Karen O’Donnell: One of the things I love about feminist theology is there isn’t one thing. There
are as many feminist theologies as there are people doing feminist theology, and I really love
the messiness of that. But also, I think partly because patriarchy across theology and across our
scriptures is so dominant and so woven all the way through it, that actually feminist theology is
the thing that recognizes patriarchy in all those places and acts to challenge it; acts to reveal it,
even. Sometimes revealing it is all that the feminist theologian can do, but that in itself is a good
thing.
Brandon: Hi, I’m Brandon Nappi.
Hannah: Hi, I’m Hannah Black.
B: We’re your hosts on The Leader’s Way, an audio pilgrimage from Berkeley Divinity School,
the Episcopal Seminary at Yale University. On this journey, we reflect on what matters most in
life as we talk about all things spirituality, innovation, leadership, and transformation.
H: So Brandon, we are back in Connecticut from Texas.
B: We are, and it’s true, everything is bigger in Texas. So we were in a hotel, a conference
center right on this mall, which was maybe as big as 10 malls that I’ve ever been in.
H: Well, first of all, how were there two of the same hotel within one mall? Wow. And also, it
made it feel like it was a city unto itself. Like you could eat there, you could sleep there, you
could shop there. It didn’t have a church inside the mall.
B:Well, I guess we were providing the church, weren’t we?
H: That’s true. There was worship every morning.
B: So we had this amazing time, so many beautiful, wonderful leaders from all around the
country, within the Episcopal Church just coming together and having a little bit of a family
reunion, I think is how I would first name it. We were doing some thinking and some reflecting,
but it was a little bit like a love fest. It was a little bit like a love fest.
H: So we were there for Episcopal Parish Network Conference, EPN, and I think that was the
first time I was in one place with 800 Episcopalians. And so you start to get to know the
subculture a little bit better. And I think, just spot on what I would have expected, which was a
lot of hope, a lot of love, a lot of wanting to do great things for the kingdom of heaven and seek
justice and a lot of good.
B: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been to a lot of conferences in my life and just shout out to the planners of
EPN. I just feel like this was one of the more human kinds of conferences.
H: That’s it.
B:There wasn’t a lot of armor up and posturing, and “Let me tell you about how brilliant and
wonderful and smart I am.” It was just a lot of friendship, which is like even post-pandemic,
which I still feel like in some ways we’re in, I still need that. Like humans connecting with other
humans in the same room.
H: And I mean, our listeners deserve to know that upon the recommendation of one of our board
members, Brandon and I hopped on Ticketmaster, got tickets, and on a whim went to the
Houston rodeo.
B:Let me just say that I do nothing spontaneously in my life. I am a planner.
H: Really?
B: I’m not advocating this approach, but it is. Like I can tell you what I’m doing three months on
a Thursday afternoon. We very spontaneously went to the rodeo. And I’ll be thinking about it for
a very long time.
H: I consider myself well-traveled. I just lived internationally for a while. And it feels kind of rare
to me that I go to something and think, “Wow, I have no idea what’s about to happen next.” This
is so– like it felt so foreign, but also so not foreign. I was like, OK, this has a little bit of county
fare, a little bit of … sports game, a little bit of going to a concert, a little bit like amusement park,
food and wine festival, just all those things rolled into one.
B: Can I throw in another one? A little bit like horror movie.
H: What?
B: Because– and just hear me out, I do so much suspense. Is that person going to die? fall off
the bull and be trampled? I was anxious. I’m an anxious–
H: You were having some visceral reactions.
B: Visceral. I was like keeling over. Danger. I slow care about these–
H: That element of danger.
B: Danger, yeah. And so I needed a nap afterward. It was exhausting. Even though I did nothing
but eat a funnel cake and watch, but I was exhausted.
H: Well, we should talk about what we ate, because we were excited about that. First of all,
there were so many things to choose from. And being a Californian, I thought, “I need Mexican
food!” because that’s just a thought I have, always. But we decided when in Rome … when in
Houston. And we went with the brisket sandwiches.
B: We did.
H: And then some funnel cake for Brandon. I went for the fried Oreos because Oreos remind me
of being a teenager in church and having Oreos at small group Bible study. So that’s sweet. But
also they were way better than I ever would have thought.
B: Yeah, I’m going to call that Oreo experience– and you were kind enough to let me have one–
I’m going to call them the eighth sacrament.
H: Whoa.
B: Yeah, they really exceeded my expectations.
H: I know. Well, because the thing is, I think what I was picturing was a crusty, fried situation.
But it was more like a beignet with a surprise Oreo inside. The Oreo lost its structural integrity
somewhere in the process in a really good way.
B: In a good way. I was also really touched– I mean, there were hundreds of livestock and
cows. And I just remember seeing these teenagers caring for their cows in a way that was just
really sweet.
H: I will say many things melted my heart. The quilts melted my heart. The children’s art melted
my heart. And then … I wouldn’t consider it a heart melt. It was emotional, but I don’t know what
the emotion was: witnessing mutton busting for the first time.
B: Whew. We may need a whole mutton busting episode. There are so many questions. So
many ethical quandaries. It was amazing. Yeah.
H: So for our listeners who are unfamiliar with the sport of mutton busting, these children who
are about six years old grab onto the back of a sheep. And then, I don’t know, they tell the
sheep “Go!” And the sheep just starts booking it to the other side. The sheep is sprinting. And
the child who’s about six years old and wearing a helmet, their job is to hold on for as long as
they can. And then they fall off. It’s like surfing, I guess.
B: Right. And depending on the kid, this experience is the most incredible, life-giving ecstasy
ever, or …
H: Or they pull them up by their clothes … with the camera zoomed into their face. And they
look … like they’ve just fallen off of sheep at high speed.
B: So we learned a lot. I’m really thankful for it. Still processing. It was clear that we were not
from there.
H: Yeah.
B: We didn’t have a cowboy hat. We didn’t have cowboy boots.
H: No.
B: And finally, I think one of my most important takeaways is that we need more Connecticut-shaped
food. When you go to Texas, you can get a variety of different foods all shaped like
Texas.
H: In the shape of Texas.
B: Cookies, French toast, pancakes. I don’t know that here in Connecticut, we make any food
shaped like Connecticut. So that was a huge takeaway for me.
So we actually have a podcast episode, don’t we?
H: For today, of course, not just going to be us talking about the rodeo today?
