- Sara, thank you so much for meeting with me. I really appreciate it. I want to get some background information first. First of all, could you say your name. - Sara Evans. - Thank you, and are you lay or clergy? - I am lay. - And your denomination? - Methodist. - Yeah. - United Methodist. - United Methodist, yes. When and where were you born, Sara? - I was born on December 1st, 1943 in a parsonage in McCormick, South Carolina. - Ohhh. - My father was a Methodist minister so I'm a PK. - You are a PK, so you're, that's great. Where and when did you go to school, or where did you to go to school? Graduate or Divinity school? - I did not go to Divinity school, I was an undergraduate at Duke University, and my Masters is also from there. My PhD is from Chapel Hill. - Mm-hmm, and what is your area again? - The history of American women, women in the United States, and particularly the history of feminism. - Mm-hmm, how did you get interested in that? - Oh my, this is a long story. (interviewer laughs) - But a fascinating one. - But let me see if I can give you the Cliff Notes. A lot of it has to do with growing up in the segregated South with parents who knew it was wrong and I didn't know any other white people who knew that. But my father, before I was born, had preached a very radical sermon on the issue of race in Columbia, South Carolina, as a 25 year old associate pastor. And he was sent into exile in McCormick which is why I was born where I was born. And so that, awareness, of deep injustice in the world I lived in and the helplessness about what do you do is central to who I am. In theological terms it's an awareness of sin. I also had a very angry mother who tried really hard to be a good preacher's wife, but it was a very bad fit, she should have been a scientist. So we had great yards, she broke some rules, went to college, North Carolina State University, in landscape architecture, when there were only six women in that whole university. Or college, it was a state college then. So I had a mother who knew she had potentials and who certainly had passions for the natural world. Birds, plants, the whole thing. That she had no way to express when I was little. So I also grew up with that kind of emotion throbbing in the background and I knew she was depressed in the '50s. So I go off to Duke University in 1962, and the civil rights movement is exploding around me, and that was a kind of liberation for me. And the center, the place where people involved in civil rights, at Duke, in my freshman year when there were no black undergraduates, was the Methodist students there. So for me, existential theology was my first radical language, and it was really important. By the end of my time at Duke, I was, full-tilt. I got involved by dipping my toes in for awhile there. But my, I ended up going to the Montgomery march, which culminated the Selma Montgomery. That was my first really big one, but right before that, I went to an antiwar march in spring of '65 we're talking about. And the summer before I had gone to Africa for a summer work camp program, which was my first interracial experience. First interracial experience with peers not in a racial hierarchy. So the movement was exploding around me and I became part of it. I ended up doing labor union support work, and working for nonacademic employees at Duke who wanted a union, and that's kind of where the civil rights movement went in '67, '66-'67. I was the North Carolina coordinator for Vietnam Summer in 1967, which means I drove around the state trying to get people to write letters to Congress, and maybe have a vigil. And so in the fall of '67 I moved to Chicago. I was gonna go to grad school in African studies, because Africa had changed me, profoundly, but it was the height of black power, and I didn't think that someone with a white female face, and, maybe even a bit of a southern accent sometimes, could be credible, in that field, at that time. And I was probably tired of school, so I dropped out, and I ended up as a secretary on the campus of the University of Chicago for the Methodist and Presbyterian campus ministries. In the basement was a radical press, and all these people were coming through, coming through, coming through, fomenting stuff. And the women stopped and talked to me. And when they realized I was like one of them, because I had just come off that organizing summer, and was very, in North Carolina everybody connected to any social justice movement knows everybody 'cause it's so small. So they said there's this group of women meeting, wanna come? I landed in arguably the first consciousness-raising group in the country, which is now called the West Side group in Chicago, in the fall of '67. And that year you couldn't, tell me about a women's liberation meeting that I didn't want to go to. And I came back to North Carolina the next summer, with missionary zeal, and began organizing women's liberation in North Carolina in the summer of '68. So, in the meantime, I had really left the church, because as I got involved in civil rights, the whiteness of the church, it's