Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Set

NEW FEMINIST RITUAL

NEW FEMINIST RITUAL l 1249 movement will grow and have influence only if the groups connect with one another through concrete actions for justice. Women-church groups will also need to link with other reform groups that seek similar goals. Otherwise, the movement runs the danger of being small communities that function quite independently without any collective identity or power. Periodic larger gatherings provide a sense of the whole, an experience of connection to the global and historical Jesus movement as well as to other communities of resistance against patriarchal religious values. Women-church will also need to pay increased attention to the children whose normative experience in a faith community is in such groups. Their religious education remains to be developed. Their celebrations of welcome and coming of age are important times for taking seriously the future of a movement still in its youth after just two decades. Children’s impact on the larger religious context will be the measure of success of the women-church movement in creating inclusive, justiceseeking communities. SOURCES: The Women-Church Convergence materials are housed at the Women and Leadership Archives, Ann Ida Gannon , BVM, Center for Women and Leadership, Loyola University, Chicago, Ill., http://www.luc.edu/orgs/gannon/ archives/gcollection.html#w. Major theological work was done by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Rosemary Radford Ruether. Schüssler Fiorenza’s classic volume In Memory of Her: Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (1983) lays the foundation. Her But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation (1992) and Discipleship of Equals: A Critical Feminist Ekklesia-logy of Liberation (1993) flesh out the theoretical and practical issues. Ruether’s important contributions include Women-Church: Theology and Practice (1985), a solid introduction to the movement, and a later overview essay, “Women-Church: An American Catholic Feminist Movement,” in What’s Left: Liberal American Catholics, ed. Mary Jo Weaver (1999), 46–64. Mary E. Hunt provides an insider view in “We Women Are Church,” in The NonOrdination of Women and the Politics of Power, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Hermann Häring, Concilium, 1999.3: 102–114 and “Sophia’s Sisters in Struggle: Kyriarchal Backlash, Feminist Vision,” In the Power of Wisdom, ed. Maria Pilar Aquino and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Concilium, 2000.5: 23–32. Mary E. Hunt and Diann Neu collaborated on a Women-Church Sourcebook (1993). Liturgical materials include Diann L. Neu’s Women-Church Celebrations (1985) and Sheila D. Dierks’s WomenEucharist (1997). International expressions of women-church include Sook-Ja Chung’s “Women-Church in Korea: Visions and Voices,” The Ecumenical Review 53.1 (January 2001): 73; and Women-Church: An Australian Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. NEW FEMINIST RITUAL Janet Walton IN THE EARLY 1970s when women began to speak about how they felt after worshipping in churches or synagogues, something new happened. While these feelings certainly were not new, the moment was. Struggles for justice, long overdue changes to acknowledge the rights of people of color and women, and organized protests against the U.S. participation in the Vietnam War marked the 1960s and early 1970s in North America. Active protests and civil disobedience were a critical part of these movements. In the 1960s also, the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that kept its rituals fixed for 1,500 years, also acknowledged the need for change. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the protest against the war in Vietnam, the demonstrations for lesbian and gay rights, and Vatican Council II provided a fertile context for women to act on what they felt in churches and synagogues. These models of struggles for justice urged action. In the midst of this momentum, New Feminist Rituals began to emerge. What was wrong in traditional religious rituals was the dominance of everything male: male leadership, male decision making, male language. Public religious rituals were constructed on what men knew, ways in which men expressed who God is and who human beings are, as if what were true for men were true for everyone. Women were invisible except as passive receivers of what men thought. In most denominations women could not assume ordained leadership. Practically no one imagined God through any words or images that reflected women’s experiences. In fact, though the foundation of biblically based religions asserted that all humans are created in the image of God, that truth would be difficult to argue, given the language, symbols, ritual forms, visual environment, and leadership of...