Author Archives: Kat Neumann

Gender and Career Progression in Theology and Religious Studies

18 Monday Aug 2014

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Recently I have received a link in my emails to a report on Gender and Career Progression in Theology and Religious Studies undertaken by Mathew Guest, Sonya Sharma and Robert Song (2013). Detailing some comparative data in the field charted against the gendered profile of the discipline, the report highlighted a number of factors that influence women’s pathway through academic study and career progression in academia that I feel are worth reiterating to our readers. While there are other Arts and Humanities-based subjects that are marked by the trends indicated in the report, in a comparison between English, Philosophy, Anthropology, Mathematics and Chemistry, the field indicated by Theology and Religious Studies (TRS) fared worst as regards a gradient decline of women enrolled in further study, or progressing through academic promotion procedures. Whereas by and large female students outnumber male students in undergraduate courses, over the course of postgraduate work, taught and research, the figures begin to tip in balance. As the study shows, ‘the drop off rate for female TRS students is more than twice that of any of these other subjects’ (12).

Of the numerous indicators gathered by the report, the ‘gradual female withdrawal in tandem with academic progression’ (4), a recurring theme was that of lacking confidence in women candidates. However, three issues stand out as especially connected to the academic subject area, rather than a patriarchal institutional culture underwriting academia at large: the recruitment strategies of some institutions that recruit from countries in which candidates are likely to be funded for their studies by their church, which may reinforce a conservative, gendered reception of Christianity also at a structural level (14). To develop the level of confidence in female students to pursue a career path in particular sub-disciplines consequently appears as comparatively more problematic. The report specifically names Systematic Theology amongst its finds (15). A second area highlighted in relation to that of recruitment from elsewhere is the connection of TRS departments with denominational affiliation, often due to supplying training for ministry for which the recruitment by the churches into ministry impacts upon the question of diversity at the university (13). And thirdly, the administrative struggle of TRS departments in their variously re-structured forms. Specifically in the complicated relationship and disciplinary distinction drawn between religious studies in a broader, often interdisciplinary field, and theology, the report noted the implications on directions for research when targeting submissions for the REF (cf. 16). All of these issues, in effect, are symptomatic of funding politics, as they come through at various stages for career progression: in recruitment, in funding further studies, and in impact assessment for career progression.

Motivation to pursue further study, in my own case here at Stirling (one of the few non-denominational schools – and one without the competing demands of classical theology), had largely been kindled by a postgraduate initiative titled “Feminine Divine” that was run over the spring term in 2009 by research postgraduates of the interdisciplinary school for Languages, Cultures and Religions at Stirling. As a first point of contact with the postgraduate community, the lively and welcoming circle of feminist postgraduates made a strong impression on me, as I shied away from approaching (our very approachable!) staff to discuss options of further study. In light of prejudices against tags such as “feminist,” highlighted in the report (8, 16), I recall the reaction of one of my friend’s parents, who upon hearing of their daughter’s participation in the group, cautiously asked if her relationship to her male partner was still all it could be. The equation between the theme “Feminine Divine,” feminism, and lesbian culture in the popular imagination gave rise to many a discussion since.

The question of funding, albeit related to other reasons and factors cited by the study, analysing the recruitment processes and circumstances of candidates, remained largely absent from their consideration – due perhaps to the focus and response of those interviewed for the report. Having been one of the 33.2% of female research postgraduate students in the figures from 2010-11 cited (9), I vividly remember the apprehension in the run-up to deadlines for funding applications after the announcement of cuts in the Arts and Humanities, that could have very well spelled the end of my own academic aspirations. The prospect, particularly in a time of economic austerity, of finding part time work that could fund tuition fees and living costs, especially if there are no family savings to meet some of the costs, is not inviting. And in retrospect, with my study all but completed, I know all too well that without funding, I would have written a different study: economic demands play crucially on the scope and outcomes of research, whichever the field.