continuing segregation, the Methodist church was segregated. There was a separate conference for African American churches, and I, couldn't bear it. So the Methodist student center was this radical place but the church, writ larger, was part of the status quo, and so, I simply, stopped being connected. And while I was back in North Carolina between 1968 and 1976, getting a PhD in women's history, I mean, it was my engagement of feminism that sent me back to graduate school with questions because I didn't think you could make history if you don't have a history. Are we the first people with bodies like this to want to change everything? Well, obviously we're not. (Sara chuckles) But I, those were my questions, and I was part of a cohort of several thousand, really, certainly many hundreds, who were doing exactly that. The field of women's history grew out of our being pulled into asking these questions and finding ways to do it in graduate school. And my dissertation was about how it happened that women involved in the civil rights movement and the new left initiated what called itself women's liberation. How did that happen, said three chapters on women's involvement in SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, focused on the experiences of white women, 'cause it was white women who started those first groups at a time when black and white women couldn't communicate very well. And then three chapters on SDS. - SDS is? - Students for Democratic Society. And when I landed in Chicago, I had been in a little group in Durham, and our mailbox after I got married was the SDS mailbox (interviewer laughs) for Duke. But I didn't know the world of SDS activism, the big names. I got to Chicago and there they where. So it was, I just learned a lot, and I went to this first women's group and most of them had been South in '64 and '65 for civil rights. Which is not something that had been on my radar. I was in the South and they didn't recruit people to go to Mississippi. What I had done is gone to Africa. That was my, I look back and think, in some kind of subliminal way, going to Africa was my way of going to Mississippi, being engaged. So, I ended up working in women's history, the history of feminism. Timing is everything, it was sort of a magical time. And then I landed one of the early jobs in women's history here at the University of Minnesota. And when I moved here with a seven year old son, I realized that I wanted to put down roots where I was, and that I was searching for some kind spiritual home. So we started going, looked in the Yellow Pages under United Methodist. (laughing) And started going to churches and landed at Prospect Park United Methodist in Minneapolis. Where I, it was a liberal progressive church, where I could, be my, ritual-loving, agnostic feminist self. And be okay. And where I felt that my son could at least be exposed to the tradition I grew up in, in that church. In the late '70s, early '80s, I was part of a group that, wanted to talk about feminism and Christianity. So we started meeting on Saturday mornings, many of us had little kids, and we, read Womanspirit Rising. Feminist theology really, touched me very deeply. When that group organized a service at Prospect Park, in which we only used feminine imagery for God, we invited a woman to preach, and we had women liturgists, and Elton Brown, bless his heart, was totally supportive of this. But, the experience of being in church, and addressing, God using imaging, God, using female imagery, made me cry. I didn't know, how much the, patriarchalism of Christian tradition had set me outside until I had that experience and it affected me in my body. So that was a wonderful group. We invented all kinds of rituals, and we, out of it came a subgroup which I couldn't do 'cause I was so busy being a professor and a mother that I couldn't be in the musical they did, but they did a musical on images of God that was written by a local woman. It was just great. - Do you remember what that was called? - I think it's Images of God, but I'm not positive. You can look it up. - Was it by Kay Heckland, or by any chance? - Probably. - Okay, yeah. - But I don't know. - Sure, sure, I'll find out. - Double check it. - Sure. - The music was wonderful and it was performed in our church. We also, that group, initiated the rewriting of our hymnal, before the denomination did, and we found that other churches were doing the same thing and so we put together, a hymnal, with inclusive language. So that's the background and there was a member of that church who told me about the first Re-Imagining conference, and I don't remember why I couldn't go, but I do remember her saying you would really love this. (Sara laughs) And I, to this day, I deeply regret that I didn't have that experience. But, my heart was always there. And so, as later conf, and I was not, I was only somewhat aware of the backlash, and it's, a lot of it has to do with being over my head, trying to be, a professor, write the books I needed to write, and raise two children. But I remember, as the subsequent