In this episode Rev. Deborah and Elizabeth talk about the history of the women’s movement and the connections between their faith journey and feminism. They talk about their experiences as women in church, and how that has shaped them.
Transcript
Transcription provided by automated service
[00:03] Rev. Deborah Duguid-May (DDM): Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.
[00:09] Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe (MET): And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.
[00:11] DDM: This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy and action. Okay. Action.
[00:39] MET: Okay, so when I was in college I was part of this college youth group at the church that I was going to And we spent some time talking about the spiritual gifts in first Corinthians. And of course, as Southern Baptist, like really specific and kind of literal about it. So, you know, these are the spiritual gifts and you have one of them.
[01:01] DDM: Only one.
[01:01] MET: Yeah. Maybe you have more, but like they were very specific. So, there was a lot of talk about, Oh, which spiritual gift are you imbued with? And everybody kind of danced around the idea that I may have the gift of prophecy. Now I am not here to say whether that is or is not the case or even what that could possibly mean. But I do remember thinking like, if that’s the case, what a terrible waste it was. Because even if somebody like me did have the gift of prophecy, nobody was going to listen to a woman.
[01:42] DDM: Oh, wow. And what age was that?
[01:45] MET: That was when I was like 19 or 20. Because, and it’s not like a woman couldn’t be a prophet. It’s just that the way I grew up, that was just the way it was. Nobody was going to listen to a woman. Women couldn’t be leaders. And then in that same youth group, I remember one of the church leaders talking to me about ways I could help serve God. And he told me, I think you could have a real knack for preaching. And I laughed because as a Southern Baptist, that basically meant nothing because women didn’t lead that way. And I look back and I think if I had grown up in a different tradition, there’s a possibility that my life would have taken a very different path. If there had been opportunities for leadership outside of children’s ministry in my church, I think I might have found a different calling. My parents always assumed I’d grow up to be a missionary or something as it was. But that’s just not where my place was. You know, there was no place for women with my skills in my tradition. You know, missionaries went out into the world and served, but they weren’t preachers. They weren’t scholars. They weren’t the things that I was gifted at. You know, the best we could do for somebody like me was enter some speaking competitions as a teenager and then maybe marry a minister or maybe go out and do kind of like nursing kind of things, which is not what I was good at. So it was kind of like, well, you have these gifts. Congratulations. You’re not good. Not able to use them. Yeah. So like, you know, I wanted to be a servant of God, but there was just no, there was just no place for me there. So I don’t know. I was just very kind of a conflicted position.
[03:48] DDM: A lot of tension within that. I’m sure. I’m sure. It’s interesting. You start this discussion around the topic of spiritual gifts because in some ways that was a little bit like my experience, but in a different way because I came into the church only in my late teens. And honestly, the church was not the place at which I was familiar. I hadn’t grown up in the church. I was much more comfortable sort of in the quote unquote world and much more rooted, I would say, in issues of social justice and medicine, funny enough. And I think for me where it began was a minister actually came up to me once after a service and said to me, I really believe you have the gift of preaching. Well, I almost fell over. But actually, and I didn’t share this with anybody ever before, but I actually had started just getting these bursts of like inspiration and I would write them all down and then put them in my desk drawer in my bedroom, not having any idea what I was ever gonna do with them. So when that priest came and said, I think you have the call to preaching, there was a resonance within me, but doing anything in the church seemed very daunting to me. But luckily enough, that was a particular tradition that actually welcomed women’s gifts. And so I started exploring preaching, I started doing lay preaching, and really pretty quickly in that journey realized that a lot of my deepest passions that I had always lived out in the world really came together in ministry, which was exciting for me. But what there was, I think, was a difference in the sense that it was fine to do ministry as a woman, but to be ordained was still for men. So there was that distinction where, yeah, a woman could do full ministry, but ordination and especially around the sacraments that was still reserved for men. And I remember just absolutely loving theology, just beginning to fall in love with, I think we spoke before about the kingdom of God and that alternative vision. And so I started studying theology as a seminary student, actually not having any idea why I was doing it, because I couldn’t become a priest, right? And like you, sometimes the idea was, well, I guess I could go into mission work, but I actually had no desire for mission work because I think of the colonial sort of imperial baggage that comes with that. And it was only later in my diocese that they actually started studying women. So for me, going to seminary really was a step of faith, not knowing where it was going to end up. But then as a woman, I think I had some pretty harrowing experiences in the seminary. You know, I mean, I remember women preaching and men, male students, literally standing up in the chapel and just walking out because they believed coming from other traditions like you were sharing yourself, that a woman should never be preaching. The sexual harassment in the seminaries and the rape, that was ridiculous because it was such a male environment. And so honestly, really it was a pretty hostile environment to enter into as a young woman. But I remember that call to ministry I think being so strong, but if your conflict was I have these gifts but my tradition doesn’t allow me to use it, I think mine was well I can use my gifts but at what personal cost to myself, my sanity and my body, because this male structure and environment into which one was entering was highly dysfunctional and unhealthy.