B: I mean, we could.
H: Indeed, indeed. Well, I have been really excited about this one. Today, we’re talking with
Karen O’Donnell, who’s Academic Dean and Lecturer in Worship and Human Community at
Westcott House in Cambridge–the United Kingdom, Cambridge. And Karen teaches
introduction to Christian Worship, Patterns in Christian Worship. And she teaches the MPhil
exercise in Religion and Gender at Cambridge. So her story is, after a career as a secondary
school teacher, she undertook postgraduate study in theology. And her doctoral thesis focused
on trauma and the Eucharist in relationship to bodies. And she was the leader of the MA
program in Christian Spirituality at Sarum College before she came to Westcott. The reason I
know Karen is because she recently launched an online community called the Feminist
Theology Gathering, which is mainly a WhatsApp community. It’s also– you can get on the email
list. And I’ve been helping Karen with some of the programming. We have some really exciting
talks coming up that people Zoom into.
It’s a little bit of a shame, because I left Cambridge right as Karen was coming to
Cambridge. And we have so many academic interests in common. So we’ve been sort of
working on feminist theology together from afar. Her book is called Broken Bodies: the
Eucharist, Mary, and the Body in Trauma Theology. She has another book that I believe is
coming out this summer. So we’ll look forward to that. It’s super exciting and sparkly for me to
have Karen here on the podcast to talk about feminist theology. And I’m hoping for our listeners
who haven’t had a lot of exposure to feminist theology that this is a fun window into it.
B: Yeah, I found this a really powerful conversation, especially just this core insight, which
maybe if you haven’t done a lot of reading in feminist theology, you might not realize. But
patriarchy hurts everyone, and feminist theology helps to liberate everyone. So there’s a really
expansive vision here for all of humanity. It’s not just for women. It’s not just focused on
women’s issues. Women’s issues are human issues. They belong to all of us. So I love this sort
of expansive place that she invites us to.
H: Welcome, Karen, to the Leaders Way podcast. I’m so excited that we finally get to record
together. This is just wonderful.
K: Thank you for having me. It’s really great to be here.
H: Yay.
B:: There are so many Cambridge vibes going on right now. Does Cambridge have a mascot?
K: I don’t know. I have no idea.
H: They don’t really have mascots in the UK.
B: No? Okay.
H: Except for like … Hogwarts has some mascots internal to Hogwarts.
K: It’s a gesture of grace towards our American readers.
H: Thank you. Yeah. Just translating. I need things in animals.
B: The Cambridge love is abounding, so I’m just going to bask in your light.
H: Well, Westcott has a tortoise, right?
K: We do. We have Hort the tortoise, who’s over 100 years old, named after one of the previous
bishops. He now makes a very gentle appearance in the final weeks of the Easter term. And
technically, the senior student is supposed to be responsible for Hort when Hort is here. No
senior student wants Hort to die on their watch, so it becomes a very stressful couple of weeks.
But he just roams the garden. They kind of give his shell a little bit of a wash. They give him
some water. He likes to munch the grass. He’s super cute. Yeah.
H: I think if I’m successful in life, whatever that means for me, someone might name a tortoise
after me one day.
K: And you’ve really made it.
B: That’s a really high bar.
K: Right.
B: Wow. Okay.
H: It seems less high than naming a person after you.
K: Also, like Hort’s lived, you know, he’s lived 100 years. I mean, that’s longevity.
H: You’ve seen things. Right.
K: Seen ordinands come and go. Yeah.
H: World events. Sort of a passive dude for, you know, having seen so much.
K: Hibernates like 10 months of a year.
H: Totally. Maybe that’s the secret, honestly.
So one of the reasons I wanted to ask you onto the podcast is because in a previous
episode, I mean, I can’t help myself. I just pepper in little feminist theology thoughts. Yeah. But I
thought to myself, we really need to have a guest who can kind of give our listeners a little intro
to what feminist theology is. I immediately thought of you because you’ve recently launched this
online feminist theology network that’s really exciting. And a lot of people have expressed
interest in … it’s become a digital community. It’s really wonderful. So with that interest and that
in my mind makes you the Queen of Feminist Theology.
K: So I’m terrified and also very, very happy about that title. I will take it and also I fear it.
H: Yeah, that’s fair. So as queen of feminist theology, might you be able to kind of give our
listeners a little intro? What is feminist theology?
K: So I think sometimes people think feminist theology is just like women doing theology. Yeah.
And like that’s a good thing. Women should be doing theology, but that’s not quite enough. And
I think sometimes people think feminist theology is just like when we bring the feminine in
alongside the masculine. And that’s good. Like we should do that. But that also isn’t necessarily
kind of sufficient. It’s kind of sometimes just serving to uphold like dominant gender paradigms
that are already like very well-established in theology.
So I like Rosemary Radford-Ruether on this. If any of your listeners have not read
Rosemary Radford-Ruether, you must. She is the queen of feminist theology.
H: True. Or was the queen. You could be the princess, I guess.
K: I take that. So Radford-Reuther says, if you’ll forgive a quote, she says, “Feminism is a
critical stance that challenges the patriarchal gender paradigm that associates males with
human characteristics defined as superior and dominant, like rationality and power, and females
with those defined as inferior and auxiliary, such as intuition and passivity.” I find that super
helpful for then thinking about what feminist theology is. So I would usually talk about feminist
theology as theology that is seeking to kind of question in a really wide range of quite creative
ways the kind of patterns and modes of theology that really justify and perpetuate forms of
male-dominant and female-subordination kind of paradigms. And really recognizing that
patriarchy is bad for everybody, not just for women. Like patriarchy pushes men into roles in the
same way it pushes women into roles, and none of those are helpful things.
So feminist theology for me is like theology that’s trying to push at that. One of the things
I love about feminist theology is like there isn’t one thing. There are as many feminist theologies
as there are people doing feminist theology, and I really love the kind of messiness of that. But
also I think partly because patriarchy across theology and across our scriptures is so dominant
and so kind of woven all the way through it that actually feminist theology is the kind of thing that
recognizes patriarchy in all those places and acts to challenge it, acts to reveal it even.
Sometimes revealing it is all that the feminist theologian can do, but that in itself is a good thing.
Is that helpful?