conferences were being organized, somebody reached out to me, and I remember showing up at a planning meeting that was kind of brainstorming. And that happened to me a few times where I began, and I would go to the conferences and go, whoa, this is so incredible. But that happened a few times and then I got an invitation to join the board. - Do you have specific memories of some of the conferences? Things that stand out to you or what your reaction was? - Well, I remember, the power of the rituals. Biting the apple, milk and honey, to summon light and darkness where they turned out the lights and we had sort of, starlight sparkles, and we're all singing Light and Darkness, and we're going into the dark, and learning to face it and welcome it. So those are, the rituals, in many ways were the most powerful, but, I remember a number of the talks. Rita Brock-- - Nakashima Brock? - Nakashima Brock. I remember as very powerful. - When you talk about the rituals, it's very moving to you. What is it about the rituals that spoke to you so deeply? - In part, I mean I'm someone who loves ritual. My father was the liturgist for the Methodist MSM National conferences in the early '60s. I discovered this going through his papers. (Sara laughs) - Really, wow. - And, because he was campus chaplain at SMU from '57 to the late '70s, I was very aware of his interest in ritual, and I was drawn to it, drawn, very much drawn. But in this case, it was, giving, putting into symbols things that, had been forbidden, and that, made me feel connected as who I am. It was also very embodied. There was dancing, there were streamers and banners, there was the physical biting of the apple, and seeing Eve as my sister. So that I think, there was a sensuality to it that was very powerful, very beautiful. I spent plenty of time in little bitty churches with really bad organs and choirs that couldn't quite get there, and singing, as John Wesley wanted us to do, all nine verses. (laughing) Sometimes in a dirge like, - Way! - Ohhh! But I had also sung in church choirs and really loved choral music, loved singing. And my mother had a really good voice and a much better ear than me, so I would stand beside her and she would hear the harmony and I could sing it with her. Those are important memories for me. But I think Re-imagining made ritual into this incredibly participatory thing. That was wonderful. - You mentioned a little bit ago about the backlash, and although you weren't that involved then, what do you know about it? How do you account for it, if you look at it now. - Well what I know is, more, things I have learned, but because of my involvement in Re-imagining since then. I grew up in the South, I went to high school in Dallas. I know about the right wing. And, it did, it has always struck me, that, Re-imagining, which the organizers of the conference thought was not that big a deal, it was this beautiful line of theological investigation that they wanted to bring together and lift up to the world. And it had been going on for 20 years. I read Womanspirit Rising from the early '70s. So, and there were things in that book that really touched me like the way we need to redefine sin because women give themselves away. And as a child what I thought was taught was sinful is being selfish. But you are equally sinful if you give yourself away and have no center and that was important to me. So the organizers didn't think they were doing such a big deal, but to the right wing, this was incredibly dangerous. Now that right wing not only was deeply invested in a very literalist interpretation of the Bible, they were deeply invested in a very patriarchal version of the family, as well as church hierarchy. And so, everything that Re-imagining stood for, upended those things. Challenged the right of men to be in charge. Fundamentally by challenging the idea that God is this little old man in the sky who's in charge and who's direct voice is the man in the church. But to empower women from the bottom up is kind of, explosive, in that context. And so you can see, at least in retrospect, why, this upset them so much. They'd been fighting feminism for a long time. Really fighting it. These were people who led the battle against the equal rights amendment, these were people who thought women should stay home and serve their husbands and families. So there was a long history behind their reaction. And so, there you have it. It was kind of brutal. - Yeah it was, you mentioned you got involved, you were kind of invited in. Could you say more about your involvement in the Re-imagining community? - Well there were a few years when I just was aware of the planning groups and showed up for brainstorming. Couldn't take on lots of responsibility, so, then I'd be there at the event. But I was quite aware of the community and its work, and also how much work goes into those conferences. And then when I was invited onto the board, I accepted that with great joy. I was glad to have a place at that table. And there I really saw the bones of the organization. Nancy Berneking churning out this