Kindle Notes & Highlights
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January 14 - January 30, 2021
This book rests on three positions: first, that what is most important is not whether the feminine is defined by society or endemic to the person but whether or not women themselves determine the content and the conclusions of those definitions. The feminine is not something that can be defined, determined, and decided by men. Women have for far too long been assigned sex roles by male authorities, and to the detriment of both sexes.
The second principle upon which this book stands is the concept that any form of dominance which leads to exclusion or underdevelopment must be exposed, critiqued, and recast if society in all its forms is to come to completion.
The third principle underlying this book is that spirituality itself rides on an understanding of these propositions. Spirituality that does not release the feminine dimension in both women and men leaves them h...
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Feminism regards the human race as one humanity in two genders and sets out
to make the fullness of human...
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Feminism is, in other words, not a woman's problem; it is a human problem.
Feminism, on the other hand, is a way of seeing. It is a new worldview. It is an attitude toward life. It values things differently than did its forebears.
It sees the world as whole only when it is both male and female, both female and male - not only in its theory but also in its shapes, in its designs, in its substance, in its daily desolations, and in its basic delights.
What feminists value and do not have, what feminists need but do not receive - equality, respect, participation, resources, access - accounts at the same t...
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It is time to reappraise everything we know about social quality, to balance it, to extend it, to...
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The truth is, however, that men do cry. They cry because they hurt. They cry because they care. They cry because they can...
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They live false lives, in other words. They learn to accept stoically what should ...
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Both genders - both women and men - are allowed to be only half of what they are.
The theologies and spiritualities of every age have been designed or at least evaluated by men. Popes required clerics to determine whether or not the women mystics of the world were orthodox. Protestant pastors and Catholic priests burned women at the stake for daring to preach the God in their hearts.
Massacre is a public act; slavery is a public act; the repression of half the human race is a public act.
Whatever impeaches life's claims, as spirituality does, requires spiritual evaluation itself.
Anything is holier than being in an aimless rut that derives from nothing with which we can any longer identify and is going nowhere we want to go.
The living God is the urge to life at the deepest level of our hearts. God is changing changelessness.
In fact, we spend most of life going from doubt to doubt, from difficulty to difficulty, unlearning today what we thought we had finally mastered yesterday so that, if we're lucky, we manage to stay young in heart and open to tomorrow.
No one understands life. We simply grow into it.
What is important is that at the conclusion of all the theorizing we will hav...
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When life the gadget slips through our fingers, we begin to see life as gift. Having heaped up things and rituals and people and positions only to find ourselves still empty, still wanting, however good our motives; having discovered that the hollow place never goes away no matter how we gorge it, we look again at things we took for granted, and, if we're lucky, this time discover in them what we have never seen before. Pain and failure make astounding spiritual directors. Hurt and disappointment make amazing guides. Dislocation and rejection make spiritual creatures of us all. Uncertainty and
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We have, as a result, in the United States and in other countries, reduced social services in order to have the money to build planes and missiles and tanks and guns instead. Even in peacetime.
We have made money our god and called it the good life.
We have reduced life to the lowest of values so that the people who have much will not face the prospect of having less.
We call them unique and say they have special natures, which we then ignore in their specialness.
We render half the human race invisible and c...
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We have been raised to believe that spiritual questions are personal questions, that the spiritual life is a relationship between me and God rather than between me and the remainder of the universe.
Maybe we need to realize that spirituality is what we do because of what we say we believe rather than the pursuit of belief itself.
The dichotomy, the division, the double standard of spirituality pulses through life too clearly to be ignored.
The ramifications of trust for the bonding of peoples and the collaboration of groups are legion. Fear of the other melts. Colors fade into one: human. Hierarchies shrink down to size. Differences become gift. Feminism
constitutes the
counterpoint to authoritari...
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Feminist spirituality emerges from a commitment to consensus rather than control.
The insights of the sincere heart mean more to a feminist than what lies in the charters of patriarchal systems, regardless how ancient, regardless how revered.
A society such as this does not question why there are so few who are so rich; a society such as this questions why there are so many who are so poor.
The richest 20 percent of the world's population control over 82 percent of the world's wealth. Only a0 percent of the world's population over the age of 6o have any kind of social security. Almost one billion people - about one-fourth of the population of the earth - already live in areas of severe
desertification while the world goes on losing the area of one soccer field per second, and no one does anything about it. The ozone layer, the placenta of the earth, is ruptured; the air we breathe is toxic; the oceans are polluted; the animal species are depleted; the fabric of life is rent and sundered for the poor, exotic and abundant for the rich, absent and out of reach for women, who make up two-thirds of the 850 million illiterates on the globe. 9'
In a society such as this, the man who does not kill for sport; who is comfortable with women, seeks them out for their ideas, and promotes them for their insights; who has no need for conspicuous consumption and pays an honest day's wage for an honest day's work is uncomfortable, is out of sync, is in search of a feminist spirituality.
We need to come to see ourselves as one more creature dependent on all the others more than they are dependent on us.
We need to live more simply, take up less space on the earth, and realize the functions of the rest of life so that creation may re-create itself.
We need to convert dominion to companionship and patriarchy to fem...
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itself is in danger from a patriarchy that has admittedly taken science, business, and technology to unparalleled heights but has become pernicious in the proces...
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We need a feminism based not on femaleness, not on human needs alone, but on a spirituality that is wholistic.
Feminist spirituality looks at pride and
strength and finds them wanting in the face of the dignity of humility and the gifts of vulnerability. Feminist spirituality encourages the kind of self-knowledge that recognizes both its strengths and its limitations. It respects the vulnerability that gives a person the capacity for pain. Then, no matter what, I can accept my weaknesses and enjoy my gifts. Then the person of the other, the gifts of the other, are always safe in my presence and sought in my life because I know that it is not necessary to diminish the other in order to