B: Yeah, that’s really helpful. Yeah, I am … I’m thinking, can you transport us to your
classroom? And what are those conversations like? You use the word messy, and I mean,
learning is so messy. Life is messy. Growth is messy. Yeah. And what’s it like to have a front
row seat to students? I imagine some of them coming into contact with feminist theology for the
first time. Yeah. You know, what are the surprises for you as a teacher? Where does your
students typically get stuck? Where are the arguments and the wrestling? Take us into a class
with you.
K: Yeah, so I actually taught a fantastic class this morning. Like I enjoyed it so much. I’m pretty
sure the students enjoyed it. And I’ll talk about that in just a moment. But I had a revelation this
week where I discovered that one of my first-year students who already has a theology degree
and he’s now an ordinand studying a master’s qualification. So he’s coming from a very good
university with a very good degree. And I’m teaching a class on liturgical theology in the
Eucharist. And I set a piece of writing by Teresa Berger to read. Yale– Yay! And he was reading
it in the library, and one of the other classmates came over and was like, “Oh, Teresa Berger is
really cool. “ And it turned out that’s the first piece of feminist theology he’d ever read. And he
has a first-class degree from one of the UK’s leading institutions. I was like, how is that
possible?
H: Yeah.
K: And we can talk about that later on. So one of my … kind of ways of teaching feminist
theology is that every class that I do is a feminist theology class, regardless of the subject that
I’m teaching. So I’m teaching this class on Liturgical Theology at the Eucharist. It’s awesome.
I’m really enjoying it. We’re reading queer theology in it. We’re reading feminist theology in it.
We’re reading black theology in it as par for the course. So I’m wanting them to come out as
well-rounded theologians at the end of it. How can I do that if I’m only giving them dead white
men to read? And liturgical theology, right? It’s harder. Like it’s a challenge for me to think, right,
hang on a minute, who am I setting to read? Whose voices am I amplifying in the classroom?
And generally, I think in those contexts, students kind of respond to that pretty well. So the class
I taught today was on Trinity and Gender, and it’s an MPhil class. So some of my students in
there are ordinands, but not all of them. It’s a master’s class, but actually a whole bunch of my
PhD students just kind of turn up because it’s a really great class. So we were reading Julian of
Norwich and Janet Martin Soskice. Fantastic.
And yeah, where things get tricky, often teaching in a confessional context where people
often do want to hold on to some kind of sexed distinction between male and female, and find
the idea of gender as something socially constructed rather than God-given to be challenging.
Like not insurmountable, but if you’ve never encountered that before and you’re in your kind of
mid-20s, early 30s, that’s a big thing to kind of come across and have disrupt your kind of …
way of thinking. So sometimes people get stuck there. There’s some perennial kind of
questions, you know, “Is it useful to use feminine language for God …” (is something we were
talking about today) “as a strategy for thinking through the masculine nature of the Trinity and
the way in which, you know, if God is male, then the male is God?”
Interestingly, what I have found is that … this is the second year I’ve taught that class.
It’s mostly women that take it. In fact, almost exclusively, it doesn’t have to be. It’s open for
everybody. I find that problematic and it’s easy for people to opt out of learning because they
see something as, they see feminist theology as something that women do. They see it as
something that’s dangerous and not proper. Yeah, sorry, I’ve digressed. Anyway, back to my
classroom. Actually, most of the students I’ve encountered tend to be pretty open. There are
kind of points of conflict and sometimes that’s about, you know, whether trans women are really
women. You know, we’ve been reading this year, Susannah Cornwall’s Gender Theology, which
has been fantastic, but it’s really provocative and requires people to think through what it might
mean to understand God as a being in whom gender is both non-existent and also in excess.
We’ve been kind of wrestling with apophaticism a lot. It’s rich and generally well-received. The
places where people get stuck are not insurmountable, but just often just really new.
H: Yeah, kind of paradigm-blasting.
K: Yeah, yeah. And some of that’s really sad, right? Feminist theology isn’t tall enough. I didn’t
do any feminist theology until I was a PhD student. In fact, I did an entire undergraduate degree
without ever reading any women, not even feminist theology. I just didn’t read any women.
H: Yeah, I encountered feminist theology in my PhD as well. I have to have read some. I read
Julian, etc.
K: Okay, yeah. Anyone who was sort of a feminist theologian was like, “Oooh, don’t let your
friends see you checking that out.”
K: You know, I’m … just 20 years ago, but women were doing theology 20 years ago. They just
weren’t on my reading list as an undergrad.
H: Well, and you and I both have been told pretty explicitly just not to do feminist theology and
or not to call it feminist theology. So there’s a very real dynamic at play there too.
K: When I was a master’s student and I was applying for PhD funding, and what I wanted to do
wasn’t explicitly feminist because I hadn’t actually ever really kind of read any feminist stuff, but
it was about Mary, about the Virgin Mary, and a very senior female theologian, a UK theologian,
said to me, “Look, Karen, if you want to be taken seriously as an academic, you need to stop
doing all that woman stuff.” Fortunately, I was quite bullish, and I was like, “I’m pretty happy with
what I’m doing, kind of cracked on.” But yeah, I’ve never forgotten it. And I know what she
means, right? Actually, there are faculties that would not employ me because I specialize in
feminist theology.
B: Well, I’ll make the confession that I made earlier to you, Hannah; as an undergrad theology
student, I think I had a choice of taking an Augustine class that was going to put me in the
classroom at eight o’clock on a Friday morning, or I could take this feminist theology class,
which I think I met once a week for like three and a half hours, and then I could have my Friday
free. And I was like, “Well, done.” Right? So I took the feminist theology class because I could
go out on Thursday nights and sleep in on Friday, and this class changed my life. So this is with
Catherine LaCugna, the Trinitarian scholar, who actually died of cancer in the middle of our
class, while we were reading her book, “God With Us.”
K: These are our texts for next week. We’re reading.
B: Oh my gosh, Catherine LaCugna! Oh … tender heart, so patient with, at least for me, I’ll
speak for myself. It took me the semester to catch up. I was like, “What?” I mean, this was
1996. And I’m just so thankful, both for the kind of urgency that she had around this work–it was
needed yesterday; and her utter generosity of patience as I was just sort of grappling with new
language. And, you know, we swim in the patriarchy. So we’re fish in water. “What do you
mean, water?”
K: We don’t see it. Exactly.
B: We don’t see it. So.
K: amazing.
