Hunt, Mary
Loading the media player...
Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Interviewer | Mary, thank you so much | 0:01 |
for being interviewed. | 0:02 | |
If you could just say your name. | 0:03 | |
Mary | Sure, Mary, | 0:05 |
my middle name is Elizabeth, | 0:06 | |
and Hunt, H-U-N-T. | 0:08 | |
Interviewer | Thank you. | 0:09 |
And are you lay or clergy? | 0:10 | |
Mary | Well since I'm a Catholic woman, | 0:12 |
I am like all Catholic women, lay. | 0:15 | |
Interviewer | Yes, yes. | 0:18 |
Mary | Even those who are nuns are lay. | 0:19 |
Interviewer | Yeah, exactly. | 0:22 |
Where did you go to school? | 0:24 | |
Graduate or Divinity School? | 0:25 | |
Mary | Initially I went to Marquette University | 0:27 |
undergraduate, | 0:29 | |
and then I went to Harvard Divinity School | 0:30 | |
for a Masters in Theological Studies. | 0:32 | |
I went to the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley | 0:33 | |
for a doctorate, | 0:36 | |
and I went to the Jesuit School of Theology | 0:38 | |
at Berkeley for an MDiv. | 0:40 | |
Interviewer | Wonderful. Very good. | 0:41 |
What work or ministry were you doing at the time of | 0:43 | |
Reimagining? | 0:46 | |
Mary | The same I'm doing now. | 0:47 |
I am the co-director of WATER, | 0:49 | |
the Woman's Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual, | 0:51 | |
which is a small non-profit inside the beltway | 0:54 | |
in Washington D.C. area. | 0:56 | |
We're actually in Silver Spring, Maryland. | 0:58 | |
And we work on feminist issues in religion. | 1:01 | |
And I started WATER along with Diann Neu | 1:03 | |
in the early 80's, | 1:08 | |
so by that time, perhaps the mid 80's. | 1:10 | |
But we were at WATER at the time of | 1:13 | |
the Reimagining Conference. | 1:14 | |
Interviewer | Yes, and still are. | 1:15 |
That's great. | 1:15 | |
When and where were you born, Mary? | 1:16 | |
Mary | I was born in June 1951 in Syracuse, New York. | 1:19 |
Interviewer | Okay, great. | 1:25 |
How and when did you first become aware | 1:26 | |
of Feminist Theology? | 1:29 | |
Mary | Well I was a student in a Catholic school | 1:31 |
in high school in Syracuse, | 1:35 | |
and I became aware not of Feminist Theology, | 1:36 | |
but of feminist issues in religion then. | 1:40 | |
I remember distinctly a priest telling me | 1:42 | |
with great conviction | 1:44 | |
that women couldn't be priests. | 1:47 | |
And I think that sparked my interest in how wrong he was | 1:48 | |
and so that was in the mid 60's. | 1:52 | |
When I went to college at Marquette, | 1:55 | |
there were, | 1:58 | |
as far as I recall, | 2:00 | |
no women faculty, | 2:01 | |
maybe a couple of, there were women graduate students, | 2:03 | |
maybe one of whom became a faculty member eventually, | 2:05 | |
but, there were no women faculty in the Theology Department. | 2:07 | |
And there was no talk of Feminist Theology, | 2:10 | |
but I finished Marquette in 1972 and then went to | 2:13 | |
Harvard Divinity School, | 2:16 | |
and it was there in 1972 | 2:18 | |
that I met Rosemary Radford Ruether, | 2:20 | |
who was the still then professor for a year at | 2:22 | |
Harvard Divinity School | 2:25 | |
and she was working on feminist issues in religion | 2:26 | |
and so that was my entry. | 2:28 | |
Interviewer | Mm hmm. | 2:30 |
And from what you said it sounded like you resonated with it | 2:31 | |
immediately? | 2:33 | |
How did you react? | 2:34 | |
Mary | No, I didn't actually. | 2:36 |
I was, there were a number, | 2:37 | |
my cohort at Harvard Divinity School in the early 70's | 2:39 | |
was the first cohort of appreciable numbers of women | 2:43 | |
and there had been women students of the Divinity School | 2:48 | |
before that, | 2:52 | |
but in terms of appreciable numbers together, | 2:53 | |
kind of a critical mass, | 2:55 | |
my group, my incoming class, | 2:57 | |
maybe the following class, | 2:58 | |
maybe the class behind us, | 3:00 | |
that cohort formed the first critical mass of women | 3:01 | |
at Harvard Divinity School. | 3:04 | |
And so, I was initially skeptical. | 3:05 | |
First of all, I was Catholic, | 3:08 | |
so I hadn't really thought about ministry, | 3:09 | |
as an option. | 3:11 | |
I had always thought about the study of Theology as a | 3:12 | |
kind of academic project that one did | 3:14 | |
because it was interesting, | 3:16 | |
not because it had any practical value, | 3:17 | |
although I was very interested in social justice issues. | 3:20 | |
But I just hadn't made the connection. | 3:22 | |
And then, then at Harvard Divinity School, | 3:24 | |
the women, including people like Emily Culpepper | 3:26 | |
and Linda Barrett Fall, | 3:29 | |
and some of the really wonderful pioneer women, | 3:31 | |
and of course we had Mary Daly over at Boston College | 3:34 | |
at that time, | 3:36 | |
began to try to school the professors in how to | 3:37 | |
use inclusive language. | 3:40 | |
It was a famous, | 3:42 | |
