Summer begins and the struggle continues

As Starhawk reminds us, today--and tonight--marks the Solstice. For all of its great and sometimes excessive heat, summer is a time of great joy for me. On this Solstice, I like to think of things that help me feel connected to the Earth, other women, the community, and the ongoing struggle to set the world right.

Here are two random things that give me hope:

First, thanks to Spinifex for sharing this radio interview with renowned Indian eco-feminist Vandana Shiva.  Shiva describes not only the peril we face, but the great and growing strength of the movement to undo that peril.

Second, thanks to Tamlyn for sharing this video made by Oklahoma labor activists. The times we live in are both scary and exciting, and seeing that activists here are working to raise the voice of ordinary working people gives me hope.

At the risk of sounding like a pagan, I would like to say that the Earth and her seasons are sacred. Actually, I guess I am a pagan of sorts, an agnostic pagan. So finally, thanks to Beacon Press for sharing this video of poet Mary Oliver reading her poem "The Summer Day."

The end of the world? Been there, done that.

Harold Camping is old enough to know better. Relying on a combination of complicated arithmetic and the interpretation of Biblical prophecies, the 89-year-old California engineer predicted that the world would end today, May 21, 2011. As Chris McGreal of The Guardian explains, one of the signs that the world was nearing its end was (you knew it) the growing acceptability of gay marriage:

Camping has also said that "gay pride" and same-sex marriage are "a sign from God that judgment day is very near". "No sign is as dramatic and clear as the phenomenal worldwide success of the Gay Pride movement. In the Bible God describes His involvement with this dramatic movement … We will learn that the Gay Pride movement would successfully develop as a sign to the world that Judgement Day was about to occur," he writes.

Camping predicted that the apocalypse would begin at six p.m. sharp in each time zone and proceed around the globe, with the saved rising up to heaven and the damned being destroyed by earthquake and fire. Predictably, he was wrong. (I'm no prophet, but my hunch is that God is not nearly so interested in enforcing patriarchal sexual standards as Camping thinks She is.)

Our friend Harold could have saved himself a fair amount of  trouble and embarrassment if he'd read some history. One famous example is that of the Millerites in the 1840s. William Miller analyzed the Book of Daniel, chapters 8 and 9, and

counted 2300 years from the time Ezra was told he could return to Jerusalem to reestablish the Temple. The date of this event was calculated to be 457 B.C. Thus, 1843 became the date of Christ's return. As the appointed year grew closer, Miller specified 21 March 1843 to 21 March 1844 as his predicted climax of the age. The date was revised and set as 22 October 1844.

The resulting failure of the world to end became known as The Great Disappointment. This reminds one of  the famous words of Jesus, that "no one knows the day or the hour" when the end will occur. But the idea of all the troubles of the world ending in an instant, the righteous receiving their just reward, and the evildoers going straight to hell appears to be irresistible to many. Harold Camping is the latest, but he won't be the last.

Back in 1998, PBS's Frontline produced a show called Apocalypse! The show's web page has an analysis of  "apocalyptism" by University of Texas Professor L. Michael White and a historical timeline of the apocalyptic world view, up through 1999. It's too late for Harold Camping, but I hope the rest of you pay attention.

Mary Daly is dead

Bridget Crawford at Feminist Law Professors reports that radical feminist philosopher and theologian Mary Daly is dead at the age of 81. In the comments to Crawford's post, Ann Bartow of FLP links to this obituary at Reclusive Leftist.

Mary Daly was a colossus. She was an absolutely towering influence on modern feminist thought. If you’re a feminist alive today, then Mary Daly influenced you. Even if you’ve never heard of her, even if you’ve never read her books — she influenced you.

Crawford links to Daly's obituary at National Catholic Reporter online.

Daly most often contemplated the divine essence as a verb, Be-ing itself, so that worship is "not kneeling in front of a so-and-so but swirling in energy." Her language echoed quantum physics, and she was flattered if you said so: "I do think about space-time a great deal," she admitted. "It's a kind of mysticism which is also political."

The Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Modern Western Theology also has an interesting biography.As in life, in death Mary Daly remains controversial. Her Wikipedia biography, while grossly oversimplified, gives some sense of the controversies that surrounded her.

In Gyn/Ecology, Daly wrote that the number of people killed as witches during the Witch Hunt in early modern Europe added up to nine million people, mostly women. This high figure, which is rejected by most researchers,^[12] caused her to coin the term 'Gynocide' and to draw comparisons with the Holocaust. Nearly all estimates today range from 60,000 to 100,000 people killed between the 14th and 18th centuries.^[13]

Also in Gyn/Ecology, Daly asserted her negative view of transsexual people, whom she referred to as "Frankensteinian." She labels transsexualism a "male problem" and claimed that post-operative transsexuals exist in a "contrived and artifactual condition."^[14] Daly was also the dissertation advisor to Janice Raymond, whose dissertation, published in 1979 as The Transsexual Empire, is critical of "transsexualism." Transsexual activist Riki Wilchins has accused Daly of being transphobic.

