Theme Articles: Luther,Feminism, Friendship and the Future

Abstract : This article traces the author's journey of becoming a Lutheran feminist theologian. Drawing on insights from both Lutheran and feminist traditions, the author proposes a shift in Christian vocation imagery from that of servant to friend. She then argues that call to friendship includes subverting global structures of domination. The article ends with an invitation to join the expanding conversation about how Lutheran and feminist frameworks address the needs of our contemporary world.     

What Do White Counselors and Psychotherapists Need to Know About Race? White Racial Socialization in Counseling and Psychotherapy Training Programs

Multicultural training in academic counseling and psychotherapy programs is often designed to address the needs of minority populations, and it rarely places Whiteness in the spotlight. Its structure, in fact, risks mirroring the very dynamics embedded in White privilege. Using the framework of feminist theory, we build on key findings on White racial socialization—which has a profound impact on the quality of communication and interaction within and across racial groups—to outline the skills and awareness needed for White counselors and psychotherapists to promote racial justice in both their individual/counseling and community/advocacy work.     

Whose social values? Evaluating Canada’s ‘death of evidence’ controversy

With twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy of science’s unfolding acceptance of the nature of scientific inquiry being value-laden, the persistent worry has been that there are no means for legitimate negotiation of the social or non-epistemic values that enter into science. The rejection of the value-free ideal in science has thereby been coupled with the spectres of indiscriminate relativism and bias in scientific inquiry. I challenge this view in the context of recently expressed concerns regarding Canada's death of evidence controversy. The worry, raised by Stathis Psillos, is that as constructivist accounts of science demoted the previously secure status of evidence for drawing justified conclusions in science, we were left with no rational delineation between the right and wrong values for science. The implication for the death of evidence controversy is that we may have no rational grounds for claiming that the Canadian Government is wrong to interfere with scientific enterprise. But he does offer another avenue for reaching the conclusion that the wrong social values are directing the current stifling of some sectors of Canadian science. Psillos draws from standpoint epistemologies to devise a salient defence of ‘valuing evidence’ as a universalizable social value. That is, government bodies ought to enable scientific research via adequate funding as well as political non-interference. In this paper, I counter that (i) non-epistemic values can be rationally evaluated and that (ii) standpoint epistemology’s universalizable standpoint provides an inadequate framework for negotiating social values in science. Regarding (i), I draw from the evidence-based medicine debate in philosophy of medicine and from feminist empiricist investigations into the science–values relationship in order to make the argument for empirically driven value arbitration. If social values can be rationally chosen in the context of justification, then we can have grounds for charging the Canadian leadership with being ‘at war with science’. (ii) I further argue that my recommended empiricist methodology is preferable to Psillos’s search for universalizable perspectives for negotiating social values in science because the latter method permits little more than the trivial conclusion that evidence is valuable to science.     

Indigenous Women’s Ways of Knowing and Healing in Mexico

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on examples of Indigenous ways of knowing in three communities of northern and southern Mexico. It centers on dialogue conducted with Indigenous women from Northern Baja California (Arcelia, the cultural healer from the Kumiai community of San Jose de la Zorra), Oaxaca (Maria Sabina through textual analysis of the only book that houses her healing wisdom), and Chiapas (the Lacandon community of Lacanja Chansayab). It then highlights ways in which the author—an academic woman—brought the wisdom of Indigenous cultures to the center of academic discourse, and how Indigenous women apply their knowledge and wisdom to heal their communities. Lastly, the article concludes with lessons learned from the dialogues with Indigenous women, how they have applied innovative research and healing strategies that depart from Euro-American paradigms, and how they creatively contribute to the development of Indigenous psychologies that are anchored in feminist, popular power.     

FORMATION,GRACE, AND PNEUMATOLOGY: Or,Where's the Spirit in Gregory's Augustine?

Eric Gregory's Politics and the Order of Love takes up an audacious project: enlisting Saint Augustine in order to “help imagine a better liberalism.” This article first provides a summary of Gregory's argument, focusing on his emphasis on love as a “motivation” for neighborly care, and hence democratic participation. This involves tracing the theme of motivation in the book, which is tied to his articulation of liberal perfectionism and an emphasis on civic virtue. In conclusion I raise the question of whether his project has ignored a key aspect of Augustine's account of love, namely, the role of the Holy Spirit, thereby demarcating the limits of Gregory's “rational reconstruction” of Augustine.     

