The Religious Imagination of American Women

255 Pages·1999·2.074 MB·English

by  Mary Farrell Bednarowski

The Religious Imagination of American Women
RELIGION IN NORTH AMERICA
Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, editors
William L. Andrews, editor. Sisters of the Spirit:
Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century
Mary Farrell Bednarowski. New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America
Mary Farrell Bednarowski. The Religious Imagination of American Women
Bret E. Carroll. Spiritualism in Antebellum America
David Chidester. Salvation and Suicide:
An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown
David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, editors. American Sacred Space
John R. Fitzmier. New England’s Moral Legislator: A Life of Timothy Dwight, 1752–1817
Thomas D. Hamm. God’s Government Begun:
The Society for Universal Inquiry and Reform, 1842–1846
Thomas D. Hamm. The Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800–1907
Jean M. Humez, editor. Mother’s First-Born Daughters:
Early Shaker Writings on Women and Religion
Carl T. Jackson. Vedanta for the West: The Ramakrishna Movement in the United States
David Kuebrich. Minor Prophecy: Walt Whitman’s New American Religion
John D. Loftin. Religion and Hopi Life in the Twentieth Century
Phillip Charles Lucas. The Odyssey of a New Religion:
The Holy Order of MANS from New Age to Orthodoxy
Colleen McDannell. The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840–1900
James H. Moorhead. World Without End:
Mainstream American Protestant Visions of the Last Things, 1880–1925
Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, editors.
The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century
Robert A. Orsi, editor. Gods of the City:
Religion and the Contemporary American Landscape
Richard W. Pointer. Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience:
A Study of Eighteenth-Century Religious Diversity
Sally M. Promey. Spiritual Spectacles:
Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism
Stephen Prothero. The White Buddhist: Henry Steel Olcott and
the Nineteenth-Century American Encounter with Asian Religions
Kay Almere Read. Time and Sacri¤ce in the Aztec Cosmos
Russell E. Richey. Early American Methodism
A. Gregory Schneider. The Way of the Cross Leads Home:
The Domestication of American Methodism
Richard Hughes Seager. The World’s Parliament of Religions:
The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893
Ann Taves, editor. Religion and Domestic Violence in Early New England:
The Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey
Thomas A. Tweed. The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912:
Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent
Valarie H. Ziegler. The Advocates of Peace in Antebellum America
The
Religious Imagination

of
American Women
MARY FARRELL BEDNAROWSKI
Indiana
University
Press
bloomington and indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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© 1999 by Mary Farrell Bednarowski
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any
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and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher. The Association of American University Presses’
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requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
manufactured in the united states of america
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bednarowski, Mary Farrell.
The religious imagination of American women / by Mary Farrell
Bednarowski.
p. cm. — (Religion in North America)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-253-33594-9 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-253-21338-X (pbk. :
alk. paper)
1. Women—Religious life—United States. 2. Religious thought—
United States—20th century. 3. Feminist theology. 4. United
States—Religion—1965– I. Title. II. Series.
BL625.7.B425 1999
200′.82′0973—dc21 99-23096
1 2 3 4 5 04 03 02 01 00 99
For Keith, Betsy and Jason, and Paul
and
Irene Smith Bednarowski, Queen of Mothers-in-Law
RELIGION
for Anne E. Patrick, SNJM
I grew up in this house.
It is heavy and dark.
The ground on which it stands
is beginning to cave in.
When it rains
the foundation leaks.
I watch and pray for a rainbow.
Once the walls were familiar,
comforting. But now the rooms
feel small and cramped,
moldy and gray.
It’s been remodeled time
and again, but the basic structure
remains the same.
Old materials, still functional,
beautiful . . . but I want something spacious
with warmth and light.
I am drawn to houses in the East,
but I live here, the hallways of its history
lined with age old manuscripts
full of architectural plans.
I rip them apart page by page
searching for a house
without walls.
Pam Wynn
Contents
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xii
1.
American Women as Religious Thinkers:
Dissenting Participants 1
2.
Ambivalence as a New Religious Virtue: The Creativity
of Women’s Contradictory Experiences of Their Traditions 16
3.
The Immanence of the Sacred:
Women’s Religious Thought Comes Down to Earth 44
4.
The Revelatory Power of the Ordinary and
the Ordinariness of the Sacred: Mixed Blessings 86
5.
“Relationship” and Its Complexities:
Inhabiting the Cosmic Web 120
6.
Healing and Women’s Theological Creativity:
Strategies of Resistance, Acceptance, and Hope 150
Epilogue: Après le déluge What’s Next? 184
Notes 189
Index 233

