-: Record this.
And do you mind if, actually if I could put that over there
too maybe. -: Okay, your volume is working
fine here. -: Good, good.
Wonderful, great.
So if I could have your name, please.
-: I'm Joan Marie Martin, I go by Joan M. Martin.
-: Okay.
-: And my mother and father had three Js,
Jerry, Joan, and Janet.
-: Did they really? -: Yes they did.
-: And where are you in the? -: I'm in the middle.
-: You are, ah, that is great.
Now are you lay or clergy?
-: I'm clergy, I was ordained in the presbytery
of Newark, New Jersey, on October 10th, 1976,
so I have been ordained 39 years.
-: Really?
And when and where were you born?
-: I was born in Englewood, New Jersey, which is right across
from New York City at Englewood Hospital
down the hill from the George Washington Bridge.
-: That's great.
And where did you go to school, graduate or divinity school?
-: I went to Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, Illinois,
which is a UCC college, the home of the Niebuhr.
-: Oh. -: Yes, yes.
They went to school there and one of them,
I think it was H. Richard who served as our president
for a time, I went, I came home
and went to Princeton Theological Seminary
and that was '73 to '76 and in 1987 to '96
I did my PhD program at Templewood University
where I was Director of Campus Ministries.
-: Oh you were.
Okay, and what was your doctoral work in?
-: Christian social ethics, church and society.
-: Mhmm, mhmm.
And how and when did you first become aware
of feminist, womanist theology?
-: Well I can't speak about womanist feminist theology first.
I became a feminist in college when the women
living in the women's honorary dormitory at Elmhurst
decided that we needed to start doing consciousness raising
and doing book reading, you read The Second Sex
by Shulamith Firestone and I can never remember,
I can never remember the name of the woman who wrote
the book that turned the American middle class women around.
She was a good friend of Gloria Steinem's and an author.
But, so I actually started early in college.
-: You did, yeah.
Do you recall what was the impetus
for the consciousness raising?
-: Well a number of things.
My first year in college was the FBI police raid
on the Chicago Blank Panther Party house
in which two people were killed.
That January, 1970, a young man by the name of James Cone
came to Elmhurst College at the invitation of his good
friend, Ronald Getz, and lectured from his new book
which at that time was Black Power and Black Liberation,
I believe, but it was his first book.
In the spring was Kent and Jackson States
and so the feminist movement, the one in Chicago
around demonstrating about the FBI,
Chicago police of Fred Hampton and then both the Kent
and Jackson States, Kent for the protest against the war
in Vietnam had large feminist contingents
and the Jackson State shootings, black women and men
were involved in raising the issue of racism there.
-: Yeah.
So how were those between gender and race?
Were those combined for you from the very beginning?
How did that work?
-: Well they were combined but they were controversial
and that continued through seminary.
The black students, there were two of us who were black
women in the Princeton campus from '73 to '76
and African-American, black, and so I belonged
to the Black Student Association and I belonged
to the Women's Center and if it was my opportunity,
I remember once preaching in Miller Chapel and I preached
about women in the bible and the black men were furious
because I should have been preaching about black issues.
At which point in time, things I still say,
anytime I preach about black issues or women's issues,
I'm preaching about both issues,
and it also means I'm preaching about class and abilities
and people who are differently abled
and I'm preaching about whatever the current
peace and justice issues are, but it began,
if I'm a black women, I preach about being black
and I preach about being a woman.
That is not a separate identity,
it is an indivisible experience.
-: And when did you start finding,
you mentioned during the consciousness raising,
but did you start studying womanist theology
or what was useful to you? -: Well it was when I went
to Princeton seminary, I was able to study more
black theology. -: Yes.
-: With Guy Hanson and Edlar Hawkins who were on the faculty
at Princeton and Kathy Sackenfeld and Frida Gardner
were the women and during the time I was there,
there was a tenure battle so that they would get tenure
and so it was always something in the mix, in the mix,
going on to raise those issues, so in those years,
it was reading Nancy Hardesty and Litha Scanzoni,
all were meant to be about women in ministry.
There were a few writings Letty Russell had begun to write
at that time and I met her in my first year in seminary,
in the spring of my first year, and it went all the way
from meeting this incredible woman
to being mentored and colleagues and in the end,
very good friends until Letty died just a few years ago,
she's buried out here in Auburn Cemetery.