wonderful newsletter, month after month after month, and coming to every meeting saying get me things for the newsletter. Here's what we're gonna work on, here's the theme, here's this and that. It was, you were there. - I was. - It was pretty phenomenal. And understanding that people like Mary Gates had just been, stalwart, much behind-the-scenes, although her involvement in United Methodist women was sort of out there and mobilizing. But there were so many people, and she just stands in for a whole group, who, did the groundwork, all the time, to make it happen. Who helped, they produced t-shirts and mugs, and we recorded everything, and we sold them at the events. The amount of work that went into making all of that happen, and we had this tiny little office with a part-time, staff person. It couldn't have functioned without that, had to have it, but most of it was carried on the backs of people, of other people. I didn't, I never met Mary Ann Lundy, who was our martyr, and, I did, a little bit, get to know Sally Hill, but not personally really, I was in her presence and awed by her. But, so these great formative figures were people who were not as much in the foreground by the time I came along. The community was kind of in survival mode. How do we keep this going? How do we keep our voices out there? When I came in, was, I guess some time after virtually all institutional support had been withdrawn, and the name Re-Imagining was anathema in the mainline denominations. They just, turned their backs. So it was a struggle, that's the other thing I was aware of. Not only the creativity and unbelievable hard work and dedication of this group of people, but also we operated on a shoestring, and the conferences themselves earned enough money to get us from one to another, but not much. And the numbers were going down. By the time I became co-chair, and now I've lost the name of my co-chair, but I know her well. - I don't remember either, actually. - Really? - Yeah, I'm sorry. - I'm on Facebook with her, I'll look it up and I'll send it to you, but it's in the record. - Yeah, I can look it up easily. - But she was wonderful, I can see her face. She also was very into, dance, ritual and dance. I think she was ordained. But, so she and I would meet and talk through things before we'd come to a meeting. It was, the whole thing was very collaborative, very collaborative, and it's kind of amazing that it sustained itself for 10 years, very amazing. But the fact is that the financial reports began to tell us a story about ourselves which was that we couldn't afford to exist. Because there was no way we could operate without some staff. Someone to answer the phone and send people somewhere. Someone, someplace to keep the stuff that was all of ours. Just the paperwork. And that was, I think, what I remember about the last part, was, how hard it was for people to face that reality because of how important the organization was to them and the community. It was deep in people's identity, had become part of their DNA. And so, there were quite a few, and I remember, just there were meetings, I can't recount any conversations, I just remember having this sense, that over time, people gradually, gradually, began to acknowledge that the handwriting was on the wall. We couldn't continue forever. It just was. Another piece of that is that every time we did a conference we burned out a whole 'nother group of people. They couldn't, they worked so hard, that when it was over, it's like their feet, they needed to go on with their lives, and to other things, and to things that fill them up, instead of draining them out. And so we kept finding new people but there comes a point when you can't find new people and integrate them fully enough to make this happen again. And with declining finances it was more and more coming out of our hides. And that just has its limits. This is really a common story about institutions that start with a mission, and that either, develop a source of income big enough to become institutionalized, and then they become more professionalized, and then they become something else than a movement. They do go on but they're not a movement anymore. If you want to stay in movement, you basically burn everybody out, and there comes a time when both the money and the human energy are depleted. And you have to think, so what's next? And what I feel best about, and I feel like I had some role in helping it happen, is that we, made a decision to have one more conference, that we knew was our last. And to use that conference to, claim what we had been and done. That it was not over, but this piece of it was over. And movements change, they morph, they have generational changes and transformations. They take new forms. This form, had certainly come to its end. And we really had to, try to end on a note that says we made a difference. The strength of the backlash is a signal about how powerful our message is. And what we did by refusing to go away and succumb to that is also a powerful message. We have planted seeds. And so, our symbol for that