Curiously, the report characterised Philosophy and English as two comparative reference groups for the field in light of working methods and subject matter within the Arts and Humanities, cited to aid the interpretation of the absolute figures attained from Higher Education Information Database for Institutions (HEIDI) (10). I say curiously because in the logic of funders – and certainly in the historical development of Religious Studies – TRS nestles under the rubric of Historical and Theological Research. While I do not have access to the numbers of female students progressing through a career in Historical Research, my estimate is that this line of inquiry might have found TRS less of a special case. Obviously this is not to say that it would therefore be any more acceptable to the health of the academic institutions to maintain this imbalance. The recent decision by the Church of England to allow for women bishops offers hope that a symptomatic imbalance in the ratio of male and female students and academics, that may have skewed the ratio of some institutions in the study in comparison to the national average (13), is likely to change over the coming years by providing significant role models to an aspiring generation of women scholars.

Institutions and organisations are eager to pick up discussions to maintain a strong and healthy disciplinary diversity, and the annual ‘Socrel Response Day’ on the theme ‘Achieving Gender Equality in the Academy: Intersections, Interrogations and Practices’ (October 4, 2014) in London is an event of primary importance to raising awareness and facilitating discussions that prepare responsible leadership in academia for a future in TRS. Plans and preparations for a mentoring scheme, central amongst the recommendations of the report, are encouraged in order to facilitate and prepare students and academic staff to face the challenges in pursuit of achieving gender equality in the academic engagement with TRS and beyond.

Remembrance: “The battles we remember…”

05 Tuesday Nov 2013

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On the run-up to Armistice Day – and the numerous other days that are marked by public commemoration – I want to think about the focus of our remembering. During the first years of having come over to Scotland from Germany especially, Armistice Day, and the dozens of war memorials, as well as the never ebbing rhetoric that would equate “the Nazis” uncritically with “the Germans”, I found public expressions of commemoration both unhelpful and disturbing. I have since changed my attitude and this is largely to do with a change of focus in what these kinds of public acts may also achieve. I want to take my cues from a lesson learnt in a poem (see below) by the late German theologian, activist and poet Dorothee Sölle (1929-2003), titled “Memories of audrey lorde” (Loben ohne lügen, Berlin: Fietkau, 2000:47; my translations). Maybe it is a problem of the “late-comer” generations, such as myself, that all we seem to recall with poppies etc. is that there was – or if we let ourselves be made conscious of it, that there is – war, with many victims no less. Despite much protesting and campaigning for innumerable causes of lived and living injustices, we lose sight of a vision for justice expressed in the solidarity with the dead, and our connection to the past and “its” struggles more generally – be that in the context of a military war, on the side of soldiers or civilians, or the many other battles faced in day-to-day living that make public commemorations of the dead so powerful.

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) – the anniversary of her death (from cancer) is only weeks away – was a Caribbean-American poet and activist. The kinship between Sölle’s and her activist concerns, especially on questions of emancipatory movements is striking, despite their radically differing contexts. Audre Lorde, as a Black, lesbian Feminist living through the American civil rights movement seems to have so little in common with the White, German academic theologian and writer, despite her spokes-role in the German Peace movement. And yet, their ties go beyond the mutual recognition of the struggles and pains with cancer (Sölle’s close writer-friend Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) is subject of various of Sölle’s poems; he died of cancer). Their poetic engagement and their belligerent verse is testament to a love for justice that makes hopeful.

While “Memories of audrey lorde” is interesting in structure as much as in content from the outset, it is the finishing words that I want to draw on most closely in view of this brief exposition. In Protestant theology the task of translation, and of continuous retranslation, holds a special place. The poem speaks with candour about what visions are lasting and outlasting the existential threat posed by death and fear in living. Although there is of course a need for awareness of the fears and the deaths suffered, in past and current wars, military or otherwise, commemorative events fall short in their own trajectory if they stop at giving information on the extent of past hardships. Meditating past suffering by oneself, too, can be a dangerous game. In the poem, noting that fear becomes ‘less and less important’ (l.4) the fear of death is undercut by a personal integrity that cares for ‘our vision’ (l.23). While Lorde’s quote in the opening lines is taken from her work The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, special ed. 1997:13), it is not a defeatist perspective onto death we are reading, but it is commonly understood to purpose individual empowerment in face of terminal illness. The way Sölle prefaces her prayer with these lines, and shifts their emphasis in her strugglesome desire to share in this perspective is particularly notable in the cross-over from ‘me’ to ‘our’: ‘i am not free / to use my power / for our vision’ (ll.21ff.). The markers strewn throughout the text of that which makes the poetic persona unfree vary – ecological, physiological and social – at heart cancer stands in for a whole range of fears that perpetually cloud the vision of the poetic persona. The reader who suddenly finds her (or him)-self amidst this ‘our’ of the vision is no better off. Elsewhere Lorde says: ‘Our visions begin with our desires’ (Claudia Tate, Black Women at Work, New York: Continuum, 1983:107) The poem then becomes a contribution, in its desired tribute to Lorde’s suffering, for breaking down the isolating grip of pain and death which Lorde’s rejection of being defined by cancer elucidates. Suddenly, fear is not everything, and we readers are no longer alone.