-: I didn't know that.
-: And we had a women's service here.
-: Yes. -: She died during the summer
and so we had a service here, but she was an amazing woman.
1990, no, it was in 2000, excuse me, Letty invited me
to go to Yale to be a visiting associate professor
so that kind of relationship.
We would get into all sorts of good trouble
around and about. (laughs)
-: Love it.
Switching to Re-Imagining, what was your relationship
to the Re-Imagining community?
-: I didn't necessarily have a relationship
to the Re-Imagining community, what I had was a strong
relationship with church-employed women
of the United Presbyterian Church, which raised employment
issues for women in, who were both program executives
and church secretaries, particularly in presbytery,
SINED, and general assembly offices.
So that was one organization.
Presbyterian women, I often did workshops
for Presbyterian and spoke at one of their general
assemblies and then I also belonged to,
we started out as a group of six ordained black women
in a Presbyterian church in the mid-'70s
while we were still in seminary and developed
the African-American Clergywomen's Association.
Now that's what it is.
There are more ordained black women in the Presbyterian
church than I can tell you I know, it's gotten that big.
Between 1977 and 1981, I was the first Justice for Women
staffperson on the National Council of Churches.
-: Really? -: Yes.
Under Lucius Walker and then
I cannot recall his name.
He wrote an incredible book that impacted
what I thought about church and state issues,
why the churches should pay taxes.
Dean, and then I can't remember his last name.
But three weeks into the job, in the fall of '77,
Claire Randall, who was the general secretary,
the first woman general secretary in the National Council
of Churches, told me that I had the job of going down
and creating a feminist presence, a religious, Christian,
feminist presence at the National Women's Conference
because she was on President Carter's commission on women
for the United States Decade For Women Conference
and that's what Houston was, the National Women's,
Decade For Women Conference, and so that position,
I was 25 years old, 26 years old, that position
was my entree into the movements of women.
Women who were struggling for all sorts of things.
The Great Panthers, part of those founding members
were some Presbyterian women, Maggie Coon
was a Presbyterian woman. -: I didn't know that.
-: Yeah, so I had this whole network of women who
had been strong, clear, feminist leaders in the church,
didn't use that term until the late '60s and early '70s
and by the time I finished seminary,
I was part of a movement, I even got to work
for the movement in the churches, being the first
staffperson for Justice For Women in church and society.
And I did that for five years and I kept those contacts
alive doing things for Presbyterian women,
church-employed women went out of business
but what became the unit that Marianne Lundey ran,
the Women's Ministry Unit of the Presbyterian Church
after reunion, people knew, because I had worked
ecumenically, I continued to do things for the UCC,
for the Lutherans, I still knew women in the WRO,
the Welfare Rights Organization for Women.
I still knew people in NOW, I knew women of the likes
of Charlotte Bunch, who became a good friend.
She was editor of Quest Magazine at that time,
which is where, Quest Magazine, I still have my original
Quest Magazine some place up there on the shelf
and then by the mid-'80s, black women were publishing
conditions, Alice Walker had published The Color Purple
in 1985, I think, her book of essays,
In Search of Our Mother's Gardens was published in 1983,
Kate Cannon had gone to seminary and she and Dolores
Williams had worked on the notion of womanist
and for a long time, outside of Alice Walker's writing,
womanist was only known in the church
until later in the '90s. -: How did that happen,
that it became better known?
-: Well you can't keep a good thing quiet
and when people read people, womanism, the name,
being a womanist, it caught on in community organizations
all through the '80s, Letty Russell and I chaired
the Women's Ecumenical Center here in Boston
and they were both an alternative for women
in theological education 'cause there were really were no
women's programs then in theological education that were
really owned by structures in theological education,
so there was that component but there was a community
component that worked with women in Boston
and we asked the question, "What would the WTC look like
"if it were run by and for black women,
"by and for women of color?"
And by the early 2000s, the WTC had done that
and it always had two co-directors, one black and one white.
So those were years when, even though I was in campus
ministry by the end of 1981, I still kept those
relationships together so that an invitation came
to be a speaker because I was known nationally
in both the traditional women's organizations
and in the feminist women's organizations in the mainline
churches that belonged to the NCC as well as into certain
women's groups in theological education.
