Women Healing the Globe, Preserving the Tibetan Plateau

The Tibetan Plateau’s Permafrost is melting at an alarming rate. Six of the world’s major rivers are sourced in the Tibetan Himalayas that are warming at a faster rate than the rest of the earth. If the temperature of the region continues to increase, the rivers will dry up and the earth will warm at an even faster rate. Buddha Yeshe Tsogyal (ye shes mTsho rgyal) (757–817 CE), long considered the Mother of Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, was the consort of Padmasambhava. She reached “complete liberation” or Nirvana in a single lifetime. Her stories are preserved in rman thar. Her life was an exemplary practice of compassion, responsible care, and non-violence toward all sentient beings and the world. Can we follow her proto-eco-feminist example? Can we build responsible care for our planet and humanity across disciplines and faith traditions? What does compassionate, non-violent Buddhist thought and Roman Catholic pastoral care bring to eco-feminism? Can an eco-feminist epistemology informed by Buddhist EcoDharma construct programs of sustainability into humanity’s excessive habits integrating science’s ability to quantify, with Buddha nature? Can Catholicism’s pastoral ability to show dependence on God, the peaceful, compassionate Creator of all allow us to see our dependence on God and our earth? Many women have already begun this work around the globe. In 2002, Rosemary Radford Ruether brought 16 women together from around the globe in Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion to tell us how they are doing it and succeeding. Each is highlighted here for their visions on how to heal the planet at the grassroots level. From their insights, this article explores their contributions as being still relevant today and adding new concerns about the dangers arising on the Tibetan Plateau. The article emphasizes their ideas, provides a warning and other ideas that collective activation might inspire to address climate change.

Equality for Women and Catholic Feminism

This chapter examines the origins, themes, and actions of Catholic feminism in the United States. It begins with an overview of Catholic teachings on women and then provides an account of the early voices and organizations that challenged these views and proposed biblical gender equality. The chapter summarizes the ideas of feminist theologies, particularly the work of Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether. It then explores several distinctive strategies of resistance, including actions for the ordination of women, the Roman Catholic Womenpriest movement, the emergence of Women-Church groups that practice inclusive liturgies and worship, and organizations that promoted diverse Catholic perspectives on contraception and reproductive rights.

Sebuah Tinjauan terhadap Teologi Feminisme Kristen

Apakah sebenarnya teologi feminis itu? Mengapa teologi ini mendapat banyak kritik di sana-sini? Apakah teologi ini mendapat dukungan yang cukup dari Alkitab sebagai sumber teologi Kristen yang berotoritas? Untuk menjawab pertanyaan ini pada halaman-halaman berikut secara singkat kita akan mencoba mendefinisikan feminisme Kristen kemudian mempelajari bagaimana pandangan feminisme terhadap Alkitab serta metode berteologinya. Mengingatnya luasnya lingkup feminis maka pembahasan difokuskan pada teologi feminis Kristen liberal yang diwakili oleh Rosemary Radford Ruether, Letty M. Russell dan Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Namun sebelum masuk ke dalam pembahasan tersebut pada bagian berikut akan kita telusuri lebih dahulu latar belakang historisnya guna lebih memahami pandangan ini.

The World Come of Age

The World Come of Age offers a cultural history of ideas that culminated in a radical political theology forwarded by the first generation of liberation theologians. Representing those marginalized by modern politics and religion due to race, class, or sex status, liberationists built a trans-American intellectual movement. Lilian Calles Barger sets the stage in the 1960s and 1970s, as black theologian James Cone, Catholic priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, and feminists Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether led the way in bridging the gulf between the religious values of justice and equality and political pragmatism. Sharing a heightened awareness of oppression with Latin American revolutionaries, Black Power and women’s liberation movements, and a Third World consciousness, liberationists honed their theo-political impulses. They unmasked the ideas that underwrote the white/black, male/female, rich/poor ordering of the world, not only within given societies but between the political and economic center and the periphery of the modern world. Questioning the religious/political divide with its privatized religion, they reconstructed thinking about God’s relationship to the world. Combining strands of radical politics, social theory, theological antecedents, and the history and experience of subordinated groups, they challenged the legitimating role of theology that dominated the mid-twentieth century. Liberationists secularized the meaning of Christian salvation combined with enlightened notions of freedom into an integral liberation and sought to recover a religious vitalism to instigate social action. The World Come of Age demonstrates how, by redefining the theo-political public space, liberation theologians set the stage for the subsequent torrent of religious activism across the ideological spectrum.

Religion and Cultural Crisis

This chapter describes the cultural and political crisis that liberationists encountered while participating in multiple protest movements of the 1960s. It examines the hemispheric cultural upheaval and the religious disillusionment expressed in the rise of Black Power, women’s liberation, and Latin American movements incited by the Cuban Revolution. It introduces the background and key complaints of liberation theologians expressed by James Cone, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Mary Daly and how as the first generation of liberation theologians emerged as an intellectual movement with an overlapping set of immediate concerns.

Words in the World

Using the analogy of the two Divine Words, this chapter begins by exploring pressing debates in contemporary Islamic feminist and Muslima theological engagement with the Qur’an, debates that arise out of the underlying problematic of the Word in the world. The chapter, then, explores Christian perspectives on Jesus Christ from Rosemary Radford Ruether, Jacquelyn Grant, Kwok Pui-lan, and Ada María Isasi-Díaz. These theologians discuss topics ranging from the language and symbols invoked to describe Jesus to the value assigned to particular human markings of Jesus (inclusive of but not limited to Jesus’s maleness) to the affiliations of Jesus with power and marginal groups. The chapter concludes by returning to Muslima theology and constructively proposing an approach to the Qur’an that embraces hybridity, human experience, and a preference for the marginalized.

Enacting Equality

This final chapter contextualizes woman-led prayer within broader discussions of authority, tradition, and change. It first analyzes Islamic feminist discourse on woman-led prayer, female leadership, and androcentric ritual norms, emphasizing theological and social assumptions. It then engages with Christian feminist approaches from Delores S. Williams, Elizabeth A. Johnson, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Traci C. West that grapple with notions of community, male imagery of God, tradition, and ritual. The chapter concludes with Muslima theology and argues for the necessity of embodied egalitarian ritual, a dynamic view of tradition, and reassertion of the transformative space between ideal and real community (umma).

Processos comunicacionais nos círculos de mulheres e suas relações com a Teologia ecofeminista

Este artigo busca apresentar as características principais do movimento dos círculos de mulheres e discutir sua relação com os preceitos da teologia ecofeminista e suas reverberações na comunicação e partilha de experiência entre as mulheres. A partir disto, verificamos uma possibilidade de formas mais orgânicas e colaborativas nos processos comunicacionais nos círculos, processos estes que apresentam uma alternativa à estrutura social e de comunicação vertical/fálica/linear típica do androcentrismo. Os círculos possuem características relacionadas às rodas de cura presentes nas religiões nativistas/xamânicas e têm uma íntima conexão com a prática da espiritualidade não institucionalizada e de pluralidade religiosa. Os círculos de mulheres também promovem, em sua maioria, a visão comum a muitas culturas de que tudo é sagrado e interdependente. A metodologia escolhida por nós é a análise tríplice que compõe a Hermenêutica de Profundidade (J. B. Thompson) e os referenciais teóricos que embasam a pesquisa são: os estudos do imaginário (Michel Maffesoli), a comunicação (Dominique Wolton), a teologia ecofeminista (Ivone Gebara e Rosemary Radford Ruether), o ecofeminismo (Vandana Shiva e Regina Célia Di Ciommo), a psicologia arquetípica (Jean Shinoda Bolen).