I think it was written up in Time Magazine, | 3:44 | |
it was before my time, | 3:45 | |
but, the year before, | 3:46 | |
but I think there was a famous incident when they | 3:48 | |
threw M&M's at Harvey Cox to get him to use | 3:50 | |
inclusive language. | 3:53 | |
If he got it right, | 3:54 | |
he got an M&M, | 3:55 | |
and if he didn't, he didn't get an M&M. | 3:56 | |
So, there were these tactics, these guerrilla tactics, | 3:57 | |
and I was rather put off by it initially. | 3:59 | |
I thought it was all nonsense | 4:02 | |
and went back to the dorm and put a dress on | 4:04 | |
and went back to class. | 4:05 | |
That lasted about a day | 4:07 | |
and then I began to see how wrong I was | 4:08 | |
and how right they were. | 4:09 | |
And from then on, | 4:11 | |
of course, I was quite a committed feminist. | 4:14 | |
And that would've been 72, 73. | 4:17 | |
Interviewer | Yeah. | 4:19 |
Oh that's a great story. | 4:20 | |
Mary | Well before- | 4:21 |
Interviewer | I missed the end of it, | 4:22 |
well before? | 4:24 | |
Mary | Well before Reimagining. | 4:25 |
Interviewer | Well before Reimagining, yes. | 4:25 |
The internet connection seems to be a little bit iffy. | 4:27 | |
Are you having any problems at your end? | 4:29 | |
Mary | I'm not, but I can imagine we are. | 4:31 |
If it turns out to be iffy, we can just go the phone. | 4:35 | |
Interviewer | Good. Good. | 4:36 |
I'll keep monitoring it. | 4:38 | |
Thank you, Mary. | 4:39 | |
Mary | If it's not working, let's just go to the phone. | 4:40 |
It's not worth, you know, | 4:42 | |
it's not worth, | 4:43 | |
if you don't get what you need it's not worth it. | 4:44 | |
Interviewer | Yeah, yeah. | 4:46 |
Well you know, just to be safe, | 4:47 | |
maybe we should do that. | 4:49 | |
Do you mind if I, | 4:51 | |
do I call you at your WATER number? | 4:52 | |
Is that correct? | 4:54 | |
Mary | Sure. | 4:55 |
Interviewer | Okay, good. | 4:56 |
Then I'll call you right back. | 4:57 | |
Because I don't want to miss any of this. | 4:58 | |
Thank you. | 5:00 | |
Interviewer | Alright, bye-bye. | 5:01 |
Mary | Bye. | 5:02 |
- | For calling, or for taking up the phone, | 0:00 |
sorry about that. | 0:02 | |
- | Sure, mhm. | 0:03 |
- | Well, let's continue, we were talking about, | 0:04 |
we're trying to move probably to Reimagining, | 0:06 | |
could you say something about your initial involvement | 0:09 | |
in Reimagining, what led to it? | 0:11 | |
Well, I had been, as I'd mentioned, | 0:15 | |
let me go back a little bit, I finished up my graduate work | 0:18 | |
and spent a couple of years in Argentina | 0:21 | |
teaching and working on feminist issues in religion there, | 0:23 | |
and then came to Washington area and started water | 0:27 | |
in the early '80s, and so water has long been part | 0:31 | |
of the women church convergence, | 0:35 | |
which is a Catholic focused umbrella organization | 0:37 | |
working on feminist issues among Catholics. | 0:41 | |
And I was also involved with CLOUT, | 0:44 | |
the Christian Lesbians Out, which became both | 0:48 | |
a Catholic and Protestant kind of group, | 0:51 | |
but primarily protestant. | 0:54 | |
And I had had my own involvement with Protestant groups | 0:55 | |
through my work in Argentina, which was sponsored by | 0:58 | |
the Frontier Internship and Mission program, | 1:01 | |
which is connected to the World Student | 1:04 | |
Christian Federation, all of these are kind of Protestant | 1:05 | |
connections that, and in those years, I think there was | 1:09 | |
a greater separation between Catholic and Protestant women | 1:12 | |
working on these issues because of | 1:15 | |
the specific subordination in each | 1:18 | |
of our respective denominations. | 1:20 | |
All that is to say that when Reimagining came along, | 1:22 | |
it was primarily, as I understood it, | 1:24 | |
protestant women, and there were a few of us Catholic women | 1:27 | |
who were invited to be part of it, | 1:30 | |
and then there was a substantial, | 1:33 | |
but not by any means large, decent number, | 1:35 | |
but not a huge number of Catholic women | 1:40 | |
who actually attended. | 1:42 | |
So, I was invited as a speaker on issues of sexuality. | 1:43 | |
I shared a panel with Susan Thistlethwaite, | 1:48 | |
and Frances Wood. | 1:50 | |
- | Yes, thank you, and I wonder if you could say something | 1:52 |
about your memories of that conference. | 1:56 | |
I have read your article in Water Wheel, | 1:59 | |
and I'm wondering if you could talk some about. | 2:01 | |
So, but, what do you recall about it now, | 2:02 | |
what moments stand out for you? | 2:04 | |
- | Well, I actually was also looking at the article | 2:07 |
that I wrote in the Remembering and Reimagining book. | 2:11 | |
- | Yes. | 2:13 |
- | And several things stand out for me, | 2:15 |
and one of the things that I, one of the points | 2:17 | |
that I make in the article in the Remember | 2:19 | |
and Reimagining was what I call the ordinariness | 2:21 | |
