), my lack of confidence has been exacerbated. The fear of being exposed as an idiot feels primal and weirdly gendered. But as I say it, as I objectify it, it feels slightly more manageable and a little easier to identify as ridiculous. I hope my doing so makes it easier for other women also struggling with these issues.

Aside from naming and defanging this problem, I want to add one thing to this discussion. When we women talk about this problem, we tend to identify the ways that women sell themselves short verbally and intellectually and get stuck deferring to the illusion of male authority. We then encourage each other to change habits and claim authority. We know that this advice in itself won’t fix everything, but it’s an important piece of moving forward. That is how we bid each other courage.

I’m obviously 100% on board with this advice and have peddled it myself throughout this blog post, but I think we need to be honest about the ramifications of moving from intellectual and emotional girlhood to intellectual and emotional womanhood in how we carry ourselves professionally: people (men) may not like it. In fact, many of them probably won’t. They don’t.

If you are a woman in the (theological) academy and you have struggled with professional self-assertion in the classroom and/or in print, and then you decide to resist girlish habits in favor of womanly ones and to begin to assert yourself, it is likely that nobody is going to bow down to you in absolute awe of your intellect. People (men) will still argue with you. They may then often try to “explain” to you the points that you “missed” that are making you “not understand.” They will “nicely” and “charitably” try to “help” you. And you may feel yourself getting a little bit smaller when that happens.

Don’t get me wrong: we all need improvement in our arguments, and there can be something really exciting and productive about good disagreement, including those between men and women. And we need to be prepared for and open to this kind of healthy, mutually respectful disagreement, since getting respect doesn’t mean getting to be right all the time. But that’s not what I am talking about here.

Making the transition from proverbial girlhood to womanhood doesn’t necessarily fix anything in terms of these problematic gender dynamics. It’s only the beginning, the beginning of a promise to yourself, to other women (and men), and to your work that you will show up as a ready and willing and capable interlocutor. You don’t get a quick fix through a one-time decision to strengthen your speech patterns to be less self-effacing. People aren’t going to applaud you the moment you decide that you may not be totally full of shit. They won’t suddenly defer to you or stop being sexist (some of them might, but is that the usual way of the world?) You still have to fight. Once you stop talking like a girl, you have to keep speaking like a woman. And you have to decide to speak like a woman every day. This is the part that we can do. It’s never done.

Now back to work.

Rather than enumerate a list of critiques of this project (on which, see…well, basically everything ever written under the broad labels of postcolonial, critical race, and feminist/womanist theory, not to mention our own Elizabeth‘s work. Valerie Saiving’s essay is also a locus classicus.), I want to offer this excerpt from Toni Morrison’s wrenching novel, A Mercy, which coursed through my head for the entire talk. If you haven’t read this book, which is a followup of sorts to Morrison’s classic Beloved, it is well worth your time. Especially if you think you’ll ever find yourself privileged and preaching on Job or humility:

Well, she thought, that was the true value of Job’s comforters. He lay wracked with pain and in moral despair; they told him about themselves, and when he felt even worse, he got an answer from God saying, Who on earth do you think you are? Question me? Let me give you a hint of who I am and what I know. For a moment Job must have longed for the self-interested musings of humans as vulnerable and misguided as he was. But a peek into Divine knowledge was less important than gaining, at last, the Lord’s attention. Which, Rebekka concluded, was all Job ever wanted. Not proof of His existence–he never questioned that. Nor proof of His power–everyone accepted that. He wanted simply to catch His eye. To be recognized not as worthy or worthless, but to be noticed as a life-form by the One who made and unmade it. Not a bargain; merely a glow of the miraculous.

But then Job was a man. Invisibility was intolerable to men. What complaint would a female Job dare to put forth? And if, having done so, and He deigned to remind her of how weak and ignorant she was, where was the news in that? What shocked Job into humility and renewed fidelity was the message a female Job would have known and heard every minute of her life.

I have to say that after his talk, I felt an unexpected sympathy with Mary Daly’s famous remark, “I don’t think about men. I really don’t care about them.”

