programme
Programme: Sunday afternoon Arrival and registration (14.00 – 17.00 ) Meeting of ‘Ritual’- women (17.00) evening Presentation of the Conference Theme: Atelier De Plooi (The Fold) introduces Bricolage Meeting and Informal exchange Meeting new conference members / Bar open Ritual Monday: morning Ritual Theme: Holy Texts and Authority Lecture: Prof. dr. Anne-Marie Korte: Recapturing the Sacred. Holy Texts, Authority and Feminist Hermeneutics Outline: From a critical feminist point of view, the authority of established ‘holy texts’ like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Koran forms a major problem. At the one hand, the authority of these texts is deeply intertwined with a hierarchical and gendered exertion of power, ánd with practices of exclusion,Dr. Anna-Louise Eriksson;Dr. Gyöngyi Varga;Prof. dr. Judith Frishman General Discussion afternoon Discussion Groups Presentation: Prof. dr. Atalhya Brenner, Dr. Caroline Vander Stichele: `A Veggie Tale Esther—for Contemporary Women and Girls?' Outline: There’s a company called Big Idea Foundation. It has a website and runs a multi-million dollar business producing animated video and DVD films for children. It has toys, music, a fan club, you name it. Big Ideas is Big Business. We shall show their film, Esther, billed on the company’s site as: "The king needs a new queen, and Esther has been chosen! But she's about to find out that being queen is going to take more courage than she ever imagined! [...] The award-winning artists at Big Idea bring to life one of the Bible's greatest stories -- and the most spectacular Veggie Tales adventure ever!" The Veggie Tales, as a cultural phenomena, should not be underestimated: millions of children do get their first, perhaps predominant view, of Hebrew Bible and New Testament texts through the visualization afforded by the Veggies. After the screening (ca. 36 minutes), we hope to initiate a discussion about biblical viewing through the lens of animated visual interpretation for children. evening Subject Groups: Poster Sessions Meeting new conference members / Bar open Ritual Tuesday: morning Ritual Theme: Authority and Body Language Lecture: Prof. dr. Adriana Valerio: Holy texts, body language and authority in female prophecy and mysticism. Some historical examples Outline : I intend to show in my report the several functions connecting the female body to mysticism, prophecy and practice of the public speeches (preaching or juridical sphere). As regards mystic, a traditional ambit for women, the body is annihilated, almost emptied of its proper biological functions. It is an ulcerated, anorexic body;it is empty, because it has to be filled and fecundated by God (I’ll report some historical examples). About prophecy, the female body assumes the virile strength character and, sometimes, the inner or outward appearance of masculinity (I’ll report some historical examples). As regards public speeches, we can notice the female body transforming almost itself, by changing the voice and using male clothes (I’ll report some historical examples). These cases show, always, the female body as denied or masked: it means the failure of femininity in the ambit of the sacrum. The poor regard of the female body, is also testified from the exaltation of manliness as the best human condition to reach the transcendent, by the traditional theological anthropology (imago Dei invenitur in viro non in muliere). Domenica da Paradiso(1473-1553) is an Italian mystic, prophetess and preacher of the Renaissance period. She preaches with a “female body”, drawing from the Scripture the elements of justification of her own public roll. It is not a juridical munus, rather a prophetic vocation, mediated from an ample interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. Through the analysis of these experiences, we can notice how much the Word of God, announced by a female body, can be recognized as authoritative. To give more dignity to the human body, there has to be found a common point among Holy Scriptures, theological anthropology (imago Dei) and human rights. Co-paper Prof. dr. Lisa Isherwood General Discussion Theme: Authority, Gender and Speaking God Lecture: Dr. Ina Praetorius: Von Gott sprechen. Als Frau. Nach die Aufklaerung. Speaking of God. As woman. After the Enlightenment.