of the conference. | 2:23 | |
That is to say that in the 10 years between the time | 2:24 | |
we founded Water and the time of the Reimagining conference, | 2:27 | |
there were lots of these kinds of gatherings | 2:31 | |
of different sorts. | 2:33 | |
Women church had again gathered in '83, and then '87, | 2:35 | |
and in '93, I believe, there were a number | 2:40 | |
of women church conferences, the Women's Ordination | 2:43 | |
Conference had a number of conferences | 2:45 | |
starting in 1975, so I had been to a number of events. | 2:47 | |
And this one, in some ways, was, and then there were | 2:52 | |
groups of women meeting, it was a very fertile time, | 2:56 | |
groups of women meeting locally in different parts | 2:59 | |
of the country, and I had been invited as a speaker | 3:01 | |
to a number of those. | 3:04 | |
So, by the time I got to Reimagining, | 3:05 | |
the two things that impressed me were, first, | 3:07 | |
the planning and hospitality of the women | 3:10 | |
of the Twin Cities, because I think they really | 3:14 | |
distinguished themselves as no detail too small | 3:16 | |
for making people welcome and comfortable, | 3:20 | |
especially since it snowed that weekend. | 3:23 | |
And they even had a little basket of mittens. | 3:26 | |
So, I remember very well gloves and mittens, | 3:29 | |
and I remember very well the depth and breath | 3:31 | |
of their hospitality. | 3:35 | |
The other thing I remember was that I came away | 3:36 | |
from the experience feeling as if nothing terribly new | 3:39 | |
had been said, but it was only because I was in | 3:42 | |
those conversations as an academic, and as a scholar, | 3:45 | |
so that I had, there was literally nothing that I heard | 3:48 | |
at Reimagining that I hadn't heard elsewhere. | 3:51 | |
What distinguished it was that the Reimagining conference, | 3:53 | |
at least in my mind, was that the Reimagining conference | 3:56 | |
was not your typical American Catholic religion session, | 3:59 | |
it was bringing people, if you look at the list | 4:02 | |
of the speakers, then you've probably memorized that by now, | 4:04 | |
but if you look at those people, you know, | 4:08 | |
people like Hyun Kyung, and Delores Williams, | 4:10 | |
and Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, and Elizabeth Bettenhausen, | 4:13 | |
and Susan Thistlethwaite, and Frances Wood, | 4:17 | |
I've already mentioned among many others, | 4:19 | |
they were people who were very well known to me, | 4:21 | |
both in their work, and in most instances, personally, | 4:24 | |
because we were, that was the work we were doing. | 4:27 | |
What was different about doing it in Reimagining | 4:30 | |
was that the people who were part | 4:32 | |
of the participating group, I wouldn't say audience | 4:33 | |
in that case, but the participants, | 4:37 | |
were what I refer to at the time, | 4:39 | |
and I think it's not the best way of saying, but it's, | 4:43 | |
to them it's, they were both pastors wives, as it were, | 4:46 | |
and women inside the pews. | 4:50 | |
And so, just a second, what? | 4:53 | |
(mumbling) | 4:57 | |
Oh, I don't know what that is, I didn't see that. | 4:58 | |
I'm on an interview, sorry. | 5:02 | |
We're running into tech problems here. | 5:05 | |
We, these, the people who were participants | 5:08 | |
were not scholars who were talking about these things | 5:12 | |
in a kind of disinterested or disembodied way, | 5:14 | |
but they were people who actually lived the life | 5:18 | |
of the church, and what was happening, | 5:21 | |
and Reimagining, in my view, was that the people | 5:23 | |
who were most, who were closest to the ground, | 5:26 | |
and who were part of congregations were now taking | 5:31 | |
what had become virtually normative ideas | 5:34 | |
within academia to heart and to soul | 5:38 | |
in the context of Reimagining. | 5:41 | |
And I think that was why the challenge | 5:44 | |
was considered so profound. | 5:46 | |
That on the one hand, on the other hand, | 5:49 | |
I think you had kind of sitting ducks for the right wing | 5:50 | |
that, what issued later as the enormous backlash | 5:54 | |
against the conference, was really a backlash, | 6:00 | |
not just about a couple of days in the Twin Cities | 6:03 | |
in the snow, but about all the work that had culminated, | 6:05 | |
and, or, not even culminated, but that was reported, | 6:09 | |
actually, at Reimagining. | 6:12 | |
- | Yeah. | 6:14 |
- | So I had really saw | |
Reimagining as a time when people | 6:16 | |
who had been, respect for them if you take the same | 6:18 | |
as Dolores Williams' statement. | 6:20 | |
- | Yes. | 6:21 |
- | There was nothing that Dolores Williams said there | 6:22 |
that she hadn't said any place, that she hadn't said | 6:24 | |
some place else before. | 6:25 | |
The problems that were driven by the media | 6:29 | |
in terms of response to her remarks about Jesus | 6:32 | |
