Sunstone Symposium: Speaker discusses women's religious feats

Many of the achievements of women in religious creativity are found in ironies, like unequal access to administrative power.

That's what Mary Farrell Bednarowski said Wednesday night in the Smith-Pettit Lecture during the 30th annual Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium at the Sheraton Hotel.

A Roman Catholic and professor emerita of religious studies at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities in Minnesota, she said that women are both insiders and outsiders in most religions. They are insiders because they are members of a church, yet they are outsiders because until recently no women had access to decisionmaking power or leadership roles.

"As members, they are still outsiders in multiple ways," she said to an opening-night audience of about 200 people.

Bednarowski said it is not ability, but capability that has mostly determined women's participation in churches. For example, she said one minister proclaimed of a woman speaking in church that it wasn't that she couldn't preach a good sermon, it was that it wasn't decent that she do so.

She also said women's theological creativity is often not seen as a gift, but as a threat. Women already run some congregations, just not from positions of authority, she said.

"Women have been opening things up," she said, adding that churches are starting to recognize what women have to offer.

Sadly, she said, most historians have left the subject of women's religious creativity to a study of women alone and only in the past 40 years has that barrier been broken and been included in specific studies of religion.

Religion needs creativity to stay vital, but "the fear is that don't we don't need creativity," though it revitalizes traditions and symbols of religion, she said.

Bednarowski said she has been aware of Sunstone for many years and has found the group's work helpful to her ecumenical studies.

e-mail: lynn@desnews.com

The Sunstone Symposium continues through Saturday. More information is available at www.sunstonemagazine.com/symposium.html.

Sunstone Symposium

The Sunstone Symposium continues through Saturday. More information is available at www.sunstonemagazine.com/symposium.html