Martin, Joan / Re-Imagining Collection / Duke Digital Repository

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Record this.

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And do you mind if, actually if I could put that over there

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too maybe.

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Okay, your volume is working

fine here.

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Good, good.

Wonderful, great.

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So if I could have your name, please.

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I'm Joan Marie Martin, I go by Joan M. Martin.

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Okay.

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And my mother and father had three Js,

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Jerry, Joan, and Janet.

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Did they really?

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Yes they did.

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And where are you in the?

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I'm in the middle.

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You are, ah, that is great.

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Now are you lay or clergy?

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I'm clergy, I was ordained in the presbytery

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of Newark, New Jersey, on October 10th, 1976,

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so I have been ordained 39 years.

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Really?

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And when and where were you born?

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I was born in Englewood, New Jersey, which is right across

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from New York City at Englewood Hospital

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down the hill from the George Washington Bridge.

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That's great.

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And where did you go to school, graduate or divinity school?

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I went to Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, Illinois,

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which is a UCC college, the home of the Niebuhr.

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Oh.

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Yes, yes.

They went to school there and one of them,

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I think it was H. Richard who served as our president

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for a time, I went, I came home

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and went to Princeton Theological Seminary

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and that was '73 to '76 and in 1987 to '96

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I did my PhD program at Templewood University

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where I was Director of Campus Ministries.

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Oh you were.

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Okay, and what was your doctoral work in?

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Christian social ethics, church and society.

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Mhmm, mhmm.

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And how and when did you first become aware

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of feminist, womanist theology?

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Well I can't speak about womanist feminist theology first.

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I became a feminist in college when the women

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living in the women's honorary dormitory at Elmhurst

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decided that we needed to start doing consciousness raising

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and doing book reading, you read The Second Sex

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by Shulamith Firestone and I can never remember,

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I can never remember the name of the woman who wrote

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the book that turned the American middle class women around.

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She was a good friend of Gloria Steinem's and an author.

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But, so I actually started early in college.

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You did, yeah.

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Do you recall what was the impetus

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for the consciousness raising?

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Well a number of things.

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My first year in college was the FBI police raid

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on the Chicago Blank Panther Party house

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in which two people were killed.

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That January, 1970, a young man by the name of James Cone

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came to Elmhurst College at the invitation of his good

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friend, Ronald Getz, and lectured from his new book

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which at that time was Black Power and Black Liberation,

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I believe, but it was his first book.

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In the spring was Kent and Jackson States

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and so the feminist movement, the one in Chicago

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around demonstrating about the FBI,

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Chicago police of Fred Hampton and then both the Kent

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and Jackson States, Kent for the protest against the war

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in Vietnam had large feminist contingents

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and the Jackson State shootings, black women and men

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were involved in raising the issue of racism there.

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Yeah.

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So how were those between gender and race?

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Were those combined for you from the very beginning?

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How did that work?

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Well they were combined but they were controversial

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and that continued through seminary.

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The black students, there were two of us who were black

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women in the Princeton campus from '73 to '76

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and African-American, black, and so I belonged

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to the Black Student Association and I belonged

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to the Women's Center and if it was my opportunity,

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I remember once preaching in Miller Chapel and I preached

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about women in the bible and the black men were furious

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because I should have been preaching about black issues.

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At which point in time, things I still say,

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anytime I preach about black issues or women's issues,

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I'm preaching about both issues,

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and it also means I'm preaching about class and abilities

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and people who are differently abled

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and I'm preaching about whatever the current

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peace and justice issues are, but it began,

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if I'm a black women, I preach about being black

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and I preach about being a woman.

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That is not a separate identity,

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it is an indivisible experience.

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And when did you start finding,

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you mentioned during the consciousness raising,

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but did you start studying womanist theology

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or what was useful to you?

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Well it was when I went

to Princeton seminary, I was able to study more

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black theology.

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Yes.

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With Guy Hanson and Edlar Hawkins who were on the faculty

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at Princeton and Kathy Sackenfeld and Frida Gardner

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were the women and during the time I was there,

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there was a tenure battle so that they would get tenure

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and so it was always something in the mix, in the mix,

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going on to raise those issues, so in those years,

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it was reading Nancy Hardesty and Litha Scanzoni,

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all were meant to be about women in ministry.

