Video: The Women’s Studies Revolution

Full Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

ANN BRAUDE: Good morning. 

AUDIENCE: Good morning. 

ANN BRAUDE: Love it. Good morning and welcome to the first full day of our gala, Bicentennial Celebration at Harvard Divinity School. 

[APPLAUSE] 

It's really a thrill to see you all here and to those of you in other rooms, to have you here as well. And I have a very easy task. This morning, which is to introduce the convener of our first panel. We're starting the day today in what I think is a great way with the Women's Studies Revolution. 

[APPLAUSE] 

Can I take you guys with me every time I speak in public? 

[LAUGHTER] 

I like this. And we're going to hear from a group of women who were in the room where it happened. And it's an enormous pleasure and honor to introduce our convener, Dr. Margaret Miles, a distinguished historian of Christian thought. 

[APPLAUSE] 

I know that Margaret has changed a lot of lives and I have a feeling these are the lives. And it sounds like she really needs no introduction. You know that she, as well as being a distinguished scholar, is the former dean of the Graduate Theological Union. And, of course, we know her as the first woman tenured at Harvard Divinity School. 

[APPLAUSE] 

MARGARET R. MILES: Thank you so much. It's lovely to see you all, really lovely. I arrived at Harvard Divinity School in the fall of 1978 having very recently finished a doctorate in history at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. I had just been appointed at HDS as an assistant professor. I was entirely ignorant of women's studies. 

Another way to say that is I was innocent of women's studies, and it depends how you-- your perspective from which way you would want to put that. Here at HDS, however, fortunately I could not remain ignorant for very long. 

The research resource associates in Women's Studies Program had existed for several years by the time I got here bringing to the Divinity School scholars like Rosemary Radford Ruether in 1972-73, and rendering business as usual scholarship. Well, boring. 

I was on a very steep learning curve. I recall vividly my excitement in realizing that study is not genderless as I had assumed or been taught. And I realized that up to this point my study had been men's studies. It was a tremendously exciting time at HDS as women's studies entered and began to impact the traditional fields of religious studies. 

These incursions represented not enhancement of traditional fields, but more or less quiet revolutions. By the late 1980s, the Women's Studies in Religion Program under the leadership of its founding director, Constance Buchanan, yeah-- 

[APPLAUSE] 

--had left no field of religious studies unchallenged. Senior colleagues here had come to respect the excellent scholars and the scholarship that was brought into the school each year. 

That program laid the absolutely indispensable foundation for the proposal in 1989-90. For a doctoral studies, a doctoral concentration, a ThD concentration in religion, gender, and culture. But I must not give the impression that the proposals sailed through. 

[LAUGHTER] 

The professorial committee at that time, composed only of tenured professors that made all the curriculum decisions of the school. No, the proposal was rather strenuously contested. After several months of informal discussion in the halls, in offices, and so on of the merits of the program, a vote came to be taken in the professorial committee. 

After more heated discussion, our colleague Richard Reinhold Niebuhr, Hollis professor of divinity, slowly rose to his feet and said in his quiet way, it seems to me that our colleagues want to do something here and I think we should let them. 

[LAUGHTER] 

[APPLAUSE] 

It was a beautiful moment. The vote was taken and carried and the doctoral concentration was established. Meantime, the WSRP program at HDS continues to inform, to strengthen, and to challenge the fields of religious studies. Today, we are privileged to hear the reflections of several scholars at various moments in time who have participated in the Women's Studies in Religion Program. 

I ask you to hold your questions and observations until after we have heard from our panel at which time there will be time for your comments. I will introduce them briefly now, though you know that each has pages and pages of accomplishments. First, Katie Geneva Cannon. Presently, Annie Scales Rogers, professor of Christian Social Ethics at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. 

Her doctorate was from Union Theological Seminary in New York. And Katie has many honors and awards and has had many visiting appointments. She taught formerly at Temple University, the Episcopal Divinity School, and she was a resource associate here in 1983-84. 

Her books include God's Fierce Whimsy, The Implications of Feminism for Theological Education, 1985, and Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community, 1995, most recently, the Oxford Handbook of African-American Theology with Anthony Pinn, 2014. Many other articles and chapters in books. 

Ping Yao is professor history department and director of Asian and Asian-American studies at California State University in Los Angeles. Her fields are gender studies, prosopographical studies, history of religion, and pre-modern China. Included in her so-called short list of publications, which she has authored, co-authored, and co-edited are nine books and multiple articles. She was in the Women's Studies in Religion Program in 2008. 

And Karen King, Hollis professor of divinity at Harvard Divinity School, the professorship formerly held by Richard Niebuhr and Harvey Cox, in living memory. It goes back farther than that living memory though. This is the oldest chair in the university and in the country, the oldest funded chair in the university and the country. And she is the first woman appointed to it. 

[APPLAUSE] 

Karen is trained in comparative religions and historical studies. She is interested in orthodoxy and so-called heresy, gender studies, religion, and violence. She has books and articles on Gnostic Christianity, and her books include, The Secret Revelation of John and the Gospel of Mary of Magdala. She was in the Women's Studies in Religion Program in 1995-96. I introduced to you Katie Cannon. 

