More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Arianna Neumann’s memoir, “When Time Stopped” (2020), is a mix of the daughters’ disinterest and feigned indifference, linked to our inability to ever really know and the refusal of our parents to tell.
“Holocaust survivors do not tell these stories, until they do. Daughters do not ask or search, until we must. And yet we know—students of the genre, as the genre—that all this trauma materializes in our families, in our genes, in our children and in our dreams.”
Ms. recently spoke with Rabbi Hara Person—chief executive of the Central Conference of American Rabbis and self-proclaimed “reader, writer, feminist and challah-baker” —about politics, women’s rights, and the role of faith-based leaders in 2020.
“We need to make sure people hear that there is no such thing as the one religious perspective or the one faith perspective on reproductive rights—we need to say loudly and clearly that there is a progressive religious voice on these issues as well as the right wing religious voice that they regularly hear. “
For the first time in many of their lives, Muslim men can’t go to the mosque. They can’t feel the peace and serenity, the connection with God. They must create this for themselves at home, a place that is now a hive of activity; adults home from jobs, children home from school. Muslim men are experiencing, for the first time, what women have come to expect.
We believe the Pell ruling will cause victims to lose their faith in the criminal justice system and also sends the message that survivors should stay hidden and silent rather than come forward and seek justice. But right now, we want victims to persevere. There is hope.
Many mosques have cancelled all services for all congregants—regardless of gender. However, at some point the lower level of restriction—and its explicit ban on women—may go back into effect. As a public health crisis looms large, it may not be a good time to bring up concerns of sexism. Perhaps there is never a “good” time to address discrimination, so the time is always right, and right now.
What progressive Christians and conservative, but not fundamentalist, evangelicals find outrageous in Trump’s behavior actually works to his advantage with white Christian fundamentalists, because his world views align with theirs—all in support of a white patriarchal theocracy.
The danger of Trump’s Commission on Unalienable Rights is that its understanding of religious liberty extends only to a certain kind of religion, conservative Christianity.
These were the subversive sisterhood of saints unsung in most seminaries, unheard of in most congregations, missing in the stained glass and absent in the canons codified by patriarchy. One decade ago, I began to paint them and write about them.
The Guru Granth Sahib says in Sikh scripture: “None may exist without a woman.” That’s a nice goal—but gender equality, Seetal Ahluwalia says, “is not where it could be or should be.” That’s why she created Young Khalsa Girls when she was just 10 years old.
The United Methodist Church voted this week to affirm the denomination’s anti-gay positions and rejected a plan that would have made LGBTQ inclusion an issue for local churches to decide. This is my response—as a feminist theologian, a queer woman and a Baptist in exile.
