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  • JFSR:A Dissenting View
  • Elizabeth Pritchard (bio)

I joined the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion as a managing editor in 1992. Frankly, this opportunity excited me far more than did the generous scholarship I received to do my doctoral work at Harvard. In fact, the opportunity to work with the journal, and particularly so closely with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, was a major reason for my choosing to study at Harvard. But if I was chock-full of excitement, I was also more than a bit naïve about the workload and about the conflicts of producing feminist scholarship.

Before starting doctoral work at Harvard, I had worked at a nonprofit specializing in conflict resolution. In my master's program, I had read a significant amount of feminist, postfeminist, and nonfeminist treatments of "difference." Nevertheless, I was still a bit taken aback that there were conflicts among the feminists with whom I would work and that the imperative of bringing feminist scholarship to print required ongoing compromise. I have since attributed this naïveté to the residue of my undergraduate education with Mary Daly, whose writings and speeches spun the dream of a New Time and New Space beyond [End Page 217] patriarchy. I have since come to recognize that there is no place where one can stand outside of what Theodor Adorno referred to as "damaged life."1 I have also learned that the desire to reach such a place is little more than a hopeless grab for purity and the avoidance of one's complicity in acts of injustice small and large, near and far. I have come to profoundly appreciate this hard-won wisdom (and its attendant skill set). And I credit the journal and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza with launching me on this leg of my feminist education!

Many of the conflicts encountered at JFSR are not all that surprising. For instance, board members and reviewers have different expectations of what constitutes rigorous scholarship. This is an especially difficult issue given the different disciplinary approaches as well as religious traditions that JFSR encompasses, its mission to reach out to emerging scholars or scholars without sufficient scholarly resources, and its dedication to being a global and inclusive journal. Other conflicts have emanated from different assessments of the priority of an international board, various visions of the themes of the issues, dissimilar sensitivities to the dominance of Christian scholars, and material, and unequal levels of involvement in and dedication to the journal. These issues simmered for different people around criticisms of each other's work, feelings of marginalization or silencing at conferences, and lingering resentment at those episodes in which members from dominant racial, academic, economic, and sexual groups have sought recognition, and perhaps atonement, from members of oppressed groups. No doubt much of the conflicts and tensions experienced by those associated with the journal have been fed by a system hostile to the emancipatory vision espoused by all the persons involved with the publication—a system that divides them by discipline, overloads their committee assignments, disciplines them for not adhering to the corporate model that now dominates higher education, rewards them for "playing nice," tokenizes them when convenient, and demands their increasing supervision of students.

There is not enough time or energy to consistently name and resolve our conflicts. We tend instead to refocus our energies on the shared tasks at hand: producing first-rate feminist scholarship in religion and prodding the academy and society toward just relationships. I would venture to say that those of us associated with the journal have had to learn to be tolerant of each other, of the particular struggles with which we each cope, and of the varied skill sets and temperaments we each bring to the table. Indeed, it strikes me that toleration is essential to successful coalitions like JFSR.

I've been thinking a lot lately about conflict and "toleration." Toleration has been increasingly subject to scrutiny and found wanting. Toleration is depicted as righteous rhetoric cloaking more nefarious purposes, especially on the part of nation-states. Talk of toleration is a specific instantiation of what Mahmood [End Page 218] Mamdani refers to more broadly as "culture talk...

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