[APPLAUSE] 

KATIE GENEVA CANNON: Good morning. 

AUDIENCE: Good morning. 

KATIE GENEVA CANNON: I'd like to begin this morning by sharing a personal experience with you. While working on my doctorate and finishing graduate studies, I enrolled in a seminar with a world-renowned white male scholar. This man ran it, raised, and delivered a scolding diatribe and his critique of my final paper. He screamed, how dare you write a paper that causes me to feel? 

[LAUGHTER] 

A paper full of hard, warm and soulful vibrations. He concluded his tongue lashing with the comment, I should be able to read this paper and not feel anything. 

[LAUGHTER] 

And because my paper evoked feelings, which appeared to be a potential threat to this man's person and his intellectual property, the professor concluded my paper was so bad he couldn't even flunk it. 

[LAUGHTER] 

He did not want to waste his time writing the letter F on my assignment. Ironically, the focus of my paper was the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and the name of the seminar was "The Passion Narratives." 

[LAUGHTER] 

That's true. Standing to lose the most from a disruption of his status quo, this world renowned scholar insisted that I, a so-called unqualified, incompetent, and inferior woman of African ancestry, that I must rewrite my research paper in accordance with his detached, disengaged, dispassionate writing style. 

Given the sensitive nature of power dynamics between faculty and students, I carefully wrote tedious drafts of my research paper so I could learn how to write as a disembodied talking head. 

[LAUGHTER] 

Repeatedly, I bleached and neutered myself so I could write asymmetrical prose with rigid predictability from the neck up. My specific experience in this class with this world-renowned scholar is not an isolated exchange of individual meanness because these antagonistic confrontations are connected to legitimate sources of power and they are replicated time and time again with routine occurrences for a number of women in the academy. 

In other words, by coming to terms with painful struggles with these types of disrespected, verbal, humiliating putdowns, I'm aware of how mass marketed presuppositions and mainstream rubrics assigned as natural and neutral or neither by happenstance nor by accident. Evaluated my work through a distorted understanding of racist misogyny, this professor believed, like so many power brokers today, the lie that so-called academic rigor and scholarly excellence equal value-free, colored blank, mathematically calculated objectivity. 

When dogmatic principles of improper instruction become the order of the day, power broke them. Seldom acknowledged their wrongheadedness that relates to our embodied mediated knowledge, the knowledge that values the ancient wisdom wherein we learn to think with our hearts and feel with our brains. 

Professors who benefit from this androcentric thinking pattern who control the database and the canonical procedures are afforded opportunities to exploit, to disregard, and even to deny the existence of racism, sexism, and class elitism. To say it another way, imperialist epistemological frameworks produce warehouse and use pseudo facts about the natural order of normalcy. 

These ideological scripts dictate what stories will be included in the master narrative and what facts will be omitted from the dominant religious discourse. This is why theological construction of gendered racism and concrete policies of inequality situate women of color in a constant state of embattlement. Like women are attacked with hostility both for what we do and we are attacked for who we are, attacked for being women in a man's world, and attacked for being Black in a white world. 

Likewise, we can see how academic stakeholders who capitalize upon mainstream knowledge apply covert and overt pressure as educational currency so that African-American students would ceasefire and desist from protests since we accommodate whiteness, acquiesced without complaint, and conform to outmoded standard bearing educational values that end up alienating African-American students from our own human beingness situating us on the outer edge of ontology. 

Therefore, for my first day arriving at Harvard Divinity School in the fall of 1983 until this very day, I have been researching, writing, and teaching about ethics and rhetoric embedded in womanist ways of knowing wherein I debunk, unmask, and disentangle widespread pervasive death dealing activities in order to envision liberating strategies in our work of resisting unjust authorities. 

Now, womanist ways of knowing invite activists engaged in fundamental changes in scholarly investigation by asking each of you to cast your lot with us. If liberated-minded advocates are serious about sharing in real-world struggles for freedom, justice, and fullness of life, we must reconceptualize our responsibilities. 

Using both form and substance, we must critique complicated, systemic, solidified transgressions, the cast of vast majority of our sisters and brothers who are global citizens to shuttle between fear, occupation and victimization. Moreover, womanist ways of knowing require us to analyze racist sexism and sexualized racism. 

With studious tenacity and forceful integrity, we cultivate opportunities to keen gain keen insights regarding how white supremacy intertwine with male superiority, serve as a catalyst for everyday micro and macro aggressions. In womanist ways of knowing, it is crucial to understand slavocracy, especially how 300-plus years of chattel slavery combined with 100 years of legal segregation, results in the vast majority of Black women being referred to as earthy, immoral, and subservient human beings. 

Black women are situated in the intersection of the two most well-developed ideologies in the USA, the ideas, beliefs, and principles about women and the ideas, belief, and principles about race. The Reverend Pauli Murray maintains the institution of slavery was built by your constructions of male chauvinism with white supremacy in order to rationalize enslavers systems of exploitation and subordination. 

In fact, Pauli Murray argues racism and sexism are twin evils, amalgamated systems of negativity created to impose death-dealing othering on oppressed people so that women, men, and children end up being designated as people with smaller brains, less intellectual capacity, inherent backwardness with weak moral fiber. 