[07:30] MET: So I think that speaks to a huge difference in character between us because I was told, oh, there’s not a place for you. And I was like, well, I guess I’m out. And you were told, oh, there’s not a place for you. And you’re like, I’m making a place.
[07:43] DDM: Absolutely. Absolutely. 100%. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. But I think it has a huge impact on you because I remember just prior to ordination, realizing how much I had internalized that misogyny because I remember in my ordination retreat the issue that I was still struggling with is if I consecrate will it be authentic or will it just be a joke?
[08:12] MET: Oh my gosh.
[08:13] DDM: And I remember it was only as I was grappling with this, should I go through with it? And I was still at my ordination retreat thinking, am I still gonna actually go through with this? I had this vision of Mary and Mary came to me in that little room that I was like sequestered into for praying for that week. And she came into this room and this is Mary the mother of Jesus by the way. Just in case there was any doubt, the main Mary. And Mary came into the room and I remember her saying to me, who do you think first produced the body and blood of Christ? It was me. And if I can do it, you can do it too. And I remember her just very clearly answering that question. And from that moment onwards, I had no internal doubt, you know? But it just shows you to what extent we grapple with that culture of misogyny when we internalize it ourselves.
[09:08] MET: So I think it’s really interesting to think… So the Mary conversation is so fascinating, And we could absolutely talk about Mary and how she fits into the conversation about women in the church for like hours at a time in and of itself. One of the things that I think is really interesting in terms of women in the church is how the conversation about women in the church is part and parcel with women in public, right? This is not just a conversation about women in like the priesthood, there has been a long conversation about what is a woman’s role in public, right? Like this is not specific to ecclesiastical studies, right? Like we have not known what to do with women in public. So, and I can, okay, I could go on and on and on about the women’s movement and feminism. This is my jam. But what I wanna do is kind of give you an overview of what women have been doing in public for just a few minutes, because I think that gives us a little bit of a background about how this has played out and kind of the interplay between public lives and religious lives and that kind of thing. So I want to kind of make some connections really quickly. So I want to talk about the women’s movement. And let’s see if we can kind of draw some some connections really quickly. The women’s movement and this is as we understand it in America, and then by extension in Europe, I’m going to talk about it in a kind of Ameri-centric way. And some of that is because a lot of the women’s movement has been a little bit Ameri-centric, like it didn’t really spread out into other parts of the world until a little bit later. It’s just been sort of a Western thing in many ways. So, and some of that Is cultural and some of that is political and there’s a lot of reasons for that. So if this seems kind of Ameri-centric it is But the women’s movement is Kind of organized into what’s called waves and I’m gonna tell you what those are. So there’s the first wave which basically deals with women’s suffrage and you can kind of pinpoint the dates on this one right like it pretty much started in what 1848 with Seneca Falls and it deals with the right to vote. There are other things that go on, but basically these women and a few men were interested in the right to vote because it doesn’t get much more basic than that, right? If you’re going to be a citizen, You need to be able to vote And that wave pretty much ended when the 19th amendment was passed right women got the right to vote That was pretty much over. We’ll get back to the first wave in a little bit The second wave is a little bit more complicated the second wav it’s got its precursors in the 1940s, but it really gets going in the 1960s. And it was a very kind of pragmatic political wave. You get people like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem involved, but it focused on like the political and legal parts of equality, equal pay, equal protection, equal rights, that kind of thing. And it was very much a movement to establish and maintain those legal and political things that you can point to as like, this is a thing we can say, this has to be established, right? This has to be like, we want this equality. The thing about the second wave though, is it was kind of limited and who was involved, right? It really focused on middle-class white Americans. Yes, there were other people who were involved, but it tended to be a little bit exclusive in that way.
