January 10, 2013
Lutheran feminist theologian Caryn D. Riswold declares, “I am not a hostage.”
In her FeminismXianity blog for the Patheos website, Riswold answers an argument often made by feminists who have rejected religion, namely that “any woman who claims to be a feminist and religious (Muslim, Jewish, or Christian specifically) is identifying with her captor, her hijacker, her tyrannical overlord.” Riswold says that not only is such a charge not new, it’s also not true. It ignores those who work for social justice within religions. In this blog post, Riswold is specifically taking issue with arguments made in a recent article for NOW News by Joumana Haddad. Riswold writes, “Haddad argues that anyone working for change from within a religion cannot call herself a feminist. I’m dubious of this claim for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is several generations of women and men doing just that.”