In the oddly entitled “Accidental Racist,” Paisley whines a litany of white supremacist excuses. LL joins him for the last verse, according Paisley’s self-servingly revisionist account of history credibility.  Like the hilarious Portlandia sketch that mocks the ridiculous hipster craze of “putting a bird on it,” many whites similarly believe that if they “get a black person to say it,” then it can’t be “racist.”

This is not the first time Paisley has proclaimed Confederate version of Southern pride.  For the last few months, his hit “Southern Comfort Zone” has been paying electric homage to the Confederate anthem “Dixie” on radio stations across the country.  After celebrating what Paisley believes to be distinctively Southern cultural traits like trucks, sweet-tea, and fireflies, Paisley brings the song to its emotional climax by looping in the Confederate anthem “Dixie” as otherworldly elegy.  Sung by a gospel choir whose voices swell spectrally, Paisley evokes sweet nostalgia for the angelic ghosts of the Confederacy.

Against this, I deploy a Thomistic corrective to neo-confederate moral methodology and unveil the neo-confederate historical imagination as selective and self-serving.

Deconstructing Neo-Confederate Logic

Paisley’s fascination with confederate iconography is strange given that he was born and raised in West Virginia, a state that came into existence as an act of geographic protest against eastern Virginian secession.  This inconsistency notwithstanding, at the beginning of “Accidental Racist,” Paisley sings that he “hopes [the black man] that waited on me at Starbucks…understands [that] when I put on that t-shirt, the only thing I mean is I’m a Skynyrd fan.”  Paisley seems to have arranged his life in such a way that the only black person he encounters in the course of his daily life is one who receives wages to serve him.  Of course, Paisley neither notices the predominately white character of his social life nor considers himself responsible for it.

Like many whites, Paisley displays a hyper-subjective theory of intention.  The Confederate flag t-shirt means only what Paisley says it means.  He holds himself accountable neither to history nor to the communal nature of human language.  It also does not matter that the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd’s most popular hit, “Sweet Home Alabama” was written in part to spit in the eye of Civil Rights supporters like Neil Young.  Actions are whatever the agent says they are.

But symbols, like language, just do not work this way.  As Aquinas recognized, intention cannot be severed from impact.  Although intention matters, (think of the difference between life-saving amputation and gruesome mutilation) it is not the only thing that matters. Impact also unveils intention.  In portraying his wearing of a Confederate flag t-shirt as racially harmless, Paisley resembles a man who brings a bull into a china shop and then insists he did not mean for all those dishes to get busted.   Just as we cannot walk up to a stranger and say “fuck you!” and then act aggrieved when she bashes us in the face, so whites cannot expect black people to feel anything other than offended in the presence of confederate flag apparel.

In fact, neo-confederate whites would not feel so attached to the “red flag” if it meant nothing in itself.  If it really only meant “Southern pride,” then why would nostalgic whites insist so fervently on the endurance of this particular symbol?  If they truly wished to express “Southern pride” rather than “Confederate pride,” then they would happily switch to a symbol that communicated this more effectively.  Confederate apologists cloak Southern pride in the Confederate flag not because they have to but because they want to.

Southern black musicians also show us that Southern pride can be displayed without reference to the Confederate flag.  The legendary hip hop duo Outkast celebrates the South incessantly.  As they say on the track “West Savannah,” “You might call us country/But we’s only Southern.”  Their music even sounds like the South.  The critically-acclaimed group “Arrested Development” sings the South on “Tennessee;”  Nappy Roots proclaim their love for Kentucky in “Po’ Folks;” Petey Pablo reps North Carolina in “Raise Up;” and Ludacris raps an ode to his hometown in the whimsical hit, “Welcome to Atlanta.”

If black people can express Southern pride without the “red flag,” then why can’t whites?