[13:21] DDM: Was the suffragette movement also a little exclusive?
[13:25] MET: Yeah, for sure.
[13:28] MET: Also. Those 19th century white women were like, that’s, that’s kind of a given, right? The second wave was also exclusive. And you can also point to like the second wave, there was a big victory, right? Roe v. Wade, they say, yeah, that was like, we did that. But you can also say the second wave kind of failed when the ERA didn’t pass. That’s the Equal Rights Amendment. It kind of fizzled out when the Equal Rights Amendment didn’t pass. And what a lot of people don’t know is that to this day women are not guaranteed equal rights legally in the United States and it’s not in the Constitution and that like people have tried to change that seriously up until the last two years People have been trying to change that and it has been defeated over and over and over again and the argument for that is Specifically, oh women don’t need to be guaranteed equal rights because it just says equal rights and that covers everybody But then you get people like conservative hero Justice Antonin Scalia saying things like well since women aren’t guaranteed equal rights we don’t have to give them equal rights so a very clear picture emerges here in terms of how we feel about women legally whatever okay so Equal Rigts Amendment fails Later on we get to the third wave Third wave is really interesting because it tries to kind of address some of the limitations of the second wave. One, it becomes a very international approach. So you start moving into things like thinking about indigenous rights and moving beyond the limitations of European and American understandings of what it means to be equal. There’s a lot of emphasis on the value of domestic work and thinking in terms of women’s labor is What powers economies and we need to value that so it’s not so much like women deserve To work it’s that women deserve to have their work valued. And that’s kind of a, that’s a nuance switch. If there is a motto for the third wave, it is that “Women’s rights are human rights.” That also includes, something called intersectionality, which a lot of people think is some kind of like really woke liberal indoctrination thing. But I think it’s actually just really a good observation. And that is the idea that our identities are a mishmash of a lot of things, right? Like I am a straight white woman. That means I understand the world differently than a black queer woman. And that means I don’t understand the world just as a woman or just as a white person being a white woman means I understand the world differently than a white man or a queer white woman or I mean these are just and our relationships to power are different because of these different parts of our identity.
[16:38] DDM: So would you say that intersectionality is really around understanding that we really function from multiple identities?
[16:44] MET: That’s exactly what It is. That’s exactly what it is. And specifically the way we relate to power is different because of we’re made up of all these different things. And because of that, we also have to consider things like men relate to things differently. Right. The third wave comes along and says, yeah, the thing about gender roles and intersectionality means that like men are screwed in all of this patriarchy too, right?
[17:11] DDM: Absolutely.
[17:11] MET: I mean, the third wave says we’ve got to include men in all of this because men are just as oppressed by things like toxic masculinity and gender roles as women are, which is why that human rights thing becomes important. There’s a fourth wave, which is basically just kind of the mediated part of it. You think about #MeToo, that kind of thing. And some people say we’re in a fifth wave. I honestly don’t know enough about it to talk about it. Anyway, that is a long story. But the reason I go through all of that is because it’s really important to understand what is going on in the world to understand what is happening in the church as well. So there’s your background to think about how women are functioning out there to think about what are we doing to function kind of in this ecclesiastical liturgical space. I don’t know. So you can probably speak more to what the church is doing within that environment.
