- For calling, or for taking up the phone, sorry about that. - Sure, mhm. - Well, let's continue, we were talking about, we're trying to move probably to Reimagining, could you say something about your initial involvement in Reimagining, what led to it? Well, I had been, as I'd mentioned, let me go back a little bit, I finished up my graduate work and spent a couple of years in Argentina teaching and working on feminist issues in religion there, and then came to Washington area and started water in the early '80s, and so water has long been part of the women church convergence, which is a Catholic focused umbrella organization working on feminist issues among Catholics. And I was also involved with CLOUT, the Christian Lesbians Out, which became both a Catholic and Protestant kind of group, but primarily protestant. And I had had my own involvement with Protestant groups through my work in Argentina, which was sponsored by the Frontier Internship and Mission program, which is connected to the World Student Christian Federation, all of these are kind of Protestant connections that, and in those years, I think there was a greater separation between Catholic and Protestant women working on these issues because of the specific subordination in each of our respective denominations. All that is to say that when Reimagining came along, it was primarily, as I understood it, protestant women, and there were a few of us Catholic women who were invited to be part of it, and then there was a substantial, but not by any means large, decent number, but not a huge number of Catholic women who actually attended. So, I was invited as a speaker on issues of sexuality. I shared a panel with Susan Thistlethwaite, and Frances Wood. - Yes, thank you, and I wonder if you could say something about your memories of that conference. I have read your article in Water Wheel, and I'm wondering if you could talk some about. So, but, what do you recall about it now, what moments stand out for you? - Well, I actually was also looking at the article that I wrote in the Remembering and Reimagining book. - Yes. - And several things stand out for me, and one of the things that I, one of the points that I make in the article in the Remember and Reimagining was what I call the ordinariness of the conference. That is to say that in the 10 years between the time we founded Water and the time of the Reimagining conference, there were lots of these kinds of gatherings of different sorts. Women church had again gathered in '83, and then '87, and in '93, I believe, there were a number of women church conferences, the Women's Ordination Conference had a number of conferences starting in 1975, so I had been to a number of events. And this one, in some ways, was, and then there were groups of women meeting, it was a very fertile time, groups of women meeting locally in different parts of the country, and I had been invited as a speaker to a number of those. So, by the time I got to Reimagining, the two things that impressed me were, first, the planning and hospitality of the women of the Twin Cities, because I think they really distinguished themselves as no detail too small for making people welcome and comfortable, especially since it snowed that weekend. And they even had a little basket of mittens. So, I remember very well gloves and mittens, and I remember very well the depth and breath of their hospitality. The other thing I remember was that I came away from the experience feeling as if nothing terribly new had been said, but it was only because I was in those conversations as an academic, and as a scholar, so that I had, there was literally nothing that I heard at Reimagining that I hadn't heard elsewhere. What distinguished it was that the Reimagining conference, at least in my mind, was that the Reimagining conference was not your typical American Catholic religion session, it was bringing people, if you look at the list of the speakers, then you've probably memorized that by now, but if you look at those people, you know, people like Hyun Kyung, and Delores Williams, and Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, and Elizabeth Bettenhausen, and Susan Thistlethwaite, and Frances Wood, I've already mentioned among many others, they were people who were very well known to me, both in their work, and in most instances, personally, because we were, that was the work we were doing. What was different about doing it in Reimagining was that the people who were part of the participating group, I wouldn't say audience in that case, but the participants, were what I refer to at the time, and I think it's not the best way of saying, but it's, to them it's, they were both pastors wives, as it were, and women inside the pews. And so, just a second, what? (mumbling) Oh, I don't know what that is, I didn't see that. I'm on an interview, sorry. We're running into tech problems here. We, these, the people who were participants were not scholars who were talking about these things in a kind of disinterested or disembodied way, but they were people who actually lived the life of the church, and what was happening, and