and so forth, were not things that were unknown to us, | 6:35 | |
those were things that we had discussed and debated | 6:38 | |
among ourselves as academics. | 6:40 | |
What was new was the people who were involved | 6:42 | |
in those conversations, or people who still lived | 6:44 | |
in the pews and who said, yeah, that makes sense to me. | 6:47 | |
Now, what do we do? | 6:50 | |
- | Mhm. | 6:51 |
- | And I think that's really the heart | 6:52 |
of what was the problem. | 6:53 | |
It wasn't that the ideas were new, | 6:55 | |
it was that the audience was new. | 6:57 | |
- | Yes. | 6:59 |
- | That the in-rows, what Reimagining showed was that | 6:59 |
feminist theology had made in-rows. | 7:03 | |
- | Mhm. | 7:06 |
- | And the in-rows were right to the heart of the church | 7:07 |
because this was now being paid for, at least in part, | 7:09 | |
by the Bicentennial Fund, and the Presbyterians, | 7:12 | |
and the accommodative staff, and that sort of thing | 7:14 | |
for other denominations, and so forth, so. | 7:17 | |
- | That's excellent. | 7:20 |
And I think you are already addressing the question | 7:21 | |
of accounting for the backlash. | 7:23 | |
Is there anything you would want to add to that | 7:25 | |
about why the backlash was so huge against this? | 7:27 | |
- | Well, as I started to say, I think it was not a backlash | 7:30 |
against the conference alone, I think it was backlash | 7:33 | |
that had been building. | 7:35 | |
I think the issue for... | 7:37 | |
- | Religion and democracy. | 7:40 |
- | Religion, democracy, yeah, I think they had been, | 7:41 |
they had set their sights on this long before, | 7:43 | |
and not to forget that they were also involved | 7:47 | |
with the contras in central America, so you know, | 7:50 | |
they were a dubious prep to start with. | 7:53 | |
The other thing was that the meeting was instrumental. | 7:56 | |
I had a woman come to my office | 7:57 | |
from one of the local radio stations, | 7:59 | |
and one of the people who, there was a person here, | 8:01 | |
and she interviewed the person who had been | 8:04 | |
at the conference, and so forth, and when we heard | 8:06 | |
the interview that was cobbled together, | 8:08 | |
it hadn't been for no relationship to what the person | 8:10 | |
had meant in the interview. | 8:14 | |
So, there was a lot of that kind of cutting and pasting | 8:16 | |
of materials to make a point. | 8:18 | |
And there was also, I think, a lot of feeding of, | 8:22 | |
or, embedding of journalists at a conference | 8:28 | |
where they were able to take their own interpretation | 8:31 | |
in the most extreme and rigid right wing interpretation | 8:36 | |
of something, and that's what happened. | 8:40 | |
So, I think there was a lot of, it became an easy target, | 8:43 | |
in a very efficient way, to have all kind of in one place, | 8:48 | |
and one set of tapes, a lot of materials | 8:52 | |
that it would've taken a good deal of time | 8:55 | |
to find elsewhere, 'cause this is, remember, | 8:56 | |
pre-internet in terms of widespread use of the internet. | 8:58 | |
We worked daily up at '93. | 9:03 | |
- | Yes, yeah, good point. | 9:05 |
- | So, I think, but I think the backlash was, | 9:07 |
the important point was the backlash | 9:09 | |
was not just about the conference, | 9:11 | |
the backlash was about the fact that mainline Christianity | 9:12 | |
was being challenged by women at its root, | 9:15 | |
and that would have implications that had implications | 9:18 | |
across the board. | 9:21 | |
But the conference became a kind of focal point for that, | 9:23 | |
but it wasn't the conference because when I had voiced | 9:26 | |
for the conference, I must say, it was not my experience | 9:28 | |
that it was the kind of, well, I'll put it this way, | 9:34 | |
you didn't recognize the conference | 9:39 | |
in some of the things that you read | 9:40 | |
in terms of the backlash. | 9:41 | |
- | Mhm. | 9:42 |
- | They weren't at the same event. | 9:43 |
- | Yes. | 9:44 |
- | Like the milk and honey, and the way in which the more | 9:46 |
graphic imagery of the text, with regard to the milk | 9:52 | |
and honey, were played out, I mean, that was just read | 9:56 | |
as a reading, it wasn't, there was nothing to it. | 10:00 | |
- | Yes. | 10:04 |
- | So, I mean, that's the kind of instrumentalization | 10:06 |
that I'm talking about, that's just sensational, | 10:07 | |
and they did a very good job. | 10:09 | |
I mean, I can take, you know, that they made it | 10:11 | |
to the mainline talk shows, and so forth. | 10:13 | |
Do you have in front of you that article, | 10:17 | |
and can you tell me what issue of the newsletter it was? | 10:20 | |
- | Yes. | 10:23 |
It was the Winter 1993, '94, and it was titled, | 10:24 | |
Reimagining I Wish You Had Been There. | 10:28 | |
- | Okay, and then there's another one which is called, | 10:32 |
Reimagining Reimagining. | 10:36 | |
Which you might wanna look up, it's the Summer of '94, | 10:39 | |