[18:15] DDM: Right. So it was interesting in South Africa because for traditions that ordained women prior to the Anglican church in South Africa, like the Methodist church actually started ordaining women prior, there was a sense that they ordained women but really didn’t understand the implications of what that actually was going to mean. So for instance, it was a great idea to include women or deign women, but what was that actually going to translate into? So I’ll share a silly little story that might in some ways illustrate that. I remember the first inclusive retreat that we went to male and female clergy together. Of course, the place at which the retreat took place was an all boys school, predominantly urinals, rows and rows of all boys urinals, one or two little stalls sectioned off. But I remember the male clergy and trying to be very welcoming to us, a small little handful of female clergy had done this beautiful pink sign and it said woman and then they put it on one of these doors and I remember as a woman I opened the door and I walked in and literally all I saw was rows of urinals and I thought to myself you know that in some ways for me was a silly little story, but it summed up the struggles. Because there is this attitude of we want you here, we want to be inclusive, but our structures, our ways of doing things are literally all geared towards men. So maybe in some ways ordination was the first step like your first wave for voting but then that second wave was really about the church starting to grapple with okay what is ordination actually gonna mean? Maternity leave and policies right? We’d never had to face those issues before. Woman menstruating in the sanctuary. That was huge, right? Because we come from a tradition where, especially in the West, theologically women’s bodies have been unclean, even though the idea of a blood sacrifice of a man is what saves us, right? I mean, think of the irony there. Woman’s bodies and blood is unclean, but it’s a male blood that is actually what saves us. I remember the first time I saw a woman priest with her baby in the sanctuary and she unbuttoned her cassock and started breastfeeding, right? That was a first, a first visual, visceral, bodily image in South Africa, beautiful images, but ones that you don’t forget. You’re not going back after those images. But the church still, I think, has a lot of work to do on this issue. I think there is still so much of dismantling of patriarchy that is needed. I mean, we’ve come a long way, but there’s still a lot of issues. But I think like in that secular wave, second wave, that women really had to grapple then with their own diversity. So as we began to name where the structures were hurting, limiting, causing damage, we started to realize that amongst ourselves, there were different perspectives. And so that diversity in race and culture, in economics, who was going to speak for us women, right? If it was simply educated white privileged women speaking, well then we weren’t really addressing women’s issues. And so of course, womanist theology develops and some aspects of the women’s liberation theology I think was very helpful in naming the problems. So it wasn’t just good enough in some ways to try to dismantle patriarchal power and methodology, but we really also had to focus on dismantling the specific racism experienced by women of color, the economic disparities for women of color, the specific oppression and violation of their bodies and how that was manifesting in society. And if we couldn’t engage these issues, we really were not transforming the system for women, but just for white women. And I think to be honest on this issue, we are far further back. I think the church has not yet paid nearly enough attention to women of color or indigenous women’s voices and I think the church has really not been open to allowing those perspectives to change the structure and the way we do church. Honestly, I mean, in the Episcopal Church right now, I take encouragement that ironically, we’ve had this whole new wave of women bishops, but also a whole new wave of black and indigenous women being made bishops. And, you know, I really pray that in some ways they will be able to help facilitate maybe a next wave of change in the church that’s desperately needed. But of course, again, there’s always the question of why place that burden of transformation on their shoulders and not on ours as a collective body. And I think for me the real question is does the church really want to be transformed and to deal with the consequences of wanting to be transformed? And I’m not always sure that the answer is yes.