conference was seeds. That these seeds, ideas, rituals, songs, are out in the world now. I remember leading, that's the only time I really took much public leadership in the Re-Imagining conference, but leading a visualization exercise in which I invited everyone to close their eyes and imagine church. And invite them to imagine church wherever and however that was meaningful to them. So not just the little place with the steeple. It could be in a natural place, it could be in a home, it could be in a small group. Most of us had been in small groups that were, powerful for our spiritual growth, and, sort of go out on that note, on that re-imagining what our spiritual communities could be. And sort of going forth in the world, to, continue the work but not with this structure anymore. We really had to, if we hadn't closed the office when we did, we would've gone in debt. And my biggest fear was that we would run the organization into debt, and there's both the fact that boards are fiscally responsible, so I remember kind of lifting that up to people. (Sara laughs) Saying do you know that we would bear personal responsibility if we run it into the ground and into debt, then it's on us. So that it was literally true that we had to close the office and that we couldn't do another conference without more support. But we had to own the fact that what had happened in 10 years, of persistent work and inspiration, was in the world. It had changed us and it was gonna continue to bear fruit other places. - Well, as someone who was on the coordinating council, those time, I have to completely affirm that you really guided us toward an ending that was graceful. - Thank you. - We didn't just whimper and-- - Right, and too many organizations do that and end up feeling like failures. - Exactly. - And that, I mean that happens a lot. - And you kept that from happening. It didn't feel like we were defeated. - I was part of that, yes. - So how would you define Re-Imagining then? - I think would define it as a movement, to open up, the theological and ritual possibilities that come when you're not stuck in a patriarchal straitjacket of the tradition, but can see the tradition, as a gift, which is, for each generation and each person, really, to embrace in a way that affirms them. And so we embarked on a process of, the alternative is to leave. And most of us didn't want to leave. We felt that we had roots, it had made us who we are, it had given us the need to re-imagine it, but we couldn't stay, without feeling affirmed. And there was plenty in the tradition that was affirming, you just had to go find it. Most of it had been suppressed over millennia. - That's great. How would you say, in your involvement in community, how did feminist theology affect the structure and functioning of the community? - The community was, I think saw itself as functioning in a feminist way. That the way many groups that I've been part of do or did. And that means very democratic, very cooperative and collaborative, open to people using their gifts, how they can, we had co-chairs. And I think there's a real deep purpose to that, which is you don't have one leader, you have two. First of all you share the work, and the burden, and the thought, but you also, keep the conversation. Conversation was at the center, really at the center of process that made (dog barks) more democratic. - Shhh. - You need to go out. - Yeah. - So, and I think there was a real consciousness of not wanting to recreate hierarchy. (dog barks) And at the same time wanting to get stuff done. And I think that's a dilemma in many feminist organizations. Can you have a specialization of labor? Can one person, do the newsletter? If we don't all do the newsletter, is it really feminist? (laughing) But if you can let and support one person doing it, and then she called on all of us all the time, then you can find your way to new ways of working. - Well that kinda brings me to the next question, which was the challenges during its 10 years of existence, what kind of challenges did the organization face and how did they try to address them? (bird chirping) - Pardon my bird clock. (interviewer laughs) - Is that what that is? - It has bird recordings every hour. (Sara laughs) - I love it. (laughing) Which bird was that? - I don't know. - I don't either. (laughing) - I was supposed to learn them and I didn't. I have a friend who tried to get me-- - Sara? - Yes. - Does he need to go out? - He would love to go, yes. - Okay. - This is a conversation about my dog, because my husband just showed up. (interviewer laughs) (door thuds) And so that noise in the background is the coming and going. - That's great. - So repeat the question. - Challenges. - The challenges, oh. - The challenges and how you tried to address them. - Well I came in late in the day, but I think, the first big challenge was how to respond to the backlash, how to not be crushed by it, and how to respond in a way that continued the work that said we don't go away. There's more to be said here. There's more to be experimented with. There are more voices to