All in all, throughout my womanist epistemological journey, surviving numerous twists and turns, challenges, and confrontation, the scholarly work I began here in 1983 at Harvard Divinity School is an ongoing kinetic mining of powers and principalities, spiritual wickedness in high places. 

I continue to research, write, and teach others how to survive and thrive in the academy, teaching students how to translate our mother tongue into the former communication language of academies. 

In essence, I teach students ethics and rhetoric, rhetoric and ethics with the hope that they can avoid experiences of mental cruelty, avoid experiences of combated meanness, avoid experiences of backhanded compliments and crude tongue in cheek insults while they're doing the work their souls must have, while we together doing the work our souls must have morning by morning, day by day. 

[APPLAUSE] 

PING YAO: Hi, my name is Ping Yao. 

[APPLAUSE] 

Thank you very much for inviting me, for a kind introduction. I began my research career as a scholar of medieval China and my dissertation explored the connections between the rise of civil service examination graduates and the changing discourse on women and femininity during the Tang dynasty, which is seventh century to 10th century. 

In fact, I defended my dissertation right about 20 years ago this month. So in 2004, I published a monograph, Women's Lives in Tang China reconstructing women's life course and everyday experience. And the main sources for this book were 6,000 epitaphs for Tang era. 

In reading these epitaphs, I realized that the religious traditions played a crucial role in defining the role of women and affected the town women's lives experience in many, many ways, and hence the beginning of my journey in this exciting religion critical turn, I would say. 

From 2004, I focused on my research on epitaphs for nuns and religious women and began to develop some ideas in various conference presentations. And I found that town princesses turned to Daoism for political power. Merging of the Buddhist ideas and the Confucian ideas of womanly virtues contributed to the gender transformation of Bodhisattva Guanyin. And there was a unique mother-daughter bond within Buddhist tradition. 

I also argue that the Buddhist signification process occurred in two spheres. In the private sphere, it was concentrated on the development of-- in the public sphere, it concentrated on the development of four major schools. 

But in private spheres, it mainly involved in inserting Buddhist ideals of womanly virtue, family values, and most importantly, the spreading of Buddhism by means of Buddhist mother's influence. So in the Dismiss of journey, I became aware of the WSRP. And my year at WSRP turned out to be quite important in my academic career. 

It is not only set my subsequent research path, but also firmed my conviction that WSRP's interdisciplinary approach would transform both the field of women in Chinese history, but also the field of religion in Chinese history. So there's a lot to do, I realized then and we need to act quick and we need to spread the message and we need to publish, to teach, and to get other like-minded scholars involved in this exciting effort. 

Luckily, it wasn't that difficult to find like-minded scholars over the past eight years. There were quite a few womenists the field of Chinese history and in the field of Chinese religion that had already begun this journey. 

In the 1990s, scholars of religious studies had begun to recover women's experience in major religious traditions, not as a form of supplementary knowledge to male norms, but as equally important, if not often different human experiences. 

In the meantime, China's scholars, such as myself, began to rethink the basic assumptions about women's presence and women's experience in Chinese history. While conventional historical sources delineate Chinese women along the line of Confucian ideals, other sources, such as epitaphs, women's own writings, anecdotal writings and vernacular fictions, and women, as well as artifacts and archaeological discoveries, point to religion as an integral part of women's everyday experience and their identities. 

Recently, there is a very clear, shared aspiration for a comprehensive field of study that is comparative, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, multi-perspective and transtraditional and cross-cultural. Seizing on that moment in 2008, Professor Bertha Grant from Washington University edited a special two-issue volume of 90 women and gender in Chinese history. The journal that was dedicated to the theme of women, gender, and religion in premodern China. 

This was the first journal issue devoted to the new subfield. In 2010, Professor Jinhua Jia of Macau University, which also was a WSRP alum and Professor Xiaofei Kang of George Washington University and myself began to plan an international conference that would bring the like-minded scholars together to explore the interrelations and interactions between Chinese women and the religious cultural traditions. 

The conference was held in the summer of 2011, produced the very first book in the field entitled Gendering Chinese Religion, Subject Identity and the Body. The volume includes 11 articles that are grouped thematically and chronologically rather than divided by religious traditions, such as Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. 

So our hope was that this will herald the emergence of the subfield of women, gender, and religion in China. We determined to make the conference a continuous endeavor and fortunately, many scholars have heeded the call. I'm happy to report that the second meeting was held in December 2015 in Hong Kong. 

Chinese universities entitled forum on gender and religion in China, a dialogue between texts and contexts. So if the first-- if the goal of our first conference was to explore the intersections between the field of women studies and religious studies, the focus of our second conference had evolved to survey the types of sources available to scholars in this subfield. 

And I'm currently working on organizing the third conference to be held in Los Angeles. And we will have an emphasis on that embedded gender patterns in Chinese religious tradition. So tellingly, at WSRP, while writing my own manuscript, I also edited two translation volumes that are intended to introduce American scholarships to Chinese readers, one on women in Chinese history and the separate one on religion in Chinese history. 