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There were a few writings Letty Russell had begun to write

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at that time and I met her in my first year in seminary,

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in the spring of my first year, and it went all the way

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from meeting this incredible woman

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to being mentored and colleagues and in the end,

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very good friends until Letty died just a few years ago,

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she's buried out here in Auburn Cemetery.

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I didn't know that.

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And we had a women's service here.

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Yes.

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She died during the summer

and so we had a service here, but she was an amazing woman.

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1990, no, it was in 2000, excuse me, Letty invited me

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to go to Yale to be a visiting associate professor

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so that kind of relationship.

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We would get into all sorts of good trouble

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around and about.

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(laughs)

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Love it.

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Switching to Re-Imagining, what was your relationship

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to the Re-Imagining community?

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I didn't necessarily have a relationship

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to the Re-Imagining community, what I had was a strong

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relationship with church-employed women

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of the United Presbyterian Church, which raised employment

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issues for women in, who were both program executives

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and church secretaries, particularly in presbytery,

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SINED, and general assembly offices.

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So that was one organization.

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Presbyterian women, I often did workshops

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for Presbyterian and spoke at one of their general

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assemblies and then I also belonged to,

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we started out as a group of six ordained black women

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in a Presbyterian church in the mid-'70s

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while we were still in seminary and developed

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the African-American Clergywomen's Association.

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Now that's what it is.

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There are more ordained black women in the Presbyterian

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church than I can tell you I know, it's gotten that big.

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Between 1977 and 1981, I was the first Justice for Women

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staffperson on the National Council of Churches.

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Really?

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Yes.

Under Lucius Walker and then

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I cannot recall his name.

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He wrote an incredible book that impacted

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what I thought about church and state issues,

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why the churches should pay taxes.

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Dean, and then I can't remember his last name.

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But three weeks into the job, in the fall of '77,

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Claire Randall, who was the general secretary,

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the first woman general secretary in the National Council

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of Churches, told me that I had the job of going down

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and creating a feminist presence, a religious, Christian,

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feminist presence at the National Women's Conference

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because she was on President Carter's commission on women

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for the United States Decade For Women Conference

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and that's what Houston was, the National Women's,

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Decade For Women Conference, and so that position,

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I was 25 years old, 26 years old, that position

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was my entree into the movements of women.

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Women who were struggling for all sorts of things.

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The Great Panthers, part of those founding members

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were some Presbyterian women, Maggie Coon

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was a Presbyterian woman.

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I didn't know that.

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Yeah, so I had this whole network of women who

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had been strong, clear, feminist leaders in the church,

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didn't use that term until the late '60s and early '70s

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and by the time I finished seminary,

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I was part of a movement, I even got to work

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for the movement in the churches, being the first

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staffperson for Justice For Women in church and society.

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And I did that for five years and I kept those contacts

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alive doing things for Presbyterian women,

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church-employed women went out of business

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but what became the unit that Marianne Lundey ran,

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the Women's Ministry Unit of the Presbyterian Church

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after reunion, people knew, because I had worked

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ecumenically, I continued to do things for the UCC,

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for the Lutherans, I still knew women in the WRO,

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the Welfare Rights Organization for Women.

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I still knew people in NOW, I knew women of the likes

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of Charlotte Bunch, who became a good friend.

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She was editor of Quest Magazine at that time,

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which is where, Quest Magazine, I still have my original

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Quest Magazine some place up there on the shelf

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and then by the mid-'80s, black women were publishing

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conditions, Alice Walker had published The Color Purple

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in 1985, I think, her book of essays,

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In Search of Our Mother's Gardens was published in 1983,

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Kate Cannon had gone to seminary and she and Dolores

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Williams had worked on the notion of womanist

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and for a long time, outside of Alice Walker's writing,

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womanist was only known in the church

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until later in the '90s.

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How did that happen,

that it became better known?

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Well you can't keep a good thing quiet

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and when people read people, womanism, the name,

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being a womanist, it caught on in community organizations

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all through the '80s, Letty Russell and I chaired

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the Women's Ecumenical Center here in Boston

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and they were both an alternative for women

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in theological education 'cause there were really were no

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women's programs then in theological education that were

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really owned by structures in theological education,

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so there was that component but there was a community

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component that worked with women in Boston

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and we asked the question, "What would the WTC look like

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"if it were run by and for black women,

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"by and for women of color?"