hear. So that was, I think that was the biggest challenge of all. And then sustaining. Its challenges were like many many groups. I'm a student of social movements, and so I have to say I've been in other groups, too, that how do you find a way to function when you have very few resources, when people who are already working full-time, many of them, not all but many, have to shoulder the work of the organization. How do you share it around so that nobody sort of takes charge and runs away with it. And that happens in organizations. You get, a kind of informal hierarchy of people who assume more authority and nobody agrees that they have it, but. So the organization clearly brought, not only feminism, but also lots of experience in other places into itself. And it's real important that we did have officers, we had a treasurer, we didn't have an argument, to my knowledge, over whether someone should be the treasurer. We needed co-chairs, somebody has to run the meetings. There was a level of structure, that in the 1970s, 20 years before many feminist groups tried to have no structure. Well we've learned a lot in 20 years. And these were women who had functioned effectively in lots of hierarchical structures, and kind of knew how to make things work, but also wanted to resist where that takes you. So how do you make a hybrid that is collaborative, cooperative, brings in new people. I mean I just walked in and felt welcome. That's a sign of something really important about the organization. - So you think Re-Imagining basically did that pretty well over its 10 years, would you say? - I think so because it had to change who was in charge. I mean the original group, some of those people were still around, but a lot of 'em weren't. But it kept going. On the other hand it was pretty small, and so I don't know that this was the case, but small groups from the outside can look insular, or you could be interested but not know how to get involved. One of the great things Re-Imagining did was initiate small groups, giving people like me a path in, because my first real involvement in Re-Imagining was coming to our small group in 1994. And I think that those, most of those groups did not survive but a few years. But some-- - Yes? - That you're still really central to, continue to this day. And so that recognition that you have to create community sets another lesson from the feminist movement, that small groups are a fundamental organizing tool. Bringing in people, people go through a learning process together, and they become supportive of each other. So that was a really good thing that Re-Imagining did right off the bat as it was figuring out how to exist in the face of this attack. They not only restructured a steering committee and a planning committee for the next conference, but they initiated small groups. And I think that was probably the best thing they did for bringing in new people who otherwise might have been on the fringes or never quite connected. - I have a question to ask you. When you talked earlier about sometimes movements, to continue, have to become more institutionalized? Do you think that that was not possible for Re-Imagining or do you think that that wasn't what Re-Imagining wanted to be? - I think both are true, I think both are true. It was not possible because there was no source of funds. You can't become institutionalized if you can't find sustainable funding. Now some service providers, like shelters for battered women, which started out as all volunteer. They raised foundation money, and then they got public funding, because they were providing a service. But I know that in the 1980s, before we came into existence, they were going through a transition, that in some cases was traumatic, because they were hiring professionals who weren't there at the beginning. And the volunteers felt pushed to the sideline, but the volunteers were also extremely burned out and needed to get on with their lives and make money to support their kids. That story of, how things go from upstart volunteer movement organizations to bookstores, coffee houses, shelters for battered women, rape crisis hotlines, daycare centers, there's hundreds of these. And the ones that became institutionalized met some kind of clear social need that generated an income stream. But it also met a kind of identity crisis for the people who create it because you have to specialize. I was in a group that founded a children's book writing project in Chapel Hill called Lollipop Power Incorporated. We did incorporate, but at first we just said the children's books that are out there, and we had all had small children, or at the time we started it I think I was pregnant. But we were thinking about how you raise children not to be so programmed into traditional gender roles and most children's books, boys were the actors, they had the adventure, and girls were their sidekick, or the observer of the adventure. The same thing was true of television but we knew we couldn't produce TV. But like many small groups in those days, we just did something, we started writing