Reimagining, in my view, was that the people who were most, who were closest to the ground, and who were part of congregations were now taking what had become virtually normative ideas within academia to heart and to soul in the context of Reimagining. And I think that was why the challenge was considered so profound. That on the one hand, on the other hand, I think you had kind of sitting ducks for the right wing that, what issued later as the enormous backlash against the conference, was really a backlash, not just about a couple of days in the Twin Cities in the snow, but about all the work that had culminated, and, or, not even culminated, but that was reported, actually, at Reimagining. - Yeah. - So I had really saw Reimagining as a time when people who had been, respect for them if you take the same as Dolores Williams' statement. - Yes. - There was nothing that Dolores Williams said there that she hadn't said any place, that she hadn't said some place else before. The problems that were driven by the media in terms of response to her remarks about Jesus and so forth, were not things that were unknown to us, those were things that we had discussed and debated among ourselves as academics. What was new was the people who were involved in those conversations, or people who still lived in the pews and who said, yeah, that makes sense to me. Now, what do we do? - Mhm. - And I think that's really the heart of what was the problem. It wasn't that the ideas were new, it was that the audience was new. - Yes. - That the in-rows, what Reimagining showed was that feminist theology had made in-rows. - Mhm. - And the in-rows were right to the heart of the church because this was now being paid for, at least in part, by the Bicentennial Fund, and the Presbyterians, and the accommodative staff, and that sort of thing for other denominations, and so forth, so. - That's excellent. And I think you are already addressing the question of accounting for the backlash. Is there anything you would want to add to that about why the backlash was so huge against this? - Well, as I started to say, I think it was not a backlash against the conference alone, I think it was backlash that had been building. I think the issue for... - Religion and democracy. - Religion, democracy, yeah, I think they had been, they had set their sights on this long before, and not to forget that they were also involved with the contras in central America, so you know, they were a dubious prep to start with. The other thing was that the meeting was instrumental. I had a woman come to my office from one of the local radio stations, and one of the people who, there was a person here, and she interviewed the person who had been at the conference, and so forth, and when we heard the interview that was cobbled together, it hadn't been for no relationship to what the person had meant in the interview. So, there was a lot of that kind of cutting and pasting of materials to make a point. And there was also, I think, a lot of feeding of, or, embedding of journalists at a conference where they were able to take their own interpretation in the most extreme and rigid right wing interpretation of something, and that's what happened. So, I think there was a lot of, it became an easy target, in a very efficient way, to have all kind of in one place, and one set of tapes, a lot of materials that it would've taken a good deal of time to find elsewhere, 'cause this is, remember, pre-internet in terms of widespread use of the internet. We worked daily up at '93. - Yes, yeah, good point. - So, I think, but I think the backlash was, the important point was the backlash was not just about the conference, the backlash was about the fact that mainline Christianity was being challenged by women at its root, and that would have implications that had implications across the board. But the conference became a kind of focal point for that, but it wasn't the conference because when I had voiced for the conference, I must say, it was not my experience that it was the kind of, well, I'll put it this way, you didn't recognize the conference in some of the things that you read in terms of the backlash. - Mhm. - They weren't at the same event. - Yes. - Like the milk and honey, and the way in which the more graphic imagery of the text, with regard to the milk and honey, were played out, I mean, that was just read as a reading, it wasn't, there was nothing to it. - Yes. - So, I mean, that's the kind of instrumentalization that I'm talking about, that's just sensational, and they did a very good job. I mean, I can take, you know, that they made it to the mainline talk shows, and so forth. Do you have in front of you that article, and can you tell me what issue of the newsletter it was? - Yes. It was the Winter 1993, '94, and it was titled, Reimagining I Wish You Had Been There. - Okay, and then there's another one which is called, Reimagining Reimagining. Which you might wanna look up, it's the Summer of '94, it's a later one. - Thank you very much. - So, look that up, and if you can't find it, let me know. - I sure will, thank you, I really appreciate