Constructing a Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust

The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust , Melissa Raphael, Routledge 2003 (0-415-23665-7) pp. xii + 228, Pb. £18.99     

The Origins and Religious Practices and Identities of the Honen Dalim Jewish Community in Mozambique

All world religions are trans-local and transcultural and have been long before or after the thalassocracy of colonial empires took shape and moulded ethnic-religious affiliations, and Judaism is no exception. This paper is focused on the religious identities and practices of the Jews in Maputo, their perceptions of belonging and constraints of integration. It relies on an inter-subjective multi-situated ethnography and tries to reason on the ways Judaism, with its unique message, meant to be spread to all peoples and claiming its own truth and forms of allegiance and identification, assumes a new significance in complex contexts like Mozambique demanding negotiations between differently empowered agents in the present in order to achieve a constructive harmonization between the global and the local forms of Judaism.     

Social and Spiritual Reconstruction of Self Within a Feminist Jewish Community

In recent decades, there has been an enormous burst of spiritual energy and creativity among Jewish women. Women have been gathering in a variety of communal forms, some spontaneously generated circles and other more committed long term groups, to create Jewish-feminist ritual, liturgy and theology. The activism, vision, writings, music, poetry and dance of these women has begun to transform contemporary Judaism. Based on the author's experience in a group that has been meeting for 12 years called B'not Esh, she reflects on how the self can be sanctified, enlarged and at the same time increasingly differentiated over time, through participation in Jewish feminist ritual and community.     

A Patrimony of Idols: Second-Wave Jewish and Christian Feminist Theology and the Criticism of Religion

This article suggests that second-wave feminist theology between around 1968 and 1995 undertook the quintessentially religious and task of theology, which is to break its own idols. Idoloclasm was the dynamic of Jewish and Christian feminist theological reformism and the means by which to clear a way back into its own tradition. Idoloclasm brought together an inter-religious coalition of feminists who believed that idolatry is not one of the pitfalls of patriarchy but its symptom and cause, not a subspecies of sin but the primary sin of alienated relationship. The first moment of feminist theology’s criticism of patriarchal power is not that it is socially unjust, but that it has licence to be unjust because it is idolatrous. Yet, neither opponents of feminist theology who dismiss it on the grounds that it is a secular import into the tradition, nor feminist students of theology and religion, have paid sufficient attention to feminist theology’s counter-idolatrous turn as the religious ground of women’s liberation. Here, the freedom and becoming of women is dependent on the liberation of the religious imagination from captivity to a trinity of idols: the patriarchal god called God who is no more than an inference from the political dispensation that created him; the idol of the masculine that created God in his own image and the idol of the feminine worshipped as an ideational object of desire only as the subordinated complement of the masculine and as a false image that becomes a substitute for the real, finite women whose agency and will it supplants.     

基于宗教、哲学和传统的创造

文明之间的对话总是源于压力和挑战,但机遇也随之而来。机遇在于,能否在对其他文明的学习、理解和观照中重新找到自信。没有这种自信,文明之间的对话将没有意义,也不可能真正发生。自信意味着在新的时空坐标中不断地对自己传统之宗教信仰、哲学理念和生命意识的重新反思、批判和再造。通过对话,重新理解、发现、再造并坚持自己,这是犹太哲学发展史所带来的重要启示。再造自己的传统和文明,不是回归,而是复兴,是基于新的时空可能性创造新的传统。     

Clocks,Creation and Clarity: Insights on Ethics and Economics from a Feminist Perspective

This essay discusses the origins, biases, and effects on contemporary discussions of economics and ethics of the unexamined use of the metaphor an economy is a machine. Both neoliberal economics and many critiques of capitalist systems take this metaphor as their starting point. The belief that economies run according to universal laws of motion, however, is shown to be based on a variety of rationalist thinking that – while widely held – is inadequate for explaining lived human experience. Feminist scholarship in the philosophy of science and economics has brought to light some of the biases that have supported the mechanistic worldview. Possible alternatives to the an economy is a machine include an economy is a creative process and an economy is an organism. Such metaphors are intellectually defensible as guides to scientific inquiry and provide a richer ground for moral imagination.     

Moving from Feminist Identity Politics To Coalition Politics Through a Feminist Materialist Standpoint of Intersubjectivity in Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Identity politics deployed by lesbian feminists of color challenges the philosophy of the subject and white feminisms based on sisterhood, and in so doing opens a space where feminist coalition building is possible. I articulate connections between Gloria Anzaldúa's epistemological-political action tools of complex identity narration and mestiza form of intersubject, Nancy Hartsock's feminist materialist standpoint, and Seyla Benhabib's standpoint of intersubjectivity in relation to using feminist identity politics for feminist coalition politics.     

The Medieval Commentary Tradition:

No abstract available for this article.     

The Grounding of Identities

Philosophia - A popular stance amongst philosophers is one according to which, in Lewis’ words, “identity is utterly simple and unproblematic”. Building from Lewis’ famous...