Rhetoric Race and Religion
We often ask whether religion is good for women but I think it’s just as interesting to ask “are women good for religion?” I am not sure they are at the moment. Here’s what’s been happening: women have been wanting greater roles, more leadership, greater participation and at the same time that has actually been becoming harder for them to do –leaving us with a bit of a crisis.
Women have always been interested in religion and been extremely active in religion; in fact they’ve been central to all the world’s religions. Historically women have been able to play very significant roles in religion. Nuns, for example, in the Christian tradition had huge power at certain times in history, acting as very independent groups doing their own thing without a great deal of clerical control.
And women around the world have always been central in all religions. That’s partly because women have always had a huge stake in developing their relationship with the divine, in getting closer to God, to what they see as the most true, the most beautiful, the most powerful; but also because women deal with the real everyday important issues of life and survival –with birth, with life, with marriage, with issues around illness and well being and of course death.
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