-: Yes, so you spoke at that 1993 conference
and I know it's been a long time.
What do you remember about the conference?
-: I remember going, "Wow, this is great."
I'm getting past a cold since last week
so my voice isn't what it should be, not as clear.
But everybody was excited about going to Re-Imagining
because women were coming up with the most incredible
resources for the church, Ruth Duck had been writing hymns
since the early '80s, Jane Parker Huber had been writing
hymns since the early '80s, the Ordination Now movement,
Mary Elizabeth Hunt, Diane New, Sister March Tewitt,
the Roman Catholic women were going all blazes,
a ton of them were getting educated.
Places like St. Thomas, here at Weston, Jesuit Seminary,
at Boston College, so you wanted to be there,
you wanted to be there.
-: And how was the experience in terms of anticipating it?
-: Well, it was great to be reacquainted
with Sweet Honey in Iraq and I remember Bernice Johnson
Reagan saying, "When people really give me a hard time,
"what I do is I pray that god gives them
"what they need so they quick wearing me out."
I remember that that's what she told us
about what she prayed when doing coalition building
was the last thing anybody ever wanted to do
'cause people only got together in coalitions to get done
what they needed to get done and most of the time,
the rest of the time, they didn't talk to each other.
So it was talking to Bernice Johnson Reagan
and Mercy Amba Odaoye.
It was hanging out with Kate Cannon and Dolores Williams
and we had been friends for a long time.
It was listening to people I had never heard before
like Betarowski from Canada even though I couldn't imagine
and I said this to her, she became very angry with me,
I raised the issue with the steering committee and with her
about, are there not women of color in Canada,
well most of us knew that there were Canadian women's,
Native First Women's issues going on in Canada
just as they were going on here, but there was nothing,
and this conference was all about diversity.
And that's what I had given my small plenary.
They said, small plenary address, plenary of 500 was small.
And it was affirming that spiritual diversity
had to be embodied if it was going to be a justice movement
whether in church and society, and so I went with that
anticipation and so to encounter some speeches,
the large two or 3000 plenary speakers who did not address
the community other than in the mantra of race,
gender, and sex, or race, class, and sex was simply,
was not liberative, so one of the things I did,
it wasn't a happy experience but I'm glad I did it,
I raised that issue with the steering committee
and some people said I was raining on the parade
and I said, "If you invite women of color,
"what do you think you're gonna get?"
Either the women's movement is ours and we are a part of it
and we're a part of it significantly for white women
or it's racist, and that was I think for some of us
a real turning point even though the Journal of Feminist
Studies and Religion had done a round table by that time
on womanist theology and ethics, I think it was '91 or '92
when they did that special round table.
Kate Cannon, Dr. Jacqueline Grant had both turned
their dissertations on womanist theology, well Jacqueline
was still calling herself a black feminist then.
Dolores had published, Tracy West was in the pipeline
on her PhD, I was in the pipeline on mine,
tons of black women were in the pipeline
so not to have recognized that you have to give substance
to your imagining, then it doesn't happen.
So on the one hand, it was, the worship was wonderful
and that's why I say that for the progressive church
of the future who want to attract the nuns,
the non-affiliated but spiritual and religious people,
who want to keep those who have grown up in the church
in the last 20 or 30 years, men and women,
feminist men or pro-feminist men and feminist women,
women of color who still identify as either feminist
or womanist or Afro-centric, the church is,
those resources are already there and they have to be
taken seriously and the church also has to,
if it wants to grow, it has to enable women in ministry
not to have just the first or second calls
but to have calls to big steeple churches,
it has to take seriously the economic disparity
that still goes on between men and women's salaries
in the churches, I won't name the denomination
but just in the last two or three years,
one denomination has cut the pension benefits of single
retired women because after all, they in no way
are supporting a family or so the old image and stereotypes
of women go in the church still.
So I think that what the church of the future needs to be
is to be even more feminist, and when I say even more
feminist, it means it must be more conscious
of womanist issues, mujerista issues, Asian,
Asian-American women's issues, as those are community-based,
on-the-block issues, which means quality public education,
not separate but equal public education,
which we're getting back to in the charter school movement,
particularly here in Massachusetts.