Identifying herself in relation with other people’s struggles, also their struggle for life against illness, the poetic persona locates the strength of overcoming fear for oneself (and the fear for others) in the collective vision, of being towards one another, and thus, not being reduced to the material dimension of the body as a conglomerate of bodily functions. In this sense, the transcendence bespoken by the poem in existential terms finds retranslation into the theological vocabulary by the name ‘eternity’ (l.30). Eternity gathers together both the living and the dead. This is not a vision of heaven in an afterlife that is in temporal terms everlasting, it is an existential qualification of a theological concept that evaluates personal involvement in such a way as to see the potential of a person not at the measure of their inhibitions and fears, or their in- or disabilities. Eternity is the recognition of being part and party to every living being, even unto and beyond “individual” death. It is then the continuity with others, rather than dull repetitiveness that marks out the stability commonly associated with the word eternity.

In the context of a ‘Memory of audrey lorde’ (l.1), this memory is not rooted in past reflection, recalling fragmentary passages of times gone by, rather it is a creative encounter with the text that is itself the product of retranslation, or presencing, occasioned by the text. Audre Lorde’s vision, courage and encouragement remain a living voice in the body of the poem. This creation does not eradicate the pains felt by those who mourn. But it co-memorates, it shapes them for those too far removed in time and situation to realise these losses first hand. Bringing to life that in past struggles death is not necessarily defeat, I say, let us re-member once again.

—-

Memories of audrey lorde [LL 47]

      When i dare to be powerful
to use my strength in the service of my vision
then it becomes less and less important
whether i am afraid

I am afraid my sister
the sun is becoming poisonous without protective shell
the breath is becoming short more asthma for everyone
and the dreams go astray

It does not matter
you say to me
your fear
is not the most important thing about you

But i cannot let go of fear
it is after all the cancer that has eaten you up
and my brother
and my women friends cancer wants
fear holds me captive
sometimes i get time off
for a while
but i am not free
to use my power
for our vision

It is less and less important
if you are afraid
you say to me

Ach i say once more
it is as if you had
translated anew
the word eternity

Approaching contemporary Christian faith in the Western academy

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Our general efforts of bridging the gap between our own socio-cultural parameters in research of other faith traditions no doubt has developed its own tradition and its own ethics of interdisciplinarity. It might then be necessary to reflect on the fact that aside from phenomena such as New Age or so-called sectarian fringe groups in society, it is also important to take stock of the course taken by once dominant and normative traditions, notably the Christian churches. In many ways their practices continue to be pervasive to many formative choices in constructing a symbolic imaginary – be that consciously in affirmation or rejection, subconsciously in modi of repression, or pre-consciously, i.e. without a prior awareness that elements adopted within a socio-cultural or political symbolic have had Christian “religious” origins. This is in part what the Critical Religion project is seeking to address.