it's a later one. | 10:41 | |
- | Thank you very much. | 10:43 |
- | So, look that up, and if you can't find it, let me know. | 10:44 |
- | I sure will, thank you, I really appreciate that. | 10:46 |
I was wondering what you think... | 10:51 | |
- | And by the way, it's there from, I mean, | 10:53 |
I'm not gonna, I'm assuming that you have those, | 10:54 | |
but if you look for Reimagining Reimagining, | 10:56 | |
it just starts off, it's official, in the New York Times, | 11:00 | |
and McNeil, Lair, and Nightline have weighed in | 11:03 | |
on the much valley Reimagining conference in Minneapolis, | 11:05 | |
it really happened. | 11:07 | |
Watching the aftermath, it is much a lesson | 11:09 | |
in how the media creates reality, | 11:11 | |
and it is a theological learning experience. | 11:12 | |
So, I would recommend you read that, | 11:14 | |
I'm not gonna repeat that, but go ahead and read that, | 11:16 | |
and do that, okay? | 11:18 | |
- | Absolutely, I will, thank you very much. | 11:20 |
What do you think was the net effect of the backlash? | 11:23 | |
I mean, did it really set back feminist theology | 11:26 | |
in the churches, do you think? | 11:28 | |
- | Well, I don't think feminist theology has ever really | 11:32 |
had its primary focus in the churches. | 11:35 | |
I think that the churches have been the starting point | 11:38 | |
of feminist theology, but I think the impact | 11:41 | |
of feminist theology has been far broader. | 11:43 | |
I mean, there are three things that have happened, | 11:46 | |
one is that Christian church membership in general | 11:47 | |
has dropped precipitously in the last 20 years. | 11:52 | |
And so, is that in some way due to this, yes, | 11:56 | |
because I think the bogus nature of patriarchal Christianity | 12:01 | |
has been called, I mean, people have simply called that out. | 12:04 | |
But what the churches weren't smart enough to do | 12:07 | |
was to support the creation of something new, | 12:10 | |
which would have shorted them up, I think. | 12:12 | |
So, that's one, and I think the second thing is that | 12:15 | |
feminist theology is an international, inter-religious, | 12:18 | |
and trans-religious conversation. | 12:21 | |
In other words, people go beyond religion, | 12:24 | |
who are interested in the kinds of things | 12:26 | |
that feminist theology is about, if you think of, | 12:28 | |
even the early work of Mary Daley to the current work | 12:29 | |
of Carol Christen, I mean, these are people who would not | 12:32 | |
be considered in the kind of mainstream | 12:35 | |
of Christian believers, but there were, | 12:37 | |
I have the deepest regards for both, by the way, | 12:41 | |
is feminist theology in conversation | 12:44 | |
with a much broader audience. | 12:47 | |
And I think the third thing is that feminist theology, | 12:49 | |
in the context of Reimagining, was still very gender focused | 12:53 | |
and it has become much more intersectional in terms | 12:57 | |
of anti-racism, post-colonialism, clear work, et cetera, | 13:01 | |
and I think that has been enormously important | 13:07 | |
in terms of what's next. | 13:11 | |
So, if anything, I think Reimagining as, | 13:13 | |
the backlash against Reimagining, was helpful for clarifying | 13:17 | |
but I don't really think in the long run | 13:20 | |
that the losers were on the feminist theology side, | 13:23 | |
I think the institutional churches have, | 13:25 | |
the numbers are clear, have lost membership | 13:28 | |
and market share precipitously. | 13:33 | |
So, I don't think that's a problem. | 13:34 | |
Feminist theology has grown, you know, on the other side. | 13:37 | |
- | Yes, thank you, that's really helpful. | 13:40 |
In the end, how would you define Reimagining? | 13:43 | |
- | Well, I don't know that I would have anything insightful | 13:47 |
or different to say other than, you know, | 13:51 | |
for your own understanding from the history | 13:53 | |
of the organization that it was, | 13:56 | |
that the term reimagining became a kind of brand for what, | 13:59 | |
in my mind, was parallel to what Catholic women were doing | 14:06 | |
in terms of women church and other forms | 14:11 | |
of re-understanding Catholicism. | 14:14 | |
Reimagining was, in many ways, largely Protestant, | 14:19 | |
although what they say, with certain exceptions, | 14:22 | |
Catholic, but largely Protestant brand for, | 14:24 | |
or umbrella, if you will, for the many efforts | 14:29 | |
that people had in mainline Christianity to rethink | 14:32 | |
and to re-tool, and I think that to the extent of which | 14:37 | |
the issues of sexuality, God language, ministry, | 14:42 | |
polity, even, were brought under broad spectrum discussion. | 14:47 | |
In other words, it wasn't simply denomination | 14:53 | |
by denomination, people weren't vulcanized in that way, | 14:55 | |
but they were really brought together in a broader coalition | 14:58 | |
that made it much stronger and much, | 15:01 | |
