FLTN Meeting November 2024
2024 San Diego, CA
Feminist Liberation Theologians’ Network Annual Meeting Report
Friday, November 22, 2024, 4-6 PM PT
San Diego Hilton, San Diego, CA
Mary E. Hunt
Video of the meeting can be found at https://youtu.be/MaM6OEftuU4 .
The Feminist Liberation Theologians’ Network, sponsored by the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER), held its 28th gathering at the 2024 Annual Meeting for the American Academy of Religion in San Diego, California on November 22, 2024. More than fifty people attended from at least eight countries (including Canada, Germany, Italy, Peru, England, Australia, New Zealand, USA, etc.).
Colleagues from the AAR/SBL Women’s Caucus were in attendance. They spoke of the changes afoot in their regard as the AAR structure evolves. They asked for solidarity from FLTN to keep the Women’s Lounge and other program openings available. These have been a reliable training ground for future AAR leaders.
We moved to a land acknowledgement learning that San Diego County, where we were meeting, is home to more federally recognized Indian reservations (more than 17) than any other county in the US.
We included a moment of silence in honor of our longtime Australian colleague biblical scholar Elaine Wainwright, RSM, who passed away this year.
Introductions around the circle are always a highlight of the meeting. It was fascinating to see how many people are working on projects related to abuse and violence. Many people are deep into their research and activism on cognate topics.
This year’s FLTN topic, “Elections Have Consequences,” was announced well before the 2024 US Presidential election. Organizers realized that no matter who won, the results would be historic and far-reaching, with US citizens responsible to vote with an impact that reverberates worldwide. Indeed the results are mainly negative in many parts of the world.
The return of Donald J. Trump as the 47th President, rather than the election of Vice President Kamala Harris as the first woman and first woman of color, portends grave global consequences. Despite the scandal of January 6th, when Mr. Trump encouraged civil unrest at the US Capitol; his guilt in sexual and financial cases; and his lawless appropriation of government property, to mention but a few of reasons why voters were expected to run the other way, they did not. Unchecked White Christian Nationalism, rampant sexism, rejection of so-called elites, shifts in the allegiances of some Latino voters are just a few explanations in the post mortem of this election.
Immigration is the center-piece of the new administration’s shake-up of the status quo, ignoring democratic principles and further marginalizing those already left aside. Early Cabinet picks make it hard to overestimate the potential damage to health care, the environment, civil rights, reproductive justice, and trans safety, to mention but a few of the domestic challenges. Threats of tariffs, lowering of US environmental standards, possible withdrawal from NATO and God knows what US policies in Gaza and Ukraine create an uneasy world.
FLTN speakers offered brief remarks to spark discussion that followed in small groups:
- Rita Nakashima Brock, Senior Vice President for Moral Injury Programs at Volunteers of America, led off. Her historical contextualizing of the election and its expected aftermath grounded the day’s analysis. She concluded with a strong affirmation of the need to “cherish the fierce friendships that sustain us and that will keep us in the struggle.”
- Janice McRandalof the University of Divinity in Australia brought a welcome perspective from outside the US, looking at the election as one more in series of liberal democratic capitalistic outcomes. She highlighted the problem of seeing events in apocalyptic terms that reinforce colonial, Christian models. Lacking a new apocalyptic imaginary theology will have to do better to be useful, she concluded.
- Melanie Jones Quarles, Director of the Katie Geneva Cannon Center for Womanist Leadership at Union Presbyterian Seminary, analyzed Kamala Harris’ impact. She contrasted the uplifting Howard University experience of her youth when Barack Obama was elected president with the demoralizing Howard experience of her freshman niece there this year. Whitelash against Obama made Joe Biden look progressive in 2020. Both Kamala Harris’ vice presidential candidacy in 2020, and her presidential candidacy in 2024 showed that Black women are carriers of freedom and democracy. But they are also those who are called upon to clean up messes made by others. Still, Black women’s political movement is powerful and growing.
- Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, professor and president emerita at Chicago Theological Seminary, concluded the presentations with a resounding “The Hell You Say” address. She called out “the perfidy of so many white, cisgender women who choose their whiteness over gender every time.” Still, “What we do, what other feminist theologians do, matters. Our resistance matters…” she concluded in a veritable call to action.
Susan and Rita’s papers are attached. Janice and Melanie’s papers will follow.
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High-energy discussion followed. Some people reported still being in shock over the results, while others were unsurprised, but equally appalled.
Suggestions for common work include:
–a feminist liberation theological analysis of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion)
–a cross-cultural critique of Project 2025
–public education through the arts
–consideration of sanctuary places (religious institutions and others)
–a critical look at the use of TikTok and other social media for effective communication
–a project entitled Declaration of Gender Rights
–future plans for the AAR/SBL Women’s Caucus which has long collaborated with FLTN
–be intentional about lowering the age of those involved in FLTN
This session, both academic and activist, both input and conversation, resulted in many new connections among colleagues and many new ideas for future work. It is feminist studies in religion in action.
Next Steps:
Special thanks to our speakers. We needed this meeting and we used our time and space for resistance and creativity. The times call for all we can muster. Thanks to Elizabeth Lee for videoing our meeting.
Please send suggestions for speakers and topics for midyear and next year to mhunt@hers.com.
Feel free to circulate this report. We are hopeful that the papers will appear in a Living It Out section of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.
FLTN will meet next year in Boston, Friday November 21, 2025, 4-6 PM ET in person, and online in April 2025. You will receive information on these events. Meanwhile, use the Google list to share relevant information with all and consult our website www.waterwomensalliance.org for additional WATER information.
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Remarks by panelists:
We Will Not Surrender
Rita Nakashima Brock November 2024
In 1776, the following people populated North America from coast to coast and from the Rio Grande to the Great Lakes:
- Millions of Indigenous people who regularly fought colonizers in defense of their territories and people.
- Enslaved Africans who escaped or violently rebelled, often supported by indigenous tribes and colonial abolitionists.
- Western European colonists, merchants, missionaries, sailors, farmers, conquistadors, and slave-owning planters, as well as women legally considered property.
- European indentured servants who would later be called “poor white trash.”
- Filipinos kidnapped as crew on Spanish galleons who jumped ship in Louisiana.
This complex population mostly lived beyond the borders of the original colonies, but they would eventually experience the consequences of the colonists’ war against England. According to historian Jill LePore, the first feminist to write a comprehensive history of the United States, a major reason for that war was to protect slavery.[1]
The stateless colonists who subsequently ratified the Constitution were not noble champions of democracy, but ordinary privileged patriarchs of their times worrying about Indian Wars and slave rebellions and seeking to protect their assets. Their ranks included crooks, rapists, slave owners, and thieves who negotiated deals for a senate and electoral college that ceded extra power to the southern, slave owning states. All the while, they espoused, in impassioned, hallowed tones, values of human equality, liberty, and democracy that they reserved for themselves and denied to well over half the population.
Jill Lepore notes that these patriarchs held “back the tide of opposition to slavery by ignoring it, for the sake of a union that in the end, could not and would not last.” She describes its demise thus:
The Civil War inaugurated a new kind of war, with giant armies wielding unstoppable machines, as if monsters with scales of steel had been let loose on the land to maul and maraud, and to eat even the innocent. When the war began, both sides expected it to be limited and brief. I instead it was vast and long, four brutal wretched years of misery never before seen.
In campaigns of singular ferocity, 2.1 million Northerners battled 800,000 Southerners in more than two hundred battles. More than 750,000 Americans died. Twice as many died from disease as from wounds. They died in heaps; they were buried in pits.[2]
In the wake of the Civil War, whatever gains made toward greater democracy were achieved largely by those left out of the Constitution who believed in its rights and promises enough to face down legions of hate, intimidation, and violence to undermine the death grip on power of the ruling elites. Every small and large step toward a democracy, usually credited to presidents who were forced into making those changes, was hard fought, sometimes across generations of resisters who refused to surrender.
