An Invitation to Faith, Feminism, and Scholarship: The Next Generation – by Kate Ott

Read Jennifer Harvey’s Essay, “Wrestling with the ‘White’ Part…A Life-Giving Feminist Challenge”
Read Rachel Harding’s Essay, “On Poetry and Mothering”
Read Melanie L. Harris’ Essay, “Teaching Womanism is a Revolutionary Act”
Read MT Dávila’s Essay, “Asking the Right Question”

I often agonize over how to live out my feminist values with respect to my vocation.  Imagine those cartoons with the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other . . . .

The two sides are not archetypal opposites in my story, though at times they feel that way.  On one shoulder sits a call to engaged activist work and on the other, a desire to teach and write in an academic institution.  I am not the only feminist activist scholar to feel this dilemma.  The authors in the edited volume Faith, Feminism and Scholarship: The Next Generation share commitments to engaged scholarship, reflective activism, and creative pedagogy.

I’d like to share a bit about the project and how it came to be.  Then I’ll turn to my own contribution to the conversation.

The book was two years in the making, which allowed the scholars involved to be in conversation, read and re-read each other’s essays, and discuss new ideas. When I started co-editing the book with Melanie L. Harris, I was working in a non-profit doing workshops in congregations and representing progressive faith voices in Washington. I saw this as “activist” and my scholarship was done in the evenings (or early hours of the morning). By the time the book was published in December 2011, I had moved full-time to Drew Theological School switching the hours I spent on activism to academic teaching and writing.

Editing this volume and shifting my job location have reinforced for me many of the points made in the essays and shared experiences of feminist scholars today. Feminism is a way of acting and being in the world; it is an ethical praxis. We could say: our desire to be engaged is our activism and our commitment to doing so critically is our scholarship. This is not something I turn off when class ends or leave behind when a rally closes down. Being a feminist activist scholar is a vocation that I bring to activities like coaching 4th grade girls basketball or having discussions with friends about presidential campaigns.

As we began our writing process, the group reflected on the volume Inheriting Our Mother’s Gardens, in which many of our academic foremothers discuss how their mothers shaped their location, commitments, and theo-ethical thinking. We share a deep, collective awareness and appreciation for where our work sits in a history of feminist and womanist scholarship and activism in Christian communities in particular. In light of that, we asked similar questions for a new time and with new scholars. We found it difficult to come to consensus on the use of the term feminist, what activism entails, and where the next steps will be in feminist activism and scholarship. That was precisely the beauty of the project: there was no one way or one answer.

In my chapter, “Feminism and Justice: Who we are, What we do?” I reflected on the New Testament passage of the Syrophoencian/Canaanite woman and her conversation with Jesus in Matthew’s and Mark’s gospel. As a young Catholic woman who grew up on a steady diet of Catholic Social Teaching, this passage allowed me to reflect on the blinders we often have when engaging in “justice work.” I resonated not with the woman in the story, but with Jesus both in my personal faith journey and experience in a faith-based non-profit. Do we limit who we serve because of biases we have, be they racial, sexual, geographic, and so on? Are we committed to one “kind” of justice: economic justice, environmental justice, sexual justice, and so on? The scripture passage was an obvious example for me of how Jesus might have offered a miracle to a gentile or to a woman or to a mother, but the combination seemed too much for him. After reflecting on how Jesus stumbles through his own limits on justice, I concluded:

Justice-seeking can be tiring and discouraging work. I find it very easy to be distracted by lack of resources, legislative set-backs, the growing number of poor people in the U.S. and globally without basic healthcare, and so on. When the challenges seem insurmountable, it is then that a vision is needed to sustain and enrich us to continue our work. As I mentioned earlier, I see this as the eschatological vision of a mended creation, as an imagined possibility.
In my advocacy work and personal life, I find myself confronting false limits, a sense of entitlement, and a lack of imagination or belief. Like Jesus, we have moments, maybe even lifetimes to step past our entry points, alter our worldviews, and move beyond our limits. Justice is possible in our lives, our organizations and our classrooms. It requires a method that calls us to authentically engage out of our own experience and location, moving creatively and collaboratively toward an imagined possibility of a just world.

The opportunity to work with the authors in this book was a creative and collaborative journey that yielded a diverse and complex imagined possibility for how we live into our faith, feminism, and scholarship as activist scholars.

Faith, Feminism, and Scholarship: The Next Generation
Table of Contents
Preface, Emilie M. Townes
Section One Coming to Voice: Faith and Feminism

• Remnants: Mothering, Spirituality, and African American Activism, Rachel Elizabeth Harding
• Christian Feminist Theology and Postcolonial Resistance, W. Anne Joh
• Feminism and Justice: Who We Are, What We Do, Kate M. Ott

Section Two Keeping the Light: Sharing Story, Sharing Strength

• Changing the Bulb and Turning on the Light: The Power of Personal Agency in Feminist Work, Malinda Elizabeth Berry
• A Solidarity- Talk among Women of Color: Creating the “We” Category as a Liberative Feminist Method, Keun- Joo Christine Pae
• A Latina Methodology for Christian Ethics: The Role of the Social Sciences in the Study and Praxis of the Option for the Poor in the United States, María Teresa Dávila
• Transformative “Moves” to Join: A Transnational Feminist Pedagogical Practice, Nami Kim

Section Three Walking the Talk: Embodied Feminist Pedagogies

• Womanist Wholeness and Community, Melanie L. Harris
• Crafting the Ground as We Go: “White” Feminism and the College Classroom, Jennifer Harvey
• Pedagogy with the Repressed: Critical Reflections from a Post- 9/11 Biblical Studies Classroom, Davina C. Lopez
• Vocational Journeys: Moving Toward a Creative and Disruptive Womanist Pedagogy, Deborah Buchanan

Kate M. Ott is a feminist, catholic scholar addressing questions of sexuality, children/youth, and the role of public, activist theology. She is Assistant Professor of Christian Social Ethics at Drew University Theological School in Madison, NJ. Her book Faith + Sex: Talking with your Children from Birth to Adolescence will be released Fall 2013. She is the editor of Feminism in Religion forum, a blog of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (www.fsrinc.org/blog). In addition to her academic teaching and lecturing, Kate conducts national workshops for congregations related to youth and parenting on topics of sexuality, technology, and cultivating just family relationships. You can follow Kate on twitter @kates_take.