The church's General Synod has, however, clarified that it will not abolish or substantially revise any of the currently authorized liturgies.

Nonetheless, this news made headlines and brought up questions of how religions refer to God. Is God male? What pronouns should be used to refer to God?

As a Catholic feminist theologian who runs a women's center at a Catholic university, I understand the impact of the pronouns Christians use for God.

Historically, Christian tradition has recognized many pronouns for God, including "he/him," "she/her" and "they/them."

This is partly because God does not have a gender.

Despite the diverse images used for God in Scripture and Christian tradition, male language and images predominate in contemporary Christian worship.

Many images for God

When we speak about God, we do so knowing that what we say is incomplete. All images for God reveal something about God. No image of God is literal or reveals everything about God.

For example, while Christians can refer to God as a king, they must also remember that God is not literally a king.

Calling God a king expresses that God is powerful.

However, it is not expressing factual accuracy about God's gender or implying that God is human.

Referring to God with many titles, descriptions and images invites many of us to recognize the mystery of God.

God is like all of these things but also more than all of these things.

Thomas Aquinas, an influential 13th-century Catholic theologian, asserted that individuals can talk about God in ways that are true but always inadequate.

Aquinas explained that our language about God affirms something about God, yet God is always beyond what we can express.

We express truths about God in human terms and constructs, but since God is mystery, God is always beyond these categories.

Scripture is filled with multiple images of God.

In some of these images, God is depicted as a father or male. Jesus teaching his disciples to pray the "Our Father" prayer is perhaps the most well-known example of a male title for God.

In other parts of Scripture, God is female.

The prophet Isaiah compares God to a nursing mother in the Book of Isaiah.

A mother hen gathering her chicks is an analogy for God in the Gospel of Matthew.

The Book of Wisdom, a book in the Catholic Bible, depicts wisdom personified as a woman.

Wisdom 10:18-19 states: "She took them across the Red Sea and brought them through deep waters. Their enemies she overwhelmed." This account presents God as female, leading Moses and the Israelites out of Egypt and into the Promised Land.

Depicting God as female in Scripture speaks to God's tenderness as well as strength and power.

For example, the prophet Hosea compares God with a bear robbed of her cubs, promising to "attack and rip open" those who break the covenant.

Elsewhere in Scripture, God has no gender.

God appears to Moses in the burning bush in Exodus 3, defying all gender categories.

The Book of 1 Kings presents a gentle image of a gender-neutral God.

God asked the prophet Elijah to go to a mountain.

While there, Elijah experienced a strong wind, an earthquake and fire, but God was not present in those.

Instead, God was present in a gentle whisper.

The creation stories of Genesis refer to God in the plural.

These examples emphasize that God has no gender and is beyond any human categories.

The social impact of male pronouns

Pronouns, like "He/Him" in the Christian tradition, can limit one's understanding of God. It can also make many individuals think that God is male.

It is not wrong to refer to God with male pronouns, but it can have negative social and theological consequences to refer to God with only male pronouns.

Feminist theologian Mary Daly famously stated, "If God is male, then the male is God."

In other words, referring to God only as the male gender has a significant social impact that can exalt one gender at the expense of others.

Referring to God only as a male can also limit one's theological imagination: Using many pronouns for God emphasises that God is mystery, beyond all human categories.

The Church of England is not only responding to modern questions about gender, but also continuing a long tradition within Christianity of referring to God as male, female and beyond gender constructs.

• Annie Selak is the Associate Director, Women's Center, Georgetown University, United States
• First published in The Conversation. Republished with permission

It is demoralizing to know that thousands of women have endured shame and great pain in silence for years.

In no way do I want to downplay the impact of their experience, nor to minimize the importance of this ongoing conversation men and women now are having.

But it's Thanksgiving. And even a Catholic feminist has to take a breath, during this month of shocking news, to take stock and give thanks.

I'm thankful for Pope Francis. Nope, he's not the pope of my dreams.

He has demonstrated, more than once, that he does not truly understand women, and he's stuck on the "women as mother" role model. He also has closed the door on the ordination of women in the priesthood, really an unforgivable lapse in judgement and even common sense.