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And by the early 2000s, the WTC had done that

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and it always had two co-directors, one black and one white.

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So those were years when, even though I was in campus

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ministry by the end of 1981, I still kept those

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relationships together so that an invitation came

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to be a speaker because I was known nationally

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in both the traditional women's organizations

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and in the feminist women's organizations in the mainline

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churches that belonged to the NCC as well as into certain

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women's groups in theological education.

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Yes, so you spoke at that 1993 conference

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and I know it's been a long time.

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What do you remember about the conference?

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I remember going, "Wow, this is great."

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I'm getting past a cold since last week

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so my voice isn't what it should be, not as clear.

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But everybody was excited about going to Re-Imagining

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because women were coming up with the most incredible

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resources for the church, Ruth Duck had been writing hymns

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since the early '80s, Jane Parker Huber had been writing

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hymns since the early '80s, the Ordination Now movement,

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Mary Elizabeth Hunt, Diane New, Sister March Tewitt,

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the Roman Catholic women were going all blazes,

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a ton of them were getting educated.

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Places like St. Thomas, here at Weston, Jesuit Seminary,

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at Boston College, so you wanted to be there,

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you wanted to be there.

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And how was the experience in terms of anticipating it?

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Well, it was great to be reacquainted

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with Sweet Honey in Iraq and I remember Bernice Johnson

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Reagan saying, "When people really give me a hard time,

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"what I do is I pray that god gives them

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"what they need so they quick wearing me out."

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I remember that that's what she told us

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about what she prayed when doing coalition building

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was the last thing anybody ever wanted to do

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'cause people only got together in coalitions to get done

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what they needed to get done and most of the time,

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the rest of the time, they didn't talk to each other.

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So it was talking to Bernice Johnson Reagan

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and Mercy Amba Odaoye.

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It was hanging out with Kate Cannon and Dolores Williams

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and we had been friends for a long time.

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It was listening to people I had never heard before

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like Betarowski from Canada even though I couldn't imagine

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and I said this to her, she became very angry with me,

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I raised the issue with the steering committee and with her

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about, are there not women of color in Canada,

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well most of us knew that there were Canadian women's,

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Native First Women's issues going on in Canada

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just as they were going on here, but there was nothing,

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and this conference was all about diversity.

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And that's what I had given my small plenary.

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They said, small plenary address, plenary of 500 was small.

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And it was affirming that spiritual diversity

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had to be embodied if it was going to be a justice movement

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whether in church and society, and so I went with that

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anticipation and so to encounter some speeches,

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the large two or 3000 plenary speakers who did not address

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the community other than in the mantra of race,

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gender, and sex, or race, class, and sex was simply,

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was not liberative, so one of the things I did,

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it wasn't a happy experience but I'm glad I did it,

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I raised that issue with the steering committee

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and some people said I was raining on the parade

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and I said, "If you invite women of color,

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"what do you think you're gonna get?"

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Either the women's movement is ours and we are a part of it

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and we're a part of it significantly for white women

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or it's racist, and that was I think for some of us

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a real turning point even though the Journal of Feminist

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Studies and Religion had done a round table by that time

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on womanist theology and ethics, I think it was '91 or '92

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when they did that special round table.

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Kate Cannon, Dr. Jacqueline Grant had both turned

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their dissertations on womanist theology, well Jacqueline

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was still calling herself a black feminist then.

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Dolores had published, Tracy West was in the pipeline

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on her PhD, I was in the pipeline on mine,

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tons of black women were in the pipeline

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so not to have recognized that you have to give substance

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to your imagining, then it doesn't happen.

