World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 184

From within religious traditions have arisen attempts by as yet a small yet growing group of women to restate their positions with relation to text, authority and experience. This has led to a question of an increasing relegation of women's roles, representation, and experiences to the traditional dogmas, tenants, papal edicts, hadiths, and shlokas. A re-envisioning of tradition from women religious elders, scholars, and theologians is needed. The intersection of this group and feminist activist spirituality promises much for the new millennium. Concerns of gender equity and justice must sit beside that of reinterpretation of text as an equal partner. Liberation theology has already encapsulated these concerns: an activism sensitive to poverty, health care, equity, and gender, as well as space for spirituality. These two streams do merge, yet, the feminist movement has shied away from religion, as this could have been too restrictive for the growth of feminist ideal over the last 100 years. As women within religious traditions radicalized and as activists faced the reality of burnout-resulting from a lack of communitas, support, belief, and faith-the two trajectories of change came to offer each other strengths of different sorts. This common ground remains to be truly defined by women themselves and not at the behest of an aid funding organization, or of transnational conscience. Thus, notions of spirituality will need to change in order to accommodate emergent spaces of worship and notions of ritual and belief. In a world of rapid change, communalism, economic fundamentalism, and globalization, the polylocationality of meaning and respect of difference call for strategies of different kinds, networks and organizational structures that can respect this emergent praxis of action that heralds a different kind of space for the girl child today, woman of tomorrow. Feminism with spirituality and religion with feminism must emerge, with an engendered telos of spirituality and respect for the earth. Women and the Interpretation of Textuality
Textual analysis of the role of women in religious texts, by women, is the recasting of light on the meaning of womanhood and a powerful movement that holds keys to the future of religious movements and the women's movement. This, in conjunction with research on the social reality of women's lives, as well as the description of women's engagement in rituals and ascetic personal practices, paves the way for a more accurate phenomenology of women's spiritual lives. The intentionality and Dasein of women's existence will open new interpretations of religion and spirituality. By extrapolation from these sources it may be possible to see what is not being said in previous textual interpretations on women's lives. That which arises from the negative capability of text and experience rises to a richer account on women, as pointed out by Leslie.
Bynum's interpretation of cultural religious symbols as gendered and 'polysemic, leads to the question of the correct interpretation of another's religious tradition. Cultural comparisons are difficult to make. Thus, the femi
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