The Movement of May 1968 and Theology in Latin America

Latin American liberation theology has almost never seen itself as an expression of or in direct relation to the international student movements of May 1968. Nevertheless, from today's perspective, one can say that what was called liberation theology was a web of relationships of many movements and events. It was undoubtedly part of the enormous worldwide movements of the 1960s, interacting with the various expressions of struggle for cultural and political liberation that manifested themselves in many different forms in different parts of the world. The same can be said about feminist liberation theology in Latin America, which emerged a few years later. Latin American feminist theology, however, unlike liberation theology, has never been concerned with making a claim of originality, nor has it struggled to be recognized as a typical Latin American way of thinking and movement. It is part of the tradition of the liberating spirit of the past and the present in its different forms, including the legacy of 1968.     

Secularity,gender, and emancipation: thinking through feminist activism and feminist approaches to the secular

In this article, I engage with feminist discussions about secularity, gender, and emancipation. The feminist study of the secular was spurred by interventions of Saba Mahmood [2005. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press], and can be seen as a critical engagement with at least one basic assumption that underlies much of progressive thinking – that secularism is beneficial for women and LGBTQ subjects. I begin by exploring how the Belgian feminist activist platform Baas Over Eigen Hoofd! (Boss Over One’s Own Head!) builds a locally suited theory and practice of emancipation. I analyse how BOEH! raises questions about gender and secularity. Second, I zoom-out by mapping feminist studies of the secular in Western European contexts, distinguishing various analytical approaches and visions on social-political secular emancipatory alternatives. To conclude, I relate local feminist activism to feminist academic discussions, and argue that there is a continued need for thinking about shared emancipatory futures.     

Phenomenology and the Poststructural Critique of Experience

Abstract

Phenomenology is considered a philosophy of experience. But in the wake of French post‐structuralism beginning in the 1970s, the concept of experience within phenomenology has fallen under heavy critique. Even today, in the context of feminist philosophy the phenomenological concept of experience has yet to recover from the poststructuralist critique.

In this article, I will closely examine the poststructuralist critique of the concept of experience within the context of feminist theory. I will thereby refer first and foremost to the poststructuralist theorist Joan Scott, and her influential text “‘Experience’”. In my examination of the poststructuralist critique of experience, the leading question will be whether or not this critique, down to its details, can in fact be applied to phenomenology. My thesis is that phenomenology is able to withstand the poststructuralist critique of experience. Further, I will argue that post‐structuralism and phenomenology have more in common as regards the concept of experience than is usually admitted. For several reasons, it seems – as I will maintain – that both poststructuralist feminism and phenomenology are equally interested in a strong concept of experience and thus do not promote doing away with the concept.     

In Between Sex and the Sacred: The Articulation of an Erotic Theology in Jeanette Winterson's The Passion

Abstract

This paper explores Jeanette Winterson's manipulation of biblical stories, tropes and language in The Passion. Winterson herself has commented upon the considerable influence that Scripture has upon her imagination and this novel bears up her claim in the profusion of allusions it makes to Christian texts and practices. While there has been a considerable amount of criticism written upon her use of intertextuality involving Scripture, this paper seeks to confront the issue from a theological standpoint and ascertain the theological implications of her writing. In viewing Winterson as a theologian, the possibility is raised of disseminating a more unorthodox, creative approach to hermeneutics, which encourages both a recognition of the paternalistic, heterosexual and patriarchal rhetoric within Scripture and traditional interpretation, and the supplanting of it with a polyphony of voices, which reach beyond the boundaries of the original texts. The conclusion of this paper is that, by inverting traditional categories of the sacred and the profane, Winterson articulates a challenge to contemporary theology in its practice of reading, and also advances a new theological hermeneutic, which reclaims an affirming spirituality of the body and desire.     

Shameful selves: Women's feelings of inadequacy and constructed façades

This paper explores women's experiences of shame as a political, existential and psychological emotional state. In particular, it focuses on women's accounts of the specific shameful experiences containing the employment of a ‘façade’ to protect the ‘true’ self constructed as inadequate and shameful. The key argument in this paper is that women's shame should be understood as discursively, politically and psychodynamically over-determined. It therefore presents a reading of women's shame that brings together Foucauldian ideas of self-surveillance and positioning in discourse, with a psychodynamic theorization of shame as resulting from a constant negotiation between external forces and internal agencies. The paper also argues for the necessity of a multiplicity of readings to make adequate sense of such over-determination.