Alison Jasper

‘religion’ In Educational Spaces: Knowing, Knowing Well, And Knowing Differently

The focus of this article is how ‘religion’, as a materially heterogeneous concept, becomes mobilized in different educational spaces, and the kinds of knowing to which this gives rise. Three ‘case studyish’ illustrations are deployed in order to consider how religion and education produce kinds of knowing which may — or may not — involve knowing well and knowing differently. We argue that it is necessary to attend to both the understanding of religion that is being deployed and the specific educational imaginary within which such knowing takes place.

‘The Past Is Not A Husk Yet Change Goes On’: Reimagining (Feminist) Theology

Feminism is still often dismissed as an outmoded or discredited concept, out of touch with the feelings and desires of real women and men or antithetical to any proper vision of Christianity. So for the feminist theologian it is as important as ever to find ways of discriminating between truth and falsity and of discerning a future path. In this piece I try to articulate one possible feminist approach using insights from the work of philosophers Deleuze and Guattari—particularly on assemblages—and from the work of poet and theorist, Adrienne Rich, on revisioning. It is my sense that these tools may be able to help provide feminist theologians with the support we undoubtedly need if we are genuinely to be able to acknowledge the weight of our pasts and the risk of our futures without becoming overwhelmed or immobilized in a context which remains decidedly challenging.

Feminism, Religion and This Incredible Need to Believe: Working with Julia Kristeva Again:

In This Incredible Need to Believe (2009), philosopher Julia Kristeva identifies the present as a time of crisis identified with ‘ideality’; historically significant cultural idealizations are failing us, leading to social and cultural breakdown, which Kristeva believes is not being addressed in ‘secular’ western societies. Remarkably, she defends the universal significance of what she defines as ‘belief’, revisiting earlier work on language, literature and the unconscious, against the background of a recent revival of interest in ‘religion’. In an introductory way, this article outlines ways in which Kristeva’s analysis can help feminist readers to take bearings at this time.

‘RE/TRS’ is a Girl’s Subject: Talking about Gender and the Discourse of ‘Religion’ in UK Educational Spaces:

This article addresses what appears to be a retrenchment into narrower forms of identification and an increased suspicion of difference in the context of educational policy in the UK – especially in relation to ‘Religious Education’. The adoption of standardized management protocols – ‘managerialism’ – across most if not all policy contexts including public educational spaces reduces spaces for encountering or addressing genuine difference and for discovering something new and creative. A theory of the ‘feminization of religion’ associated historically with Barbara Welter, provides some useful insights as to why this might be, suggesting that those in British society who would prefer to see greater separation from ‘religion’ in ‘secular’ schools may well also be caught up in forms of gender stereotyping.

Womanspirit Still Rising? Some Feminist Reflections on ‘Religious Education’ in the UK

It is a complex and sometimes frustrating business to effect change that is in accordance with recognizably feminist principles in the world as it is and we inevitably risk confrontation, misunderstanding and compromise. In this paper I consider some of the complexities and obstacles to effecting feminist-friendly changes in educational spaces with specific reference to the field of teaching most familiar to a majority of us – Religion/Religious Studies or Theology and Religious Studies (TRS). I suggest an approach to change based on the mobilization of spirituality – characterized as becoming – as one metaphor that has been grasped to effect in the past by pioneers such as Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow to bring about changes in the western theological academy. This imaginative work has itself generated resistance and critique from scholars of religion and some feminists, but remains, I believe, one fruitful starting point for thinking through what needs to change in educational spaces identified as ‘religious’, and for avoiding the gendered traps that are laid for us in the process. Primarily these are traps that frustrate our abilities to explore the widest possibilities of difference/s and lead us back into the constrictions of sameness – here, that state of being tied either to a historical view of Christianity that privileges a disembodied, masculine, monotheistic God or to a post enlightenment view that privileges a disembodied, so-called ‘secular’ masculine rationality that just as fearfully excludes the Otherness of the feminine and all she represents.