We inherit the brave legacies of those who have come before us, and we will betray them if we slide into despair. We will also give up on ourselves and all we’ve done for the struggle. We’ve worked to uncover histories of enslavement, genocide, exploitation, persecution, ecocide, theft, and exclusion and to tell the stories of suffering and harm in the past and in the lives of so many of us. We’ve resisted forces that want to whitewash the past and pretend it is better than it was. But now, we are facing a time that will take all of us to find ways to support each other with fierce determination to resist the designs of project 2025.
We’ve come very far since 1920. We’ve succeeded to the point that the backlash is now desperate to bury accurate history and silence truth-telling. We’ve come far, but we still have in place an undemocratic system that makes it possible for a presidential candidate to lose the popular vote but win the electoral college.[3] We’ve also succeeded to the point that we nearly elected an Asian/Black woman President of the United States. In past elections with an unpopular incumbent president, he or his party’s candidate won votes only equal to his approval rating. Biden’s was 37% in November. Kamala Harris beat the odds by 11% with 48% of the popular vote, she came within less that 2% of winning it. In the final count this election, slightly over half of voters preferred another candidate than the one who won the electoral college.[4]
Kamala Harris ran to be president of the country, for all of us. But she was handed an impossible task and worked her heart out to make it happen. I am deeply grateful to her. Her candidacy is a step that opened possibilities for the future, even if it didn’t happen this time. Such a close margin in a very high stakes election is a bitter loss, but it was not an overwhelming loss. Had Harris been elected, she would not have been a savior, but she would have given us space to keep working on change we need. As Lepore observes:
The American experiment has not ended. A nation born in revolution will forever struggle in chaos. A nation founded on universal rights will wrestle against the forces of particularism. A nation that toppled a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquility. A nation of immigrants can never close its borders. And a nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight forever, over the meaning of its history.[5]
This AAR we are celebrating the March 2024 induction of Judith Plaskow into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, the first feminist scholar of religion to be inducted. I would suggest that her career is a model of solidarity across lines of difference. She fought to open the academy to a wider and wider diversity of feminist, minoritized, and marginalized scholars, even as she also created contexts for challenging each other honestly about our own privileges and implicit biases. We owe it to her and our foremothers to resist what is coming and to strengthen our networks for the work facing us now.
We have the holidays to rest and get ready. We need time to rage, to grieve, and to recover our mojo. We must now, more than ever before in my seven decades of life, cherish the fierce friendships that sustain us and that will keep us in the struggle, wherever it takes us, with each other, however long it takes.
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[1]Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, W.W. Norton & Co., 2018, Part One. In 1772, William Murray, Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, ruled in Somerset v Stewart that it was unlawful for Charles Stewart to transport James Somerset, an enslaved African he had purchased in Virginia who escaped in England, forcibly out of England. Abolitionists interpreted the ruling a having outlawed slavery in England. (See https://aaregistry.org/story/somerset-v-stewart-ruled/)
[2] Lepore, These Truths, Ch. 8.
[3]Denise Lu, The Electoral College Misrepresents Every State but Not as Much as You May Think, Washington Post, Dec. 6, 2016 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/how-fair-is-the-electoral-college/).
[4] https://whyy.org/articles/2024-presidential-election-popular-vote-trump-kamala-harris/
[5] Lepore, These Truths, Epilogue.
The Hell You Say
FLTN Nov. 2024
Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite
I am a white, cisgender, middle class woman, but I try hard not to be a fool.
I could see the likely outcome of this election, probably since I was in high school when I became an antiwar activist, and I have struggled against it. I will continue to do so.
Patriarchy is lethal. I have known that for a very long time, and I suspect you have too. It’s been a long journey of resistance and activism especially around violence against women.