So these have become a little bit popular, but now I think the time is ripe for a third translation volume, which I intend to call western scholarship on women and gender in Chinese religions. 

In reflecting on changes in the field, I would say that instead of looking into women and gender in each religious tradition, say Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, womenists have propelled the scholars in religion to think more broadly, in particular, to address how religion affected women's life experience or gendered experience. 

Furthermore, because of that push, less established religious traditions, such as popular practice of worships and the cults began to catch scholars attention. In addition, scholars are now becoming more interested in thematic topics than individual religions. 

Finally, where do I see our program going from there? For women's studies in Chinese religions, I think we should, again, emphasize the importance of gender as an analytical category and explore the deeply embedded gender patterns in various Chinese religious traditions. 

Recently, I have shifted my attention from epitaphs to Buddhist sutra donations. And in doing so, I have begun to realize the limitations of my past approach placing women at the center of scholarly attention. During the course of building a database for medieval sutra copying colophons discovered in Dunhuang area, encountered a clearly gendered pattern. 

Men would donate sutra copying to benefit all types of relatives, but few women listed a man as the. Intended beneficiary. Looking back, epitaphs for Buddhist clergy, as well as Buddhist hagiographies, I have read, actually also reflected a gendered pattern in medieval Chinese religion. 

This is especially true in their differing descriptions of monks and nuns, intellects, their sermons, manners, and the conducts. A much more intriguing signs of perceived gender or sex difference is how biographies recounts stories of monks and nuns birth and to a lesser degree, their deaths. 

For instances, tales of miraculous pregnancy and birth are very common among biographies for renowned monks, but nowhere to be seen among the nuns. In addition to their mothers, Buddha inspired pregnancy. Quite a few epitaphs and hagiographies for monks tell stories how their mothers abruptly changed to a vegetarian diet once they became pregnant. 

Another theme that is absent from biographies for nuns, but very common among monks is the supernatural occurrence related to a monk's death. So my hypothesis is that such a stark difference reflected a rather consistent proposition of Buddhism. 

The female body represents a accumulation of past sins. And a person who attains a higher level of realization will in future births reside only in male bodies. 

So even though I have long argued that women had always played an important role in the development of Chinese Buddhism and that the female agency was an integral part of Chinese Buddhist tradition, I'm coming to the realization that by emphasizing gender we can tell a more complex story of the religion, gender, and sociopolitical hierarchy of Chinese history. 

Along those lines, my current scholarly pursuit is to look through all available data to see if there is a crossed board pattern of gender divide. And if so, what can we learn about Chinese Buddhism and about the Tang dynasty? 

More broadly, thinking in these terms will become a fruitful endeavor for other researchers as well and this will be one of the driving themes behind our Los Angeles conference, which I have high hopes for. I think, as Ann said, the revolution started from here. Thank you very much. 

[APPLAUSE] 

KAREN KING: I wish we had time to hear stories from everyone here. I would really love that. There is so much wisdom and experience here among us today. My dear friend and the WSRP director, Ann, however, asks each of us to, and I quote, "give a sense of our own trajectory emerging from those heady early days, how our work developed and where we see it, and women's studies and religion in general going from here." And she said, we could have 12 minutes. 

[LAUGHTER] 

Well, it's obviously rather impossible to speak even about my own field of early Christianity where there's such a wide range in depth of work being done by really fabulous teachers, scholars, and activists. I'm going to start instead with the first women's studies course I taught. I was thinking of what Margaret said about knowing nothing. 

I got this job. They asked me to teach women's studies. I said sure. And so I did. I really pity those first students because the course was really my own awakening to the realities of misogyny to the religious structures and strictures of subordination and violence. 

I remember, in fact, vividly the student who pleaded in frustration and distress, didn't they have anything positive to say about women? It was what we used to call consciousness raising and it was both painful and illuminating. And it continues to be painful and illuminating. 

But early work on women in the Bible on theologies and histories centered on women, these gave some response to the students plea. By the time I came to WSRP, I had taught women's studies courses for over a decade, often team taught with colleagues in other fields and disciplines. 

The year for me, as for others, was very crucial. It was a time when I learned-- and I want to thank Connie Buchanan for this-- that the work we do in antiquity is not necessarily antiquarian that it might actually be important in speaking to us today and it is, in fact, by us today and for us. So it's not in that sense antiquarian. 

I was then working on a set of manuscripts relatively recently discovered in Egypt, manuscripts that prominently displayed the female divine wisdom, Sophia, that showed Eve to be the Savior of Adam, and told off Mary Magdalene as a leading apostle of Jesus. 

The idea in that work was to display the diversity of early Christianities and build on work done by so many others by helping marginal voices to be heard afresh. That was almost 20 years ago. Much, much has happened since and many of you have been part of that in all kinds of ways. 

In early Christianity, new emphases have enriched the field in vigorous and rigorous work on the intersections of sexuality, gender, and real women's lives. Important research is being done in areas, such as slavery, martyrdom and torture, virginal asceticism, anti-Jewish slander, imperialism and colonialism, sexual ethics, Christianity as a third race, and much more. 

I just sent off to press an article on Jesus for the Oxford Handbook of gender and sexuality in the New Testament, who knew? It's not about the sexual practices of Jesus, sorry, about which there is indeed only silence.