In a personal letter to Daly, published after four months without any reply, Audre Lorde expressed a fondness for Daly's work, but expressed concern over Gyn/Ecology, citing homogenizing tendencies, and a refusal to acknowledge the "herstory and myth" of women of color. ^[15] The letter, and Daly's decision not to publicly respond, greatly affected the reception of Daly's work among other feminist theorists, and has been described as a "paradigmatic example of challenges to white feminist theory by feminists of color in the 1980s." ^[16]

I would say that one of the biggest reasons that Daly remains controversial is the utter seriousness with which she took women's lives and patriarchal oppression. For an analysis of Daly's work that gives due respect to Mary Daly's work, while also criticizing it, I would recommend the anthology Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly edited by philosophers Sarah Hoagland and Marilyn Frye, which was reviewed by Carol Anne Douglas in off our backs. I admit that it's been sitting on my bookshelf for years, and I've kept it because it looks so interesting. When I'm finished reading it, you're welcome to borrow it.

In the meantime, you can get some of the flavor of Mary Daly's work by visiting her web site.

A poem I wrote while I wasn't in church

Actually, I don't ever go to church, and I don't exactly believe in god, but here's a poem I wrote this morning:

Not Quite a Prayer

I talked with God this morning,
and I don't think I understood
a single word she said.
I wasn't even sure she was really there,
or if it was just me hoping
that there was someone listening.
I didn't understand what she was saying,
because I'm almost sure she said
she's not an unpleasant bossy man
with a long beard,
and she doesn't send people to roast slowly
over hellish fires once they're dead.
I was trying to talk to God
but I couldn't understand her because she
wasn't what I expected.
She said that when she writes,
she writes with music in the clouds,
she whispers in the roar of the waves,
and under extraordinary circumstances,
she might shout along with the thunderclap,
but she never writes anything in stone.
Stone is for pictures.
Stone is for vast sculptures carved slowly
over many, many centuries.
I talked with God the other day,
and I swear I didn't understand a word she said,
because she told me she doesn't have a plan
for my life,
that she won't save me in this life,
and won't condemn me in the next.
But if I lift my eyes to the hills,
I might see a diagram I could use,
and if I reach out my hands I might
find friends to help me.
If I reach out my hands I might grab
hold of friends that I could
help along their way.

Bad Bush policies continued, part one

According to the Daily Women's Health Policy Report:

President Obama filled the remaining seats on the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships this week, appointing an antiabortion-rights Pentecostal bishop among his last nine selections to complete the 25-person panel, the AP/Chicago Tribune reports. Bishop Charles Blake is a presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ, a predominantly black Pentecostal church with about six million members. At a Democratic National Convention interfaith service, Blake called on Obama to adopt policies to reduce the need for abortion and criticized those who show "disregard for the lives of the unborn." The White House has asked the council to address four priorities, which include economic recovery, reducing the need for abortion, "encouraging responsible fatherhood" and improving interfaith relations, according to the AP/Tribune.

Let's start out with the whole idea of "faith-based initiatives," which Obama decided to continue and expand. Regardless of what safeguards are supposedly in place to protect the separation of church and state, I'm not sure it's a great idea for religious organizations to receive federal money. Religious groups that want to engage in charitable work are already able to collect money tax free to use on those projects. Why should they also be also awarded taxpayer money to fund their programs?

I'm even less sure that it's a good idea for there to be a special federal office devoted to encouraging the charitable projects of religious groups. And what does it mean for the government to try to improve interfaith relations? This sounds a lot like government meddling in religion, which is at least as bad as religious groups meddling in government. It also sounds like the government trying to say, we don't care which religion you practice, as long as you practice some religion. The whole thing makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

And then there is the question of who President Obama has decided to appoint to the advisory panel. As Ann at Feministing points out, "he's stacking the panel with anti-choice men."

So maybe the more things "change," the more things stay the same?

Elizabet Sahtouris

Elizabeth Sahtouris was one of the guests featured this morning on the program To the Best of Our Knowledge on KOSU. According to the TTBOOK website:

Biologist Elisabet Sahtouris left her teaching job to go live on a Greek island and re-think her life as a scientist. She tells Anne Strainchamps that while she dismisses the Biblical creationists,she thinks the standard story of evolution has some major problems. Her book is "Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution."

I'm not exactly sure what I think of her ideas, but what Sahtouris has to say is very interesting. Here's an excerpt from a 2003 essay:

We have a new definition of life in biology in the last few decades called autopoesis which means that a living entity is onethat continually creates itself. This is very unlike a machine which is created from the outside by an inventor, given its rulesof operation, and usually in a hierarchic arrangement and has tobe reinvented to have generations of technology rather than being able to reinvent itself in an evolutionary trajectory.

On her website, you can download a copy of her book for free. Or you can watch her on YouTube.