Foreword
Mary Farrell Bednarowski’s new book represents scholarship come of age.
Women’s studies, feminist studies, and gender studies have all interwoven
themselves with contemporary interests in American religion and spirituality
to produce a series of specialized studies of women and religion. Building on
that work and in®ecting it with her own particular concerns and approach,
Bednarowski here offers an authoritative synthesis not of women’s religious
experience, as many would be tempted to do, but of women’s religious thought
in the American context. Her period is the extended present—public expres-
sions of American women thinking religiously from 1985 onward, with spe-
cial attention to the 1990s. And her focus is on the comparative task, cutting
across different traditions in terms of the ¤ve themes that frame her interpretive
vision.
First and above all, Bednarowski argues, these women’s religious thought
is ambivalent, for it is the product of people who are both insiders and outsid-
ers in their traditions and who therefore stand in a place of creative tension
that is positive. Second, Bednarowski tells us, women’s religious thought is
characterized by a sense of the immanence of the divine or sacred world,
with a strongly persistent habit of bringing religion down to earth. Third, says
Bednarowski, if women favor religion on the ground, they also celebrate the
revelatory power of the ordinary, and their claim that the ordinary is sacred
is important for its capacity to generate a certain kind of religious thought.
Fourth, she says, women’s religious thought is characterized prominently by
themes of relationship and relatedness, important again here for their ability
to yield fruit in religious thought. Finally, in Bednarowski’s reading, American
women’s religious thought is pervaded by the theme of healing, a healing that
is conceptualized in ever more expansive ways to encompass well nigh the
whole of life.
In positing and describing all of this, Bednarowski treads ground that is
laced with scholarly land mines. Is she trying to claim that there is something
unique about women as women when they are being religious? And should
she be? Are the themes she uncovers so general as to be simply descriptions of
the human? Or are they merely truisms about women conveyed ubiquitously
by American vernacular culture? What role do history and lived experience
play in thought? Do all women in America ¤t into the same or similar religious
molds? Can Bednarowski talk about thought at all except in the context of an
ix
foreword
ongoing and lengthy tradition of self-conscious theology directed by seminary
schools and professors? And what relationship does thought have, anyway, to
issues of women’s spirituality, which are everywhere seemingly à la mode?
As readers will ¤nd here, Bednarowski is an astute guide through and past
the land mines. She is unwilling to say that women’s religious thought in the
land of the free is totally distinctive, a separate species of religionizing from
that of the male chorus. Neither is she willing to write it off as being just like
the theological expressions of men. She understands the banality that some
of the themes and claims come trailing, but she is also a depth reader who can
move past surface to recover a substantive dimension beneath the truisms. She
takes history seriously; but she takes gendered experience as seriously. She
reads feminist theologians carefully, but she also reads op-ed pieces and more
ephemeral literature. She ¤nds women’s thought inevitably tied to experience
and action, so that her work leads her into the realm of women’s spirituality
that in one sense she has consciously eschewed in her decision to focus on
“thought.” And she writes with an ease and a grace that bring the reader in
close touch with her material.
In this context, two abilities most distinguish Bednarowski’s contribution
in these pages. First, Bednarowski brings to her subject a long background in
studying new religious movements in the United States and as long a back-
ground of involvement with mainstream Christianity, through both her teach-
ing situation and her personal religious history. Thus, she represents a bal-
anced voice—not just a student of the New Age who can explore Goddess
spirituality, Wiccan practice, feminist eco-theology, and the like, not just a lib-
eral or progressive Christian scholar who can tell us all about the church and,
in a few cases, the synagogue. Moreover, although liberal Christian feminist
thought forms the center of Bednarowski’s volume, balance opens into a catho-
licity of vision that is able to encompass not merely the Goddess and the
church, but also an even more extended sampling of the intense religious plu-
ralism that characterizes America at the turn of the millennium. African-
American, Latina, and Native American women all have found their voices on
her pages. So have Buddhists and Muslims and assorted others.
Second, and perhaps most exciting, what Bednarowski is able to do—and
to do so well—in her study is to construct a theology in ways appropriate to
a scholar of American religious history in postmodern times. By naming the
characteristics of women’s religious thought, by linking themes with other
themes—ambivalence toward at-homeness linked with the ordinary, commit-
ment to healing linked with the primacy of relatedness, comfort with imma-
nence linked with an embodied and “material” spirituality, for example—
Bednarowski is engaged in declarative practice that will shape what others see
and say about her subject. By pointing the way for readers to see what she says
is there, she also points the way in de¤ning a theology. This particular religious
landscape will look different to readers after they encounter Bednarowski’s
work.
x