But it's about the cacophony of voices poured into that silence representing him as married, celibate, a castrated eunuch, an elite masculine ruler, a female slave, the husband of the church, the spouse of very, very many virginal brides and so on. And this is only the first centimeters of Christian history. 

We can ask, who or what is served by these representations? What's at stake in for whom? And asked us also to talk about where from here. Now, what research, writing, teaching does our current social and political world call us to be responsible to. 

Every day brings vital issues of life and death to the fore. Many talk about the different and seemingly irreconcilable accounts of America and indeed just about everything immigration, racial violence, science, climate sexualities and gender, and so on. You know the list. 

Religion also belongs very prominently in that list, so does class. And certainly, there is a renewed imperative to look at issues of class, not least here, as a recent article in the Harvard Magazine that many of you may have seen on Harvard's class gap illustrates so well. 

Is it possible to offer an account complex and compelling enough to make life livable for us all? I'm thinking again about Mary Magdalene. Historical analysis shows that there is no evidence of her being a prostitute. All the evidence is that she was an honored disciple of Jesus, probably from the town of Migdal on the Sea of Galilee. 

But another Mary, Mary Setterholm, an HDS grad, an activist and the founder of Serenity Sisters, asked another question about how, and I quote, "how my sisters and I-- prostitute, the stripper, the call girl trafficked or consenting-- can reclaim a Mary Magdalene despite the inadvertent negation of our persons felt in the refrain? 

Mary Magdalene, she was not a prostitute. Another way of saying this, she was not like you. And I thought, mistakenly perhaps, that we were sisters," unquote. Why have I and others been so happy to declare Mary Magdalene not a prostitute? We could say because it's true. It's a fact. And these days we're very happy to have facts. 

[LAUGHTER] 

OK. 

[APPLAUSE] 

Yes, OK, yes. But the bigger fact is that we know virtually nothing about the historical Mary Magdalene. What we have are, two millennia, 2000 years of her afterlife, portraits of her as a leading apostle, and the wife of Jesus, according to the Gospel of Philip. A prostitute whose extraordinary penitence was legendary and iconic, a preacher and miracle worker, an object of erotic art, and a model feminist. 

Her name was also given to the Magdalene Laundries spread throughout Europe. Now, the laundries are an interesting and perhaps less well-known case. The excellent historical study by Rebecca McCarthy on the origin of those laundries shows that these institutions were originally set up to teach women a respectable trade so they could go out and lead a better, more Christian life. 

Whatever the very real intent to aid however, many of these institutions became lifelong workhouses, imprisoning women and their children who were deemed to have fallen outside the regulatory norms of patriarchy and kyriarchy often in the name of Christianity. 

These institutions underwrote and declared a strong class status distinction between sexually fallen women and chaste righteous Christian women. Who benefited, we have to ask, from that distinction? Who now benefits from a narrowed? 

Just the facts, ma'am, Tale of Mary Magdalene, not a prostitute, but a powerful apostle. If we're going to tell the story of Mary Magdalene now, it needs I think to take account of all the ways that she has been and can be represented. All the complex effects on the lives of real women, including our own. 

Race and sexuality are absolutely central to these representations, but we must not neglect our intersectional analysis of class. It operates powerfully and in many guises. 

More, broadly speaking, the research and writing we do as historians, scholars, and activists has to continue, of course, to participate fully in the events of our time, on the one hand, sharpening both the communication of our work with a wider public and on the other hand, honing our own listening and learning skills, attentive to marginal voices, but also seeking to hear the voices and the stories of those we don't yet know and perhaps those we don't want to know who we simply ignore. 

The challenge remains to respect the complexity and yet act with firm resolve building on the life giving work already done while leaning into the visions of those to whom the future belongs to recognize the full humanity of each and every person to meet each other with generosity and compassion and a love of justice, or otherwise known as divine love. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE] 

MARGARET R. MILES: Your turn. 

[LAUGHTER] 

What observations or comments would you have for the panel for our topics of the morning? There is someone with a microphone who will come if you raise your hand so that your question or comment can be heard. Here she comes. 

AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Betty Anne Donnelly. I did an MTS in '85 and I'm the preacher coordinator of Catholic Women Preach. In this incredibly fraught environment in which we live now with Donald Trump spewing nonsense, I'd like to hear how you envision that we can get out, all of us can get out more in the public understanding of spiritual seekers and different faith traditions, really, that there is a religious. there's is religious sensibility that we are about something else as human beings. 

KATIE GENEVA CANNON: You have to answer too, don't you? 

AUDIENCE: Yeah, [INAUDIBLE]. 

MARGARET R. MILES: Yeah, would some member of the panel like to address that? 

KATIE GENEVA CANNON: I'll follow Margaret-- 

[LAUGHTER] 

--because we were just talking about that informally. 

MARGARET R. MILES: You don't have a mic. 

KATIE GENEVA CANNON: I have a mic. 

MARGARET R. MILES: OK. I'm going to have to let Katie go first. 

