Home

The Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health & Ethics

This book is a product of The Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health and Ethics. With significant help from the Ford, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, and David and Lucile Packard Foundations we have been able to assemble an international collegium of scholars from the world's religions and bring them together to work on projects such as this one on sexism and men's obligations to women. The Consultation has a bias and is up-front about it. All our scholars are recruited from the feminist, progressive zones of their religions. All are aware of the downside and debits of their traditions regarding our issues. As one of our Buddhist scholars, Rita Gross, asks of her religion: "Can a religion founded by a man who abandoned his wife and newborn infant because he was convinced that they were an obstacle to his salvation possibly serve women's interests and needs?" (Gross, 1991, 65)

Similar indictments are in order for all the religions. The male dominated religions of the world are reservoirs of sexism. While acknowledging this wholeheartedly, our scholars remain convinced that there are renewable moral energies in those same traditions awaiting creative application to the human alienations and terracidal threats that confront us. The results of this shared vision and shared passion are remarkable. Though we inhabit diverse parts of the globe and different symbol systems of religious imagination, our common quest has bonded us into an universitas of scholars.

Some universities have been able to achieve a common framework for study in a particular area and to arrive at an agreed upon vision of the field. Maybe Tubingen could once lay claim to such a shared and distinctive vision in theology. Most schools do not. There is no Harvard school of thought in religious studies, nor a Princeton school, nor a Marquette or Temple "school" of religious thought. But there is a budding school called The Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health and Ethics. This volume illustrates it, as do all of our others.The seven themes that bind the Consultation scholars are these:

(1) In the manner of realistic psycho-therapy, we take full account of the negatives in these largely male-ruled religious traditions, but then we move on to stress the positives as a cure. We give some warranty to the Buddhist saying that all belief systems are illnesses waiting to be cured, but none of them is pure pathology. We ground our creative work in the foundational texts and authorities of the religions, fully aware that religions contain, in orthodox Jewish theologian Pinchas Lapide's term, "theopolitical dynamite." We set out to use that dynamite to bring down the patriarchal walls.

(2) Our definition of religion is normative. It is not the descriptive definition used in the social sciences which must treat as religion whatever phenomenon calls itself religion. We see religion as a positive response to the sacred that issues into advocacy and commitment. The religions out of which we speak, some theistic, some not, are struggling classics of cherishing. None is a perfect success story and there is much to be rejected in each. Yet beneath the inevitable debris that accumulates in any march through the turbulence that we call history, there flows an heroic re-envisioning of our affective and moral capacities. This positive and normative definition of religion undergirds our assumption that the moral experiences of all religions are complementary and shareable. Each of them touches down to the deepest predicates of human existence. This allows many religions, staying faithful to their own discoveries, to address single problems in fruitful collaboration.We see religion as an appreciative, enhancing response to the preciousness of life, a preciousness that merits our supreme linguistic encomium sacred. This separates religion from the weird explosions of superstition and magic that fill our human history which may and should be studied under a different rubric.We resist the shallow sophistication of much of Western culture that does not see religion as a culture shaper. We insist that religions are powerful. John Henry Cardinal Newman said people will die for a dogma who will not stir for a conclusion. In parallel insights, Camus noted that people will not die for scientific truth, and the poet Alexander Pope, reaching to the nether side of religion, said that the worst of madmen is a saint gone mad. All three gentlemen are onto the same point. The tincture of the sacred yields power and effaces limit, for good or for ill. Realistic social analysis should recognize that two thirds of the world's peoples affiliate with some religion and the other third are affected by the gravitational pull generated by these symbol-filled cultural powerhouses. We admit that. And we call that admission realism.

(3) Our common assumption in the Consultation "school" is that the religions we study all have elements of a rich sense of justice that becomes our normative rubric for assessing, embracing, or dismissing ideas and practices that have arisen in the traditions. This justice stress militates against individualism and libertarianism, with the weakened sense of the common good and of human rights that these views entail. Thanks largely to the persistence of the United Nations, the concept of human rights (necessarily grounded in some theory of justice) has become the key category in the vernacular of international ethics.

(4) In all of our projects, the empowerment of women is seen as the key to progress on every one of our issues. This moves on to an identification with all of the disempowered, all of the anawim, including indigenous peoples, gays and lesbians, economic and environmental refugees, and the environment itself.