Nat Turner Preaches Religion

Others claim they celebrate the Confederacy not for its support of chattel slavery but only for the willingness of its soldiers to fight and die defending Southern freedom.  But why then do Southerners not remember Nat Turner, a Virginian, or Denmark Vesey, a South Carolinian?  What about Dangerfield Newby, a black Southerner born into slavery who joined John Brown in his raid on Harper’s Ferry?  If Southerners wished to celebrate only Southern valor and not chattel slavery, then why not elevate Southerners who fought to abolish it?  After all, these men died seeking to free others from slavery; Confederate soldiers died seeking to preserve the right of white men to enslave. As Paisley admits, loving a place does not entail loving all that happened there.

Play-acting powerlessness, Paisley portrays himself as “just a white man” and “just a proud rebel son,” who is “still paying for the mistakes that a bunch of folks made long before we came.”  Paisley pouts about “walking on eggshells” so as not to offend.  In his mind, racially offensive speech seems to be like hanging out with a temperamental alcoholic suffering from a mind-scaldingly high fever: you just never know what is going to set them off.  Paisley displays Confederate-loving Southern whites like himself as victims of a tragic misunderstanding.  But rather than seeking to be understood, as to understand as he claims, Paisley wants to be accommodated without having to accommodate.

Further disavowing his responsibility for persistent racial inequality, Paisley believes racial injustice exists only in the past.  Thus, since “[his] generation didn’t start this nation” and cannot “re-write history,” we should just “let bygones be bygones.”  Paisley’s ignorance of white supremacy’s pervasive persistence does not evidence his moral innocence.  As Aquinas reminds us, not all ignorance excuses.  When our ignorance arises as a result of our failure to will the truth, it qualifies as culpable.  Those who do not see because they keep their eyes shut exhibit not blindness but willful ignorance.  In this way, many whites see no evil in order to continue participating in it.

Paisley and LL also remember history overly narrowly.  For Paisley, the post-bellum period operated as Reconstruction in name only: although “they called it Reconstruction,” the South is “still siftin’ through the rubble after a hundred-and fifty years.”  Repeating popular neo-confederate myths, Paisley depicts Reconstruction as a scheme of destruction from which the South has yet to recover.  LL validates neo-confederate fantasy when he laments the time that “Sherman’s March turned the South into firewood.”

Survivors Leaving the Scene of the Colfax Massacre

The neo-confederate apologist mourns Sherman’s March even though it only destroyed property belonging disproportionately to wealthy whites who had seceded but it does not mention the anti-Reconstruction terror deployed by whites against the bodies of freed women and men.  White supremacists “redeemed” the South by shedding the blood of black Southerners.  But these neo-confederate apologists do not remember the Klan’s massacre of one-tenth of the black members of post-war constitutional conventions.  They decline to commemorate the slaughter of 300 of Mississippi’s black women and men by white men seeking to strip them of the franchise.  They fail to mention the massacre of 100 black elected officials and their supporters at the Colfax, Louisiana courthouse.

Nor do they mourn the shots fired at Fort Pillow, where white Confederates motivated by racial spite slaughtered scores of captive black soldiers who had already surrendered.

Massacre at Fort Pillow

White privilege renders even treason patriotic.  When the insurrectionists have white skin, we view the state’s destruction of their property with suspicion and even rage.  When the insurrectionists are brown inhabitants of faraway places like Iraq or Pakistan, we kill even their children with impunity.

In the white supremacist imagination, white people are only victims.  And when they have done wrong, they are never really to blame for it.  Even when a white person gives foreseeable racial offense, it is only “accidental.” “Caught between Southern pride and Southern blame,” at the end of the song Paisley chooses “the only thing that’s left: Southern pride.”

Operating out of this distorted imagination, Cool J and Paisley profess a succession of false equivalencies.  Cool J vows: “If you don’t judge my gold chains/I’ll forget the iron chains.”  Cool J obeys a double standard: while whites need never forget their Confederate ancestry, African-Americans routinely receive pressure to let “the bygones” of chattel slavery “be bygones.”

