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  • Editors’ Introduction

As we enter yet another pandemic year, it seems appropriate to begin with wishing you all a “Healthy New Year,” as variants and discussions over whether COVID-19 is here to stay now begin to dominate our landscape. In this special issue, we turn our attention to the “pandemic within the pandemic”—which is how Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) characterized the experience of Black Americans in calling for an examination of the legacy of slavery and systemic racism in 2020. In summer 2020, as noted in previous issues, Feminist Studies in Religion Inc. (FSR) publicly affirmed commitments to combat anti-Black racism. Those commitments can be found on our website at https://www.fsrinc.org/web-articles/action-items-to-combat-anti-black-racism/. One of those commitments is to self-reflect on FSR’s history and current practices. Specifically, “FSR recognizes its need to critically reflect on its own history and practices as they relate to race and racism. JFSR [Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion] and CoLaboratory will begin curating related information from the organization’s history, including retrospective contributions such as roundtables, lists of editors and board members from the very beginning, etc.”

We are grateful to Judith Plaskow, one of the founding editors of JFSR, for writing a piece that interrogates race and racism at the journal, and who asks whether the problem lies with the very container that JFSR is as a journal of feminist studies in religion. This issue, then, prominently features a roundtable on race, racism, and the JFSR that comprises Plaskow’s challenge to JFSR and reflections on Plaskow’s piece. We invited former editors of the journal, former and current board members of JFSR, and board members including officers and unit chairs of the journal, e-FSR, and CoLaboratory (LAB) to share their thoughts in conversation with Plaskow’s remarks. Such reflection is essential if we are to take seriously the challenge of looking within to see how we can do better in being inclusive, diverse, and equitable across our organization and specifically within the pages of the journal in addressing the deplorable legacy of racism that, like the pandemic, refuses to go away. We do not intend to stop with reflection, but rather commit to changing the very systems that have continued to reinvent white supremacist ideologies and practices that have leached into, or, as several of the [End Page 1] commentators have observed, have been the systemic premises on which the journal was unwittingly created.

In addition to the roundtable, this special issue also brings you some of its usual fare in the form of articles whose themes we offer to you to whet your interest. However, before we share those themes, we note our deep sadness in learning of the passing of another founding member of the journal, Carol P. Christ, whose landmark works on Goddess spirituality and embodiment reimagined the divine at work, and whose essay is featured in this volume in the Living It Out section. The essay was posthumously prepared for publication by Judith Plaskow, to whom we owe a huge debt of gratitude. The theme of the Goddess is continued in Caryn Tamber-Rosenau’s article, “The Goddess in the Exodus,” which critically examines Nina Paley’s reimagining of the Exodus story to claim that the rise of YHWH killed the Goddess while simultaneously adopting an anti-trans ideology and reinforcing two-sex essentialism.

Peter Sabo and Rhiannon Graybill’s article, “The Bible and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments,” continues the twin themes of misogyny and reimaginings in examining how Atwood’s novel subversively draws upon the Bible to suggest the liberatory power of infinite interpretations in rewriting stories replete with “misogynist representations of gender, violence, and patriarchy,” and whether such an approach is successful (132). The liberatory potential of religion is echoed in Zaynab al-Ghazali’s (d. 2005) call to Egyptian Muslims to “return” to Islam, as Asmaa Mansour ably demonstrates in her examination of al-Ghazali’s memoir, titled Return of the Pharaoh, which “envisions Islam as a decolonial tool of resistance in Egypt’s postcolonial or postindependence era that gave birth to ‘new Muslim rulers [who] surpassed...

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