had a much bigger impact. | 15:04 | |
- | Mhm, great. | 15:05 |
Now, you mentioned that, you know, a lot of what was done | 15:07 | |
at Reimagining wasn't new, do you think it made | 15:09 | |
any specific contributions to Christian theology | 15:11 | |
or liturgy? | 15:14 | |
- | Well, I think that what was new, I don't wanna, | 15:16 |
I don't want to link the impression that nothing was new, | 15:20 | |
but the things that were new to me were, as I mentioned, | 15:23 | |
the audience was new, the people from mainline church venues | 15:27 | |
were the audience, it was not an academic, | 15:33 | |
scholarly audience, or a radical feminist audience, | 15:35 | |
it was, mining, but it was mostly people from | 15:38 | |
what I would call inside the church, | 15:41 | |
whether it was with the ministers, wives of pastors, | 15:43 | |
there were a lot of wives of pastors, | 15:46 | |
a lot of women ministers, and a lot of women seminarian | 15:48 | |
students, at least as I understood it. | 15:50 | |
- | Yeah. | 15:53 |
- | Or, women who had studied | |
in seminary, but mostly, there were a lot | 15:53 | |
of church women there, and I think that was what was new. | 15:55 | |
Secondly, I think that many things we've talked about | 15:58 | |
in the literature, and again, my articles, | 16:01 | |
both of those, and the one in the book you can look at. | 16:03 | |
- | Yes. | 16:05 |
- | We talked about the, you know, the way in which the, | 16:06 |
the tables moving in the room made a difference, | 16:09 | |
the plexiglass podiums, those speakers were addressed, | 16:12 | |
different people up at the front row, | 16:15 | |
the way in which we sat at tables with the possibility | 16:18 | |
of drawing or coloring, no one will forget | 16:21 | |
those little eggs, the little black eggs with the, | 16:26 | |
you know, with the rice or whatever was in them | 16:29 | |
that made noise. | 16:32 | |
And those kinds of things were very new, | 16:33 | |
and very, very, very important because they pushed us | 16:35 | |
to a kind of right brain activity | 16:39 | |
as being equally important. | 16:41 | |
They expanded the parameters of feminist theology | 16:44 | |
from simply academic content and theory | 16:46 | |
to personal experience and spiritual sharing. | 16:49 | |
And then of course, liturgical ritual, arena which is | 16:54 | |
probably where it was most innovative, you had, again, | 16:57 | |
nothing new from those of us who were | 17:01 | |
eating it for breakfast, but for people who had | 17:03 | |
never had that experience before. | 17:04 | |
You could have celebrated by women together, | 17:07 | |
bread, and milk, and honey as liturgical elements, | 17:10 | |
women from across the board sharing together, | 17:16 | |
what you could call a eucharistic meal. | 17:20 | |
The Catholic and Protestant women, much less Protestant | 17:24 | |
women from a variety of traditions, sharing Eucharis, | 17:26 | |
none of the kinds of, and again, this is 20 years ago, | 17:28 | |
but none of the kinds of head scratching and hand ringing | 17:31 | |
of the male ecumenical movement, | 17:34 | |
but women simply sitting down and doing it, | 17:36 | |
and I think just that fact of doing it, come what may, | 17:38 | |
the use of the goddess chant, | 17:43 | |
the blessing of all the speakers as each one began, | 17:46 | |
and that kind of reverence and respect, | 17:49 | |
just doing those things, I think, | 17:52 | |
had a transformative effect on people, | 17:54 | |
my life, and in other people's lives. | 17:56 | |
We would not do conferences the old way again. | 17:59 | |
- | You know, in that article, you mentioned, | 18:04 |
made a comment I thought was very interesting, | 18:06 | |
you described it as "an historic conference | 18:07 | |
that future generations will study like Trent and Calceton." | 18:10 | |
Almost 25 years later, do you think that is still true? | 18:13 | |
- | Well, you're the proof of it, aren't you? | 18:17 |
- | Yes. | 18:19 |
(laughing) | 18:20 | |
No wonder I like that sentence, right? | 18:22 | |
- | Yeah, no, no, I mean, I think I was right. | 18:23 |
I mean, not just that I was right, | 18:26 | |
but I think it was like the women church conferences, | 18:28 | |
and ordination conferences, and all of those events | 18:31 | |
that we shared over in that period of time, | 18:33 | |
were landmark experiences because of their results | 18:37 | |
on the one hand, but mostly because of what happened | 18:42 | |
to people who were there, who went on to do | 18:44 | |
exciting and interesting things, | 18:47 | |
and changed the defaulted functions about, | 18:49 | |
for example, what does it mean to do theology? | 18:53 | |
It doesn't mean to go to the AAR and give a paper, | 18:56 | |
only, although, many of us do that, | 18:58 | |
it also means to have the kind of exchange on the ground | 18:59 | |
with people who really live this stuff out, | 19:04 | |