And something I disagree with Mr. Obama on
and former governor Deval Patrick
and current governor Charlie Baker about.
It still doesn't answer the question of quality education,
particularly in your inner cities and in your poorist
rural areas, those are all women's issues because any issues
that affect children affect women and any issues
that affect women affect families and communities.
So that the churches need to ramp up and be ready
not to expect people to come in but train people,
but seminaries and particularly denominational seminaries
need to train people to understand the local dynamics
of structural oppression, including that of women,
and take its members and go out and work on those issues
in the communities so that people see the church
as a resource in their community to help them struggle
with the issues which confront their lives.
And that as they confront those issues, they're deeply
spiritual and integrated as persons in the community
because of Christian faith and the Christian church.
Otherwise, you have burnout and you have it.
Burnout is seen in different ways these days.
It's seen in how many people have high blood pressure,
how many people are obese, how many people get cancer.
I believe those are signatures of when the rest of us,
awhile ago, used to burn out and take off a year
or take out a year if we could afford it and just get
ourselves back together and get back in the movement.
-: Could you say more about how spirituality prevents that,
how it ties into, how it gives that kind of support?
-: Well I can only do that because spirituality
is always contextual, it always is about
your relationship with god but your relationship with people
because it's through people that we oftentimes
experience god, it's with other people that we experience
the creation, it's with other people and ourselves
that we experience what it means not to be god,
that means fully human, that we get sick, that we grow old,
that we have disabilities, so spirituality is an integral
part of being a whole person and having the stamina,
the inner stamina that listens to god so that one can work
in the world, 'cause you gotta be able to see where god is
out there because generally we think god's up there.
That's not the promise of the gospels.
The promise of the gospels is, "I will be with you
"to the ends of the earth," so if that's what the promise is
that means Christianity, Christian faith,
what happens in church can't be focused on my comfort,
it needs to be focused on my wholeness so that when I leave
the church, when I leave the table, I'm empowered to serve.
And if that's happening week after week or the first Sunday
of every month, or even quarterly, it ought to be about
the forgiveness of sins, the wholeness that I feel after
Eucharist or after hearing the word rightly preached,
I'm a Calvinist, the word rightly preached,
then that is sustaining word, so Christian spirituality
to me is about helping people be sustained
in the world to do god's mission.
And that mission is, if you look at the historical sleep
of the story of god and the Israelites,
god is always moving out from the Israelites' understanding
of who god is, they can never contain this tribal god thing.
And by the time you get to Jesus and the fullness
of the incarnation, you have somebody standing in front
of the people in the synagogue reading the Book of Isaiah
and they wanna try to catch him
and throw him over the cliff so that those issues
are not just about me and mine, but it's about god's mission
primarily, actually the church doesn't have a mission,
it doesn't have a being without it being understood
that what it's doing is god's mission.
So if we're gonna live, literally, climate change,
you have to have, you have to approach it
with a spiritual understanding of the relationship
between god, creation, and all living things
in order to sustain yourself in that work.
If you're going to work, and I don't even necessarily know
how to put this, whatever is the meaning of terrorism,
if anything ever called on the objective love of our enemies
that's it, and how we do justice making,
it's probably the most complicated issue.
-: Do you have any thoughts on that?
-: As the people of Paris and the people of France
have experienced just as we did in 9/11,
it takes deep spiritual resources to keep people going off
the deep end of hate.
So you know, it takes deep spiritual fortitude
to say that black lives matter and this nation needs
gun control and to keep working at it
and working at it and working at it.
I remember when I was much younger
in the '60s and '70s when I was a teenager
and then when I was in college, people would say,
we're not called to be successful,
we're called to be faithful, but if we're faithful,
then the struggle just changes because it's not about
a win or lose situation, it's always about making known
the presence of god through how we treat one another,
whether that's between parent and child or spouse or spouse
or nation to nation, and the differences of people
within a nation or now, the course I'm gonna teach,
in January, is a globalization course and ethical issues
that globalization demands we give our attention to.
So it's those kinds of things that spirituality enables
and is necessary, not to be god, but to be as fully human
as possible, which is very very hard.
-: That is, this is wonderful.
-: That's what the church needs to do.
-: Right right, yes.
This is so helpful.
-: Where are we?
Oh okay, we're fine. -: Good.
