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Rosemary Radford Ruether, a founding mother of feminist theology, dies at 85: NPR

Rosemary Radford Ruether was one of the first scholars to think deeply about the role of women in Christianity. She died Saturday at the age of 85.

Garrett – Evangelical Theological Seminary


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Garrett – Evangelical Theological Seminary


Rosemary Radford Ruether was one of the first scholars to think deeply about the role of women in Christianity. She died Saturday at the age of 85.

Garrett – Evangelical Theological Seminary

One of the founding mothers of feminist theology has passed away. Rosemary Radford Ruether was one of the first scholars to think deeply about the role of women in Christianity, shaking up old patriarchal regimes and driving change.

According to theologian Mary Hunt, who announced her death in California on Saturday at the age of 85 after a long battle with illness.

“Dr. Ruether is an outstanding scholarly activist. She is respected and loved by students, colleagues, and collaborators around the world for her research on liberation theology and ecology. , anti-racism, Middle Eastern complexity, women-church, and many other topics,” the statement said.

“Her legacy, both intellectual and personal, is rich beyond imagination. The scope and depth of her work, and the testimony of her life as a rights activist. feminist is committed to forever shining with a light that time will only raise.”

She is a theologian defiant to dogma

In 2002, Ruether looked back on her long career in a Harvard Divinity School conference on religion and the feminist movement.

“In 1968, I wrote and delivered my first major essay on sexism, titled ‘The Theology of Men and Women’s Anger.’ I think it’s a nimble title,” she said with a chuckle. “So I’m a bit surprised by how burly white men are and how scared they are by the term ‘women’s anger.'”

She chose her words carefully. Ruether was a white Catholic who challenged church dogma and wrote books like “Sexism and God’s Talk.” Ruether stepped back, explaining that she had been shaped in part by the Black Power movement.

After earning a doctorate in canon and cardinals – the history of the patriarchs of the Catholic church – at Claremont Graduate University in California, she spent the summer of 1965 in Mississippi with civil rights activists. For the next decade, she taught at the historic Black Howard University School of Religion in Washington, D.C. These experiences led her to question the history of Christianity in a new way, thinking about the power dynamics of church and ask questions like: Can a male savior save a woman?

“This question is not a trivial one,” says Kwok Pui Lan, who teaches theology at Emory University in Atlanta. “In other traditions you can find goddesses, so why would you worship a male savior?”

Kwok first read Ruether’s work when she was an undergraduate student at the University of Hong Kong. It inspired Kwok’s own pioneering research on women and Christianity in Asia. She said Ruether was one of the first scholars to amplify women’s voices throughout Christian history – all the way back to the time of Jesus.

“And the restoration of these voices is no exception, but part of ongoing conversations that have been buried over time because think that women don’t talk much”. Nashville. “That’s not what’s happening in the early church. Women have a lot to say.”

She beat the Pope with a punch

During the 1980s, Ruether worked as a consultant for Townes’ doctoral thesis at Garrett Evangelical Seminary, a Methodist school near Chicago. Ruether spent most of his career there, training generations of Christian leaders and challenging his own Catholic church on doctrines surrounding abortion, birth control, and the priesthood. all men. She beat the Pope: decades before Pope Francis’ climate justice encyclical, Ruether addressed the topic in her 1994 articles and book “Gaia and God: Ecological Theology of Healing on Earth”.

“Rosemary has turned all that soil on its own,” said Mary E. Hunt, theologian and co-founder of the Women’s Coalition for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual in Maryland. Rosemary”.

Ruether served as an advisor on Hunt’s doctoral thesis from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and Hunt says Ruether is a renowned, caring advisor who has traveled extensively to meet students and colleagues across the globe, from Gaza to Latin America. She has collaborated with Muslims, Jews, Protestants, and Buddhists across a variety of academic fields and championed the writing of feminist theologians from developing nations.

Ruether shows, says Hunt, “that you can be a scholar and an activist, and have to be thorough in both respects. That’s where Rosemary’s legacy is.”

Her books are required reading in many theological schools

She paid the price for her activism. A Catholic university once got a job offer back because she served on the Catholic council for choice, a group that advocates for abortion rights. Despite her challenge to Catholic dogma, Ruether continued to identify herself as a Catholic, and to the chagrin of some conservative Catholics, she made herself part of canon law: Many of her forty books and hundreds of articles are required reading in theology. schools. Where Ruether isn’t on the syllabus of a feminist theology class, her students’ books – and theirs – certainly are.

At the 2002 Harvard conference, Ruether reflected on what inspired her and gave her the courage to challenge male church authority. She moved on to the summer of 1965, when she volunteered with the Delta Department in Mississippi. She sees a dormitory at a black college littered with bullets and visits a town besieged by the KKK.

“I experienced what white America looked like from a black Mississippi background,” she said. “It was the defining moment for me; when one has to decide, will you be driven by fear, or will you move on?”

Ruther went ahead.

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