which is what we naturally want, | 19:06 | |
and that's exactly what threatened both the right wing | 19:08 | |
and the media friend. | 19:11 | |
- | Yeah, yeah, that's great. | 19:14 |
What do you think Reimagining means today? | 19:17 | |
And by that, I'm not talking about just the conference | 19:18 | |
or the community, but what needs to be reimagined today? | 19:20 | |
- | Well, I think Reimagining, the genius of Reimagining | 19:25 |
is that it's, like reformation, it's an ongoing process, | 19:28 | |
and I think that we certainly are, | 19:31 | |
we proficiently take the same agenda. | 19:34 | |
And say, well, 20 years later, | 19:37 | |
how has this process continued on issues of sexuality, | 19:38 | |
for example, we weren't thinking about trans people. | 19:41 | |
- | Right. | 19:44 |
- | We weren't thinking about beyond gender essentialism | 19:44 |
in terms of what's a man and what's a woman, | 19:47 | |
we weren't there, we just weren't there, | 19:49 | |
we needed that, that needs to be reimagined. | 19:51 | |
In terms of issue of race, we weren't there | 19:54 | |
towards understanding the complex inter-structured nature, | 19:56 | |
what relative adherence, the cause of kyriarchy, | 20:01 | |
of the ways in which lordship is infrastructured | 20:04 | |
in a variety of destructive and oppressive ways. | 20:06 | |
We have much more information about that now, | 20:09 | |
which means we can reimagine what some solutions | 20:12 | |
or some next steps might be. | 20:15 | |
The same thing with economics, that I think we didn't have | 20:17 | |
at our disposal the same kind of information | 20:20 | |
that we have now, and certainly, we didn't have, | 20:23 | |
at least in the US, we didn't have the economic disparities | 20:25 | |
that we now experience. | 20:28 | |
So, I think that rather than looking for topics | 20:29 | |
to reimagine, the thing to do is to see reimagining | 20:32 | |
as a methodology that is an ongoing one. | 20:36 | |
- | That's great. | 20:40 |
- | That each generation takes then on, like reformation, | 20:40 |
I mean, always in reformation, notion of Protestantism, | 20:43 | |
I would say the feminist equivalent is always being | 20:47 | |
reimagined, that there's this generation, | 20:50 | |
and the next generation, it becomes a task | 20:53 | |
of each generation to their own reimagining. | 20:55 | |
- | Exactly. | 20:57 |
That brings me to my final, very specific question, | 20:58 | |
which is that we are working on a reimagining website, | 21:01 | |
which should be ready at the end of the Summer, | 21:04 | |
and part of that is to preserve this information | 21:05 | |
and make it accessible for future generations, | 21:09 | |
but I'm curious if you have specific ideas about | 21:12 | |
what to include in it, what resources, | 21:14 | |
who would benefit from it? | 21:17 | |
- | Yeah, I'm not sure if I understand what it is. | 21:20 |
Is it to be an archival website? | 21:22 | |
Or is it to be a live kind of community? | 21:24 | |
What are you imagining? | 21:27 | |
- | Actually both, it's starting as archival, | 21:28 |
but the idea is to add resources to it | 21:30 | |
and to have it be ongoing. | 21:33 | |
- | Well, I would certainly urge you to link with | 21:36 |
both other archives of women's history. | 21:41 | |
For example, the Water's archives are at | 21:43 | |
the finest fit collection. | 21:45 | |
- | Yes. | 21:46 |
- | The finest fit of collection, the finest collection | 21:47 |
has lots of women's archives in religion. | 21:50 | |
You know, one has Margaret Sanger, it has Gloria Stein in it | 21:53 | |
and it has Mary Daley, it has Judith Glasgow, | 21:55 | |
and there's lots of stuff there. | 21:59 | |
- | Yeah. | 22:00 |
- | Duke, I know has a women's history archive | 22:01 |
that would be important, and I that Schlesinger Radcliffe | 22:03 | |
Harvard has a women's history archive, | 22:06 | |
is having some renewed interest in women and religion. | 22:09 | |
So, those are, and the Gannon Center | 22:12 | |
for Women and Religion, for women's leadership | 22:14 | |
at Loyola would be one Catholic equivalent. | 22:16 | |
The Gannon, G A N N O N Center for Women and Leadership, | 22:20 | |
their archives would be an excellent source. | 22:23 | |
So, I would link archives. | 22:25 | |
I would also link with contemporary groups like | 22:27 | |
Jeanette Stokes' Center for Women and Ministry, | 22:31 | |
and the sound, can be water, women church conversion. | 22:33 | |
The problem is, and I know, Evangelical and Ecumenical | 22:37 | |
women, too, but what to call, Christianity today, | 22:40 | |
Evangelical and Ecumenical women's caucus. | 22:45 | |
- | Right. | 22:47 |
- | I think those people | |
are great. | 22:48 | |
- | Yup. | |
- | Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, who was one of the speakers | 22:50 |
at Reimagining, I actually talked to Lisa Scanzoni | 22:52 | |
and make sure that you're connected to their stuff. | 22:56 | |