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So on the one hand, it was, the worship was wonderful

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and that's why I say that for the progressive church

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of the future who want to attract the nuns,

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the non-affiliated but spiritual and religious people,

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who want to keep those who have grown up in the church

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in the last 20 or 30 years, men and women,

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feminist men or pro-feminist men and feminist women,

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women of color who still identify as either feminist

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or womanist or Afro-centric, the church is,

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those resources are already there and they have to be

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taken seriously and the church also has to,

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if it wants to grow, it has to enable women in ministry

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not to have just the first or second calls

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but to have calls to big steeple churches,

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it has to take seriously the economic disparity

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that still goes on between men and women's salaries

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in the churches, I won't name the denomination

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but just in the last two or three years,

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one denomination has cut the pension benefits of single

23:23

retired women because after all, they in no way

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are supporting a family or so the old image and stereotypes

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of women go in the church still.

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So I think that what the church of the future needs to be

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is to be even more feminist, and when I say even more

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feminist, it means it must be more conscious

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of womanist issues, mujerista issues, Asian,

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Asian-American women's issues, as those are community-based,

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on-the-block issues, which means quality public education,

24:09

not separate but equal public education,

24:16

which we're getting back to in the charter school movement,

24:19

particularly here in Massachusetts.

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And something I disagree with Mr. Obama on

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and former governor Deval Patrick

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and current governor Charlie Baker about.

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It still doesn't answer the question of quality education,

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particularly in your inner cities and in your poorist

24:50

rural areas, those are all women's issues because any issues

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that affect children affect women and any issues

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that affect women affect families and communities.

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So that the churches need to ramp up and be ready

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not to expect people to come in but train people,

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but seminaries and particularly denominational seminaries

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need to train people to understand the local dynamics

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of structural oppression, including that of women,

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and take its members and go out and work on those issues

25:31

in the communities so that people see the church

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as a resource in their community to help them struggle

25:39

with the issues which confront their lives.

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And that as they confront those issues, they're deeply

25:45

spiritual and integrated as persons in the community

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because of Christian faith and the Christian church.

25:57

Otherwise, you have burnout and you have it.

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Burnout is seen in different ways these days.

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It's seen in how many people have high blood pressure,

26:18

how many people are obese, how many people get cancer.

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I believe those are signatures of when the rest of us,

26:29

awhile ago, used to burn out and take off a year

26:33

or take out a year if we could afford it and just get

26:36

ourselves back together and get back in the movement.

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Could you say more about how spirituality prevents that,

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how it ties into, how it gives that kind of support?

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Well I can only do that because spirituality

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is always contextual, it always is about

27:02

your relationship with god but your relationship with people

27:08

because it's through people that we oftentimes

27:12

experience god, it's with other people that we experience

27:17

the creation, it's with other people and ourselves

27:20

that we experience what it means not to be god,

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that means fully human, that we get sick, that we grow old,

27:29

that we have disabilities, so spirituality is an integral

27:33

part of being a whole person and having the stamina,

27:38

the inner stamina that listens to god so that one can work

27:46

in the world, 'cause you gotta be able to see where god is

27:54

out there because generally we think god's up there.

27:57

That's not the promise of the gospels.

28:05

The promise of the gospels is, "I will be with you

28:08

"to the ends of the earth," so if that's what the promise is

28:11

that means Christianity, Christian faith,

28:15

what happens in church can't be focused on my comfort,

28:22

it needs to be focused on my wholeness so that when I leave

28:29

the church, when I leave the table, I'm empowered to serve.

28:37

And if that's happening week after week or the first Sunday

28:49

of every month, or even quarterly, it ought to be about

28:54

the forgiveness of sins, the wholeness that I feel after

29:05

Eucharist or after hearing the word rightly preached,

29:09

I'm a Calvinist, the word rightly preached,

29:14

then that is sustaining word, so Christian spirituality

29:17

to me is about helping people be sustained

29:24

in the world to do god's mission.

29:28

And that mission is, if you look at the historical sleep

29:34

of the story of god and the Israelites,

29:40

god is always moving out from the Israelites' understanding

29:47

of who god is, they can never contain this tribal god thing.

29:51

And by the time you get to Jesus and the fullness

30:01

of the incarnation, you have somebody standing in front

30:06

of the people in the synagogue reading the Book of Isaiah

30:11

and they wanna try to catch him

30:14

and throw him over the cliff so that those issues

30:16

are not just about me and mine, but it's about god's mission

30:21

primarily, actually the church doesn't have a mission,

30:30

it doesn't have a being without it being understood

30:32

that what it's doing is god's mission.