that. I was wondering what you think... - And by the way, it's there from, I mean, I'm not gonna, I'm assuming that you have those, but if you look for Reimagining Reimagining, it just starts off, it's official, in the New York Times, and McNeil, Lair, and Nightline have weighed in on the much valley Reimagining conference in Minneapolis, it really happened. Watching the aftermath, it is much a lesson in how the media creates reality, and it is a theological learning experience. So, I would recommend you read that, I'm not gonna repeat that, but go ahead and read that, and do that, okay? - Absolutely, I will, thank you very much. What do you think was the net effect of the backlash? I mean, did it really set back feminist theology in the churches, do you think? - Well, I don't think feminist theology has ever really had its primary focus in the churches. I think that the churches have been the starting point of feminist theology, but I think the impact of feminist theology has been far broader. I mean, there are three things that have happened, one is that Christian church membership in general has dropped precipitously in the last 20 years. And so, is that in some way due to this, yes, because I think the bogus nature of patriarchal Christianity has been called, I mean, people have simply called that out. But what the churches weren't smart enough to do was to support the creation of something new, which would have shorted them up, I think. So, that's one, and I think the second thing is that feminist theology is an international, inter-religious, and trans-religious conversation. In other words, people go beyond religion, who are interested in the kinds of things that feminist theology is about, if you think of, even the early work of Mary Daley to the current work of Carol Christen, I mean, these are people who would not be considered in the kind of mainstream of Christian believers, but there were, I have the deepest regards for both, by the way, is feminist theology in conversation with a much broader audience. And I think the third thing is that feminist theology, in the context of Reimagining, was still very gender focused and it has become much more intersectional in terms of anti-racism, post-colonialism, clear work, et cetera, and I think that has been enormously important in terms of what's next. So, if anything, I think Reimagining as, the backlash against Reimagining, was helpful for clarifying but I don't really think in the long run that the losers were on the feminist theology side, I think the institutional churches have, the numbers are clear, have lost membership and market share precipitously. So, I don't think that's a problem. Feminist theology has grown, you know, on the other side. - Yes, thank you, that's really helpful. In the end, how would you define Reimagining? - Well, I don't know that I would have anything insightful or different to say other than, you know, for your own understanding from the history of the organization that it was, that the term reimagining became a kind of brand for what, in my mind, was parallel to what Catholic women were doing in terms of women church and other forms of re-understanding Catholicism. Reimagining was, in many ways, largely Protestant, although what they say, with certain exceptions, Catholic, but largely Protestant brand for, or umbrella, if you will, for the many efforts that people had in mainline Christianity to rethink and to re-tool, and I think that to the extent of which the issues of sexuality, God language, ministry, polity, even, were brought under broad spectrum discussion. In other words, it wasn't simply denomination by denomination, people weren't vulcanized in that way, but they were really brought together in a broader coalition that made it much stronger and much, had a much bigger impact. - Mhm, great. Now, you mentioned that, you know, a lot of what was done at Reimagining wasn't new, do you think it made any specific contributions to Christian theology or liturgy? - Well, I think that what was new, I don't wanna, I don't want to link the impression that nothing was new, but the things that were new to me were, as I mentioned, the audience was new, the people from mainline church venues were the audience, it was not an academic, scholarly audience, or a radical feminist audience, it was, mining, but it was mostly people from what I would call inside the church, whether it was with the ministers, wives of pastors, there were a lot of wives of pastors, a lot of women ministers, and a lot of women seminarian students, at least as I understood it. - Yeah. - Or, women who had studied in seminary, but mostly, there were a lot of church women there, and I think that was what was new. Secondly, I think that many things we've talked about in the literature, and again, my articles, both of those, and the one in the book you can look at. - Yes. - We talked about the, you know, the way in which the, the tables moving in the room made a difference, the plexiglass podiums, those speakers were addressed, different people up at the front row, the way in which we sat at tables with the possibility of