The companions along the way have been crucial in the past and will be crucial as we move forward. It’s not like we don’t know what to do, but the friends of the mind and spirit must be kept near at hand.
I have read bell hooks, oh so often, and believe her when she wrote[i]: “We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.”
Absolutely and one site for resistance for me is writing for the public. That is getting harder and harder as corporate media rejects any really important critique or alternative perspective. When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, he eliminated the section I wrote for and even deleted us from the servers. I can Google my columns from that decade, but I can only find the critiques of what I wrote, not the columns themselves.
I think newer streaming sources like Substack, and I have my own Substack (No Fear Religion and Politics[ii]), are an alternative, as is now Bluesky as decent people run hell bent for leather away from Musk’s X, leaving behind the pile of ashes smoldering by his torching Twitter.
And really, let’s just flag Musk here for a minute since this white geek raised in apartheid South Africa seems bent on bringing apartheid to this country.
But what absolutely gets to me is the perfidy of so many white, cisgender women who choose their whiteness over gender every time. They trade on the gains we have achieved through feminism and womanism and then turn around and betray other women. Not all, but far too many.
Adrienne Rich is another companion along the way, and I named one of my murder mystery novels, Where Drowned Things Live,[iii] after her poem “Twenty-One Love Poems”.
“Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.”
In my mind’s eye, I sometimes think you can see the women who have false consciousness floating along under the water of patriarchy rather like Ophelia. But they won’t come up and break through to the surface, breathe the air, feel the sun. I turn myself into a pretzel, dance on the head of a pin, shout it aloud, and still, they remain silent floating under water, oblivious to so much damage. And well, really, complicit in so much damage.
How to get out of this? Well, we know that too.
Critical consciousness is the way. I have lived and taught Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed for so long and honored the work of Frantz Fanon in his book Black Skins, White Masks.
Rich knows this too. “The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.”
Trump is not so much a politician but a myth with compelling emotional resonance. I am convinced that we need to generate a more powerful myth of liberation going forward.
But for god’s sake, does it have to be this hard?
Yes, says Rich, in her poem “A Mark of Resistance.”[iv] She imagines piles of stone set by her intention across fields in danger of flooding. She knows she can’t stop the flood, but she can leave her mark for others to follow.
A pile of stones: an assertion
that this piece of country matters
for large and simple reasons.
A mark of resistance, a sign.
What we do, what other feminist liberation theologians do, matters. Our resistance matters. It is a mark, a sign toward something that has never existed before. Those who hear us, those who come after, can follow the piles of stones and know they are part of that assertion that the country of freedom and equality is possible.
Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite is President Emerita and Professor Emerita of Chicago Theological Seminary. She has a Ph.D. from Duke University, a Masters of Divinity (Summa Cum Laude) from Duke Divinity School and a B.A. from Smith College.
An ordained minister of the United Church of Christ since 1974, she is the author or editor of thirteen academic books, including two different translations of the Bible.
Upon her retirement from CTS she became a fiction writer, publishing seven mystery novels. She has described these fiction books as “theology as performance art,” that is, a way to show liberation theology in action. Her full list of publications can be found on her Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/Susan-Brooks-Thistlethwaite/e/B001K8N1VG%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
Thistlethwaite is also well-known media commentator and has written numerous columns for the Washington Post and the Huffington Post as well as the Chicago Tribune. She now has her own substack. https://susanthistlethwaitewaite.substack.com/
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[i] Thompson, Lisa B. “With the death of bell hooks, a generation of feminists lost a foundational figure,” NPR December 17, 2021.
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/17/1064871075/bell-hooks-groundbreaking-feminist-legacy
[ii] Thistlethwaite, Susan. “No Fear Religion and Politics.” https://susanthistlethwaitewaite.substack.com/.
[iii] Thistlethwaite, Susan. “Where Drowned Things Live.” (Eugene, Oregon, Resource Publications, 2017).
[iv] Rich, Adrienne. “A Mark of Resistance.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed December 23, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=90&issue=5&page=40