A friend and local business owner posted this picture with a half-furious comment on Facebook yesterday: “Seriously?! Who steals Jesus?!” The baby Jesus had been stolen from one of the nativity scenes on display in her very lovely fair trade store, Just Good Trade: The comments that followed from her creative and wise friends were a great combination of frustration, sadness, and hilarious theological musing. They went more or less like this: We should pray for the person who steals... Read more
I’ll let actual Republicans do the full post-mortems on their collective failures in the 2012 election, and just say one thing here: It’s not about a failure to communicate conservatism, or even a bad candidate. It’s about a fundamental worldview that privileges whiteness over all other races. It doesn’t matter if the party dresses itself up with Michael Steele’s black face, or if it champions Marco Rubio and Susanna Martinez and Bobby Jindal and any other conservative with an ethnic... Read more
So, can a story make you believe in God? Note: In this post, I take up a central question posed by the framing of Life of Pi. If you don’t want to know how it ends yet, read this post after you read the book or see the movie. “So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story... Read more
In his book Living Buddha, Living Christ, Thich Nhat Hanh relates an episode in a section titled “To Be Grateful.” “During a conference on religion and peace, a Protestant minister came up to me toward the end of one of our meals together and said, ‘Are you a grateful person?’ I was surprised. I was eating slowly, and I thought to myself, Yes, I am a grateful person. The minister continued, ‘If you are really grateful, how can you not... Read more
Last week, at the annual meeting of Lutheran Women in Theological and Religious Studies at the AAR/SBL, I talked about how transgender activism and queer theory needs to be more a part of our theological reflections on what it means to be a woman. Here’s some of what I said, framed and informed by the work of Judith Butler, Julia Serano, and Jasbir Puar: The simple fact that there have always been individuals whose socially assigned and constructed gender... Read more
The American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature continue their annual meetings today and tomorrow in Chicago. I’ve already returned home (to be back in the classroom!) from two full days of meetings and sessions and conversations, so I thought I’d share a glimpse into this theologian’s time there. On Friday, I wrote more about the Lutheran Women in Theological and Religious Studies session at which I presented some new work that day. I’ll share a bit of... Read more
Today I’m at the annual meeting of the Lutheran Women in Theological and Religious Studies, an “additional meeting” of the joint American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature in Chicago. I’m presenting some new work on gender theory, trans activism, and theology that I’ll share some of here in the coming weeks. I first encountered this group, LWTRS, as a bright-eyed and overwhelmed graduate student in 1996. It had existed for a little less than years prior to... Read more
What if the fundamental problem that we need to work to overcome, that embedded flaw at the core of being human, isn’t mortality? Consider all the ways that we struggle mightily to overcome our mortality – to extend life, transcend our physical limitations, care for others’ most basic physical needs for food and shelter. Sometimes these are all good and necessary things. But is this the central human problem? Mortality? What if, actually, it’s isolation? What if we reconsider our... Read more
I’ve been wanting to read more about the content of Pussy Riot’s protest at the altar of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral for some time, and finally got around to this piece by Jeffrey Tayler in The Atlantic. I might be accused of liking irreverent feminist protests of religion a little too much, having thrilled at Madonna’s Like a Prayer video as a teen girl back in 1989. I was even strangely interested in Nicki Minaj’s performance both on the... Read more
I’m happy to share two responses to the inevitable days-after-the-election question: Now What? The first is from Kim Moore (fellow participant in the Faith and Reproductive Justice Leadership Institute at the Center for American Progress, pictured here with me and two other fab women near the White House in September) who posted the following yesterday over at Soul Revision: A couple of weeks ago I tuned into The League of Young Voters event and the most profound thing I heard came... Read more
Caryn Riswold
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