This is exactly what I'm, this is wonderful
about where to go.
I did wanna go back a little bit and I think I know it
but I wanna make clear I do.
When you talked the Re-Imagining Conference
not doing the substance, could you say more
about what it needed to do that it didn't?
-: It didn't give, now this is in hindsight.
-: Sure, right.
-: It did not give a rubric for all of its speakers.
-: And what should that have looked like?
-: You can't get out of EDS without in some way,
somewhere, some course, some table discussion,
but let's say structurally, there is no course you can take
here that doesn't talk about anti-racism
and other forms of structural oppression.
-: Mhmm, mhmm.
-: So if you are organizing a conference,
you say to every speaker, even if you speak
on this one issue, please address it
keeping in mind how the issue impacts people
or people experience the impact of the issue
from the matter of difference, racial difference,
gender difference, economic difference,
physical ability difference, all those things,
it gets real hard around here to stand in the chapel
and not look around the room and go,
"Oh boy, I have to remember to do this."
So I think that one of the things is you really want people
to be able to reimagine, then you have to have people
who you give leadership to some guidance
about what re-imagining might be like
and it's always thinking, if we can multitask,
we can think about more than one kind of experience.
-: Mhmm, that's very helpful.
-: I think, so that's one thing.
I thought people ought to be able to lead worship
out of their traditions and experience what the best
of different traditions become or can be recognized to be
when we fully decide that there is something
called ecumenical worship and we might have to create it
every time we meet, I mean, the World Council of Churches
has to do it every time it meets.
And say that what would an ecumenical service be like
if we started with responding on a theme of re-imagining
the abundance of god from diversity and difference.
So would the worship service be about preciousness
because of scarcity or preciousness because five loaves,
and five fishes and three loaves become, can feed 2000
who are all different out there even though they may all
be Aramaic Jews. -: Right, that's great.
I wanna be respectful of time.
Were you aware of the backlash of the 1993 conference?
-: Oh yes, yes, I didn't get as many letters
as other folks did because I no longer was as much a part
of church organizations and structures
'cause I was in graduate school.
I came here in '94, I was writing my thesis
in the fall of '93 so Kate Cannon had once told me
that when you're writing your thesis,
there is no other lover and you know this is true.
-: I do know this is true, yes.
-: No matter how much you love your husband,
no matter how much you love your kids,
no matter how much you love your partner,
no matter how much you love your mama and your dad.
-: You got it. -: Listen, when I'm done.
(laughs)
You're thinking about it when you're at the grocery store,
you're thinking about it when the kids are at the park
and you're watching them, you're thinking about it,
those are the times I was the most creative, oftentimes,
when you're actually not trying to think about it.
-: Right, yes.
-: Some of my best thinking happened in the grocery store.
So I think that what we need to do are those types
of things that we don't ordinarily think about.
-: What do you mean?
-: I think I lost your track of question.
-: Oh, I was talking about the backlash.
-: The backlash, the backlash.
I didn't have to think about that stuff.
I got some letters, I didn't get any phone calls.
I tried to stay in touch with people who were getting it
like Marianne and like some of the other
women I knew in denominational offices.
-: How do you account for it, do you think?
What happened there?
Do you have thoughts on that?
-: I think I learned my analysis from Beverley Harrison
who was a mentor and friend, beginning years I worked
in New York and she took me back to the 1964
presidential election between Barry Goldwater
and John F. Kennedy but it wasn't between them,
it was what happened in the right.
And the right couldn't pull it off
even though Barry Goldwater was probably the most
prestigious conservative in the U.S. Senate and Congress
but he was so roundly defeated that the party and Johnson
became popular until the Vietnam War got out of control
that what happened was it took conservative
and I mean political conservative America
to the Iran hostage taking, in which Jimmy Carter
had no response that they had spent those years rebuilding
and part of that rebuilding was non-formally in the church,
I say non-formally 'cause you wouldn't even say informally
until you get to the point of the popularity
of Ronald Reagan by the end of his first term.
By that time, you've got a sophisticated radical right.
And you've had several radical right Evangelical preachers.
You've had the demise of the National Council of Churches
from the strength it had in the '50s and '60s and early '70s
and they establish think tanks
and you even had religion in democracy as a think tank.