But at least this pope calls us to help the poor, relieve income inequality and care for the earth. It's nice to see social justice trump sexual mores, at least as far as the Vatican is concerned.

I'm also grateful that the pope recently reaffirmed the primacy of individual conscience in making moral decisions, something Vatican II proclaimed quite clearly more than half a century ago.

In recent remarks responding to ecclesiastical critiques of his encyclical on marriage and the family, the pope said there was an important difference between informing the faithful and dictating what they should do.

He reminded them that they should support couples as they strive to make the decisions for their families, but he made clear that priests' dicta cannot "substitute" for what their hearts tell them is the right thing to do.

And he's been good at taking the clergy down a peg or two. He's spoken out on the evils of clericalism.

He's chastised priests who "feel they are superior," who "are far from the people" and unable to respond to their needs. Continue reading

• Celia Wexler is a journalist, feminist and nonfiction author

Reaction from the bishops' critics didn't take long. Some said the bishops themselves have very serious problems with pornography; others pointed out the not-so-distant sex abuse crisis.

The upshot was that the bishops ought to have different priorities.

One could be forgiven for confusing this disagreement with one from the 1980s.

Didn't it play out over a generation ago — with the result that our culture basically accepts porn as part of sexual liberation?

Perhaps. But the era of magazine and video porn has been replaced by online porn, and this may lead us to wonder if Catholic teaching on this topic is worth a second look.

Indeed, the bishops' new initiative resisting porn is likely to gain many unexpected allies, including many feminists.

The digital age has produced a situation in which on-demand video of virtually any sexual act is available for free at the click of a mouse. Last year, one site alone had 18.35 billion visits, leading some to call porn "the wallpaper of our lives."

And as virtual reality porn becomes available, it is difficult to see how this trend might reverse itself.

The result has been that porn now dominates the American sexual imagination. What sex is for has been "pornifed."

The rise of "hook-up culture" is instructive here: Such casual and impersonal sex is, unsurprisingly, very similar to a porn scene.

Feminists — from Andrea Dworkin in the ‘80s to Naomi Wolf today — are among the few allies joining the Catholic bishops in energetically resisting this trend.

The porn industry, it turns out, is overwhelmingly patriarchal and works out terribly for women. Continue reading

• Charles C. Camosy is associate professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University.

She was a staunch atheist, and spent the evening telling me, as many have done before, that Christianity is unavoidably and embarrassingly patriarchal.

She urged me to throw off the shackles of my misogynistic faith.

I am surprised at how frequently this happens at feminist gatherings.

Regularly I find myself the only Christian present, treated like an anomaly in need of conversion to fully fledged, religion-free feminism.

Often it takes me a while sheepishly to admit my faith in these circles.

Finally I pipe up that actually I do "believe in that stuff", between the tirades of "God is dead" and "Religion is the oppressor!" that usually emanate from the microphone.

In years of attending feminist seminars and marches, one thing has become clear: you are about as likely to meet another Christian there as you would a vegan at a meat-feast buffet. Continue reading.

Vicky Beeching is a theologian, writer, and broadcaster who is researching the ethics of technology.

Source: The Church Times

Image: Worship Leader

Indeed. Forty years after that statement and fifty years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique, the road that Friedan embarked upon has led women to places they have never been before—entering the workforce and academia in ever-higher numbers, yes, but also historically low fertility rates, no-fault divorce, and abortion on demand. The emotional consequences for women have not been rosy. Stevenson and Wolfers report that, in spite of the fact that all objective measures of women's happiness have risen, both women's subjective well-being and their well-being relative to men have fallen since the 1970s. For the first time in the last 35 years, men report higher levels of happiness than do women.

Friedan's diagnosis of "the problem that has no name"—women's sense of purposelessness—was justified, but her prescriptions have been disastrous. The road that Betty Friedan and second-wave feminists paved has led women to lives new and unfamiliar, but not to a solution to the problem. In following the impact of feminism through three broad categories of the life cycle—education, child-bearing years, and the empty nest—we see that the promises of feminism have fallen flat, as women have bought into a feminist mystique that has left them more alone and conflicted in their pursuit of fulfillment than ever before.