B: Would you say a word about Mary? I feel like if you want to start a fight in theology, you start
saying things about Mary. So what kinds of fights have you been having?
K: Oh, I haven’t had that many fights, but maybe I just don’t talk about her enough. Like
nobody’s ever asked me to teach a class on Mary. So maybe it’s not needed here. I don’t know.
So I can’t escape her. Every time I think I’m done with her, she pitches back up again. When I
went off to do my PhD, I thought I was going to be a Mariologist. And then like three months into
my PhD, I discovered trauma theology. And I was like, that’s me. I’m sold. That kind of never
escaped Mary, but my kind of dominant interest kind of went elsewhere. I’ve just finished editing
a book on pregnancy and theology, which will be out in July. (Small plug there.) We’re very
excited. I edited it with Claire Williams. We’ve herded cats for two years. We now have this
amazing volume. And I put in a little bit of my, it was actually a bit that my viva examiners and
my PhD told me to take out of the PhD. And I loved it so much. I’ve never let it go. So I put in
this thing.
I’ve got a chapter that’s called “Pregnancy, Human and Divine.” And it’s about the
relationship between Mary’s flesh and the body of Christ and the difference between Mary’s
pregnancy and other pregnancies and whether or not we can then take Mary’s pregnancy as a
model for human pregnancy, in general. (Spoiler, no, we can’t.) So yeah, that’s… I’ve kind of put
that in there. I’m really interested to see what people make of it because it’s quite biological. So
talking a lot about like mitochondrial DNA. The mitochondrial DNA for women is passed down
and it’s lost for men. So there’s this kind of, in Jesus’s body, a kind of legacy of women. But
because there’s no male sperm, it’s missing the legacy of men that he would normally get. So I
just like, “Oh, I’m fascinated by that.” Like I’m sure the biologists would be like, “That’s not how it
works, Karen.” But I did my best with the sciences. So I’ve done that one.
Another thing I wrote recently was about Mary the crone, where I’ve been thinking about
Mary after the resurrection, because in kind of apocryphal and early Christian texts, you know,
she lives until she’s in her eighties. And so I use this text called The Life of the Virgin by
Maximus the Confessor. He talks about Mary, the kind of, life of Mary beyond Jesus’s
ascension, where she’s a leader in that she teaches them how to preach. And she teaches them
how to pray and she teaches them what Jesus is like. And, you know, she tries to leave
Jerusalem and kind of let the church community grow. And she’s kind of turned back and sent
back by God into the community and made to kind of stay there. And I’ve drawn that into
conversation with Nicola Slee’s work on … she has a little book called The Book of Mary. And
Nicola Slee has this amazing poem about Pentecost and it’s the older Mary, Mary the crone,
who sat with the children in the church. And the spirit begins to move and Mary’s eyes light up
because she’s been there before. And she tells the children about Pentecost. Oh, just love it. So
I try not to get in many fights with it. I know she’s a bit contentious for feminist theologians. I
think there’s much to be gained from creative reflection with Mary. And I really appreciate it, like,
theologically and like for my own kind of spirituality as well.
B: It may be that I’m just being shaped by a conversation that I had just yesterday with Teresa
Berger, in fact, and the Roman Catholic students who are gathering to plan the Feast of the
Annunciation service in Marquand Chapel. Yeah. Right. And so, “How sort of Mary-forward do
we want to be? How sort of Roman Catholic do we want to show up in a traditionally reformed
chapel space?” So it’s all on the mind.
K: Amazing. Yeah. I mean, we wrestle with that here, right? We’re, Westcott House is an
Anglican Theological College. And whilst it might once have had a very kind of Anglo-Catholic
tradition, it doesn’t really have that. It’s much more varied now. And we have, you know, some
students who are big fans of the BVM and some who are like, “She is not important to me at all.
I will happily sing a song at Advent about her. But other than that, I’m not really bothered.” It’s
always really interesting.
H: Wow. So how did feminist theology become important to you? Was it through Mary? Was it a
different way?
K: Well, I spent 15 years from being about age of 14 in a charismatic evangelical church that I
got kind of converted and saved into that was strongly complementarian. And I can look back
now and see that I was profoundly shaped by narratives that I heard at the front of the church,
the visuals that I saw of who could be in leadership, who could preach. But also as a teenage
girl, the kind of models of marriage and relationship that I saw, you know … my youth leader got
married at 18. She didn’t kiss her husband until they got like, and “I pronounce you man and
wife” and everyone was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s amazing.” And I was like, “All right, okay, that’s
what I should do.” (That’s not what happened–But you can’t see me on the podcast doing my
little aside into my hand). But anyway, like, there were no women in leadership except for
children’s work, which is okay. So there was this expectation of marriage. I got married at 22, I
was an old maid. So wrong. And then you produce babies, you know, that was that was the job.
And when you start producing babies, you go down to part-time work, you might stop working
altogether. And that was appropriate. And I’ve written widely about my experiences of multiple
pregnancy losses during that time, which eventually led to the breakdown of my marriage, but
also leaving the church. Church did not know what to do with me as somebody that couldn’t
fulfill that.
H: Yeah, you weren’t fitting in that box.
K: I didn’t fit. Yeah. And they just didn’t know what to do with me. Well, so it was awful; but like
really good things came out of it. And I, I was a secondary school teacher. So I quit my job and
went and enrolled on a master’s degree. And then I was really fortunate and got some PhD
funding and went off with a PhD. I started to think about Mary, I couldn’t even tell you why, but
in my masters at Nottingham… and Mary Cunningham, who’s an Orthodox nun, I think she’s
amazing. She taught this class on Mary; I was the only person in it. So me and Mary sat and
talked about Mary.
H: Wow.
K: Two hours every week. It was so cool. And I can’t even remember why I picked it beyond the
fact that I quite like Mary Cunningham. And I was like, “Well, this sounds cool, I’d enjoy it.” And
there wasn’t much on the curriculum that was about women. So my 20th-century theology was
Karl Barth, Karl Rahner and Hans van Balthazar. That was it. Right? I did that, I did Dante, and I
did Henri de Loubac. And then I did Mary, that was my other thing. And then I ended up doing
my dissertation at Mary’s. So I kind of started getting into Mary and then that kind of led to the
PhD proposal. And I was quite anxious about the term “feminist.” I didn’t identify as feminist. I
was quite anxious about feminist theologians. I pitched up in my first PhD supervision with
Siobhán Garigan and I was like, “I’m quite anxious about feminist theologians. I don’t really think
they’ve got anything to say to my project.” And she told me to get a grip and sent me away to
read a whole load of feminist theologians. And she was quite right.
