Book Forty-Nine: From the Pews in the Back edited by Jennifer Owens and Kate Dugan
So we're back into the category of life-changing books. This one is a little more substantial than the other books I claim to be life changing (Neverwhere stands out as one that I made such claims about). This book is more true to life than that. It's about growing up as a Catholic woman and an intellectual, and finding the space to be both.
Surprising exactly no one who reads this blog (hi, bf), I am Catholic. I grew up in a very strong Catholic community and almost everyone I knew was Catholic or at least Christian. I went to Catholic grade school, high school, and college, and since my institutions of learning were Catholic all the way through, I never thought to separate being an intelligent person from being Catholic. Apparently, I am in the extreme minority, and many people can't comprehend a woman who would be intelligent and feminist and pro-women's rights... and still Catholic. But to me, the women in my life were all intelligent and all Catholic, and beyond that, they were powerful. Many of the essays in this book were by women who were attending divinity school at Harvard or other institutions of higher ed. They would sit back and have to watch their classmates who were not Catholic be able to go on and be received fully into their faith communities as ministers, pastors, priests. To me, the idea of women priests in the Catholic church just doesn't really seem like something that concerns me, because at my schools, the nuns were as powerful if not more so than the priests (who were relegated to the church) because the nuns were actually directly impacting how I learned and viewed them, as the big women in charge.
After reading this book, I was inspired to go to church practically constantly, renew my secret wish to become a youth minister, and seek out religious communities that I had unconsciously been missing since my Grandma died. In reality what this will translate to is hopefully a more regular mass schedule (anything is more regular than not going), at times accompanied by my bf, and hopefully, if possible, a joining of a church choir. It also made me see that even if I'm not personally invested in the idea of women priests simply because I do not wish to be a woman priest myself, I can really not justify standing idly by while injustices against women are committed in the name of patriarchy and the church. Before I knew about white privilege, I really could have cared less. But being informed is half the battle as GI Joe (Jane!) says and now I can't pretend to be ignorant to this case any longer. It's up to me to advocate for a more equal status of women in the church, and it's up to me to stay informed, stay critical, stay intelligent and stay involved in something that helped create the very core of who I am today.
I don't think Jesus would have had it any other way for me and the young women in the church today. And that kind of thought makes me more willing to accept religion back in my life.
