This week, I bought a copy of Womanspirit Rising to donate to my local free little library.
I also bumped into a lot of takes on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence.
I kind of wish more tech bros would have read the book before embarking on an endeavor they now recognize as an existential threat. Hell, I wish more of everyone would take some time digesting it. I’ll be thinking about why I want people to read this book, and then a bit about what it has to do with A.I.
Womanspirit Rising, edited by Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow, is an early anthology of feminist theology, originally published in 1979. I read it in college. I remember first coming across it at a friend’s house and starting to read Rosemary Radford Ruether’s essay “Motherearth and the Megamachine.” At the time, I found her opening sentence, “Christianity, as the heir of both classical Neo-Platonism and apocalyptic Judaism, combines the image of a male, warrior God with the exaltation of the intellect over the body,” to be deeply unsettling. But by the time the book was assigned in one of my classes a couple of years later, Ruether had become one of my favorite writers and what had seemed threatening had already become a basic starting point for how I think about religion. Revisiting this anthology is always a moment of coming back to some basics and seeing where I am now in relation to them.
The anthology is organized in four sections, “The Essential Challenge: Does Theology Speak to Women’s Experience;” “The Past: Does It Hold a Future for Women?” “Reconstructing Tradition;” and “Creating New Traditions.” A product of its time, its assumptions about “women” rest within white women’s experiences, a problem Christ and Plaskow corrected in their follow-up anthology Weaving the Visions. The first three essays diagnose the problems of traditional religion for women at a deep level, anticipating the anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s anthropological arguments in “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture,” highlighting experiential over institutional foundations for religion, and noting the extent to which exclusive male imagery for divinity reinforces patriarchal arrangements. The arguments point to the need for deep rethinking. The next three sections mine the past for alternatives, pose ways of reconstructing (not simply reforming) existing traditions, or seeking alternatives.
Coming back to this book is frustrating because it’s a reminder that so many of its insights have simply gone unheeded. In a remarkable passage from Georgia Harkness’s 1954 introduction to the Bible, she describes the experience of women being ignored as analogous to God’s attempt to speak:
When a woman tries to call her family to meals and they are so bent on their own pursuits that they do not come, or tries to correct a child who pays no attention, or talks into the telephone to discover suddenly that she has been cut off or that the other party has hung up the receiver, she is not really speaking to anyone. Try as best she may, if there is no response she is not disclosing anything to anybody but simply talking into the air. This baffling experience, which everybody has now and then, can perhaps suggest how God yearns to communicate far more important messages than any of us ever have to give, but is unable to do so except to receptive persons.
And looking at the state of the world, it’s apparent that most people simply have not listened to feminist creativity in religious thought. I feel this frustration right now in relation to two social contexts: Having taught mostly Latina students at a Catholic college for the last 8 years and the hegemony of Silicon Valley.
With regard to my students, I encounter students who have a strongly rule-based, authoritarian understanding of religion. When I get into the kinds of questioning that feminist theology encourages, I’ve lost track of the times I’ve been asked, “are you allowed to do that?” I often feel like I am teaching people to see the bars of their prison. There is a rich tradition of Roman Catholic feminism, and my institution carries it forward, but it can take me off guard how much work it takes to get the most basic starting points of feminist theology, articulated 40 or 50 years, ago to stick. So, I find a gap between my sense that feminist work in religion has come a long way and the fact that I keep having to come back to square one.
On the other hand, as news about Chat GPT and other aspects of Artificial Intelligence proliferate, I keep coming back to the diagnoses of technology as a kind of masculinist quest that the book offers. As Valerie Saiving noted in her 1960 essay, reprinted as the first essay in the volume,
For masculinity can with good reason be defined as the distance between spirit and nature. Because of his less direct and immediate role in the reproductive process, including nurture during the long process of human infancy, man is, in his greater freedom, necessarily subject to a kind of anxiety - and consequently, to a kind of creative drive - which is experienced more rarely and less intensely by most women.1
It’s this kind of anxiety that I see in the compulsive drive to “innovate” technology and simultaneously fear its results that we’re all living with.
I have generally negative reactions to Artificial Intelligence, but Religion for Breakfast had a particularly good video on the religious underpinnings of A.I. that reminds me that both overwrought hopes and overwrought fears have less to do with the promise and perils of techological change, and more to do with established religious narratives that address other existential conundrums. I recommend it.
Writing today was harder than it was the last couple of Saturdays. There’s still a lot in my head that’s just not coming out or coming together. But staying with writing as a habit means writing on the days it’s not as much fun as the days when ideas just spill out.
See you next Saturday!
Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” in Womanspirit Rising, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, 33.