drawing or coloring, no one will forget those little eggs, the little black eggs with the, you know, with the rice or whatever was in them that made noise. And those kinds of things were very new, and very, very, very important because they pushed us to a kind of right brain activity as being equally important. They expanded the parameters of feminist theology from simply academic content and theory to personal experience and spiritual sharing. And then of course, liturgical ritual, arena which is probably where it was most innovative, you had, again, nothing new from those of us who were eating it for breakfast, but for people who had never had that experience before. You could have celebrated by women together, bread, and milk, and honey as liturgical elements, women from across the board sharing together, what you could call a eucharistic meal. The Catholic and Protestant women, much less Protestant women from a variety of traditions, sharing Eucharis, none of the kinds of, and again, this is 20 years ago, but none of the kinds of head scratching and hand ringing of the male ecumenical movement, but women simply sitting down and doing it, and I think just that fact of doing it, come what may, the use of the goddess chant, the blessing of all the speakers as each one began, and that kind of reverence and respect, just doing those things, I think, had a transformative effect on people, my life, and in other people's lives. We would not do conferences the old way again. - You know, in that article, you mentioned, made a comment I thought was very interesting, you described it as "an historic conference that future generations will study like Trent and Calceton." Almost 25 years later, do you think that is still true? - Well, you're the proof of it, aren't you? - Yes. (laughing) No wonder I like that sentence, right? - Yeah, no, no, I mean, I think I was right. I mean, not just that I was right, but I think it was like the women church conferences, and ordination conferences, and all of those events that we shared over in that period of time, were landmark experiences because of their results on the one hand, but mostly because of what happened to people who were there, who went on to do exciting and interesting things, and changed the defaulted functions about, for example, what does it mean to do theology? It doesn't mean to go to the AAR and give a paper, only, although, many of us do that, it also means to have the kind of exchange on the ground with people who really live this stuff out, which is what we naturally want, and that's exactly what threatened both the right wing and the media friend. - Yeah, yeah, that's great. What do you think Reimagining means today? And by that, I'm not talking about just the conference or the community, but what needs to be reimagined today? - Well, I think Reimagining, the genius of Reimagining is that it's, like reformation, it's an ongoing process, and I think that we certainly are, we proficiently take the same agenda. And say, well, 20 years later, how has this process continued on issues of sexuality, for example, we weren't thinking about trans people. - Right. - We weren't thinking about beyond gender essentialism in terms of what's a man and what's a woman, we weren't there, we just weren't there, we needed that, that needs to be reimagined. In terms of issue of race, we weren't there towards understanding the complex inter-structured nature, what relative adherence, the cause of kyriarchy, of the ways in which lordship is infrastructured in a variety of destructive and oppressive ways. We have much more information about that now, which means we can reimagine what some solutions or some next steps might be. The same thing with economics, that I think we didn't have at our disposal the same kind of information that we have now, and certainly, we didn't have, at least in the US, we didn't have the economic disparities that we now experience. So, I think that rather than looking for topics to reimagine, the thing to do is to see reimagining as a methodology that is an ongoing one. - That's great. - That each generation takes then on, like reformation, I mean, always in reformation, notion of Protestantism, I would say the feminist equivalent is always being reimagined, that there's this generation, and the next generation, it becomes a task of each generation to their own reimagining. - Exactly. That brings me to my final, very specific question, which is that we are working on a reimagining website, which should be ready at the end of the Summer, and part of that is to preserve this information and make it accessible for future generations, but I'm curious if you have specific ideas about what to include in it, what resources, who would benefit from it? - Yeah, I'm not sure if I understand what it is. Is it to be an archival website? Or is it to be a live kind of community? What are you imagining? - Actually both, it's starting as archival, but the idea is to add resources to it and to have it be ongoing. - Well, I would certainly urge you to link with both other archives of women's history. For example, the Water's archives are