Friedan oft laments what she calls the "sex-directed education" of women. Women, she discovered when interviewing college girls to write her book, embark upon higher education primarily to meet a man and cannot be bothered with academic pursuits. Continue reading

Sources

• The Family in America
• Image: tumblr

It was a statement that seemed directly at odds with her circumstances: the 37-year-old is one of the most powerful women in the technology industry, Google's first female engineer and now head of a Fortune 500 company. After the birth of her first child just months into her new role, she resolved the angst of mother-child separation by building a nursery alongside her office so that she could bring the baby to work.

Mayer might not call herself a feminist, but in smashing through the glass ceiling of a male-dominated industry she is standing, in part, on the shoulders of all those feminists from decades and centuries past who spent their lives fighting for gender equality.

While her comments have offended the women for whom the connections between modern-day female liberty and the feminist movement are still obvious and strong, they also highlight the way in which progress has transformed the feminist ideal in the western world.

Although women still earn considerably less than men for the same work, are not well-represented at senior levels in business and politics and are often valued for their youth and beauty rather than their skills and expertise, they exist in a largely egalitarian milieu when compared to women in developing countries.

In Australia, girls are outperforming boys at school, more of them are going on to university, and less of them are being discriminated against in the workplace. There is no need for militant drive and a chip on the shoulder when the fight has already been won.

Despite all this, feminism is still as relevant as ever, if only as a structure with which to maintain the advancements that have brought us to this point and to ensure that we don't regress. Continue reading

Sources

• Catherine Marshall in Eureka Street
• Image: Literatur Haus Stuttgart
  

Catherine Marshall is a journalist and travel writer.

The nine women from Ukrainian feminist group Femen had their chests and backs emblazoned with the words "Pope No More." They didn't explain their action except to say they are "provocateurs" celebrating Pope Benedict XVI's decision to step down later this month.

At one point some of the women rang an enormous bell on display in the hall of the landmark cathedral, part of a set of new bronze bells cast for Notre Dame's 850th anniversary this year. Cathedral staff turned off the church lights and pulled the women away.

The women say they're also protesting in support of gay marriage.

France's lower house of parliament approved a bill Tuesday to legalize such unions.

Sources:

• Seattle Times
• Windsor Star (Photo)

Yousafzai first attracted the group's ire for her insistence on the right of girls to be educated. At the age of 11, she gained international recognition for her BBC blog, in which she documented Taliban atrocities as they burned girls' schools to the ground.

Following Yousafzai's shooting earlier this month, the Taliban released a statement claiming, 'We did not attack her for raising her voice for education. We targeted her for opposing mujahideen (holy warriors) and their war.'

And so, the Taliban continues to paint Islam as an inherently violent religion.

Muslims are required to model their lives on that of the prophet Mohammed. Consequently, it is easy to assume the roots of radical Islam can be traced back to the prophet himself, hence the numerous Western depictions of Mohammed as an intolerant, murderous tyrant. Such depictions have no basis in history.

Mohammed was trying not just to introduce a new faith, but to transform Arabian society. He blamed much of Arabia's ills on the concept of jahaliyyah. Referred to as the 'Time of Ignorance' by Muslims to denote pre-Islamic times, jahaliyyah, according to historian Karen Armstrong, is better translated as 'irascibility', an 'acute sensitivity to honour and prestige; arrogance, excess, and ... a chronic tendency to violence and retaliation'.

In establishing an inclusive Muslim community (ummah), Mohammed sought to overcome the tribal ethos that had led to customs such as lethal retaliation for perceived transgressions, honour crimes and blood feuds, and whose patriarchal nature bred violence against women including wife beating, forced marriages and female infanticide, all of which Mohammed condemned.

Indeed women had such low standing it is not surprising that, after hearing Mohammed declare women's rights to inherit property and determine who and when they marry, women were among his earliest converts. For this, Mohammed was ridiculed for mixing with the 'weak'. Continue reading

Image: The Guardian