We plan to run extracts from the talks by Don Cupitt and Stephen Batchelor in later issues. The full text of Don Cupitt’s address is obtainable from the Network Secretary, 15 Burton St, Loughborough LE11 2DT, price £1 A little welcome perversity and a dash of odd, outrageous vision is what ROSIE MILES finds in two recent books on radical feminism and radical ‘thealogy’ herstorical processes Is There a Future for Feminist Theology? Eds. Deborah F. Sawyer and Diane M. Collier (Sheffield Academic Press).
Quintessence...Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto (The Women’s Press).
Is There a Future for Feminist Theology? has two parts: “Text and Her-Story Revisited” and “New Directions for the New Millennium”. The four essays in part one all fall into a revisionist or reformist category, reinterpreting or interrogating biblical and male-authored church texts. The rationale of such an approach is to offer more womenfriendly readings of the biblical canon and/or expose the limitations of such texts.
It’s bonkers, but it’s very good bonkers.
By contrast, Mary Daly’s Quintessence is at one level the kind of bonkers radical feminism that rational feminist theologians can only too easily categorize and dismiss. Yet it is highly readable and compelling. The book has, as integral to its structure, a utopian, almost sci-fi concept in that the work presents itself as being the “50th Anniversary 2048 BE (Biophilic Era) Edition”. The Biophilic (meaning “love of life”) Era, which started in 2018, “signifies the end of the necrophilic era, that is, patriarchy”.
Quintessence consists of five chapters which outline the evils being perpetuated against women and the planet at the end of the 20th century, but at the end of each chapter Daly shares “Cosmic TEI AE TELE iE eS) While this approach is undoubtedly valid, the positioning of these essays prior to the “New Directions” section suggests that they offer what have now become relatively “traditional” feminist theological methodologies. It also highlights differences between feminist theologians over the degree to which they remain connected to a church or faith tradition, with Daphne Hampson and Mary Daly the most significant thinkers who regard Christianity as beyond any kind of feminist redemption.
Melissa Raphael and Beverly Clack, the high priestesses of academic “thealogy” in this country, both have essays included in part two. They both discuss, among other things, the realist/nonrealist issue in relation to the study of the God/ess (thealogians don’t tend to get hung up on whether she “really” exists or not). The increasing importance of the specific study of masculinities is in evidence in Sean Gill’s “Christian Manliness Unmanned” which looks at 19thcentury constructions of an appropriate Christian masculinity.
Arguably the “queerest” piece in the volume is Gerard Loughlin’s “Sex Slaves: Rethinking ‘Complementarity’ after 1 Corinthians 73-4”. Loughlin make persuasive links between prostitutes’ accounts of the men they service in New York in the 1980s and Paul's notion of bodily giving in Corinthians.
Oh that all biblical criticism was this perverse!
Tina Beattie asks in her essay why “secular” feminists seem to have a blind spot in acknowledging the work of feminist theologians, and perhaps one answer would be that it is because feminist theologians don’t bother to read the work of “secular” feminists or other theorists (with the possible exception of French feminist Luce Irigaray who gets a mention here, and who has also been used by other feminist philosophers such as Grace Jantzen).
Comments and Conversations” with Annie, a woman aged 30 who lives in 2048BE and who thus has never lived under patriarchy but is existing in a liberated future time. Through these conversations Daly is able to offer a utopian alternative perspective to life in the 1990s. There is a strong sense of the connectedness of generations of women here, and the debt that the young have to their foremothers (Annie's “Network” name is “Anonyma”, in honour of all the unknown women who have struggled so that she may have a freer future), and Annie is only too keen to learn about the history of the Women’s Movement back in the 20th century.
And the 1990s in Quintessence are pretty awful. Global warming, cloning, genocide, the Promise Keepers, postmodernism and the backlash against feminism and women are just some of the things wrong at the end of the century. My indiscriminate banding together of these unequal evils is no doubt just the kind of postmodern irresponsibility that Daly hates. This is undoubtedly a book of much passion and anger: Daly has a vision arguably far more expansive than any of the contributors to Is There a Future for Feminist Theology? If her vision seems odd, outrageous, laughable, then Daly would say that is because it is incomprehensible from the standpoint of patriarchy.
However, there is also a clear sense in this work that the feminism of the 1970s, which does rather become a nostalgic golden age, has fizzled out, with Daly almost presenting herself as a lone heroic voice still fighting for The Cause.
It’s bonkers, but it’s very good bonkers. Daly’s American outlandishness is a necessary foil to British feminist theology’s relative conservatism. Almost the final words must go to Daly: “The quest for Quintessence...means throwing one’ life as far as it will go”. A challenge to all of us.