Editorial

In the Spring of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic swept across the world, and communities locked down. Circumstances that were unimaginable became real within days, even hours, as our lives changed beyond recognition. At the time of writing, we have no idea whether the worst is past or is still to come.

For many, of course, this has been overwhelming and catastrophic. Healthcare providers, caregivers and suppliers of essential goods and services have found themselves on the front line. Large and small businesses are hanging on for dear life. Community organisations, congregations, voluntary bodies and charities have seen normal activities suspended. Whole populations, already devastated by war or poverty, have been left horribly exposed, and individuals have faced the horrors of isolation from all the ordinary contacts that make life – and death – bearable in such alien circumstances.

Any far-reaching change has the greatest impact on those who have the least access to resources. Women are disproportionately affected by poverty, conflict, violence and abuse. As responsibility for education and caring focuses back on the home, women still bear the bulk of the responsibility. The majority of jobs that will be lost or downgraded will be those traditionally filled by women. After generations of painfully slow progress in women’s access to the public sphere, there are those who fear that our lives will retract again. And that means that the transformations that take place when women speak will stop happening.

Education and Academic life have felt the impact as much as others. With face-to-face contact and physical access to libraries and other resources severed in an instant, we have had to find new ways of teaching and supporting our students, and resourcing research. Much of academic life has moved online.

Teachers in higher or further education are in contact with people at crucial points in their lives. For the most part, these are young students, apprentices or trainees, tentatively exploring the world they will emerge into as adults, professionals, researchers and potential world-changers. Others are reaching out to learning in middle years or later in life, with the aim of changing careers, following a vocation, or simply entering into a world of discovery that was inaccessible to them in earlier years.

I have worked with adult returners to learning all my life, and I know how transformative the experience can be: what a difference this can make to their lives, and what a difference they can then make to the world around them. Education is not an indulgence.

As a body of people, the academic community has a role in ensuring that all who are willing to engage in the enterprise are heard, and that vulnerable voices are not suppressed and issues of global justice not submerged by the myth of the ‘common foe’. Feminist Theology has stood by this principle since its foundation. Our aims, stated in the front of each issue, place us right at the heart of academic empowerment, challenge and debate.

While we are probably better placed than previous generations to cope with the changing circumstances enforced by pandemic, since we have access to a huge range of online resources and communications, these sudden, far-reaching changes have pushed us to the brink of an unknown future.

There is a lot still to be said, and the wider story will unfold over time, but here is a bit of it. This is the context for Feminist Theology 29.1.

The issue begins in the heart of an earlier global catastrophe, the consequences of which are still with us. The world-changing story of the slave trade is still unfolding as post-colonial discourse recognises its impact. Maria Stewart was a Black abolitionist writer in nineteenth-century America, often overlooked among better-known campaigners and yet, Jane Duran argues, with her own distinctive voice. In a series of short pamphlets and speeches, she expresses what Duran calls ‘focused anger’, not only against the White population for maintaining the horrific institution of slavery but also against Black women (in particular) for their failure to take a strong, positive moral stand in the circumstances. Her writing is powerful, practical and radically scriptural.

Slavery is part of the world view that drove European expansionism into every continent and rests on the self-identification of Europe with its own classical story, told and retold in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Grace Ji-Sun Kim traces slavery to the racism inherent in the European classical tradition and enthusiastically adopted in the colonial movement, which saw ‘foreigners’ as naturally servile, and therefore definable and usable by ‘civilising’ racial superiors. The question then is who are classed as foreigners. Kim charts the arrival of Koreans, particularly Korean women in America, from the 1900s onwards. Korean women faced multiple discrimination, including hyper-sexualisation. The article analyses the consequences in Korean women’s self-image and calls for a new resistance in the language of Church and Society.

Underlying both these articles is an awareness of the potential of women’s agency in resisting injustice, coming up against the insidious forces massed in opposition. Women’s resistance is frequently undermined by internalising, and even justifying, discriminatory characterisations. Maria Stewart and Grace Kim both challenge the societal pressures that so often pin women down.

Eun-Young Julia Kim listens to two American Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) women who argue against women’s ordination. They are speakers at a Women’s Ordination Symposium in 2015, and both oppose the ordination or leadership of women in the church from perspectives that will be dishearteningly familiar to anybody who has engaged in the debate. Kim responds deftly to the arguments, uncovering inconsistencies in the use of terminology such as headship and a failure to understand the complexity of gender relations in practice.

One speaker expresses the concern that women’s leadership will introduce a new and damaging hermeneutic, which will challenge the biblical interpretation that underlies faith and practice, exemplified in the acceptance of gay marriage and loss of the 6-day creation. In a sense, she is right, in that the radical exploration of biblical hermeneutics underlies much of the hope for equality expressed by Maria Stewart and Grace Kim.

In a study on women’s preaching, Liz Shercliff explores the need to acknowledge a ‘new hermeneutic’ in the development of women preachers through teaching and training. Her argument is that women have the capacity to develop a new ‘register’ of preaching, released from the hegemony of rationalism and rooted in an invitation to encounter God. This is not an essentialist argument, but recognises that women are de facto both shaped and judged by gender in a way that male preachers are not, and therefore speak from a marginal position, from which they have the potential to engage with transformation.

This is a process I have been involved in all my life. I grew up listening to male preachers, and yet felt the call to my own ministry very early on. I did not know then that female preaching could be different, or why that might be. It has been my privilege to spend my life learning and exploring this voice, of mine and others: how it sounds, and what it sometimes dares to say. These voices genuinely encounter scripture in different ways. But I had to wait till years after my own training, in an all-male cohort with all male teachers and, crucially, access limited to an all-male canon of academic resources, to find that out.

I can still remember the excitement of encountering Deborah (first) and then Jael (Yael) in the book of Judges, so it was a delight to read and edit Dvora Ledermann Daniely’s exciting exposition. One of the SDA women in Kim’s article opines that ‘unruly’ women (i.e. those who seek dominance over their husbands) really want to be tamed. Daniely sees in Yael a visceral resistance to the taming of women’s bodies by patriarchal dominance, which reveals a ‘sharp and piercing indictment against the male culture of rape’.

In a sense, this is all one story. The same patriarchal hermeneutic justifies slavery, racism, rape and destruction. An ecofeminist article by Jonathan Kangwa brings the journal full circle. Kangwa is writing from the context of sub-Saharan Africa, a region that is seriously affected by climate change, and this forms the basis for the final article in this issue, which is a feminist ecological exploration of the book of Job. Here is the voice of resistance, not only in Job’s impassioned responses to the ‘comforters’ and the response of the natural world in the epilogue, but also crucially in Job’s wife, often ignored as part of the prose narrative framework.

As this issue goes to press, it seems increasingly clear that our rape of the natural environment and the global impact of human activity have enabled and exacerbated the present pandemic. We can struggle to develop protection from and resistance to infection. But we desperately need to release resistance to our culture of gender and race-based dominance in order to build a hermeneutic of global transformation and act on it.