Halfway up the chimney, my leg started to shake. Shit! I couldn’t get my body to move. The only part of me that would move was my uncontrollable sewing machine leg.

This short story combines ideas from Sultana from Sultana’s Dream: A Feminist Utopia and Karl Marx, the author of Manifesto of the Communist Party.

The virgin and the whore play very dramatic roles on the stage of the Christian church through the ages. One is venerated and the other condemned. The life-giving power of the female body is respected in awe or perceived as a threat.

This post is based on an assignment in my Life Sex and Death class taught by Dr. Doe Daughtery at Arizona State University in the fall semester of 2021. What is at stake for women’s identities in the context of sexuality and religion? I reference a disturbing news article about victim shaming in India that occurred in March of 2021.

This blogpost reviews chapters 1-3 of Dag Øistein Endsjø’s enlightening book Sex and Religion: Teachings and Taboos in the History of World Faiths. This is the first part of a series based upon assignments completed in the 2021 fall semester in my Life, Sex and Death class taught by Dr. Doe Daughtrey at Arizona State University.

How I escaped the constricts of literalism and fundamentalism and discovered a new body of truth outside of Christianity. The thrill of reading Christian texts outside the canonized collection of the old and new testaments and how it inspired me to pursue my degree in Religious Studies.

A story that turns the Genesis idea of the garden of Eden and humanity's origins on its head. This Gnostic text featuring Jesus, the apostle John, the Mother-Father, Sophia, Zoe, and the dark Yaltabaoth and his archons paints a picture of equality and the divine feminine.

A story of a woman’s struggle through the material world into the invisible world from which she came. This story is from a text from around the 2nd to 4th century A.D.. It can’t be pinned down to Gnostic or Christian, so it’s origin is a bit elusive… just like a woman.

The cabin had a kitchen sink, with a faucet (which is still a mystery), but no running water, unless you count the water running into the five strategically placed pails during rainstorms. On a sunny day, I could lay on the couch and see daylight streaming in through the plethora of holes in the black tar chinking that they must have used when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president.

As an assignment for my religion and politics class, I wrote a policy brief based on the refugee crisis that we are in. I learned that the Trump administration’s intention was to reduce the refugee ceiling to zero. Biden intends to bring back from its current 18,000 to 95,000.