LL pledges, “if you don’t judge my do-rag/I won’t judge your red flag.”  A do-rag shares almost nothing in common with the Confederate flag.  One facilitates hair care; the other symbolizes a confederation of states that seceded from a country because they did not believe its federal government possessed the legal or moral right to interfere with their ability to traffic in human flesh.

It’s time to put this neo-Confederate nonsense to rest.

Interrupting this spectacle of gender difference, sports journalist Jemele Hill refutes this debate’s entire premise.  She explains: “what I don’t like about Cuban’s comments [to Griner] is that they perpetuate the dangerous idea that great female athletes need to validate themselves by competing against men.”

Hill’s argument is unexpected.  In the sports world, one pays a woman a supreme compliment by telling her “she plays like a man.”  Indeed, men’s athletic superiority over women operates as one of our society’s most self-evident truths.  The objective and inherent superiority of men’s sports to women’s seems to us equally self-evident.  Men’s sports earn more money, draw more fans, and elicit more media attention than their female counterparts as a result not of sexism but the facts of life.

And in some ways, this is true.  On average, the most elite male athletes do in fact jump higher, run faster, and exert more physical power than their elite female equivalents.

But even if we grant that male basketball players display more skill than female ones, does this alone explain why we consider men’s basketball so much more important? For example, we do not as a rule love musicians in proportion to their skill.  Madonna sells out stadiums while symphony orchestras play in cozy theaters.  Perhaps we value skill more highly in competitive endeavors like sports.  But even then, we do not always love in proportion to skill.  In certain parts of the country, for example, the local high school football team is loved as deeply and rooted for as fiercely as its big time college or pro equivalent—even though they are slower, weaker, and much less skilled.

Women’s basketball is undoubtedly different from men’s.  But I remain unconvinced that these differences render it objectively less exciting.  Consider the dunk.  Casual male sports supremacists routinely cite the dunk as the difference that most emphatically epitomizes everything that makes men’s basketball so much more exciting than women’s.  In its mind-bending display of embodied creativity and split-second suggestions of human transcendence, the dunk does inspire.  But until the 1970s, the slam-dunk was a rare and relatively disrespected aspect of the men’s game.  In this spirit, the NCAA imposed a no-dunking order, which lasted from 1967 to 1976.  Our elevation of the slam-dunk as the apex of basketball ability arises not self-evidently but out of a historical context.   Had the dunking ban persisted, would we hold women’s basketball in higher esteem than we do now?  Put another way, if men didn’t dunk, would we care that women don’t?

But even this explanation falls short.  In sports that emphasize flexibility and hyper-endurance, like rhythmic gymnastics and ultra-marathoning, women outpace men.  And in several Olympic shooting events, men and women competed against each other for several decades, with women winning several of that era’s gold medals. Scientists have also uncovered that women handle the G-Forces of high-speed flight better than men do.  The average “woman’s” body performs certain athletic skills more adroitly than does the average body belonging to persons classed as “male.”

Do we more or less ignore feminine sports like synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics in part because they require skills women hold more highly than men?  Asked inversely, has professional football overtaken basketball and baseball as America’s most beloved sport in part because it is seen as distinctively male?  While girls play basketball and softball, only boys play football.

But we devalue women’s sports for an even deeper reason.  All of our society’s most beloved sports, American football, soccer, basketball, and baseball, were designed by men and for men.  Seeking to tame American football of its violence, Dr. James Naismith tailored the height of the rim and the size of the ball to the bodies of men.  Women came later, staking their claim to a sport that was never meant for them.  Women have never really had the opportunity to develop sports suited to their bodies in the way that men have.

Sexism operates at all levels: in the way we perceive women athletes, in which sports we elevate, and in which sports exist in the first place.  Women’s difference from men continues to be categorized as a liability, a lack, and an expression of inferiority.  Like a high school senior stuck on the J.V. squad, we believe that women play women’s sports because they aren’t good enough to make the men’s team.

For those keeping score at home, here is what men’s professional basketball looked like sixty one years after its invention:

And here is what women’s college basketball looked like thirty one years after Title IX.

Why can’t we just let women’s sports be?