Rosemary Ruether to Berkeley: scholar-activist takes on new challenges

Catholic New Times, April 6, 2003 by Rosemary Ganley

Last fall, the internationally respected, pioneering coo-feminist theologian. Rosemary Radford Ruether retired from 25 years as applied theology professor of at Garrett Seminary near Chicago. She recently moved to California. where she will soon teach at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) at Berkeley.

"Ruether's 37 books and more than 600 articles over the past 30 years provide the bases of whole courses on feminist theology, coo-feminism, anti- Semitism, Third World feminisms, Palestinian-Jewish relations and Catholic church reform," said Rosalind Hinton of De Paul University in Chicago, who recently interviewed Ruether for the American faith and politics journal, Cross Currents.

"While many of us debate how to write an inclusive and embodied theology, Rosemary Ruether has unassumingly created not only a body of work but a model of scholarly activism based in marginalized communities," Hinton said. "Many of the founders of the modern feminist movement in religion, such as Beverly Harrison, Letty Russell and Rosemary are leaving their long held posts in the academy. We younger theologians must take up their work.

"Each of Ruether's books," says Hinton, "has come from personal friendships and activist commitment and a feminist community engaged in bettering their world whether in Africa, Palestine, the Philippines or Latin America"

"I got my start in the Civil Rights movement of the sixties," Ruether said to Hinton, "and went to Beulah, Mississippi in 1965 with the Delta Ministries. When Stokely Carmichael made his famous remark that the only role for women in the revolution was prone, we were already doing a race and class critique of the movement. Then we began a gender critique. I was teaching at Howard University, the black college in Washington from 1965-1976. It was an all-male faculty. I realized that black women would have to raise these issues .Now they have Kelly Brown Douglas doing that. My feminist theology developed during semesters away from Howard, at Yale and Harvard-on sabbaticals.

"It was clear then that my feminist work had to happen somewhere else, and I went to Garrett."

Contextualizing feminism deconstructing patriarchy

The most important development in feminism, said Ruether, has been its contextualization across global communities. Women in Latin America, the Philippines, and Africa, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Muslim women are at work deconstructing patriarchy in their religion.

"I guess I helped," Ruether says now, "by going places where people asked me to speak. These women did not need me to help them organize. They knew their own problems and how to address them. I encouraged their work and helped them legitimize their own questions."

For many years Ruether has worked in this way with Palestinian women (She names Jean Zaru); the Ecumenical Association of Third World Women Theologians (EATWOT); Maria Pilar Aquino and Ivone Gebara in Latin America; Elsa Tamez in Mexico; Mercy Oduyoye in Africa; Mary John Mananzan in Asia and Heather Eaton in Canada.

On her thirty year engagement in Catholic church reform, she says: "The church has shut the door to a lot of social change. The magisterium has tried to close all progressive doors, replacing progressive bishops with reactionary conservatives, driving women and liberation theologians out of seminaries and so on. It is a very sad history. Now, most progressive Catholic theologians are based in ecumenical settings, that is, Protestant-funded institutions.

"I am committed to trying to support the continuance of progressive perspectives in Catholicism but I think you can only do that independently of the hierarchy so that you cannot be shut down. I write for the National Catholic Reporter. I think every progressive initiative is going to be lay-organized and funded--for example, Catholics for a Free Choice. I call this work my 10 per cent tithe. But only 10 per cent. Otherwise, you will burn out with frustration. I don't think anyone should put all their energy into such a tiresome situation, but I think it is worth some energy to keep, shall we say, the pot stirring of the progressive wing of the church, so that it is not completely destroyed."

Feminism and family life

Hinton asked Ruether for advice for women trying to juggle their work as feminist scholars, and family life. "I would say it is a lot easier to do if there are two of you trying to raise children, for starters. Parenting keeps us grounded in a lot of realities not only in the work of bringing up little kids but in the questions that are important to young adults.

"There is a whole level of experience that has to do with helping young people develop that you do not get into if you do not parent or surrogate-parent. I am not saying people have to have their own children, but we have to move to the stages of life where we are concerned with helping the next generation of people."

Ruether spoke of the network of activities she and her husband Herman are leaving in the Chicago area. "I have had the Women, Ministries and the City" network that tied me to a number of organizations in the Chicago area and a network of Arab and Palestinian concerns. But we have parallel networks as we move west. We both did our degrees at Claremont and there are a lot of people in the Los Angeles area getting us involved in a branch of Sabeel, an ecumenical grassroots liberation movement among Palestinian Christians.