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Introduction Remembering the Past in Creating the Future The first volume of my collected essays, Transforming Vision, reflected on the articulation of a critical feminist the*logy of liberation, whereas the second, Changing Horizons, brought together articles on a critical feminist biblical hermeneutics. This third volume explores the intersections between memory, history, rhetoric, and movement from the perspective of a critical feminist the*logy of liberation. While it overlaps in many ways with the previous volumes, it is at once an autobiographical and a systemic exploration of both the interface of memory as heritage and as scientific history as well as that of interpretation, movement, and sociopolitical location. The autobiographical, the rhetorical, the historical, and the hermeneutic come together in the practices of remembering the past in creating the future. Action for change with respect to both the present and the future is inspired by the memory of past struggles against injustices and is sustained by social movements for change today. This vision and commitment to the past and future have decisively shaped the entirety of my present work. Whether in the 1970s women’s liberation movement in society and religion or in the 2000s global movement for women’s rights, feminist movements have had to wrestle with religious scriptures, norms, and cultural institutions that threaten the wellbeing of wo/men. The work of feminist the*logy1 and studies in religion provides rich resources in these struggles, although these contributions are often overlooked by feminist cultural-political movements. Moreover, feminist studies in religion is still not accepted in many places as an important field of academic inquiry. Few institutional structures exist to preserve the memory and heritage of feminist movements in religion and their intellectual work. For this reason, I have collected these essays and interviews in the hope that they not only will be helpful for wo/men struggling within religious communities but also that they will contribute to the knowledge of future generations about 1. Since theology (from Greek theos) is masculine-defined and thealogy (Greek thea) also would reinscribe gender, although the Divine transcends gender, I write the*logy in this fashion to alert readers to this problem and language use. 1 feminist the*logy and studies in religion. In a small way, these essays and interviews seek to articulate a politics of memory for feminist studies in religion and the*logy. Although I understand my approach as explicitly political and decolonizing in line with the tradition of liberation the*logy, I hesitate to label a critical feminist the*logy simply as “liberation the*logy,” “postcolonial the*logy,”2 or “political the*logy.” This is because all three forms of progressive the*logy are articulated in terms of an androcentric framework and have not theorized the fact that, until quite recently, all wo/men3 without exception were excluded from the*logy and the academy and in many countries still are. The largest portion of the poor and disenfranchised were—and still are—wo/men and their children, who in the three forms of progressive the*logy named above are subsumed under “the poor” but not explicitly mentioned nor are their specific problems taken into account. The religious and cultural exclusion of wo/men from public and academic awareness occurs first and foremost through language.4 Feminist theory and the*logy have again and again pointed out that androcentric5 or, better, kyriocentric6 language functions as language of domination because it 2. I do not understand my own work as postcolonial the*logy, because postcolonial theories frequently lack a critical feminist analysis. Rather, I understand it as a critical feminist the*logy, whose processes of consciousness-raising (or conscientization) have the effect of being decolonizing. See my book The Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 111–29. 3. Postmodern feminist studies have problematized the essentializing function of the categories “woman/feminine.” Critical postcolonial and liberation studies have warned against abstracting a feminist-theoretical analysis of gender from its sociopolitical function, because in so doing they reinforce the cultural ideal of the “White Lady.” This problematizing of the basic categories of feminist analysis has led to a crisis in the self-understandings and practices of the feminist subject. I try to mark this crisis by writing “wo/men” in a fractured form, whenever woman/women is not understood in essentialist terms of feminine gender but in socio-political terms. This way of writing wo/men also seeks to reverse andro-kyriocentric language...

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