Ruether: Catholic reformer on Protestant soil

Christian Century, May 22, 2002

Pioneering feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether is heading toward retirement gradually. A reformist Catholic whose writings such as Sexism and God-Talk gave her hall-of-fame-like status among peers, Ruether recently ended 25 years on the faculty of one Protestant seminary and will spend three more years at another before retiring.

In spite of her association with non-Catholic faculties--or because of it--Ruether has remained a voice of influence in U.S. Catholic circles. "Frankly, if I hadn't been born into the Catholic Church I doubt I would have joined it," she said in an interview in the April issue of U.S. Catholic magazine, noting that her upbringing was interreligious. "My family is Catholic, Protestant and Jewish.... The Catholicism I grew up with, on my mother's side, valued serious intellectual religion, serious piety."

United Methodist--related Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary celebrated her quarter-century at the Evanston, Illinois, campus with an early April conference. Among colleagues speaking at the gathering was Rosemary Skinner Keller, dean of New York's Union Theological Seminary, who is coediting with Ruether the Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America.

That multivolume work will mark more than 30 books written and edited by Ruether, who held the Georgia Harkness Chair of Applied Theology at Garrett. Harkness, who taught at Garrett Biblical Institute in the 1940s, was widely regarded as the first professional woman theologian in the U.S. Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, a Baptist theologian, has been named Ruether's successor in the chair, effective January 1.

Ruether, born in 1936 in St. Paul, Minnesota, earned a master's and doctoral degree at Claremont Graduate School (now University) in the early 1960s. She and her husband plan to return to southern California for retirement.

But not for three years. Ruether will begin a three-year term starting this fall at the Pacific School of Religion, a United Church of Christ-related seminary in Berkeley. Her faculty appointment is a joint one with the Graduate Theological Union. She has been associated with PSR since 2000, dividing her teaching between PSR and Garrett.

In her U.S. Catholic interview, she said one of the things that has kept her Catholic is the importance of remembering the whole history of Christianity, including the Eastern church--"not just a Protestantized New Testament and then a jump to the 16th century." Ruether said she also wants to continue to support the reform wing of Catholicism. "To do that, I need to continue to identify as a Catholic, although I also function ecumenically and interreligiously, so it's not a limitation for me."

She popularized the term "ecofeminism" a decade ago. "The basic idea behind ecofeminism is that there is some symbolic and social connection with how woman and nature have been treated and how they're often symbolized in a similar way," she said. "Once you get that idea across, the big question is what you do with it."

However, academic friends say Ruether has been at home in a wide range of studies--the early church fathers, the historical and theological roots of anti-Semitism, liberation theology, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the mythology of the ancient Near East. Her most recent book, Visionary Women, looks at several medieval women mystics.