So I read Rosemary Redford-Reuther there, and I read Beth Johnson. I read Dolores
Williams and Serene Jones and Nicola Slee and Kelly Brown Douglas and just discovered this
whole world; that I knew I loved theology, but I did not know theology could be like that. I didn’t
know it could be so creative and so liberative. And that was so attractive to me. It was a way of
kind of holding on to all of the good things that I really appreciate about the Christian tradition,
whilst, I guess, really recognizing that theology is a human endeavor and that therefore it can be
wrong, and that there is space within theology to kind of reclaim and reshape the goods of the
Christian tradition that kind of do better justice to our attempts to speak about God. And I had
never encountered that before. So it gave me hope, I think, having come out of what I could kind
of at that point reflect back on a church experience that had been incredibly damaging. It gave
me hope that things could be better, and started to help me articulate who I was and what my
faith looked like.
So for me, my experience of academic study has always been intertwined with my own
faith experience, my own kind of spirituality. So I’ve done joke that I became an Anglican
because of my Ph.D. I niched up in Exeter Cathedral and then before you knew it, I was being
received into the church and bish, bash, bosh. Now I’m academic Dean at an Anglican
theological college. It didn’t take long. But I would say, oh my goodness, it genuinely changed
my life. And more than that, it changed my relationship with God. And therefore it changed the
kind of theology that I felt I’m able to produce out of my own body.
H: Yeah. Yeah.
K: Just, oh my goodness, this has been quite the journey over the last decade for me.
H: Yeah.
K: Zero to, you know, heading up a network of feminist theology that’s worldwide and really
exciting.
H: Which is just like taking on a life of its own so quickly. Yeah.
H: So some; I have a group of students right now who are really struggling to see the link
between the study of academic theology and their call to ministry. And I have a very similar
experience to yours, which is that my spiritual life has more often than not been fueled by my
theologizing. But I completely see where they’re coming from. And it’s a really common struggle
for people studying theology to have trouble in their spiritual lives in tandem. What kind of words
do you have for people in that position who are kind of studying academic theology, wondering
what the point is, but really have a heart for the church, that kind of a thing?
K: Yeah. So we actually at the start of the academic year, not this year, but last year with one of
my colleagues, we ran a session for all our returning students. And we used Simone Weil’s work
on attention, and attention and its relationship to prayer. And we made them do a bit of Simone
Weil at the start of the year. But we use that as a kicking off point to think about what it means
to pay attention to things, not to get them right, but that the attention, in and of itself, is a good
thing. And that that’s developing something useful and spiritual within us. And so we did some
work with them around prayer, attention, and academic study, and trying to enable them to start
to see academic study as part of their prayer life. I wouldn’t say it was like super successful, but
it had some success. I have a Ph.D. student who prays before he starts his Ph.D. study each
day. We use the Thomas Aquinas’ prayer for students, which I just love. We gave that to our
students as way of encouraging them to see that when they’re sitting down to study, this is part
of their worship. It’s part of their prayer. It’s feeding them in the same way that their prayer in
chapel is supposed to be feeding them.
H: Totally.
K: It’s hard. I get it. I totally get it. And I would say there were days in my PhD and there are
days now where I’m like, I’m getting nothing from this. This is dry as you like.
H: Or it’s like really frustrating.
K: Yeah. It’s totally contrary to like, what it is that I’m actually kind of feeling I’m going to do. But
yeah, I think we’ve tried to kind of recognize and address that and repeatedly address it. But I”m
lucky, in Westcott’s context, in that I think I have a number of colleagues who are like researchactive
and would talk about their research and their own spiritual lives as being deeply
entwined. And that, we’ve been trying to make that the kind of culture here. But it’s hard, right,
especially for ordinands who are studying, and their own placements, and they’re doing like a
formational track. You know, they’re real busy. It’s easy to not see this as a gift. And that’s okay
as well. I think just kind of kind of bring them back to the idea that the things we pay attention to
cultivate an attitude of prayer within us. You know, it doesn’t matter how good the grades are.
It’s the attention itself that is the gift.
B: I was just on retreat with some of our students at Holy Cross Monastery and we spent a
couple of days in silence together at the beginning of Lent. And this was precisely the subject of
our conversation. How do we integrate the head and the heart? How do we cultivate a kind of
attentiveness when most of the time we’re actually distracted? Attention really is the mother of
almost every other activity, right? And so if we don’t know how to be awake and alert, right? This
was Jesus’ invitation the night before he died, to stay awake with him, right? And so I’m really
excited to hear that it’s sort of foundational for y’all. And, you know, those are seeds that you
plant that, you know, you may not see germinating now, but I’ve got to believe that many will
have that light bulb moment. Oh, that’s what Karen was talking about. Oh, I get it now.
K: Yeah, I hope so. Also, kind of this idea that they’re not finished when they leave here. There’s
two things with that. Firstly, that we would encourage them to continue to think of themselves as
theologians as they move forward into ministry. We try to use that language in our classrooms,
as referring to our students as theologians. But the other part of that is that we try and use
language in the college of all of us, the staff as well, being in formation. So we talk about
students being on a program of formation, but I will also talk about myself as being formed by
the classes I teach and by the time I spend in chapel. And it’s helpful to see all of us on a kind of
movement together, that we’re not these kind of finished products that are trying to churn out
other finished products.
H: Yes. I need to ask you about this class that you’re teaching where you’re doing different
prayer practices. How’s that going? You have anything to tell?
K: Yeah, it’s not a class actually. So we have a tutorial system here in Westcott House where
each student is assigned a tutor and our tutor groups, so I have about six in my tutor group, we
meet together during the week. We’re a small community, so we see plenty of each other, but
we intentionally, all the tutor groups meet together on a Friday morning after morning prayer.
And we have breakfast together. And so we take it turns to provide breakfast. Students do it, I
do it. And what we’re supposed to do is just have various conversations. So I’ve been here for a
year and a half, and the first year in a term, students signed up to lead conversations. And we
talk about All Saints kind of at the end of October. And we talk about our favorite saints or
spiritual practices that help us grow or if we’d organized a Eucharist previously, kind of reflecting
on how that had gone or “What’s your favorite book?”– different topics.