[LAUGHTER] 

KATIE GENEVA CANNON: I mean, I'm overwhelmed by what's happening. I never thought I'd live in a world in a time for us to be going back so fast. I mean, I'm speechless. I really don't have anything constructive to offer other than I'm praying harder than I ever prayed and I'm praying on my knees longer than I've ever been on them. But I don't have anything other than that. I mean, I just keep hoping this thing will turn around, but I don't know how to get it. How about you? 

KAREN KING: I know what I told my students-- the day after the elections we had to walk into class and it's not something you could ignore. And I remember telling them-- these very, very good people, as you know, in particular, that we have utterly fabulous students here-- they care deeply and they want to do good. 

The impulse might be to quit school and run out and hit the streets, do activist work, join and so forth. That work is very important and it is in those places and in the many forums that I think are being invented in various kinds of media and publications, in the newspapers and so on and so forth, that a lot of good work is being done. But I told them things have not changed from one day to the next. In fact, I think they probably had. 

[LAUGHTER] 

KATIE GENEVA CANNON: In major ways. 

KAREN KING: And major ways. But that in some real sense, we were still in it the long haul and that there was a tradition in women's studies to build on and to work with. And that the work we do here in the academy of providing the kinds of work of theologies, of histories, of the presence of women and other persons and the work we're doing has played and has to continue play an important role. And so to dig deeply into their studies, but to keep an eye always. 

As Emily Culpepper told me, you can be in the academy, but you also always need to know people who are not and be in alliance with them. And our work needs to be like that. So resolve, hang in there. And I do think, as I said in my talk, that we have stories to tell that we're being called to be much more complex, much more fulsome, and much louder. 

PING YAO: Well, a little bit. Well, the day after the election, I think I told my husband, I came to the States for this? 

[LAUGHTER] 

So you can tell I'm an immigrant. But I felt it's a lot more important now that I speak up. For the first time in my life, I marched in a [INAUDIBLE] march and I participated a lot of activities. 

I think my students needed me more than ever because most of my students are immigrants and first generation college students. And some are undocumented. We are sanctuary campus at Cal State, LA. So I think we have a lot to do. And I'm more than ever determined to play a role. 

[APPLAUSE] 

MARGARET R. MILES: I think that there has been a rather invidious divide in the women's movement between activists and academics. And I find this invidious because it saps energies, who's doing the real thing? Well, we all are according to our talents, our preparation, our education. 

The activists are very much needed and so are the academics, so are the scholars that point to the subtle ways in which attitudes are formed and directed. And so I would just hope that we could just get over that. Academics are activists in many ways. Those you've heard this morning certainly are playing an important role in activism. 

AUDIENCE: I have this mic, but thank you very much. I'm Diana. And so wonderful to hear you all. But I think the thing that you have demonstrated today is exactly what we need, which is that the fearlessness of women who have plowed through the domains and territories of academia and created something new. 

Fear is really one of the things that we cope with on a day-to-day basis. And I believe that fear is not something that is simply generated from the top. There's a lot of commercialization of fear, you might say, if you ever read the report that is called Fear Incorporated or Fear Inc that is widely available on the web that shows the way in which fear, especially fear that has to do with immigrants and our Muslim brothers and sisters is actually something that's created. 

It's the center for American progress that has put this out and keeps it up to date. So we need to know that fear is something that is spread in society in a rather deliberate way. And we've seen a lot of fearlessness here and I believe all of us benefit from the fearlessness of the women that we've heard this morning. 

And the pluralism project has a very minor, little thing going on now called response and resilience where we're really looking at the resilience of communities just in the Boston area, but it's across the country, the resilience of communities that say no to what's happening. There are interfaith communities, women's communities, and quite secular communities, but it's very encouraging and we need to think of ourselves as resilient and our students certainly are. Thanks very much. 

[APPLAUSE] 

KAREN KING: Since Diana and I are maybe the only ones in this room from Montana-- yeah? No, no? Yay, all right, there are three of us-- I just want to say a little bit of something about coming from a small rural town in Montana I know and love a lot of people who voted for Trump. 

And part of what is so terribly, terribly important, I think, is for us to lean in to the complexity, to the vast complexities of what's going on and to push ourselves with regard to how much one needs to hear and listen, learn, and know from these folks. And maybe that's not a popular position to take, but it's an important one for me to say here. 

[APPLAUSE] 

AUDIENCE: My name is Reverend Shuma Chakravarty. And I'm thrilled to be here, as I'm sure you are also. I had the great blessing of being one of Margaret Mills students, a great admirer of both professors Mills and Professor Eck. They may or may not remember me, but I hold them very close to my heart and soul and spirit. 

I have 1,000 questions as does everyone else. You are great scholars and I've been told by distinguished Harvard professors that I am also a great scholar, so I suppose they are right. 

What I want to celebrate at this moment with you in this time of tragedy and turmoil on a global basis and acute gender issues, which haunt us women in particular, what I want to do is to request you with love and humility to cherish this moment, this very moment of gladness, of refuge, of respite from suffering, and of celebration, celebration of our women's studies, celebration of our very souls, celebration of us as fellow travelers, as scholars. 

This is a moment so rare, almost miraculous. Let us take a quick moment, at least to celebrate, to affirm, and to appreciate the blessings that we are experiencing in the here and in the now. 