The bold declaration of a “post-Christian secular” West, as has been elaborated across various fields and disciplines, has changed the influence and public emphasis ascribed to the institution of the Church (I mean this at a conceptual level, where denominational differences merely amount to a diverging implementation of its institutional character). Heralded almost as a revolutionary struggle to destabilise the institution(s) and its (their) insidious hierarchies, secularisation ushered in an era of research in alternative forms of spirituality (itself a crucial buzz-word), that was to displace the institutional, traditional religiosity of a former age. The phrase “I’m not religious, but…”, to my mind, stems from this particular antagonism between a view of traditional Christianity as naive and ritualistic, and the emergence of a popular, deregulated “spiritual search” which aims to find a relationship to “something sacred” in life, free-from disciplinary boundaries, a peculiar form of religious diet. Our postmodern sensibilities thrive on this kind of absolved freedom that does not need to submit to the regulation of the norm, does not have to answer to the need of the many. “I’m not religious, but…” is an idiom that identifies the wish for spiritual liberation without the risk of material relationship. In other words, each to their own!, even if that means rendering personal spirituality in splendid isolation, both from society and the demands of the public, as well as ultimately from an encounter with oneself as another. ‘I positively feel, in my hideous modern way that I can’t get into touch with my mind’ (as Katherine Mansfield wrote in her Journal (ed John Middleton Murray, NY: McGraw-Hill 1964 repr., p82).  There is no encounter with an o/Other, only a reflection of one’s own urge of spiritual transcendence into nothingness.

What does and what can a critical view on the Christian tradition reveal standing outside of its institutional hierarchy, if not altogether outside its disciplinary conceptions? The history connecting the two institutions, academy and church, is long, and fraught with its own struggles of independence from theology and divinity faculties. The disciplinary differentiation between, for example, theology and (what has become known as) “religious studies”, was seen to follow the trend implicit in the secularisation of the academy that would posit critical rigour and scientific validation of varying research perspectives into competition with each other. The plurality of methods in the field of religious studies amplifies the problematic (and capitalist) ideological assumptions that become apparent when researching questions of institutional power, so tangible in matters ecclesial. Whereas the former is free to identify its self-interest in the hermeneutical horizon that focalises on the church and aspects of Christian living, faith and doctrine, religious studies, in an attempt to question not only the very assumptions of what constitutes any of these elements in interaction with other socio-political and geo-economic concerns, it also has to reflect on its own validatory methods drawn from a range of fields outwith the parameters of classical theology. Thus, its perspectives often drive at a philosophy, psychology, sociology or anthropology in deconstruction of “religion”, instead of organising and constructing frameworks by which to orientate a religious ethics in view of a Christian conception of divinity.

The emphasis I put onto the ethical dimension of disciplinarity here is crucial to the way I rationalise the critical capacity and impact for research into Christian institutional life in the West at present. Ethics, with its emphasis on right relations, on the means of such relationship and the modalities of their interactions offers a sufficient model for conceptualising interdisciplinary inquiry at the level of the text and its metanarrative discourse. Not by chance did discussions on “secular theology” popularised in the works of, for example, John A. T. Robinson (Honest to God, 1963), Paul Tillich (Theology of Culture, 1964) and Dorothee Sölle (Christ the Representative, 1967) tie themselves to a discussion of the ethics of incarnation, establishing theological enquiry at the intersection between anthropology and sociology on the one hand and the political and ideological impact of the institution of doctrine on the other. Whereas philosophy of religion has paved a way for the inquiry into the role of doctrine, and much has been written within and outside of the theological faculty to consider the psychology of worship, I want to suggest that the route to situating the current state of the churches, as institutions and as instituting bodies to the life of participating believers, can be helpfully illuminated by a focus on liturgy, conceptually and practically. In its multidimensional engagement, liturgy can be understood to intersect with every aspect of Christian living, inside and outside strictly ecclesial spaces (Peter Cornehl offers an argument to this effect in Die Welt ist voll von Liturgie, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2005). To be reading liturgy outside of a strictly theological concern, I suggest, not only allows investigation of crossing points between spiritual concern and physical embodiment, between individual participation and collective identity, and between a faithful repetition and innovative response to tradition, conceptualising liturgy also allows for a critical assessment from outside the institution that it perpetuates, and invigorates. Liturgy is an invitation to shift disciplinary emphases.

Praying For Japan

21 Monday Mar 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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This blog posting was written by Kat Neumann, who is writing her PhD under Andrew Hass and Alison Jasper.