But just at the end of the Michelmas term, just before Christmas, my tutor group decided
that they wanted to be a bit more intentional about what we were doing on our Friday mornings.
And I used to lead a master’s degree program in Christian spirituality. So what they said was,
we want to focus on different spiritual practices. I was like, “Cool, what do you want to do?” So
we brainstormed like a massive list of things. And I just allocated them to the weeks that were
left of Lent term and Easter term. And so we have been experimenting. So we’ve done the
Jesus prayer; big hit. Everybody’s a big part of that. It is interesting, like everybody had done it
before. We talk about it on a Friday morning, and then we intentionally do it for a week. And
then we check back in the next Friday and then the next student teaches us the next practice
and then we go off and do that. So we’ve done the Jesus prayer. We’ve done how to use
rosaries, daily offices (which we pray morning and evening prayer anyway). But what we ended
up doing was we discovered that we loved the midday prayer in common worship. And so we
have as a tutor group added in midday prayer. So we meet together to pray in the middle of the
day, which is amazing. This week we’ve been using the examen, which has been fantastic. We
had a fantastic week a couple of weeks ago where we used Cole Arthur Riley’s Black Liturgies
book, the new book that’s just come out. And I photocopied them a kind of morning office that
we had to use for the week. And they loved it so much. They did a bulk order and all ordered the
book. And then they’ve been using them in intercessions, in morning and evening prayer in the
chapel, we’ve used them for praying on Ash Wednesday. Her Ash Wednesday meditation was
amazing. Interestingly, it’s brought us really close as a group, which is weird because like
technically we’re not really doing anything much more different than we were doing before. But
yeah, it’s been amazing. And we’re only kind of, not even halfway through. We’ve got another
two weeks of term left.
H: I mean, it’s a different level of depth and human connection than just talking about a book or
something like that. Yeah, just talking about a book. I love to talk about books. But Rowan
Williams in his episode also talked a lot about the Jesus Prayer. And I didn’t share this story at
that point …
K: Come clean, Hannah; tell us.
H: I have like my own experience of the Jesus Prayer. And I almost responded to you on Twitter
X or whatever with this story. And I was like, “This is a little too wild for the Internet.” So now I …
guess I’ll share it with the Internet.
K: Yeah, in the Internet.
H: I used to have a job as a performer at Disneyland and one of my roles was so stressful to me
because I, since the time I was a toddler, have been afraid of fireworks. And in this dancing role,
I had to jump straight into fireworks that were coming at me, because it’s supposed to look like I
came out of thin air, obviously. So I had to do this night after night, twice a night, for my job. And
I was so afraid of it that like as I was waiting, I would be doing breathing exercises with the
Jesus Prayer, fully costumed. Like, the music amping up behind me going, “Lord Jesus Christ,
Son of the Living God, Have mercy on me, a sinner!” I have yet to discern whether this is a good
or a bad thing. But now, like when my heart rate gets really high and I can feel stress in my
body, the words start just happening.
K: Oh, wow.
H: Like I feel like maybe that shouldn’t always be a stress response. Like maybe I should pray
those words also when I’m not feeling like I’m about to die.
K: But this is what the group was saying was like when we talked about the Jesus Prayer,
everybody was like, “Yes, I’ve used it in times of great anxiety.” Somebody was like, “I get very
frightened going to the dentist and it’s my meditation at the dentist.” And so what was fun was
doing this intention. One of the ways I ended up using it was, if I get to chapel two, three
minutes early, I’ve got kind of a set of prayer beads, I keep in my pocket. And just do like I just
keep doing it until the prayer, the kind of office starts. Yeah. And I’ve taken to carry the prayer
beads in my pocket. So every time I put my hand in my pocket, I catch on it. I’m just starting to
do it. And yeah, because I don’t even really used it as a like panic attack medication type thing.
Which I don’t think Jesus minds.
H: I think I’ll look forward to the heavenly conversation where we really hash that out.
K: And I think it’s just like, well, is that the best way praying? I don’t mind. It’s fine.
H: I mean, better to pray than not to pray.
B: Well, this is maybe a great transition to trauma because that sounded terrifying to me,
Hannah.
H: To be clear, I wouldn’t name that as dramatic.
B: That’s the best part of the podcasting with you. I get to learn things about you. And not
surprisingly, it’s also true for me. I detest fireworks. I mean, the Fourth of July is the low point of
the year. But there’s been so much conversation in the last generation or two about the
pervasiveness of trauma in our world. And thankfully, so much more awareness and so much
more compassion and sensitivity. And I just wonder how you became interested in trauma and
speak a little bit about what you’re finding at the intersection of trauma and theology. It’s
everywhere, I suspect.
K: Right. I became interested in trauma theology by accident. That’s all the best academic
career moves happen. My PhD supervisor, one of them is Siobhán Garrigan, and she happened
to mention some writing by her friend, Serene Jones, on trauma. And I was like, that sounds
cool. So I went and kind of tracked it down. And what I found was Serene Jones’s 2001 article in
modern theology, which is called Hope Deferred, and is about pregnancy loss and infertility. And
she writes out of her own experience of miscarrying and of pastoring those who have miscarried
as well. I’d never read anything like it. Siobhán had no idea that I had had a number of
miscarriages. And I didn’t–to this day, don’t even know if that’s the piece of work she was
meaning to talk about when she said Serene Jones. But I read it and I was supposed to be
writing a book review of something for Siobhán. And like a week later, I came back and I said, “I
think I’ve overstepped.” And I gave her what I’d written. And basically, I’d like started this book
review and then grown some trauma legs quite quickly and like, just run with it. And Siobhán
was like, “This is what you should be doing your Ph.D. on.” And she was quite right.
So I did like a bit of a crash course. There wasn’t much. So took in like over a decade
ago now. Pretty sure I read almost everything written in trauma theology within the three years.
The field was so small that you could kind of count the major publications on two hands. I can’t
keep up with it now. And that’s amazing. So I have Ph.D. students working in trauma, and
they’re like referencing books. I’m like, “I’ve not heard of this one.” This is so cool. This is the
only way I keep up to date with the reading. I really appreciate it. For me, trauma theology and
feminist theology, they’re obviously not the same thing. But for me, they kind of sing out of the
same hymn sheet, in that they’re both interested in taking the experience of our body seriously,
accounting for or taking notice of the way in which, that the experiences of our body shape the
kinds of theologies that we are able to write and also able to affirm as well. And so there’s a kind
of natural connection. In fact, Katie Cross and I edited a book a few years ago called Feminist
Trauma Theologies. We were trying to make that connection quite explicit. Interestingly, Shelly
Rambo wrote the foreword for that where she talks about she was Serene Jones’s Ph.D.
student. And she talks about how obviously it was feminist, because we were all feminists. But
we never like called it feminist. It was just we were the people doing it. And so it has this kind of
feminist root, feminist legacy that has blossomed and flourished in lots of really interesting ways.
And church needs to become trauma-informed. And to do that, it needs good trauma-informed
theologies and it needs pastors and priests that are trauma-informed and understand what it is
that we’re talking about when we’re talking about trauma. Yeah.
H: One of the reasons I was really excited when I saw you were launching this feminist theology
network is because in sort of a lone wolf kind of a way, I had done my due diligence, literature
review of feminist theology, blah, blah, whatever. And just kind of noticed on my own that
theology calling itself feminist theology has like trickled away.
K: Right.
H: But it seems to me, and what you’re saying about these observations kind of tracks with my
hypothesis, which is that like, it’s dovetailed into trauma theology in a really significant way. And
our usage of the word feminist has changed a lot since the 80s and 90s. So that’s significant
too.
K: Yeah. I just … one of the things I found really interesting is that feminist theology is now
having another moment.
H: Yeah, I think so.
K: Actually, it’s kind of in the ascendancy. Again, people are excited about what it might mean.
People are hungry for finding out more about it. And that’s like people of all generations. So it’s
not just kind of people that, you know, missed out on the kind of flourishing stuff of the 90s. And
I think part of that is maybe it’s kind of post-economic crash 2008 onwards as the kind of
resurgence of tradwife kind of culture. And I think that part of that’s to do with the Internet and
kind of making these things kind of really popular and accessible to people.
H: I also think part of it is looking in the mirror and realizing actually things in church life and
home lives haven’t changed. Like all this amazing work has been done. But when we look at our
friends, our families, our churches, like the cash-out hasn’t quite been accomplished.
K: This is it. So I was asked recently to write a survey of feminist theology for there’s a new
volume of Ford’s Modern Theologians coming out. And I felt the weight of that request like super
heavy on me.
H: Wow.
K: But one of the kind of sections that I was kind of told that I had to kind of write about was the
influence, achievement, and future agenda of feminist theology. And I was like, “Oh, OK.” But
what I actually ended up doing was looking at an edited collection from 1990 that was written by
Anne Loades. And she wrote in the kind of foreword about the situation of feminist theology in
1990. And as I read it, I thought … that’s still exactly the same today.
H: Yeah, that’s it.
K: Talks about like the Christian tradition is still fundamentally ambivalent for women.
Christianity still offers women really unhelpful gender construction. The male-related symbol and
metaphor is still given priority. We still need to do better attending to experiences of difference in
class and ethnicity.
H: Yeah.
K: Like that’s still the same.
H: Well, the way I see it and this may be different from the way you see it. And actually, I have
some things I can email to you and share with you so we can keep talking about this offline. But
the way I see it is some really important, incisive critiques have been made by people like Rita
Nakashima Brock. But, or, and, that was difficult work that was done. And at the same time, it’s
easier to critique something than to build something new. And so we’re in a stage now, I think,
where the projects we have to undertake are telling the stories in fresh ways. And actually, this
does bring me to kenosis and atonement and things like that. Do you have any words of wisdom
for people wanting to parse out what is kenosis? How do I interpret that well? What is
atonement? How do I interpret that well? “Those kinds of issues.
K: Yeah. OK. Wow, yeah, okay. Well, kenosis, okay; I’ve got no truck with it whatsoever. So
self-emptying, self-giving, self-sacrificing … women are socialized to do those things, especially
in familial context. But also in academic contexts, also in business contexts, and work contexts.
And I just don’t think that feminist theology can endorse at least a traditional version of kenotic
theology. And I think traditionally theology has done a really bad job at saying, “This is what it
means to be like Christ.” So like Jesus’s suffering was redemptive. Fine. You might like to argue
that, you don’t have to argue it. I’m increasingly not on board with the idea of redemptive
suffering. But the problem comes in that, that kind of particular suffering then is writ large to
imply that all suffering is redemptive and that what it means to follow Christ is to be engaged in
that form of suffering. And I’m … not a big fan of Paul, really, Saint Paul. He talks a lot about the
life of the Christian as one of Christ-like suffering and self-denial. Fine. But that’s like one day of
Jesus’s life, right? The passion. I’m also interested in Jesus’s life and ministry. I think we can be
Christ-like in lots of ways. We can be Christ-like in hospitality and welcome and joyfulness and
abundance and excess and hanging out with our friends. And I’ve been massively inspired in
the last year or so. I’ve been reading again, Lisa Isherwood’s The Fat Jesus and just this
beautiful image of an abundant Christology where, yes, Jesus suffers. And he bears his
suffering in a particular way. But he also is full of joy. And he’s also the person that transforms
water into wine and hangs out and eats fish on a beach with his friend. I think we get into trouble
when we say to be Christ-like is to do this thing.
I heard Kelly Brown Douglas speak. We were really fortunate that she came to Westcott
earlier this year. And she just made this tiny little point about how in the Creed we say he was
born and then he suffered and died. And we skipped 30 years. And I’m like, “Oh, and they’re the
best bit, right?” Like they’re challenging, but they are just as much part of what it means to be
Christ-like as the other bits. All super important. I’m not devaluing those. But what I get
frustrated about is that, yes, Jesus Christ is kenotic. And yet that doesn’t mean that he spends
all 33 or however many years of his life in suffering and self-denial. You know, he has a good
time along the way. We need a bigger vision of what it means to be Christ-like because if we’re
going to say to be Christ-like is about self-denial and suffering and it’s God of Gethsemane
through to the resurrection, we’re doing ourselves a disservice, but we’re doing the incarnate
God a disservice as well. That’s too small a vision for me. Sorry, I got really excited there. I got
into preaching mode.
B: No, no. And your excitement actually led me to want to zoom out actually and ask a big
question. So, you know, I’m a father of daughters, both of whom are just around 20, and they’re
strong women and they’re deeply rooted feminists. And they’re not so sure about the church.
H: Yeah.
B: Because they haven’t been in your classroom, Karen. And they’ve been in parishes that, you
know, we’re all too familiar and all too patriarchal. And they’re wondering, “You know, is there is
there a space for me anywhere in this tradition?” And of course, when when dad sort of
describes conversations like we’re having today and when I, you know, roll out my litany of
feminist theologians and saints and mentors, they’re not so sure. And so I wonder. So here’s a
tall order. You know, speaking to, you know, a 20 year old who’s open, who’s curious.
K: Yeah.
B: But who’s at a moment of decision like, am I going to embrace this, you know, in my adult
life? How do you speak to them? What do you talk to them about? What stories do you tell to
awaken their imagination?
K: Gosh, that’s really hard. You can be what you can see, right? So I think if you want women to
be making choices to be in churches, then they need to be encountering parts of the church
where there are women who are like them. You know what? I have found … don’t laugh. Don’t
judge me. I have found TikTok to be an amazing experience.
H: Oh, my gosh. Yes.
K: I’ve encountered so many women priests on TikTok that have filled me with joy and brought
me closer to God. Like I’m just … I don’t have enough of them in my life. And I have
encountered them like you say what you like about social media. And a lot of it is absolute toxic
hell. But oh, my goodness. There are some amazing, amazing women and particularly women
priests who have just … Like really blessed me. And, you know, I’m in a tradition where, you
know, we do ordain women, but largely nothing has changed. And the masculine patriarchal
structures of what it means to be a priest are still very much in place. But I think for me, part of
the journey has been not just seeing, you know, great priests on social media, which is fab, but
discovering the women in the tradition for myself.
I discovered the Beguines a few years ago. You know, they are amazing. I’ve discovered
Hadewijch, and she was bonkers. And I loved Marjorie Kempe. Oh, I love Marjorie. You know, I
just say, oh, she’s, she’s full of emotion and she’s loud and she’s messy and leaky. And Julian
says, “This is from God.” And I love it. Yeah, you can only be what you can see. And one of the
things I think feminist theology needs to do is to be more active in dismantling the structures of
patriarchy. I think we’ve pointed out the flaws. But actually, we need to be advocating and
enabling change to happen. I don’t have a kind of recipe of what that change would look like.
But it can’t look the way it currently is, because why then would any person of any gender want
particularly to join the church right there? They’re the declining group.
But I’m equally I’m challenged by I read last year, Abby Day’s work on The Religious
Lives of Older Anglican Laywomen. That’s quite a mouthful of a title, but she basically spent two
years hanging out in parish churches with older Anglican lay women. So they were in their late
70s upwards and discovering what their spirituality looked like. Oh, it’s incredible. These women
are in our churches. They’re the reason the churches are still going. We have not done justice to
women in our church yet. And I don’t know how we do it, but I want to be doing it.
H: I love it. Well, we’ve been talking for longer than it seems like we’ve been talking for. So I
wonder if we can ask you one final question that we do really like to make a practice of asking
people, which is, “What is giving you hope right now?”
K: Oh, OK. The Feminist Theology Network has given me hope.
H: Oh, amen. Oh, it’s …
B: Could you share just a little bit about what that is?
H: Yeah. Good idea.
K: I was lying on a sun lounger in Lanzarote and … I had had a number of people previously. I
was like–you know, when you’re finally on vacation, like all the conversations you’ve had, like
start to make sense in your head? I had like a couple of Ph.D. students and then a couple of like
women, vicars who I was friends with, just be like, “Oh, where would I go in the UK or anywhere
really, to like meet other feminist theologians and find out about what’s happening?” And I was
like, “Huh, I don’t know. And if I don’t know, that probably means it isn’t that.” So I thought I
should start something. And so basically, it’s an informal gathering of people who are interested
in feminist theology. So it’s all genders, it’s around the world, all occupations, all kinds of
occupations. It’s not just academics, not just clergy, all kinds of people are involved in it. And the
last few months, we’ve been gathering every couple of months to listen to a speaker, to ask
some questions, to find out more about different types of feminist theology and to spend some
time together.
It’s the one Zoom thing that I’ve been to where people are like, “The breakout groups are
amazing!” Not the bit everyone’s like, “Oh, no, not the breakout groups.” People are like, “Oh, I
got to meet so many cool people and I wish we had more time.” So that’s fantastic. So that’s the
kind of starting point; we’re hoping to launch a mentoring scheme later on in the year. I’m hoping
that we will have a summer kind of event on pregnancy and theology, because that’s when the
book will come out and I could have some of my amazing contributors give little papers.
I’m hoping that we’ll have some of the best papers. Hannah’s organizing something on
feminist and queer homiletics in September, which is going to be so cool. I’m really looking
forward to that. So that’s what it is. But the best thing about it is that we have a WhatsApp
community which anyone can join. And it’s pretty lively. People asking for book
recommendations, people kind of making plans as some of like local groups, kind of making
plans to meet up, sharing events. It’s just been really great. So that’s giving me hope.
If I can add two more things to this, things that are giving me hope. The new generation
of ordinands that I’m teaching gives me hope that the church will be better. And that’s a good
thing. The other thing that I found here, although I work at Westcott House, we are part of
what’s called the Cambridge Theological Federation. And I also teach in the Divinity Faculty at
Cambridge University. And one of the things I’ve found to be really life-giving is working with
colleagues who are deeply committed to theological education. I’m a teacher at heart. That’s my
vocation. And I just find that to be really life-giving, and makes me hopeful for the future of
theology.
H: Well, thank you so, so, so much for spending time with us.
K: It’s a pleasure.
H: Such a sparkle joy in my week. And I’m really excited to share this with our listeners.
K: Thank you. Me too.
B: Absolute blessing, Karen. Thank you so much for all your work. You go with our prayers and
our hope that we can meet someday in person. I hope our paths. Yeah. That would be amazing.
B: Thank you for listening to The Leader’s Way. We hope you were encouraged and inspired.
To learn more about this episode, visit our website at berkeleydividendy.yale.edu\podcast.
H: Rate and review us and follow the podcast to make sure you never miss an episode. Follow
Berkeley at Yale on Instagram for quotes from the podcast and more.
B: Until next time.
H: The Lord be with you.