Taking Sides on Severed Heads: Kristeva at the Louvre

Abstract The theorist and philosopher Julia Kristeva is invited to curate an exhibition at the Louvre in Paris as part of a series-Parti Pris (Taking Sides)- and to turn this into a book, The Severed Head: Capital Visions. The organiser, Régis Michel, wants something partisan, that will challenge people to think, and Kristeva delivers in response a collection of severed heads neatly summarising her critique of the whole of western culture! Three figures dominate, providing a key to making sense of the exhibition: Freud, Bataille, and the maternal body. Using these figures, familiar from across the breadth of her work over the last half a century, she produces a witty analysis of western culture’s persistent privileging of disembodied masculine rationality; the head, ironically phallic, ironically and yet necessarily severed; the maternal body continually arousing a “jubilant anxiety” (Kristeva, Severed Head 34), expressed through violence. Points of critique are raised in relation to Kristeva’s normative tendencies-could we not tell a different story about women, for example? The cultural context of the exhibition is also addressed: who are the intended viewers/readers and whose interests are being served here? Ultimately, however, this is a celebration of Kristeva’s tribute to psychic survivors.

Reviews and Interviews / Contributors

Reviews/Interviews/Contributors Tributes to Professor Andrzej Kopcewicz - Agnieszka Salska New Media Effects on Traditional News Sources: A Review of the State of American Newspapers - Richard Profozich Review of The Body, ed. by Ilona Dobosiewicz and Jacek Gutorow - Grzegorz Kość “Taste good iny?”: Images of and from Australian Indigenous Literature - Jared Thomas Speaks with Teresa Podemska-Abt Engaging the “Forbidden Texts” of Philosophy - Pamela Sue Anderson Talks to Alison Jasper

In Defence of Female Genius: Maude Royden and Passionate Celibacy

Genius is a concept, derived from a pre-Christian European past which has been identified with the creativity of an exclusively masculine, transcendent, disembodied and idealised god. This identification has encouraged the view that women, in so far as they represent both singularity and materiality, cannot exemplify the divine creativity of genius and that, for the same reasons, the feminine has no part in any understanding of the creativity of the transcendent divine. Julia Kristeva’s re-vision of “female genius” draws on psycholinguistics and also her own use of revolt to claim that the feminine and especially the feminine maternal, far from being excluded from genius, constitutes the key to its dynamics.

A case of misrepresentation: James L. Cox and Steven J. Sutcliffe, ‘‘Religious studies in Scotland: A persistent tension with divinity’’ [Religion 36 (1) (March 2006) 1e28]: A response from Religion at Stirling

A PhD student1 in our department who has a background in classical studies and is now researching the use of the World Wide Web by pagan groups was the first to see this survey on religious studies in Scotland. She felt worried at the time by the way the article misrepresented what we did at Stirling. Coming from another country to do postgraduate studies in religion here, she felt people in her country reading this journal would be given a false impression that could affect her career prospects. In particular the article stated that the typical orientation of the department at Stirling was ‘traditional textual-hermeneutical methodologies of Theology and Divinity’ when she, and subsequently the rest of us, felt this bore little relation to the breadth of what was actually being taught. Why was there no mention of the interdisciplinarity of our approach or the centrality of feminist, critical and postcolonial theory? Overall we felt there had been too little investigation of the kinds of modules which were actually being offered at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, or of the kinds of research and publications that members of the department were producing, including Fiona Darroch e not mentioned at all in the report e who at that time was and still is researching and teaching Caribbean literature and religion.

Raising the Dead? Reflections on Feminist Biblical Criticism in the Light of Pamela Sue Anderson's Book: A Feminist Philosophy of Religion, 1988

to justify what they do can benefit from the work of feminist philosophers of religion. Pamela Sue Anderson’s recently published, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1998), has been helpful in building my own case for reading the biblical text beyond simple critique. First of all, I believe that her work helps to give a clearer shape and definition to the criteria for value which are being used within feminist biblical interpretation. What informs the widespread idea of the Bible as either a live or a dead horse, for many feminist readers, is the conviction that the text must ’work for’ the reader. Anderson/s thesis