How can and do mothers experience, undertake, and understand parenting as spiritual practice ? How do mothers’ and children’s intersecting identities of gender, race, sexuality , and class affect parenting as spiritual practice? And how can the spiritual practices of parenting contribute to theological scholarship?1 Parenting as Spiritual Practice and Source for Theology: Mothering Matters explores these interdisciplinary questions that arise in fields such as motherhood studies, religious practice, spirituality, pastoral care , and theology. The embodied practices of care that most mothers carry out on a daily basis historically have been devalued in Christian spirituality, which has too often sought an ethereal escape from matters of the flesh. Moreover, maternal voices have been missing from theology for most of Christian history. Therefore, this volume generates a fertile space for academic, ecclesial, and everyday conversations about how the experience of mothering challenges and informs both spiritual practice in particular and theological reflection more broadly.
How and Why It All Began
Our memories of how this project came to be are a bit fuzzy, in large part because we started this process seven years ago while graduate students at Emory University, but also because our experiences of mothering have profoundly shaped this journey. During the course of this book’s writing, the three of us have birthed four children, experienced eight miscarriages, and parented nine children. We have also written three dissertations and negotiated several academic transitions—graduate student to Ph.D., adjunct to tenure-track, and stay-at-home parent to full-time faculty member. It might surprise you to know that the three of us have never been in the same place at the same time, and two of our editors (Claire and Liz) have never met in person. Instead, this book was birthed through countless Skype and Google Hangout calls, which started as the three of us tried to figure out how to navigate our own mothering in the context of our lives as scholars of religion and theology. As we talked amongst ourselves about how mothering (and experiences of loss) shaped our scholarship, we broadened our circles to get advice from our mentors and professors, who shared with us their excitement, and also hesitancy, in thinking more critically about the intersections of mothering and theology . This volume was born out of these conversations and was transformed by dialogue with the authors represented here, who were excited to think about how their lived realities of parenting had shaped the work that they do and how they do it.
We must also confess that this volume has been birthed with a sense of nervous trepidation—among us as the editors and several of the authors represented here. Writing about our personal experiences of mothering feels dangerous in the academy and beyond; writing frankly about the feelings of loss, fragmentation, guilt, pain, anger , and isolation that often accompany mothering feels precarious, as if we are lifting the curtain on a show that is not quite finished. We were all too aware of the trope of the “good mother ,” a classed (upper-middle) and raced (white) stereotype of someone who has it all together, as we edited this book. The deconstruction of this trope is behind many of the chapters represented here, but its specter no doubt haunted our work. Additionally, we wondered how writing such personal reflections on life and motherhood might impact our work as scholars. Would others see us differently when our anxieties and challenges were on full display? It was only the strong support of the contributors in this volume (and others who were unable to contribute but who no doubt influenced its writing) that pushed us forward. These stories, we felt, needed to be told and told in dialogue with other scholar-mothers.
We became convinced, then, that the topic of mothering as spiritual practice and source for theology is of critical importance to academic theologians, faith communities, and parents today for several interrelated reasons. First, mothering is often very isolating work; this is especially true when it is undertaken in conjunction with an academic vocation, as evidenced by several studies and volumes that have been published recently on motherhood and the academy.2 Methodologically, much feminist, womanist, mujerista, and Asian women’s theology, by contrast, is done in conversation and collaboration. To do the kind of theology that we all do, we need to be in conversation with each other, and mothering is one point of entry into a potentially rich dialogue across identity markers. This volume thus brings together a diverse group of women to create a more identifiable community of mother-scholars and scholar-mothers.
Second, mothering is a ‘hot topic’ in contemporary popular culture—romanticized, reviled, and passionately contested. Recall, for example, the controversial May 21, 2012, cover of Time Magazine, in which a beautiful, thin, blond mother was pictured breastfeeding her older toddler son. Or consider the debate that ensued around Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” in which she argued that despite women’s many gains in the professional world, the odds for moving ahead were still stacked against working women.3 More recently, Beyonce’s artistic tribute to black motherhood and the divine feminine at the 2017 Grammy Awards almost broke the internet. Furthermore, over the past decade or so, rich and exciting conversations have been taking place amongst scholars in the interdisciplinary field of motherhood studies (see below for a brief reference to this literature). Generally absent from both cultural and academic conversations on mothering, however, are the voices of women in the theological academy whose lived experience includes mothering. This volume allows both for theological reflection to enter into fruitful dialogue with these cultural and academic trends and for experiences of (and research on) mothering to inform theological scholarship.
Third , theological discourse on the religious meaning of motherhood as a spiritual practice is often dominated by ecclesial authorities (read: men) for whom women’s ultimate vocation is total self-sacrificing motherhood. Further, there is little appreciation of how the joys, challenges, and sorrows experienced by mothers are far from homogenous and are always and everywhere affected by markers of gender, race, class, culture, and sexual orientation. There is a continuing need for black, white, Asian, and Latina scholars in the theological academy to challenge this association of mothering with oppressive, white-washed, and religiously-backed gender norms. At the same time, we hope that this volume fulfills a need for exploring the spiritual dimensions of mothering that can and do contribute, in diverse and sometimes paradoxical ways, to women’s empowerment and well-being.
Fourth, in the realm of practical theology and ministry, we find that all too often faith communities are child-centered and thus fail to support the spiritual lives of mothers and provide for their care as they encounter the process of becoming a parent; the reality of reproductive loss ; the daily rigors of caring for dependents; the integration of professional and parental roles; the guilt involved in perceived and real parenting failures; and the joys of family life. Most Christian traditions lack language for talking about the way parental experiences have a profound impact on the spiritual growth and well-being of parents in general. And again, our traditions lack an appreciation of how these challenges and joys of parenting are diversely affected by the intersections of gender, race, class, culture, and sexual orientation. As such, faith communities often miss opportunities for care and formation of current and future mothers, whose spiritual health is important not only in its own right but also in relation to the care of children and other dependents.
Fifth, mothering largely has been absent from mainstream conversations about religious practices and practical theology, and it makes even less of an appearance in systematic theology, theological ethics, and biblical studies. Nevertheless, an increasing number of women have begun to incorporate experiences of and research on motherhood into their theological writing (see below for a brief review of this literature). This growing body of literature indicates a burgeoning interest in bridging the gap between mothering, on the one hand, and theological reflection, on the other. Women are pushing back against the implications of the traditional lacuna between these two poles, arguing that the mundane and embodied tasks of parenting are not separate from or unimportant to the formation of theology and questions of spirituality and are not something to be left behind in the search for intimacy with God. But the conversation has only just begun, and there is much work left to be done. If we allow the lacuna to persist in mainstream theological reflection, the result is that much theology does not speak out of and back to the lived experiences of mothers and that our Christian traditions will continue to lack language for talking about the way parental experiences have a profound impact on the spiritual growth and well-being of mothers in general. Thus mothers (and parents in general) need an avenue to express their profound awareness of God in the everyday to their faith communities; in turn, we need enhanced theological resources to enrich and expand this experience of parenting as spiritual practice .
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