Katha Pollitt on Laudato Si': "If Pope Francis Really Wanted to Fight Climate Change, He'd Be a Feminist"

And more outstanding commentary today — this by Katha Pollitt at The Nation noting that Pope Francis's considerable blind spot regarding women's rights significantly diminishes the power of his encyclical Laudato Si' to address the world's ecological crisis effectively:

Mary Hunt on Vatican Council on Women: Funny If It Weren't So Insulting

In the hope of encouraging you to read Mary Hunt's wonderful essay on the Vatican council on women at Religion Dispatches today, I'm going to pick out some of its finest lines and point you to them: first, 

Commentary on Cardinal Burke and the New Emangelization Project

"Men need to dress and act like men..." -Cardinal Burke, pictured, in an interview http://t.co/uAkzd65VgH pic.twitter.com/BRHsOP8aSR
— Michael O'Loughlin (@MikeOLoughlin) January 6, 2015

Twitter's aflame now with tweets about Cardinal Raymond Burke's new emangelization program, with tweets like Michael O'Loughlin's above. Do a search at Twitter with the search terms "Cardinal Burke," and you'll discover a sartorial smorgasbord of amazing photos of His Eminence modeling for us that manly resplendence he finds absolutely necessary to the maintenance of a manly civilization and manly church that will attract real manly men to the manly Christ and his manly priesthood.

Theologians Pope Francis Would Do Well to Read: Ivone Gebara on Catholic Church's Insistence on Maternal Role of Women

In the theologians-Pope-Francis-would-do-well-to-read category today, here's Brazilian theologian Ivone Gebara on what the maternity-centered view of women in official texts of the Catholic church actually does to real-life women. "No room for women to be worthwhile in and of themselves" . . . as they ornmanent the cake (which is, after all, the important thing in the equation) like beautiful red strawberries . . . . 

Catholic Synod on the Family: Theologians Talking about Women, Democracy and Human Rights, Catholic Families — and Jesus

As the Catholic synod on the family nears, I'm spotting more and more commentary focusing on the distance (in the view of many Catholics) between the rhetoric of church leaders about pastoral issues, and the realtiy lived by those church leaders as they go about their pastoral work. There is a well-articulated fear in many quarters that the synod will be much more about rhetoric than about reality, that it will, essentially, change nothing, especially for those on whom the church's teaching and policies inflict serious pain.

Sister Elizabeth Johnson to LCWR: "The Submerged Female Half of the Church, Indeed of the Human Race, Is Rising"

Sister Elizabeth Johnson, as she accepted the the top award of the Leadership Conference of Religious Women last week: 

Rebecca Solnit on Struggle to Name the Significance of Isla Vista Shootings as "Watershed Moment in the History of Feminism"

In yesterday's New York Times, Charles Blow continues the post-Isla Vista drumbeat of insistence that men, all men, need to face the fact that we're at the root of the problem of "female objectification and discrimination and violence against women." Contra those who want to minimize said problem, Blow writes flatly:

Quote for Day: "Said Another Way: Sexism Affords As Much Bondage As Racism"

Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993):

Beverly Wildung Harrison on Connections Between Racism and Misogyny, and Story of Donald Sterling: These -Isms Hang Together in Web of Patriarchy

Recently, when I wrote about Andrew Sullivan's take on Jonathan Rauch's essay calling for special tolerance for those who oppose same-sex marriage out of sincere religious conviction, I concluded by noting, 

Former President Carter on Women, Religion, Violence, and Power: An Interview with Sister Maureen Fiedler

For Interfaith Voices, Sister Maureen Fiedler interviews President Jimmy Carter about his new book A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power. The book looks at the influence of religion (at a global level) on the lives of women and girls — as either an oppressive or a liberating force. What follows are my transcripts from and observations about the audio version of the interview to which the link above points.

Footnote to Brendan Eich Discussion: Yes, It Is about Gender, Race, and Sexual Orientation

"In discourse and analysis," Catholic feminist theologian Ivone Gebara says (citing French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu) "the male vision of the world is presented as evidence and functions as an ideology justifying what exists" (Out of the Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation, trans. and intro. Ann Patrick Ware [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002], p. 68). And then she goes on to say, in a passage I shared with you last month,

Feminist Theologians on the Bible and Slavery and Christian Theology and Skin Color: Applications to Debate about Gay Marriage

Two interlocking quotations from feminist theologians I've been reading lately--Delores S. Williams and Ivone Gebara:

Sister Elizabeth Johnson Talks About Her Vocation As a Theologian: "There Were These Men and They Had All the Power"

At BuzzFeed, a marvelous article by Jamie Manson surveying the theological career of Sister Elizabeth Johnson, whose book Quest for the Living God was condemned by the U.S. Catholic bishops in March 2011--though they never met with Johnson to discuss the book before they chose to condemn it, and didn't even inform her that they were deliberating about the book and intending to condemn it. 

Ivone Gebara on the Violence of the World's Main Religions Against Women, and Extension of This Violence to "All Kinds of People"

In my posting several days ago, I cited Ivone Gebara's Out of the Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation, trans. and intro. Ann Patrick Ware (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), on the ways in which various male-dominated religious traditions reduce women to silence, make them voiceless, deprive them of any means of expressing their spiritual insights in language that makes sense to them as women. Gebara's analysis of this reduction of women to silence goes further: she emphatically depicts these effects of patriarchal culture and religion as a form of violence against women.

Placing Pope Francis's Remarks about a Theology of Women Against the Backdrop of Ivone Gebara's Real Theology of Women

Sister Ivone Gebara

One of the themes that emerged in Pope Francis's anniversary interview this week was the question of the place of women in the Catholic church. As readers will know, this has been a persistent theme of Francis as pope: we need a theology of women, he said last summer. But to a great extent, what he has said in this vein is echoed in what he suggested in his interview this week: namely, that women's place in the church is to represent the feminine, Marian nature of the church, and not to usurp positions of authority that the tradition has assigned to males.

Males active and dominant. Females passive and receptive--like the Virgin Mary, as the male-dominated tradition likes to imagine her.

Ash Wednesday Meditation: Ivone Gebara on the Communtarian Dimension of the Cross

Today's Ash Wednesday, a day in which some Christian liturgical traditions limn crosses of ash on the foreheads of the faithful, to challenge them to remember that they are dust and will return to dust. Ash Wednesday inaugurates a liturgical season of remembering the cross and resurrection of Jesus, the central symbols on which Christian faith turns.

Delores Williams on Black Womanist Theology, the Cross, and the Rape and Defilement of Nature

Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993):

Stephanie Krehbiel on the Woody Allen Case and the Problem of John Howard Yoder: A Must-Read Article

A must-read article from this past week: Stephanie Krehbiel on the "Woody Allen Problem": how is it possible to read pacifist Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder now, now that we know that Yoder was a serial sex abuser? Here's the problem: