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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
In this cultural and religious history course, the cultures of subordinated ancestors (Basques, Sami, Sardinians, Etruscans, Sicilians, et al. are studied alongside the subaltern cultures of the United States. In addition to Native Americans, Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans, we will study European immigrants who were considered black when they arrived in the United States (e.g., the Irish, Jews, Slavs, and Italians). Many ways of knowing are tapped: mythology, folklore, science (notably genetics and archaeology), art, poetry, literature, social sciences (e.g., anthropology), dance, and semiotics.
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1.00 - 3.00 Credits
In this course, we will deepen our understanding of the holy women from the three Abrahamic religions. We will examine their religious contributions in the midst of limiting sociopolitical difficulties that curtailed women's expression and spiritual self-disclosure. In our investigation spanning the ancient to the contemporary period, we will learn how they attained their goals resulting in the remarkable flowering of feminine spiritual instrumentality. We will endeavor to apply their methods to our immediate circumstances.
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3.00 Credits
This course compares and contrasts feminist approaches to sources of reliable knowledge (how we know), Goddess/God, humanity, nature and ethics in the contemporary Goddess movement, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Authors to be studied include the following: Alice Walker, Susan Griffin, Mary Daly, Judith Plaskow, Carol P. Christ, Delores Williams, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Rita Gross, Rita Nakashima Brock, Starhawk, Lina Gupta, China Galland, and Kwok Pui-lan.
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2.00 - 3.00 Credits
Process philosophy, especially as developed by Charles Hartshorne, presents a radical challenge to the understandings of divine transcendence in "classical theism" while affirming change, embodiment, relationship, and the place of humanity in nature. Many feminist theologies andthealogies reject the transcendent "male God-out-there" of traditional theism and share process philosophy's interest in positively valuinthe processes of birth, death, and renewal; the body; relationship; and human embeddedness in the web of life. This course will explore three related theses: that process philosophies can benefit from having their implicit critique of traditional philosophical ways of thinking made explicit; that a "feminist process paradigm" can aid feminist theologians and thealogians to articulate more clearly the radical differences oftheir visions from traditional theological views; and that classical theism is rooted in "matricide," the denial of the female body through whichwe are born into the physical world.
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1.00 - 3.00 Credits
The intersection of Jewish cultural and religious identity with the feminist movement has resulted in a flowering of new Jewish liturgies, prayer traditions, midrash, and rituals that are more female-inclusive or female-centered. Some leading Jewish feminist theologians, scholars, and authors to be studied include Judith Plaskow, Marcia Falk, Lynn Gottlieb, Ellen Umansky, and Anita Diamant.
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1.00 - 3.00 Credits
New directions in Christianity include several important developments, among them the ordination of women as ministers and priests, the open inclusion of gays and lesbians in church communities and leadership positions, a growing ecumenical movement extending beyond tolerance to mutuality, the dynamic intersections of faith and feminism, and growing interest in women saints, including Mary Magdelene as a leader in the early Christian Church community and possible bride of Jesus, Anne as the Grandmother of the Mother of God, Mary as a personal-cosmological Being, Black Madonnas, the "feminine face of God," Christ-Sophia, the Feminine Divine, and Goddesses as divine female archetypes.
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1.00 - 3.00 Credits
Through selective readings, class discussion, and personal reflection, this course encourages students to put their spiritual values and beliefs into action in the larger community. Students have the opportunity of integrating their academic study with practical experience. Students may deepen and broaden their concepts of compassion, spirit, and activism, and explore their educational and lifework goals and visions through community engagement and service. Students are expected to take 1 unit in conjunction with 60 hours of in-service learning, volunteering with a nonprofit community organization.
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3.00 Credits
This feminist cultural history course is grounded on Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum's books, Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy, and Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers. Students analyze evidence of genetics, archaeology, and folklore for the oldest veneration we know, a dark woman of Central and South Africa whose signs were carried by African migrants to every continent after 50,000 BCE. Other topics include the memory of the African black mother in saints' stories, peasant women's (comari, comadri, commere ) rituals, and vernacularart; persecution of dark others in Europe (Canaanites, Israelites, Muslims, and heretics); comparisons of white elites in the United States with persecution and social control of dark others; the rise of dark others in the world in 1950s and 1960s; and contemporary dark mothers.
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3.00 Credits
This class for all M.A. and Ph.D. students examines a diversity of womanist, feminist, mujerista, and postcolonial worldviews, theories, and activism in the United States and internationally. It reviews contemporary international dialogues and postcolonial discourses, along with modern and historic womanist-feminist controversies. Topics covered include the following: an examination of the intersectionality of gender, race, class, and sexual identity proposed by African-American and Latina feminists; feminism, gender, and activism among local/global/ Diasporic feminists of Africa, Asia, North and South America, the Middle East, and Europe; dominant and non-dominant womanist-feminist discourses on spirituality, religion, and gender; local and global feminist analyses of gender, violence, and war; the social construction of the self in a variety of social and cultural settings; and a cross-cultural examination of the experience and institution of motherhood.
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3.00 Credits
The primal human rites of passage-birth, sex, death, and rebirth-were celebrated in the rituals of the Mother and Daughter Goddessesthroughout Greece every spring and fall. Class participants co-create the ancient nine-day rite of initiation into the Greater Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone as celebrated at Eleusis, which intimate a spiritual death/rebirth. These rites were generated by priestesses, priests, and initiates-as individuals within community, within the cosmological context of the Sacred Marriage of Earth and Sky. The ineffable Mysteries imparted an experience of divine kinship and purpose (Aristotle), and a vision that would "give us a better reason to live with joy; and to die with better hope" (Cicero).
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