[23:21] MET: Wow, okay. So much there and I love it all. Okay, so what I’m gonna do Is I’m gonna take us back in time for just a minute and I’m gonna tell you why You were specifically talking about how women and specifically women of color Are dealing with issues that like we’re just this is a brave new world We’re in right now like women women of color in the church, etc. So I am going to take us back to that first wave, the 19th century. And I’ll tell you why. These were women who were not good on race. Right? Like, I mean, they, for most of the women in the 19th century, it was a different thing to support women than it was to support women of color. And that’s why, you know, someday we’ll talk about Sojourner truth and some of the other women of color who were, you know, fighting for abolition, like supporting abolition. I shouldn’t say fighting abolition, right? Supporting abolition, that kind of thing. But I want to look at two women who made completely different arguments for women’s rights, even though they left. It’s interesting because it’s like they’re making arguments for equality, even though they kind of leave out certain women. And it’s interesting because it’s like, well, they’re making arguments for equality, even though it’s not for women of color, but it’s also interesting to see these arguments for equality. These are from the 19th century. How have they carried through? How have we progressed? So I’m going to take us back to the beginning and see what has changed. Does that make sense?
[25:02] DDM: Yeah, sounds great.
[25:03] MET: Yeah. Okay. So the first person I want to talk about is Susan B. Anthony. Okay, we are in Rochester, New York area. And if you are from this area, you know all about Susan B. Anthony because Susan B. Anthony is from here. And like she’s everywhere, right? Like if you can’t get away from Susan B Anthony, if you’re from this area, I have my students read this speech by Susan B Anthony called, “Is It a Crime for a US Citizen to Vote?” And it’s so funny because I assigned it to my students and they come the next day and they’re just completely glassy eyed and they’re looking at me like what did you do? Because it is the most boring speech in the history of speeches. It’s, It’s long, it’s dull. And the first thing I do is ask my students, okay, why on earth did I have you read this? Because it’s awful. And they look at me like, what? I’m like, no, I recognize this is a very long, it is very boring, like, why on earth would I have you read this? What could you possibly get out of something this long and dull and hard to read? And they’re shocked because like how many professors come in and admit to you, I just had you read something that was terrible. And I don’t even like reading it like what what are we doing here? The speech is 100% like logical syllogistic it’s based on the most foundational form of logic it’s a syllogism: All citizens deserve the right to vote. I am a US citizen. Therefore I deserve to vote. And the whole thing is just pages and pages of that kind of foundational logic punctuated by some appeals to ethos, right? Some name dropping and that’s all it is just logic logic logic and we talk about why on earth I mean it’s just dull right like you can’t write pages and pages of pure logic without putting your audience to sleep and we talk about why she would do that And what we get to is the stereotype about women then just as now is that women are overly emotional.
[27:12] MET: And Susan B. Anthony knows that. So she gets up in front of wwell this is the speech is being made like in community centers and You know town squares and she gets up in front of a group of men and does the exact opposite of what is expected She is not emotional She is not overworked. She does the exact opposite of what they say women are supposed to do and is 100% rational, logical, no emotion. The other thing you have to know about this is Susan B. Anthony has been arrested for voting. Women are not allowed to testify in court and women are not allowed to be on juries. So Susan B. Anthony is about to be tried and she can’t defend herself and there’s no women on the jury. So Susan B. Anthony is going around from town to town, giving us 100% logical speech, defying all of the stereotypes about women. She’s seeding the jury pool. So she’s playing chess while everybody else is playing checkers is what it comes down to. And when you put it in that context, my students are like, oh my gosh, that’s so brilliant. And I’m like, I know it’s brilliant. It’s just boring. Right? Like I admit it’s boring. But like when you think about what she’s doing, like this is, this is smart stuff. And then they like they get really into it. They’re like, Oh my gosh, let’s look at it. Let’s read it. I’m like, yeah, I know. Like women can be smart too. But it’s just it’s a very simple. We have given citizens the right to vote. I am a citizen. I deserve the right to vote. It is not hard, right? Compare that to this other person I would like