[APPLAUSE] 

MARGARET R. MILES: Thank you, Shuma. 

AUDIENCE: My name is Anne McClenahan I'm an MDiv and PhD graduate and I'm currently the director of the Boston Theological Institute. And as a result of my location there, I'm enormously interested in, how do we create opportunities for interreligious connections so that the men and women who are graduating can go out and model some of these things in the broader world? 

When I first was a student here, which was in '96, it tended still a bit to be that you would read about women in the last week or two of the class, and that was better than not reading about them at all, certainly. 

But my question is, in the commitment that HES has to interreligious plural community here, how plural are the women in that? What is the level of real integration that has taken place in the last 20 years, I would ask? And how did you do it? 

KATIE GENEVA CANNON: Cornel West said several years ago, we're now at a place in our society that if you don't play sports or if you're not in the military, you never have to relate to anybody who's not of your race. Those of us who were part of the civil rights, those of us who are baby boomers, those of us who knew that I cannot be my best self if I don't have friends of other religions, other races, that's no longer a value among a whole lot of people. It's very homogeneous. 

One of the reasons that this present time is so overwhelming is because you can go out to get Skittles and iced tea and be killed. You could be selling loose cigarettes and get killed. The Sandy Hook situation and they're now saying that's fake news, that those children weren't murdered. People sitting in church having Bible study, they get killed. 

The current attorney general is trying to bring lynching back as legal. When I was 40 years, every 2 and 1/2 days a Black person was lynched in this country. So for those of us of African ancestry, we know our body count will be higher than anyone's. 

And so it's very hard for other people to understand why they need to cast their lot with us. So I don't know how to get it done, but I know we're paying a heavy price and everybody who kills us, they go free. 

KAREN KING: The Divinity School has changed a lot in the last 20 years since I came certainly in the diversity of the faculty, the number of women on the faculty, but just the diversity in very many different ways. The curriculum has changed enormously. It's much more engaging interreligiously or at least pluralistically in terms of religion. 

We now have a robust program in Buddhist studies, scholars in Islam. The Women's Studies program in religion is perhaps maybe absolutely the leader in terms of the folks who come every year and bring us such great richness. The student body is also diverse in all kinds of ways. 

But we're deep in the lesson of that's not even-- that's good, that's fine, but that's not enough and you can bring people together. So the term that we're hearing around the university in the school a lot is inclusion. What makes it really possible for real learning, real conversations two things to happen? 

And I think we're learning a lot from our students about this. And I would say they're teaching us every day what-- certainly what little I know has come from them. And so I think it's one of those listen deep, expect a lot of complexity, be open to conversations, make them happen, stay uncomfortable as much as you can. 

AUDIENCE: Hi, thank you so much for being here. You've given me so much food for thought. My question is, I'm here for a course at the college for undergraduates. And I was asked in a meeting, how do you prove that personal reflection is useful in academics? How do you prove that? 

And I guess there's a lot of things going on in that question that I might not understand that it's going on. So I want to tread carefully with it. But as far as I understand, there's a large sum of money and a need to prove that a program works to prove results. So my question is, how would you answer that question? And like, how do you tread carefully as well? 

KATIE GENEVA CANNON: There are several lectures I've done on, what do you do when somebody calls your truth a lie? And then I did a lecture last summer down at Spelman, even when they lie, they lie. Even when they lie, they lie. 

So it means that when I talk about embodied mediated knowledge that you've got to come from your gut for it to have value. And so many women are socialized to believe that that which is in our gut has no value. So it's like we try to go through the wall instead of the door to prove that we are intelligent, that we have these gifts, that we are profound. 

A lot of people dismiss true for if you can't prove it empirically, it didn't exist. But there are enough of us growing I think in the women's community who are saying our experiences do count. Our point of departure has to have something to do with where we're going. And if you end up being just a talking head even when you lie, you lie. 

MARGARET R. MILES: Bernadette? 

AUDIENCE: Yes, I'm Bernadette Brooten, GSAS 1982. 

[APPLAUSE] 

KATIE GENEVA CANNON: She's from Idaho. 

KAREN KING: Yeah, close enough. 

AUDIENCE: I'm a former faculty at the Divinity School. So I have a several-part question on which I will be concise. So the topic has come up of advocacy academic work in within the academy and activism. And you might personally have experienced some challenges with this respect, but certainly many others do. 

There is an inexorable move within the academy not to consider what is called advocacy scholarship to be real scholarship. In other words, an inexorable move to cut academics off from the communities around us and I wonder if you could comment on that. 

Secondly, a very important development in our fields has been the recognition of woman as not an essential category and the turn toward the critical analysis of gender, and especially with the rise of the openness of transgender and gender non-conforming persons. And I wonder if you could comment on how that is affecting your work or what you think about it with respect to the field. 

[LAUGHTER] 

Further, again, within the academy often there's great hesitation to address some of the edgiest issues, the most controversial issues, such as discrimination of women by other women violent pornography, working for better working conditions for sex workers, sexual violence. And I wonder if you can comment on what questions are being addressed and what other questions you would like addressed in the field. Thank you. 