I mean, I don't think there's any need | 22:58 | |
to reinvent the wheel. | 22:59 | |
What I worry about is that in the '90s, | 23:00 | |
there were a whole lot more, at least in my perception, | 23:04 | |
programs and projects focused explicitly on women | 23:08 | |
than there are now. | 23:11 | |
- | Yeah. | 23:12 |
- | So, if I were looking, for example, | 23:13 |
things like the Women's Theological Center is no more. | 23:15 | |
Grailville, which has had, Grail, the Grail, | 23:19 | |
Grail is still, but the Grailville is being sold. | 23:21 | |
Or, there's a talk of selling Grailville. | 23:25 | |
They're not doing programs there anymore. | 23:28 | |
The, you know, the number of the, it's more I can take off | 23:31 | |
the places that are on than the places | 23:34 | |
that have risen anew. | 23:36 | |
I think some of the specific work, for example, | 23:38 | |
The Faith Trust Institute, that works, | 23:41 | |
that's actually domestic file, it's Marie Fortune's work, | 23:43 | |
that would be critical to include. | 23:45 | |
- | Yes. | 23:47 |
- | But there really, and once that's said, | 23:49 |
I can't, oh, for example, the Center for Women | 23:53 | |
and Religion in Berkeley, which is no longer, | 23:56 | |
I can't point to centers connected to theological schools | 23:58 | |
in a ways that I could before. | 24:04 | |
Harvard still has a good program in terms of women | 24:05 | |
and religion gender studies, and so forth, | 24:08 | |
but I don't know that they have an office | 24:11 | |
that deals with women's programs. | 24:13 | |
The Boston Theological Institute had an office | 24:15 | |
that dealt with women's programs, I don't know | 24:17 | |
if that still exists, you'd have to find out. | 24:18 | |
But those kind of things, but there are fewer | 24:21 | |
of these resources now than there were then, even. | 24:23 | |
At least in my perception, I could be wrong. | 24:27 | |
I'd love to be proven wrong, but I just, you know, | 24:29 | |
many of the groups that existed are no longer. | 24:33 | |
- | I appreciate that, those are great suggestions. | 24:37 |
- | Including Reimagining, by the way. | 24:40 |
I mean, you were talking about revising Reimagining, | 24:42 | |
but what would, you know, think about Church Women United, | 24:43 | |
I mean, how vital are they at this point? | 24:47 | |
- | Right, right. | 24:49 |
- | How, you know, where are the people in the bureaucracies | 24:51 |
of the UCC, the Lutherans, the disciples, you know, | 24:55 | |
who are really working women's issues in a particular | 24:59 | |
and portfolio way, I don't know. | 25:01 | |
- | Yeah, yeah, yup. | 25:04 |
- | That's what I mean by different. | 25:05 |
People say, well, that's been folded into justice, | 25:07 | |
or that, yeah, the fact of the matter is | 25:09 | |
that having that presence, it's not there. | 25:11 | |
- | Right, right. | 25:15 |
Is there anything that we, this has been extremely helpful, | 25:19 | |
Mary, is there anything we haven't discussed | 25:21 | |
that you would like to add? | 25:23 | |
- | Oh, I'm sure there are lots of things, | 25:26 |
but like I said, this is plenty, I think this is plenty | 25:28 | |
for now and certainly feel free to get back to me | 25:30 | |
if you have further questions or, you know, | 25:32 | |
this is just one person's view of this, what, | 25:35 | |
20 plus years later, but I could still say | 25:38 | |
that it was a very important event. | 25:42 | |
I congratulate and thank the people who | 25:43 | |
put it together, and who, some of whom paid fairly steeply | 25:46 | |
for what they did. | 25:50 | |
But certainly the overall... | 25:52 | |
Result, I think, of the conference was wildly positive, | 25:57 | |
and that the backlash in some ways only helped | 26:01 | |
to focus tension on that, and now that the backlash | 26:04 | |
has kind of faded into history, but the fact of the matter | 26:07 | |
is that many of the contests that were discussed | 26:11 | |
at Reimagining are now normative | 26:14 | |
within mainstream Christianity, | 26:17 | |
including things like inclusive language, | 26:20 | |
although it's not, it's honored in the breech, | 26:22 | |
but everyone knows that there's no, | 26:24 | |
you can't get away from that. | 26:27 | |
You can try, but everyone knows that the backlash | 26:28 | |
only indicates how important that is, | 26:32 | |
or women in ministry with denominations now approaching | 26:34 | |
parity, if not more women ministers. | 26:37 | |
Or issues of sexuality, I mean, look how far we've come on, | 26:40 | |
on issues of sexuality in 20 years. | 26:44 | |
So, I think there's no question that the, | 26:47 | |
that Reimagining was moving in the right direction, | 26:49 | |
I think that the backlash brought attention to that, | 26:51 | |
but certainly didn't succeed in stopping it. | 26:56 | |
- | Thank you, I'm gonna turn off the recording now, | 27:00 |
this was excellent, really helped. | 27:02 |