Embodying Radical Democracy: Reflections on the FSR/WATER 2008 Summer Forum

Between June 15 and 20, 2008, Feminist Studies in Religion (FSR), Inc., and the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER) hosted the Summer Forum in Feminist Theologies, titled "Making the Connections: Claiming Our Past—Envisioning Our Future Together." Thirty participants and five faculty mentors constituted an interdisciplinary, interreligious, intergenerational, and international group of emerging and established scholars, who explored together some pressing chalxlenges for feminist/womanist studies and activism in religion and the*logy at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, national and religious identity, economic, and dis/ability issues. This essay reflects on the goals, activities, and impact of the 2008 Summer Forum. To celebrate and carry on the work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, the authors interpret the forum as a site of embodying radical democracy or incarnating an ekklesia of wo/men (women and men), as well as consider its importance for their future scholarly, pedagogical, and activist work.

Forming and transforming feminist communities in religious studies that support and sustain life, learning, love, and laughter takes care, collaboration, risk, and creativity. The 2008 Summer Forum in Feminist Theologies titled "Making the Connections: Claiming Our Past—Envisioning Our Future Together" exemplified such virtues. The forum, organized by the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER) and Feminist Studies in Religion (FSR), Inc., took place at Cathedral College on the campus of Washington National Cathedral during a sultry summer week in Washington, D.C., between June 15 and 20, 2008. Getting acquainted on the first night through a formal introductory session and an informal reception revealed that we thirty participants and five faculty mentors constituted a highly interdisciplinary, interreligious, intergenerational, and international group of emerging and established feminist and womanist scholars in religious studies and the*logy.¹ While this pilot forum focused on junior faculty and advanced graduate students, we the participants hailed from divinity schools as well as schools of theology and ministry, seminaries, research universities, and liberal arts colleges, thereby reflecting a rich range of institutional contexts from which to explore together some of the contemporary challenges and opportunities that confront feminist/womanist studies and activism in religion.

We enjoyed collaborating and learning with our renowned mentors, Mary Hunt, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Judith Plaskow, Kwok Pui-lan, and Deborah Whitehead, who selected the thirty forum participants from more than ninety applicants. In her opening remarks, Mary Hunt placed the forum in a long lineage of alternative living-and-learning spaces for women's the*logical education, such as the Seminary Quarter launched at Grailville in the 1970s, the conference "Teaching for Change" that celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion in 2005,² and the seminar "Women and Religious Organizations: Collaborating for Change" developed by WATER and FSR and sponsored by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion in 2006.

In her opening comments, Schüssler Fiorenza envisioned some of the religious and political implications of the gathering, which attempted to embody what bell hooks thematizes in her teaching and writing as a radical democratic space of possibility.³ Incarnating an educational site of and space for radical democracy proved exciting yet difficult relative to enacting global solidarity among us. The participants came from Belgium, Botswana, Finland, Germany, India, Spain, and the United States, and reflected a broad diversity based on race, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, religion, ethnic and national identity, language, and dis/ability. Yet some international participants could not attend due to current U.S. immigration policies. Such political roadblocks to solidarity only reemphasized that feminist and womanist studies operates within less-than-ideal democratic settings in the academy, religious life, and the public square.

Feminist/womanist scholars therefore often turn to alternative educational and political practices—through a praxis of border crossing or intercultural work⁴—to imagine and aim to achieve their emancipatory goals for academic, activist, and everyday wo/men.

Learning From and With One Another

The Summer Forum created a new space of possibility—both in all...