30:36

So if we're gonna live, literally, climate change,

30:41

you have to have, you have to approach it

30:51

with a spiritual understanding of the relationship

30:53

between god, creation, and all living things

31:01

in order to sustain yourself in that work.

31:05

If you're going to work, and I don't even necessarily know

31:09

how to put this, whatever is the meaning of terrorism,

31:13

if anything ever called on the objective love of our enemies

31:23

that's it, and how we do justice making,

31:37

it's probably the most complicated issue.

31:43

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Do you have any thoughts on that?

31:47

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As the people of Paris and the people of France

31:48

have experienced just as we did in 9/11,

31:55

it takes deep spiritual resources to keep people going off

32:02

the deep end of hate.

32:07

So you know, it takes deep spiritual fortitude

32:14

to say that black lives matter and this nation needs

32:21

gun control and to keep working at it

32:25

and working at it and working at it.

32:28

I remember when I was much younger

32:38

in the '60s and '70s when I was a teenager

32:46

and then when I was in college, people would say,

32:52

we're not called to be successful,

32:55

we're called to be faithful, but if we're faithful,

32:58

then the struggle just changes because it's not about

33:02

a win or lose situation, it's always about making known

33:08

the presence of god through how we treat one another,

33:12

whether that's between parent and child or spouse or spouse

33:17

or nation to nation, and the differences of people

33:23

within a nation or now, the course I'm gonna teach,

33:27

in January, is a globalization course and ethical issues

33:32

that globalization demands we give our attention to.

33:38

So it's those kinds of things that spirituality enables

33:44

and is necessary, not to be god, but to be as fully human

33:50

as possible, which is very very hard.

34:02

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That is, this is wonderful.

34:05

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That's what the church needs to do.

34:08

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Right right, yes.

34:09

This is so helpful.

34:12

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Where are we?

34:13

Oh okay, we're fine.

34:14

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Good.

This is exactly what I'm, this is wonderful

34:17

about where to go.

34:19

I did wanna go back a little bit and I think I know it

34:21

but I wanna make clear I do.

34:24

When you talked the Re-Imagining Conference

34:25

not doing the substance, could you say more

34:27

about what it needed to do that it didn't?

34:31

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It didn't give, now this is in hindsight.

34:46

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Sure, right.

34:49

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It did not give a rubric for all of its speakers.

34:51

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And what should that have looked like?

34:57

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You can't get out of EDS without in some way,

34:59

somewhere, some course, some table discussion,

35:02

but let's say structurally, there is no course you can take

35:06

here that doesn't talk about anti-racism

35:09

and other forms of structural oppression.

35:15

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Mhmm, mhmm.

35:17

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So if you are organizing a conference,

35:20

you say to every speaker, even if you speak

35:22

on this one issue, please address it

35:26

keeping in mind how the issue impacts people

35:32

or people experience the impact of the issue

35:42

from the matter of difference, racial difference,

35:45

gender difference, economic difference,

35:51

physical ability difference, all those things,

35:55

it gets real hard around here to stand in the chapel

35:59

and not look around the room and go,

36:02

"Oh boy, I have to remember to do this."

36:04

So I think that one of the things is you really want people

36:10

to be able to reimagine, then you have to have people

36:14

who you give leadership to some guidance

36:19

about what re-imagining might be like

36:24

and it's always thinking, if we can multitask,

36:27

we can think about more than one kind of experience.

36:33

-

Mhmm, that's very helpful.

36:36

-

I think, so that's one thing.

36:39

I thought people ought to be able to lead worship

36:41

out of their traditions and experience what the best

36:44

of different traditions become or can be recognized to be

36:49

when we fully decide that there is something

36:58

called ecumenical worship and we might have to create it

37:07

every time we meet, I mean, the World Council of Churches

37:18

has to do it every time it meets.

37:21

And say that what would an ecumenical service be like

37:27

if we started with responding on a theme of re-imagining

37:42

the abundance of god from diversity and difference.

38:04

So would the worship service be about preciousness

38:14

because of scarcity or preciousness because five loaves,

38:20

and five fishes and three loaves become, can feed 2000

38:27

who are all different out there even though they may all

38:37

be Aramaic Jews.

38:40

-

Right, that's great.

I wanna be respectful of time.

38:46

Were you aware of the backlash of the 1993 conference?

38:47

-

Oh yes, yes, I didn't get as many letters

38:51

as other folks did because I no longer was as much a part

38:54

of church organizations and structures

39:00

'cause I was in graduate school.

39:04

I came here in '94, I was writing my thesis

39:06

in the fall of '93 so Kate Cannon had once told me

39:11

that when you're writing your thesis,

39:20

there is no other lover and you know this is true.

39:23

-

I do know this is true, yes.

39:30

-

No matter how much you love your husband,

39:32

no matter how much you love your kids,

39:34

no matter how much you love your partner,

39:36

no matter how much you love your mama and your dad.

39:39

-

You got it.

39:43

-

Listen, when I'm done.

(laughs)

39:46

You're thinking about it when you're at the grocery store,

39:50

you're thinking about it when the kids are at the park

39:51

and you're watching them, you're thinking about it,

39:55

those are the times I was the most creative, oftentimes,

39:58

when you're actually not trying to think about it.

40:00

-

Right, yes.

40:01

-

Some of my best thinking happened in the grocery store.

40:03

So I think that what we need to do are those types

40:06

of things that we don't ordinarily think about.

40:22

-

What do you mean?

40:29

-

I think I lost your track of question.

40:33

-

Oh, I was talking about the backlash.

40:35

-

The backlash, the backlash.

40:36

I didn't have to think about that stuff.

40:39

I got some letters, I didn't get any phone calls.

40:41

I tried to stay in touch with people who were getting it

40:46

like Marianne and like some of the other

40:49

women I knew in denominational offices.

40:51

-

How do you account for it, do you think?

40:58

What happened there?

41:01

Do you have thoughts on that?

41:03

-

I think I learned my analysis from Beverley Harrison

41:11

who was a mentor and friend, beginning years I worked

41:21

in New York and she took me back to the 1964

41:24

presidential election between Barry Goldwater

41:36

and John F. Kennedy but it wasn't between them,

41:40

it was what happened in the right.

41:43

And the right couldn't pull it off

41:50

even though Barry Goldwater was probably the most

41:53

prestigious conservative in the U.S. Senate and Congress

41:57

but he was so roundly defeated that the party and Johnson

42:05

became popular until the Vietnam War got out of control

42:11

that what happened was it took conservative

42:20

and I mean political conservative America

42:23

to the Iran hostage taking, in which Jimmy Carter

42:31

had no response that they had spent those years rebuilding

42:47

and part of that rebuilding was non-formally in the church,

42:57

I say non-formally 'cause you wouldn't even say informally

43:05

until you get to the point of the popularity

43:09

of Ronald Reagan by the end of his first term.

43:13

By that time, you've got a sophisticated radical right.

43:20

And you've had several radical right Evangelical preachers.

43:27

You've had the demise of the National Council of Churches

43:36

from the strength it had in the '50s and '60s and early '70s

43:45

and they establish think tanks

43:55

and you even had religion in democracy as a think tank.

44:00

-

And that was a major one.

44:05

-

They were major ones behind

the backlash but you would also have people fan the flames

44:10

with feminism as Nazism, remember the feminazis?

44:18

-

Feminazi, I do.

44:22

-

So that when you're talking about inclusive language

44:24

at church or you only have a few bishops,

44:26

women bishops in the Methodist Church

44:33

and one of your women ministers in your conference,

44:36

and how Talsic wrote a book about the Sophia,

44:43

the feminist face of god, and my god,

44:47

people don't read the bible, their pastors don't do

44:50

the commentary work that they were taught to do in seminary,

44:59

calling the Holy Spirit or the ruach, also feminine,

45:05

in Hebrew, the Holy Spirit, well what are we gonna do next,

45:11

are we going to make Jesus non-gendered?

45:17

Oh this stuff about, you know of course, the '80s

45:21

was a ripe time for God the Father,

45:24

for the feminist to take on God the Father.

45:26

I mean, Nel Morton's book, Our Journey Is Home,

45:30

somewhere in that she talks about that the real need of,

45:38

that you cannot make God the Father, God the Mother

45:45

until you smash the image of the father

45:49

and that takes the power of the goddess.

45:53

Well.