Parler du Dieu En tant que femme. Après le siècle des Lumières.. Outline: Feministische Theologie ist nicht nur Kritik patriarchaler Transzendenzverwaltung, sondern auch Rede von Gott. Von Gott zu reden kann zwar bedeuten, distanziert “über Etwas” zu sprechen, evoziert aber immer auch den Anspruch, im Namen Gottes die Wahrheit zu sagen. Biblisch gesprochen steht Theologie, sofern sie diesen Anspruch nicht ausdrücklich zurück weist, in der Tradition des prophetischen Amtes: es ging und es geht beiden darum, immer wieder neu öffentlich auszusagen, was Gottes Weg und Weise für die Welt ist. Frauen stehen, wenn sie Prophetie als eine eigene Möglichkeit begreifen, vor vielen Fragen: Können wir uns in eine Tradition stellen, die weibliche Autorität beargwöhnt, wenn nicht gar ausschliesst? Wie entsteht prophetische Vollmacht? Wie verhält sie sich zu den heiligen Texten der Vergangenheit? Welche zeitgemässen Begriffe können ein Phänomen, das mit dem “Tod Gottes” nicht einfach verschwunden ist, angemessen zur Sprache bringen? Welchen Gefahren setzt sich aus und welche erstaunlichen Lebensmöglichkeiten entdeckt, wer sich nicht nur wissenschaftlicher Objektivität verpflichtet, sondern sich auch versteht als eine, die auf göttliches Wort hört und es der Welt mitteilt? Ich werde von dem aus eigener Erfahrung gewonnenen Wissen ausgehen, dass es vollmächtige Rede (von Frauen immer gegeben hat und) auch heute gibt. Anknüpfend vor allem an bibelwissenschaftliche Befunde zur Frage der (weiblichen) Prophetie und den derzeit viel diskutierten Begriff der weiblichen Autorität werde ich auf die Suche gehen nach einem angemessenen Verständnis und einer sinnvollen Begrifflichkeit für ein Phänomen, das wir im Interesse einer lebenswerten Zukunft nicht für überholt erklären sollten. Co-paper Dr. Brigitte Enzner-Probst General Discussion afternoon Mini Lectures: 4 X 3. Four sessions of three mini-lectures each 1. Angela Berlis: Heilige Text in Mund von Liturginnen Susanne Hennecke: Zu Eva’s Ehre: Michelangelos `Erschaffung der Eva’ in verschiedener Perspektive betrachtet. Charlotte Methuen: `And your daughters should have visions’. Biblical Authority for Women’s teaching in the German Reformation 2. Hildegund Keul: Die Macht der Geschlechterdifferenz und die Autorität weiblicher Gottesrede – das Verschwiegene heiliger Text des Christentums Andrea Bieler: ‘This is my body – this is my blood’. Inventing Authority and Tradition in Liturgical discourse. Susanne Scholz: Bible and Yoga: Introductory Comments 3. Kornelia Buday: Frauenleben zwischen ‘Himmel’ und Hölle. Gottesbilder und Frauenbilder in der ungarischen Volksreligion. Dorothea Erbele-Küster: From hermeneutics of Suspicion to Deconstruction of the Authority of the Biblical text. In Dialogue with Women Theologians from Africa, Asia and Latin-America lona Nord: Predigen aus der Atmosphäre virtueller Realitäten 4. Freda Dröes;Holy Words in Sarah Kane’s Blasted. Chia Longman: Strictly Orthodox Jewish Women’s Religious Discourse: An Ethic of Modesty Anni Tsokinnen;Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza on the Authority of the Bible. Subject Groups: Paper Sessions evening Preparatory groups (General Meeting;per theme) Party Ritual Wednesday: morning Ritual General Meeting afternoon free time bookmarket: Public Lecture: Dr. Melissa Raphael: Witnesses to Presence: Daring to Read Jewish Women’s Holocaust Memoirs as Holy Texts Outline : The dominant theme of post-Holocaust Jewish theology has been that of the temporary hiddenness of God, most commonly interpreted as God’s deferral to human freedom. Yet a feminist reading of the traditional Jewish image of the Shekhinah as a female figure of divine presence accompanying Israel into exile counters such theologies of absence, as do the narratives of resistant presence to the suffering of the other found in women’s memoirs of the Holocaust period. Indeed, the masculinist bias of post-Holocaust theology only becomes fully apparent when considered in the light of both feminist conceptions of God and women’s holocaustal experiences and relational priorities. This paper attends to the process by which a feminist theology of the Holocaust can be derived from the correlation of testimony and an essentially masculinist Jewish theological tradition. In the act of correlation memory becomes witness and is taken into the sphere of the holy: the sphere in which revelation becomes possible. Yet, ironically, this religious methodology might not so much give women victims a voice as silence them once more. When the Auschwitz survivor Judy Weissenberg Cohen wrote to me saying, ‘I am convinced that God was absent in Auschwitz-Birkenau - at least, according to what I saw around me, there was nothing but pure, unadulterated Evil doing its work in the guise of so called humans’, I questioned, not for the first time, whether I – as an Anglo-Jewish woman born fifteen years after the liberation of Auschwitz - had any right to appropriate Jewish women’s suffering to my own feminist theological project. Moreover, the genre of memoir resists its sacralization. The women’s memoir literature is neither art nor historiography. Still less is it theology. While Jewish history is, for Jews, a sacred history, taken up into the sweep of revelation and redemption, Jewish women’s experience will not be consoled or generalized. Even in the one camp of Auschwitz, these women’s experience was shaped by factors of class, political affiliation, age, geographical origin, status within the camp hierarchy and so forth. Granting their particularity, this paper argues that the reading of largely secular Jewish women’s memoirs of the Holocaust as holy texts is not to coerce them into religious truth claims or to say that others know better how to interpret their experience. To call these texts holy, that is to make a claim for their canonicity, is not to speak on behalf of their authors or to re-write what they wrote, but to say that the reading of texts is a very Jewish sort of religious experience and can constitute a ‘discernment situation’ where the meanings of women’s stories continues to unfold in other women’s lives;that as text the narrated memory of Israel can be read antiphonally and midrashically into new stories of covenantal love. At once broken and powerful, narratives of presence accrue holiness in so far as they can be read as pericopae – fragments of a larger text now lost and which a redactor works to piece back together. For in their testimony to the indestructibility of love in a place set apart for its destruction these texts participate in the transfigurative properties of the holy. And because revelation is an aesthetic category and moment, theological reading can be a judgement of the religious imagination so that the narration of women holding, covering, warming, feeding and encircling other women in Auschwitz becomes a figure or tableau of God’s maternal presence to suffering. Discussion evening Conference Dinner Ritual Thursday: morning Ritual Closing Lectures: Dr. Andrea Günter, Drs. Monika Walus, Dr. Haifaa Jawad Farewell Ritual afternoon Departure
