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Created: October 9, 2002
Latest Update: October 9, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Study Notes on Sexism and God-Talk

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, October 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Chapter 10 of Rosemary Radford Ruether's Sexism and God-Talk: Eschatology and Feminism:

I apologize for jumping right to Chapter 10, but the recent 60 Minutes broadcast with Jerry Fallwell's pronouncement that Muhammad was a terrorist requires some theological background to establish an illocutionary discussion of the issue.At the same time that we need to listen in good faith to the validity claims of the Other, we must also have access to information that could serve to situate the validity claims in settings about which we have some understanding. Habermas would consider such access to information a part of the normative preparation for public discourse.

Ruether begins the chapter with reporting the perceptions of a psychoanalysts whose research and practice has found that men are far more concerned with immortality, with ways of guaranteeing their existence and achievement into the unknown future, than are women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman spoke of this as death-based religion, and spoke of women's concern with birth-based religion. At. p.236.

Ruether refers to three patterns of hope, not all of which include the concept of immortality. "Hebrew religion focises on the collective, ribal self, not the fate of the individual.: At p. 237.

More soon . . . . jeanne