children's books. And in the beginning, everybody was supposed to write them, we were a collective. Everybody write a book, let's come read them to each other. And everybody ran the press and everybody stood there in the YMCA on campus at Chapel Hill and stapled them together. I wrote the first book, I kept it on my vitae my entire career. - Do you remember what it was called? - Jenny's Secret Place. - I love it. - And it was just a little picture book with role reversals built in. It was very simple, but it's just little reversals of expected things. And Jenny learns to ride a bicycle and her little brother cries 'cause he can't keep up with her. But, anyway, I don't need to tell the whole story. And I was long out of Lollipop Power, I helped in the incorporation papers in the early '70s, but I had gone on to my dissertation and into Minnesota. And they really wrestled with the fact that some people wanted to go get trained to be printers and become specialists. And then you have to, when you incorporate, you have to start paying taxes or filing forms 'cause you're a nonprofit about your income and keeping books. I mean all that institutionalization is a challenge to the identity of a movement group that is just doing everything. And great fears of hierarchy, great fears that some people needed to be paid a living wage. Well, that's totally fair, but when you start from a all-volunteer thing, and there's actually a certain value placed on not monetizing things, that expectation of being paid reasonably well feels like we're getting commercial, we're getting, we're losing our soul. So, I had seen this in many other places. I don't think that was an option for Re-Imagining. Re-Imagining was fundamentally about ideas, it was fundamentally an insurgent movement in multiple denominations. It had institutional support in the very beginning because the initiators had institutional positions. But when that was withdrawn, and it would not have continued if there hadn't been the backlash. It would have been a one-time wonderful event with ripple effects that we would never know what they were. But because of the backlash, it decided to continue, and the work it did was to produce a conference. That costs a lot of money and you have to charge people to come, and then you have to produce things people will buy, like mugs, and t-shirts, and tapes, so you can make enough money to fund the next conference. That's not a business model unless you're doing corporate conferences and can charge many many hundreds of dollars to people. But that's not what we were about. So I don't see, that there was really any way for Re-Imagining to become really institutionalized, to become an institution, and that means it had, its future was always problematic, at least, as an organization. But not necessarily as a movement. - As we're talking, I'm remembering that, near the end, there was some talk of hiring an executive director, and that didn't happen. Do you have any thoughts about that? - It couldn't happen, we had no money. I mean I guess I was, in the position of being the voice of reality from time to time because people would come up with fantasies of what what we could do, and why don't we, and so it became kind of my job to say, that would be good, how would we pay for it? Where would that come from? And I was genuinely afraid of us going in debt, so I, did bring that up a lot. If we'd had an executive director sometime before, maybe, but frankly it's hard for me to see how we could have made that happen. We just didn't generate enough income. And given the power of the backlash, such that, for two decades, Re-Imagining became, when Sue Swanson talked about having to suppress Re-Imagining on her resume, or understand that there were serious consequences to putting it there, that was so disheartening to me, so disheartening. And so many people had to do that. - It's true, it's true. So what aspects of Re-Imagining were most significant to you and why? - I think the innovations, and ritual, and the lifting up of the incredibly creative, thinking going on among feminist theologians. - Did your involvement in Re-Imagining change your perspective at all on feminist theology or the church, do you think? - It affirmed it. - It affirmed it, yeah. - I don't think for me it was a changing thing 'cause I had been there. It had been important to me but it affirmed it. - As you reflect on it, maybe you've said a little bit about this, but can you name specific contributions you think Re-Imagining made to Christian theology or liturgy? - It's a little hard for me to sort out what Re-Imagining's contributions were from the broader field of feminist theology 'cause it lifted up most of those things. Rethinking, basic doctrines like atonement, is fundamental, fundamental. Rethinking what we mean when we talk about sin. And opening up, the widest possibilities for, imagining the divine or the mystery, having no limits on that. Because you can't capture that inwards anyway. But, to open it up, in a way that, makes it more real when we talk about people being made in God's