After the catastrophic events in Japan, the language of secular politics and news reports on the economic and political impact on food supplies, the stock market, rising flight fares and evacuation of Western nationals, tactically evade the humanitarian horror scenarios, which meanwhile haunt our imagination, and touch base with our own privatised existences. The traditional response, in a Christian context, is the appeal to prayer. And yet, our modern minds have little if anything to go by when “prayer” is invoked – an emotional safety-blanket for some, a futile appeal to God, whom we fail to recognise in the continuous flow of “bad news” that reach us from Japan and elsewhere, for others. A clearer conception of what is meant by Christian prayer is needed if we, who may still hold to some form of Christian faith, are to find in it an adequate, that is, a sensible yet sensitive response to the situation.

The German theologian Dorothee Sölle (1929-2003), who until recently did not receive much critical attention from the academy, has been popularly known in Germany for her political activism, her engagement with the German peace movement throughout the Cold War, and her poetry. What fascinates me about this writer is the way that she engages religious sources – both the biblical text and the Christian tradition – to render her political context meaningful to personal faith without abandoning rational thought or analytical discourse, yet supplementing it with a poetic vision that reconfigures the divine after the “death of God”. What this means is, that there is no place for romantic notions of God as one who directs the world and is ultimately responsible for the workings-out of history (relieving the political subject of lasting ethical obligations, tying these to the temporality of sin). On the premise that with the Holocaust there can be no God that intervenes and directs each individual fate according to a divine, predetermined plan, Christianity is called again to uncover what the metaphor of “God” as the signifier of the Unnameable One means in the concrete reality of this world. This forces Sölle to consider prayer for this world and in this world as a means, not to gain magical favours from a metaphysical otherworld, but for enabling divine revelation in the concrete realities by which we are confronted.

Sölle, within the climate of the Arms Race and the bloc building between East and West, can serve as a model for genuine prayer today, particularly in light of the potential nuclear disaster we are witnessing in the aftermath to the Tsunami that hit Japan. Sölle structured prayer meetings concerning political events and social problems along a threefold organisation: information, meditation and collective action. “Deprivatised prayer” (Sölle, 1971) was not to be public vanity as one exposes oneself as a believer to the world, but the conscious articulation of one’s faith in relation to the world and a preparation for realising an alternative vision by concrete (political) action. Rather than denominational boundaries or institutional dogmas, this process would rehearse and reveal mutual concerns that would mobilize people into recognizing their role and potentials for changing the status quo. This aim for prayer, the self-articulation and engagement with the world that recognises the believer’s own, “private” spiritual need (for salvation in whatever shape or form to be envisioned) as bound up with the “fate” of the world, places faith firmly in the public sphere, and is the first step in manifesting compassion.

What the press describes in the ordeal of the so-called “Fukushima 50” is the human responsiveness to catastrophe. In the concrete threat of nuclear melt-down and high levels of radiation, the presence of the “Fukushima 50”, as a human symbol of self-sacrifice, draws attention to a concrete formulation of compassion, borne out of the urgency of the situation: ‘in the words of Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan, “retreat is unthinkable.”’ (March 18th). It is an intercession, a bid for time for those who these workers are seeking to protect and keep alive. Their struggle to contain the direct consequences of the damages caused by the earthquake and subsequent flood is paradigmatic of “deprivatised prayer”. Their work is public protest against suffering nuclear holocaust.

The “Fukushima 50” have offered the world their petition – extending the time and space to reach out to the world. They remind us that we are not only responsible, to ourselves, and to those who come after us, but that we owe it to those that have gone before us, too, to join in their prayer. Terrifying as the ever-unfolding reports of the disaster from Japan appear, they cannot be overlooked. How then do we relate, how do we respond to the suffering these workers bring to focus? A prayer set in context of Japan published on the website of the World Council of Churches reads as follows:

Lord Jesus,
the storm is life and life is the storm
and there is no escaping it;
but what matters is that you are in the storm with us,
a beacon and a presence that is sure. Amen

What this prayer articulates is not only the inevitability of being faced with difficulties and dangers, but the assertion that “what matters” is assured solidarity. If we want to be able to turn the prayer of petition of the “Fukushima 50” into a prayer of thanksgiving, we need to substantiate our presence with these workers, with Japan. Only when we use the time that they have given to us to respond – in practical terms – to the suffering we all need to recognise, can we validate their sacrifice and call ourselves responsible. Sin is social denial of the suffering of the afflicted. Prayer is transformative contextualisation.