-: And that was a major one. -: They were major ones behind
the backlash but you would also have people fan the flames
with feminism as Nazism, remember the feminazis?
-: Feminazi, I do.
-: So that when you're talking about inclusive language
at church or you only have a few bishops,
women bishops in the Methodist Church
and one of your women ministers in your conference,
and how Talsic wrote a book about the Sophia,
the feminist face of god, and my god,
people don't read the bible, their pastors don't do
the commentary work that they were taught to do in seminary,
calling the Holy Spirit or the ruach, also feminine,
in Hebrew, the Holy Spirit, well what are we gonna do next,
are we going to make Jesus non-gendered?
Oh this stuff about, you know of course, the '80s
was a ripe time for God the Father,
for the feminist to take on God the Father.
I mean, Nel Morton's book, Our Journey Is Home,
somewhere in that she talks about that the real need of,
that you cannot make God the Father, God the Mother
until you smash the image of the father
and that takes the power of the goddess.
Well.
God bless Nel Morton.
So feminist theology had really begun to move on that
in terms of, it had gotten, there were enough women
who had now come through PhD programs,
particularly in Bible and in Theology
and they were teaching women that by the time you get
to the second generation of women like Katie Cannon
who had studied with Bev Harrison and Jacqueline Grant,
who had studied with James Cone and so on and so forth
and women who had studied, she was at Garrett Theological
Seminary in the '50s and '60s.
United Methodist, not just Rosemary,
Rosemary's Roman Catholic.
Why can I not, Anna Howard Shaw is earlier.
I cannot recall her name.
But a number of the major, one of the major women's
quadrennial conferences of the United Methodist Church
in the late '70s spent a large colloquium talking
about the works of this woman, Georgia Harthness.
-: Oh right, mhmm, mhmm.
-: It was threatening. -: Mhmm, mhmm.
-: And this was as threatening to the church as was the early
feminism to traditional womanhood in a family.
They're all part of the same cloth.
Except in 1977, it was Phyllis Schlaffley
in the Eagle Forum, but now it's women in the churches.
-: Thank you.
Is there anything we haven't talked about
that you wanna mention or say?
-: Interestingly enough, Joan Clark had come out
as a lesbian in 1977, the issues of Concern Magazine
had come out earlier in the '70s
but I can't exactly say that lesbianism and gay rights,
even though there had been a movement going on
were as threatening as feminism was.
That didn't come until the latter part of '90s.
-: Why do you think that was?
-: 2000.
'Cause I think most women in the churches still saw
the fight as feminist, womanist, mujerista on the levels of,
we're talking to a predominantly heterosexual group
and still a generation of women who, if they were lesbian,
did not call themselves that, in church circles and were not
out because there had been the ordination struggles.
You can't do church now, you can't do re-imagining.
I can't reimagine a church, I wrote an article a couple
years ago for a forum, there were four or five conferences
by the Catholic Church, I think YDS, Hartford Seminary
were kinda all in this together, who more than a monologue.
It's two or three volumes.
I responded to Patricia Beatty Young.
Her essay was something like God Gives.
(phone rings)
God Gives the Lonely Families.
And so I responded that I couldn't imagine a church
only dealing with welcoming gays and lesbians
and that's without using the word marriage equality
when my goddaughter was in the process of becoming my godson
so I can't imagine the church not dealing
and a church that wants to be lively and alive
not dealing with a host of issues of sexuality
and not just because of people's either
because they come to realize their sexuality,
I'll put it that way, but because of the choices
that reproductive technology will come bear on us
in the future, much more so than now.
And I'm not talking about abortion.
The reproductive technologies of gene identification,
whether one can identify a disease,
the potential for a disease in a gene,
so then you determine to have that gene screened out.
Those are all, pastors, get ready.
-: Right, yeah.
-: Then it was abortion,
surrogate motherhood, and that was even in the '80s
but they were larger societal issues
and they had class ramifications, they had all sorts
of things that the church wasn't dealing with then
but the church would, a Re-Imagining Conference
would have to at least name those issues,
they would have to name eco-justice, climate change
in different ways than hugging trees and eating quiche.
(laughs)
To use the phrase of the right.
Yeah.
-: Thank you, thank you so much, I really appreciate it.
-: You're very welcome. -: Thank you.