at the finest fit collection. - Yes. - The finest fit of collection, the finest collection has lots of women's archives in religion. You know, one has Margaret Sanger, it has Gloria Stein in it and it has Mary Daley, it has Judith Glasgow, and there's lots of stuff there. - Yeah. - Duke, I know has a women's history archive that would be important, and I that Schlesinger Radcliffe Harvard has a women's history archive, is having some renewed interest in women and religion. So, those are, and the Gannon Center for Women and Religion, for women's leadership at Loyola would be one Catholic equivalent. The Gannon, G A N N O N Center for Women and Leadership, their archives would be an excellent source. So, I would link archives. I would also link with contemporary groups like Jeanette Stokes' Center for Women and Ministry, and the sound, can be water, women church conversion. The problem is, and I know, Evangelical and Ecumenical women, too, but what to call, Christianity today, Evangelical and Ecumenical women's caucus. - Right. - I think those people are great. - Yup. - Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, who was one of the speakers at Reimagining, I actually talked to Lisa Scanzoni and make sure that you're connected to their stuff. I mean, I don't think there's any need to reinvent the wheel. What I worry about is that in the '90s, there were a whole lot more, at least in my perception, programs and projects focused explicitly on women than there are now. - Yeah. - So, if I were looking, for example, things like the Women's Theological Center is no more. Grailville, which has had, Grail, the Grail, Grail is still, but the Grailville is being sold. Or, there's a talk of selling Grailville. They're not doing programs there anymore. The, you know, the number of the, it's more I can take off the places that are on than the places that have risen anew. I think some of the specific work, for example, The Faith Trust Institute, that works, that's actually domestic file, it's Marie Fortune's work, that would be critical to include. - Yes. - But there really, and once that's said, I can't, oh, for example, the Center for Women and Religion in Berkeley, which is no longer, I can't point to centers connected to theological schools in a ways that I could before. Harvard still has a good program in terms of women and religion gender studies, and so forth, but I don't know that they have an office that deals with women's programs. The Boston Theological Institute had an office that dealt with women's programs, I don't know if that still exists, you'd have to find out. But those kind of things, but there are fewer of these resources now than there were then, even. At least in my perception, I could be wrong. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I just, you know, many of the groups that existed are no longer. - I appreciate that, those are great suggestions. - Including Reimagining, by the way. I mean, you were talking about revising Reimagining, but what would, you know, think about Church Women United, I mean, how vital are they at this point? - Right, right. - How, you know, where are the people in the bureaucracies of the UCC, the Lutherans, the disciples, you know, who are really working women's issues in a particular and portfolio way, I don't know. - Yeah, yeah, yup. - That's what I mean by different. People say, well, that's been folded into justice, or that, yeah, the fact of the matter is that having that presence, it's not there. - Right, right. Is there anything that we, this has been extremely helpful, Mary, is there anything we haven't discussed that you would like to add? - Oh, I'm sure there are lots of things, but like I said, this is plenty, I think this is plenty for now and certainly feel free to get back to me if you have further questions or, you know, this is just one person's view of this, what, 20 plus years later, but I could still say that it was a very important event. I congratulate and thank the people who put it together, and who, some of whom paid fairly steeply for what they did. But certainly the overall... Result, I think, of the conference was wildly positive, and that the backlash in some ways only helped to focus tension on that, and now that the backlash has kind of faded into history, but the fact of the matter is that many of the contests that were discussed at Reimagining are now normative within mainstream Christianity, including things like inclusive language, although it's not, it's honored in the breech, but everyone knows that there's no, you can't get away from that. You can try, but everyone knows that the backlash only indicates how important that is, or women in ministry with denominations now approaching parity, if not more women ministers. Or issues of sexuality, I mean, look how far we've come on, on issues of sexuality in 20 years. So, I think there's no question that the, that Reimagining was moving in the right direction, I think that the backlash brought attention to that, but certainly didn't succeed in stopping it. - Thank you, I'm gonna turn off the recording now, this was excellent, really helped.