Young Women and Catholicism

In November 2005, My Red Couch and Other Stories on Seeking a Feminist Faith was published, a collection of first person narratives by people trying to reconcile their faith and their feminist commitments for which I was a co-editor and contributor.

Now, Kate Dugan and Jen Owens, two graduate students at Harvard Divinity, are putting together a similar anthology, Young Women and Catholicism. They invited young women to tell stories about the role of Catholicism in their lives for consideration in the anthology, and they received over 100 submissions. The large response to their call for papers seems to speak to the importance people place on telling their stories.

If a tree falls in a forest...

One of the major topics I study is identity, and one of the major debates in the literature is about whether identity is something individually constructed/achieved or whether it is based in social relations. (I do not think identity is either individual or social/relational; it seems like more of a both/and situation to me. Incidentally, Terence Tilley claims that a commitment to both/and thinking is a particular trait of the Roman Catholic intellectual tradition.) Lately, I have come to understand in a new way the relational component of identity. Living in Australia, I am relatively isolated. Sure, I can talk to friends and family from home through e-mail or skype phoning, but there are many days when the only human interaction I have in person is with my husband and with the check out people at the grocery store or library. Thus, I have temporarily relinquished a lot of the identities that formerly populated my life: here I am not a daughter, sister, best friend, teacher, student, colleague, writer, expect in the most provisionary sense. Without these identities mirrored back to me by people in my life, sometimes I feel as if I have become one-dimensional, both in the physical and the metaphorical sense. The only role I am expected to play here is wife, and there are days when I feel as if my personhood is flat, nearly non-existent. And I think it is because I am not engaged in the relationships that normally give my identity its familiar heft.

There is an age old question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise? This is a question about the relationality of knowledge. My current question is: if a girl is living in Australia, and there is no one there to know her, does she have an identity?

Footprints we leave behind

People concerned about how human beings are affecting our environment and climate talk about lessening the footprint we leave on the earth. Intellectually, I have understood this notion, but I don't think I really felt it until two weeks ago on vacation in the red center of Australia, true outback country. We stood in the middle of the desert, with a near 360 degree view and watched the sun go down on two amazing rock formations, Uluru and Kat Tjuta. As we spent the next few days in the area, and then were able to view it one last time as our plane departed, it occurred to me that I had never seen a place where the human footprint has been so light.

And this is not because there have not been people there. Coincidentally, when I returned home I ended up watching a documentary on the red center while running on the treadmill. Aboriginal people have been living in the red center for about 40,000 years as a best guess. And unless you saw the cave paintings they do to teach their children their stories, you would not know they live here, probably because they have learned to live more with the land than against it or off of it.

I was truly drawn to this place. The emptiness intrigued me, and the sheer natural beauty of it awed me. It caused me to reflect on how human cultures shape the land and the values that undergird our decisions to shape it as we do.

Buying locally

My sister Ellie just visited us in Melbourne. She is currently working on a book about her experience of spending a year abroad as a volunteer in the tiny town of Lascano, Uruguay. She and I worked on her book proposal while she was here, which led to many interesting discussions about her time in Uruguay. One thing she noticed about her time in Uruguay was how little she consumed and how when she did spend money, she almost always knew who the money was going to.

Granted, it may be easier to know where our money goes when living in a small town in Uruguay than when living in a mass capitalist society like the U.S. But reading my sister's writing has inspired me to think about how to be more creative as a consumer so that I am shopping more locally and how to be attuned to businesses that are being creative as well. One small thing Ethan and I have tried to do in Australia is to shop for produce at the local farmers' markets, although there are times when our desire to sleep overrides our desire to get up early to get to the market.

I also wanted to mention two companies that have caught my attention because they are owned by friends or friends of friends. The first is 3 Crowns Design, which is owned by people who went to Gustavus Adolphus college with my sister. 3 Crowns sells limited edition t-shirts designed by up and coming artists as a way for artists to gain recognition, and they also donate part of the proceeds from the t-shirts to charity.

The second is Twin Six, co-founded Ethan's friend from high school, Ryan Carlson. Ryan and his business partner, both avid cyclists and talented graphic designers, decided it was high time to bring "a graphic revolution" to cycling apparel. And they have succeeded...beyond all expectations. We just got an e-mail from Ryan saying he quit his "day job" to focus completely on Twin Six. Seriously, if you need new t-shirts, check out these two sites.