45:59

God bless Nel Morton.

46:02

So feminist theology had really begun to move on that

46:06

in terms of, it had gotten, there were enough women

46:13

who had now come through PhD programs,

46:17

particularly in Bible and in Theology

46:21

and they were teaching women that by the time you get

46:25

to the second generation of women like Katie Cannon

46:28

who had studied with Bev Harrison and Jacqueline Grant,

46:31

who had studied with James Cone and so on and so forth

46:35

and women who had studied, she was at Garrett Theological

46:40

Seminary in the '50s and '60s.

46:47

United Methodist, not just Rosemary,

46:51

Rosemary's Roman Catholic.

46:54

Why can I not, Anna Howard Shaw is earlier.

46:58

I cannot recall her name.

47:07

But a number of the major, one of the major women's

47:11

quadrennial conferences of the United Methodist Church

47:17

in the late '70s spent a large colloquium talking

47:22

about the works of this woman, Georgia Harthness.

47:27

-

Oh right, mhmm, mhmm.

47:32

-

It was threatening.

47:38

-

Mhmm, mhmm.

-

And this was as threatening to the church as was the early

47:42

feminism to traditional womanhood in a family.

47:51

They're all part of the same cloth.

47:57

Except in 1977, it was Phyllis Schlaffley

48:03

in the Eagle Forum, but now it's women in the churches.

48:07

-

Thank you.

48:15

Is there anything we haven't talked about

48:16

that you wanna mention or say?

48:17

-

Interestingly enough, Joan Clark had come out

48:31

as a lesbian in 1977, the issues of Concern Magazine

48:35

had come out earlier in the '70s

48:42

but I can't exactly say that lesbianism and gay rights,

48:49

even though there had been a movement going on

48:56

were as threatening as feminism was.

48:59

That didn't come until the latter part of '90s.

49:02

-

Why do you think that was?

49:07

-

2000.

49:08

'Cause I think most women in the churches still saw

49:11

the fight as feminist, womanist, mujerista on the levels of,

49:14

we're talking to a predominantly heterosexual group

49:25

and still a generation of women who, if they were lesbian,

49:28

did not call themselves that, in church circles and were not

49:35

out because there had been the ordination struggles.

49:41

You can't do church now, you can't do re-imagining.

49:51

I can't reimagine a church, I wrote an article a couple

49:58

years ago for a forum, there were four or five conferences

50:02

by the Catholic Church, I think YDS, Hartford Seminary

50:11

were kinda all in this together, who more than a monologue.

50:19

It's two or three volumes.

50:26

I responded to Patricia Beatty Young.

50:28

Her essay was something like God Gives.

50:36

(phone rings)

50:43

God Gives the Lonely Families.

50:45

And so I responded that I couldn't imagine a church

50:59

only dealing with welcoming gays and lesbians

51:03

and that's without using the word marriage equality

51:08

when my goddaughter was in the process of becoming my godson

51:13

so I can't imagine the church not dealing

51:23

and a church that wants to be lively and alive

51:26

not dealing with a host of issues of sexuality

51:33

and not just because of people's either

51:37

because they come to realize their sexuality,

51:48

I'll put it that way, but because of the choices

51:51

that reproductive technology will come bear on us

51:54

in the future, much more so than now.

51:58

And I'm not talking about abortion.

52:02

The reproductive technologies of gene identification,

52:09

whether one can identify a disease,

52:21

the potential for a disease in a gene,

52:31

so then you determine to have that gene screened out.

52:35

Those are all, pastors, get ready.

52:45

-

Right, yeah.

52:50

-

Then it was abortion,

52:57

surrogate motherhood, and that was even in the '80s

53:05

but they were larger societal issues

53:10

and they had class ramifications, they had all sorts

53:17

of things that the church wasn't dealing with then

53:20

but the church would, a Re-Imagining Conference

53:23

would have to at least name those issues,

53:27

they would have to name eco-justice, climate change

53:37

in different ways than hugging trees and eating quiche.

53:42

(laughs)

53:48

To use the phrase of the right.

53:50

Yeah.

53:56

-

Thank you, thank you so much, I really appreciate it.

53:58

-

You're very welcome.

54:03

-

Thank you.

Martin, Joan

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Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History & Culture