to talk about. And that’s Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Elizabeth Cady Stanton does the opposite kind of reasoning. It is not a logical argument. It is a very kind of, I don’t know, spiritually oriented argument, but still kind of Western in its thinking. She wrote something called “The Solitude of the Self.” And basically she says, when it comes down to it, we’re all kind of alone in this life. Not like alone and depressed, but in the sense that nobody can carry your burdens for you. And that is especially true for women, right? Like you birth your children, You do your laundry, you do all of these things that we are required to do and nobody can do it for you, right? Like you carry your worries for your children, you do all of these things. And ultimately, you are the only person who can do that. You go through this life on your own. Nobody can understand this world. It’s kind of like that intersectionality thing, right? Like you understand this world as you understand it, and nobody can do that for you. So ultimately we live in solitude. But that is the thing that ultimately unites us because we all live that way together. Right? Like, And that is ultimately her argument for equality. We ultimately experience the world that way together, right? You understand the world your way. I understand the world my way. And because we are individuals and we experience the world that way, we deserve to be treated as individuals that way. And it’s this very like because we experience the solitude of the world, we deserve to be treated the same way through that world. And it is like this really kind of nuanced, wild, like I’ve never heard anything like that. Yeah. Like 19th century. You don’t expect that. And it’s coming from a woman and people are like, what is this? It’s very strange. And this is the arguments that get carried through to the 20th century and they progress. Anyway, this is how we start the arguments about equality and think about how they get carried through to like intersectionality and the third wave. It’s just wild. Right?
[31:16] DDM: Right. Anyway, so interesting. It’s interesting. Cady Stanton’s perspective, you know, because I think when you were speaking, I was finding myself struggling a little bit with that kind of solitary sense of self-concept, because I think in South Africa and in Africa there is that alternative always worldview of kind of Ubuntu Which is “I am simply because we are” without without you without us There is no ever even capacity for that solitary sense of self. But again, that concept of solitary sense of self, how can my being have any meaning except in relationship with others? Because it’s the community that gives us our sense of humanity and our sense of identity. I love in African philosophy and particularly within Ubuntu, there’s this concept that humanity is what we owe to each other, which I think is such a profound concept, you know, and maybe in some ways the community and the community of the church owe women their full humanity, and men in the society will never be fully human until women are fully human, you know, because I think stripping each other of equality, full inclusion, equal access to wealth, power, it really just diminishes in some ways our collective humanness. But I think the other side is that from the church’s perspective, I think part of the real problem in the church is that often we’re working from sacred scriptures written thousands of years ago, you know, where women were seen and viewed very differently, You know, I mean, we can’t even correlate 3,000 years later, sort of, you know, the role of women, you know. There was a large aspect in which, in the scriptures, women were there for procreation. They were there to build that ancestral patriarchal family line. And so that really is in some ways the dominant narrative around women. But then you also find these subversive elements woven through scripture. You know, God who, God’s self is portrayed in feminine language, right? The El Shaddai, the many-breasted God, the Shekinah, the feminine face of God. You know, the Holy Spirit is Ruach, or the wind of God always with a she pronoun. You know Deborah the judge, Mary the birther of God. You know there’s these glimpses and narratives of women and womaness breaking through almost that patriarchal concrete but they are definitely not the dominant. And I think if we can begin to try to understand scripture as really part of that progressive revealing of God’s self and who God is in relationship to us in creation. I think the danger is that we tend to very often in the church stop theological thought and development in the first century AD, right? And that’s why some church communities literally function and teach as though they still living in the first century AD.
[34:32] MET: And that’s so interesting because, you know, it’s like I was just saying some people want to stop those reasons for women’s rights in the 19th century, right? Like we have to move forward.