image. That we really do mean that. - In the time we have left, how 'bout if we turn toward the future? - Sure, - And, what do you think re-imagining means today, or what could it mean today? What needs to be re-imagined? - Well, I feel that, some of what I felt was progress going on in the '90s, has in the early 2000s, is slipping away from us. I don't, I think the language that's used liturgically, for example, we are no longer as careful, even in really progressive churches. I mean some are actually wonderful, wonderful, but many of the mainline denominations are not paying much attention to that. And I watch the easy slippage back into traditional language and it makes me sad. So I think there's still a lot of work to do and that the work we thought we had done isn't finished, that's clear. I don't know, I mean on the other hand, the world has changed. The proportion of clergy who are female is totally different and that was underway in the early '90s. I mean that flood in seminaries happened in the '80s. Just a flood. What difference that's making for, churches I am not totally sure, and what those women's experiences are, I don't understand. So I feel like there's a lot for us to learn about in these years since then. We need to know, what is the place of feminist theology in seminaries? I mean there's questions that we are all asking today, the reconstituted Re-Imagining community that would like to pass this legacy on. In order to pass it on effectively, we have to understand better the world we're in. And so I'm hoping we will learn more about what are the conversations in seminaries? What is the place of feminist, womanist, mujerista theology? What is happening in interfaith conversations? Because I think that's a frontier that we did not fully appreciate in Re-Imagining. I think we felt we had all we could handle just to address our own Christian tradition in it's great diversity, but, the fact is, that when I have been in interfaith contexts, where people are genuinely talking to each other, it's very powerful. And so, that's the direction, that I see, for the future with great promise. So I'm like I get hopeful and excited when I think about things like that and then I also feel, distressed, about how things are now. I've had the similar feelings about other aspects of feminism and I'm aware that younger women have a very different experience than my generation did, and we need to listen to them. They need to articulate where the issues are for them. So some of it is developing conversations, developing settings where those conversations can happen, but also to communicate to them that they can build on what we did. They don't have to reinvent that wheel to go a new place. They can take that wheel and add it to other wheels of their own making. And then roll into the future. (interviewer laughs) Just trying to play with this metaphor. (laughing) I've got this cart (laughing drowns out other sounds). There's a huge amount to be done. And that's daunting. But on the other hand, the world is different, and in some ways, it's much better. So we have to kinda figure out how we balance those and how we generate the conversations that need to occur now. - Well you said conversation was at the heart of Re-Imagining, so let's continue that. I have a very specific question to end up with, and that is, as you know, we're working on this Re-Imagining website. Any ideas you have about what should be included, who would benefit from it, how we should get it out in the world? Any thoughts you have about the website would be welcome. - Well I think it has to be, continue to be a work in progress. We might want to think about it as a site where conversation can happen. I'm excited at the thought that all the different archives could collaborate, and so researchers, like me, could go there and find their way to all the resources that we generated over those many years. How you link that to conversations about the present and the future is the thing I don't fully understand yet. So one thing I would do is maybe go look at the SNCC website that Duke hosts because that's part of their concern as well. That their papers are at Duke, their history needs to be lifted up and appreciated, but they certainly don't see it as something that was done and taken care of at all. And so, giving it back and building on it is central. So I'd like to see how they're handling that 'cause I think that's what we hope for. How we ultimately build something a little more interfaith into it, I have no idea, but I think we have to lay the groundwork first. You can't just jump to your big vision, you have to, lay the bricks and make it sturdy. But know that you want to go where you want it to go is into some bigger place and so it can be part of those big conversations. - Sara, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you would like to add? - It's certainly not on my mind right now. (laughing) - But the conversation can continue, right? - But it certainly can. At any time. - Very appreciative, thank you so much. - You're welcome. - Sara, that was great.