(5) In all of our projects we recognize the market economy not just as a pattern of global business, but as a surrogate religion generating visions and value judgments and permeating and transforming cultures throughout the world in ways that are usually noxious.

(6) In all of our projects, we have a distinctly Buddhist stress on interdependency, and not just human interdependency. We and the stars and all of nature are kith and kin. When the sun completes its parental mission and this orderly moment in the history of the universe unfolds and dissolves back into chaos, we will return to the dust from which we proceeded. To transpose the Catholic Ash Wednesday mantra: stardust we are and unto stardust we shall return. We, being many, are one body more than Paul the Christian Apostle could imagine.

(7) Finally, this budding school holds that critical theory requires conversation in the deep Latin sense of conversari, literally being with. (The English "conversation" could mean nothing more than a chat.) Conversation in this epistemological usage is extended social intercourse where emotion and affect can anchor our logical flights of fancy, where disagreements can function like lightning to cleanse the air. All value judgments are rooted in affectivity. Moral and religious intelligence is born in the heart. The heart keeps us in touch with flesh and dirt where all value is ultimately rooted. Solitary, isolated scholarship is tendentially disembodied and dis-affected and more liable to fall under Sartre's indicting insight that the worst of evils is to treat as abstract that which is concrete.

The scholar-authors of this volume were able to physically meet three times for hard- working and enjoyable sessions. We broke bread together and some of us shared the fruit of the vine. (The MacArthur Foundation gave us supplemental funds for that third meeting, since our original plans called only for two sessions.) The results were something that e-mail or post could not of themselves produce. Presence admits of degrees, as does meeting. We are present to those in the airport waiting with us at the gate, but only dimly so. We are more present when we take off. But presence and togetherness take a qualitative leap when the pilot announces mechanical trouble and a need to return to the airport. When the plane lands safely after a struggle, there are no strangers aboard. Affectivity, shared hope, and needs that are felt are the sinews of community.

Scholars who meet as we meet become more present, more trustfully candid with each session and in each of our projects, as in this one, we found parting to be filled with "sweet sorrow." We will not wholly part, however, since we will continue as a permanent Task Force of The Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health and Ethics. We will seek out opportunities to speak in international contexts when the voices of men sensitive to gender justice claims are needed in other conversations.

These are the moral insights that bind us and give us a spirit of collegiality that few find in university departments.

As this project was aborning, our first concern was about having only men as the authors. We did build in critique from outstanding women feminist scholars but we decided on the male authorship for multiple reasons. For one thing, as John Raines noted, the sexism that assaults women is at root a male problem. Men should stop and think about it. Groups of whites talking about racism among themselves while open to critique by persons of color is not unuseful. Self- criticism by separate groupings of men and women, whites and blacks, homosexuals and heterosexuals is healthy. To sit together and compare the way sexism has advantaged men and oppressed women in the various traditions was for us illuminating and medicinal. Similar advantage could be found by other groups meeting by themselves. This is not the only way, but it is not an unprofitable process and it can be followed by and coupled with other processes.

Also, our approach to the evil of sexism is not filed under Internecine. As the distinguished scholar of Hinduism Katherine Young says: "there is one striking omission in most Western feminist discussions of religion. There is virtually no opening to men... Whether deliberately or not, some feminists have demonized men as a class and most in the name of solidarity have not launched an ethical critique in the public square against this." (Sharma and Young, 1999, 298-300) Gynocentrism is no better than androcentrism. Macha is not superior to macho. The goal is dialogue, not conquest. Male anatomy, any more than female anatomy, is not destiny. Professor Young proposes Gandhi as the model for inter-gender conversation. "Far from seeing the British as moral cretins, Gandhi respected them as people with moral sensibilities that would eventually support Indian independence. And he was correct." (Sharma and Young, 1999, 303) Maybe we men working together -- and not at all shrinking from women's critique -- wanted to show that men could be something more than moral cretins. Maybe we somewhat succeeded.

Bibliography:
Rita M. Gross, "Buddhism After Patriarchy?", in Paula Cooey,William Eakin, Jay McDaniel, editors, After Patriarchy: Feminist Transformations of the World Religions, OrbisBooks: Maryknoll, New York, 1991. Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young, Editors, Feminism and World Religions, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1999.

Daniel C. Maguire
2823 N. Summit Avenue
Milwaukee WI 53211
tel. 414 961 0139
fax 414 961 2150

Back to Top

Home