[34:42] DDM: Absolutely. Absolutely. There’s a continual development. And I think we’ve also got to understand that just because some books of the Scripture were canonized into what we have today as the Bible, that does not mean that God is still not speaking, that God is still not revealing God’s self, that God is still not actively leading us deeper and deeper into a transformation of who we are both as individuals and communities, even today in the 21st century. And so our understanding of God needs to be growing, shifting, just as momentously as it did for those early disciples who in some ways literally turned their whole world and their understanding of Judaism completely upside down And I think we do see that many church communities are trying to do this You know Women’s ordination may have been practiced in the early church, but I think the understanding was different from what ordination is today. And I think ordaining women has been a big shift in theological consciousness and understanding and practice. It’s ironical that we’re doing this episode today because just this weekend we actually consecrated in Rochester our first woman bishop in this diocese. And I mean, that is huge. As I sat there in that service, I thought, I’ve never had a bishop who looks like me. And I went home, this you’ll find interesting Elizabeth, I went home that Saturday night and I dreamt of our new bishop, Kara. And I dreamt we’ve just gone out and we were talking about dishes and we were talking about kids and we were talking about, she literally felt like a friend in my dream. And I woke up and I thought, I’ve never had a Bishop dream like this in my entire life. Right. It’s, it’s that, Oh my God, there’s so much that we share simply by being woman, you know? These are big changes in the church. But I think the real question is, is if we don’t change the structure, if we really don’t change the way we do ministry, the way we think and act and relate in the church, then we have to ask the question, are women simply being co-opted, even if they’re clergy or bishops, into a patriarchal system? And then we actually just become a part of the problem.
[37:02] MET: So here’s what I think is incredibly cool about this conversation. We’re talking about women in the public, we’re talking about women in church arguments for why women should or should not be in these spaces. And we’ve talked about wildly different ideas, you know, Ubuntu and “Solitude of the self,” like different ideas from different cultures, different times in history, all of this stuff. But substantially, it all comes down to the same thing. And that is God recognized this humanity of women too. Right? That is what we’re getting at. And that, you know, it’s because of their citizenship, because of the burdens they carry on their own, the importance of community. There are a number of reasons we have given here, but all of the people and cultures that we’re talking about here have latched on to one of the myriad reasons why the Holy Spirit says, “Hold up, you do not get to diminish part of my creation.” That is what it comes down to. Each of these arguments or concepts in some way is somebody’s attempt to show that women literally half of the population deserve to have their humanity recognized. And this is a really fascinating conversation because for people like us, this is a spiritual thing, right? There is a spark of the divine in all of us and that has to be acknowledged It’s kind of like how we talked about with the creation stuff the other day. And thinking about Ubuntu, it is that we share our lives with each other, right? So we have to love and respect and acknowledge each other to keep ourselves whole. The first way there’s those first savers talked about (Susan B.) Anthony and (Elizabeth) Cady Stanton, they made very secular arguments. We deserve to be treated as whole people because we’re citizens or because we share the same personal and legal burdens as men, right? Like these are all arguments we’ve heard. And I think it’s fascinating and telling that regardless of where or when you’re coming from, people come to the same point, and that is that women are deserving. So projects like what we’re doing right now are really fruitful because you can see that it is not the concept of equality that is wild at all because people are coming to the same conclusions. It is the opposition to that that makes no sense.
[39:27] DDM: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think the biggest fear maybe as a woman is that the visual optics will change so we’ll start to have women coming in as lawyers, women coming in as priests or bishops, women as educators, but if the culture of patriarchy remains intact what than have we actually achieved.
[40:00] MET: Thank you for listening to The Priest & the Prof. Find us at our website: priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast at priestandprof.org, make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at priestandprof.org/donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
[40:23] DDM: Music by Audionautix.com.
Very interesting- and some heavy analyzing.
I wonder how the fact that the vast majority of ministers (including women) received their initial religious education (catechetical instruction) from women – religious sisters, Sunday school teachers, youth leaders is often overlooked when we discuss spiritual formation.
My Catholic education (grades 1-12) was a solid foundation in the doctrines and traditions of my faith. I was also blessed with religion teachers (all religious sisters) sisters)in high school who cast a critical eye on Scripture and Church history. And it was in high school that I was introduced to Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua and his Development of Doctrine treatise.
That is very true about religious instruction coming from women for the most part. Other than sermons and the occasional classroom visit from the priest when I attended Catholic school, I cannot think of any instances where I received religious instruction from a man until I was an adult.