[APPLAUSE] 

KAREN KING: Bernadette? 

[LAUGHTER] 

My dear friend, Bernadette? 

AUDIENCE: Yes. 

KAREN KING: I think that you have a great deal to say about all three of those things. 

[LAUGHTER] 

KATIE GENEVA CANNON: She does. 

KAREN KING: I know from your work that you are deeply engaged in addressing precisely these kinds of issues and are facing precisely these kinds of challenges. So I just want to thank you for putting those issues right here in our midst, putting them into a part of the conversation for us to have. And I ask you all to have a nice long conversation with Bernadette. 

[LAUGHTER] 

KATIE GENEVA CANNON: [INAUDIBLE]. 

KAREN KING: Lab Karen. 

[LAUGHTER] 

Maybe you ask. 

KATIE GENEVA CANNON: You see why she is at Harvard and the first woman that did what she did? Wasn't that smooth? That was seamless. I like that. I'm learning from this sister right here. 

AUDIENCE: I'm going to jump in here because I got this mic somewhat either before or after Bernadette got in line. So my name is Dorothy Emerson. I got an MDiv here in 1988. And one of my first classes was with Katie and several other women on the genealogy of race, sex, and class oppression. And that so shapes my thinking about just about everything now. 

But I wanted to go back actually what Karen said about Montana because I think-- and we started with this question about, what do we do today? My current work is on the 1960s. I'm writing from a personal perspective, but also looking at the unfinished agenda of the 1960s. 

And it seems to me that one of the things that happened then was this great cultural divide and that we're still reaping that. And so I want to know what from your perspectives we can possibly do to mend that because if we don't I think it is hopeless. How do we reach across to those people that are so different from most of us? 

I won't actually assume that everyone here is exactly in the same place, but most of us. And I know I live in that coastal bubble. So what do we do? How do we communicate? What in your fields informs that potential dialogue and healing? 

KATIE GENEVA CANNON: I know in ethics, those of us who do liberation ethics, it's about what Bev Harrison and others talk about as cost benefit analysis. Unless there's a [? wide ?] crisis, unless there is something that says it's a matter of life and death, we're not willing to take the risk if the benefit does not exceed the cost. 

So just doing it because it's nice, it's not going to cause transformation, but it has to be I'll take the risk to change and be a different person in solidarity with others if I know what the benefit is or else I'm not willing to pay the cost because it's going to cost. And sometimes the cost is the greatest sacrifice, but it's a cost. And when people want to do it in a nice, polite, sanitized way, that's not going to change anything. But put on the hip boots and get in there and do the hard work. 

KAREN KING: I was not actually raised in the coastal bubble. I was actually raised in Montana. And I think that the differences are certainly there, they're very important. But I think there's a way in which one leans into our common humanity and into the fullness of that and into the enormous complexity and that's where the analytic work as well as activist work happens, but sorry. 

AUDIENCE: I am Renato Rose, and I am not a famous scholar, but I am an activist, and I am a graduate of 1980 here of the school. I wanted to do a PhD on political theology in the Bible, but I was turned down with the reason, oh, we have nobody competent in that area. 

So I think coming from a tradition of Dorothy Thurlow, et cetera, I thought it was time for the Harvard Divinity School to teach political theology. And as an activist, I still think we don't talk enough about militarism and we don't talk enough about nuclear weapons and the immorality of it. All this is connected to feminist issues. So this is my question, can the Harvard Divinity School finally teach political theology? 

[APPLAUSE] 

KAREN KING: Well, I would make an argument that there are certain topics certainly we could do more on, et cetera, et cetera. I think that a lot of what we do is political and it's theological. But I want to point in particular to the extraordinary program that our dean David Hempton has brought us on religion and the practices of peace. 

And this program is specifically trying to get us to think about religion and peace building and has brought in some just extraordinary people. There's a course attached to this. There's a lot of work being done. And I want to thank David, my dean, for the leadership that he's providing us as we move to do better, but already doing really great with this program. Thank you, David. 

[APPLAUSE] 

MARGARET R. MILES: We need to conclude, I'm afraid. We're over time and I hope we can have many of these further conversations in other parts of the day. I was going to also observe that this panel segues rather nicely into the panels of the afternoon in which we will hear more about what is essentially politics. 

We may not talk about candidates, but we talk about politics where it's really important. And I think that-- I'd just like to say in closing that I think we have heard today from the whole gamut of women's studies in religion. We started out with horror stories. We all had horror stories and we loved to swap them. And they gave us a certain energy and that was great. 

But now we have moved into much-- we still have the horror stories, but we have moved into much more nuanced and reflective studies, I think and the world of religions focus of the Divinity School as a whole and of the Women's Studies program, which was maybe the pioneer in looking at other religions. Now, Diana Eck has told me never to say other religions. We are all other to one another. 

[LAUGHTER] 

And other religions presumes a center, so we won't say that. But this afternoon we'll be hearing more about the new themes of the school that are certainly much more vivid than when I left HDS in 1996. Thank you all so much for your participation and thank you for the panel. 

[APPLAUSE] 

Couldn't have done it without you. 

[APPLAUSE] 

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