Background: In this June 2010 exchange with Katherine Marshall, Karen Torjesen, a professor of women's studies at Claremont Graduate University, reflects on the evolution of her intellectual interest in religious history towards a focus on the role of women in the early church. That interest in religion and its gender dimensions paralleled a growing interest in women's studies. The two threads found themselves united in the development of Claremont's interreligious studies program and rooted in the social realities of the Los Angeles community. Her focus now is on linking academic and practitioner approaches that can lead to social change and has brought her back to women's studies. Her aim is to design new academic programs that focus on rigorous analysis of the cultural dimensions of change in a truly global context, in ways that integrate both religion and gender.
Let’s start from the beginning, and how you became interested in women, religion, and peace.
I was born in San Francisco in 1945 and was thus a war baby. We moved shortly thereafter to Salem, Oregon, where my father ran a printing business. The family settled into an ordered life, remodeled an old farmhouse, bought a horse, and so on. But in the early 1950s, my parents decided to drop out. So they sold the business, the house, the horse, the furniture, the lot, and bought an old Cruiser, and we drove along Route 66, right across the country. When we got to Florida, they bought a Nova Scotia sloop, and we sailed up and down the coast and inland waterways for a year. It was a chaotic and adventurous life, very much part of the counterculture of the time.
The family then moved to Mexico, Costa Rica, and Guatemala for several years. Thus I essentially grew up in Latin America, making occasional trips back to the United States.
Reflecting on our topic and my path put me in mind of a moment in Mexico. By way of an anecdote it serves to answer in large part the question of how I came to be where I am today. Our hometown at the time was Oaxaca, Mexico, and I remember a moment, sitting in the Church of Our Lady of the Sorrows, an 8-year-old girl. I was a sweet, rather evangelically inclined girl, as that was the tradition my parents came from, and this church was dripping with gold and filled with angels. My instinctive reaction, given the jarring difference from my background, was that God could not be there. Then I saw a group of indigenous people come in, as Oaxaca is some 70 percent pre-Hispanic. I watched them pray, and I recognized without a thought process, as children do, that they did meet God there. When I revisited the same church some 40 years later, I recalled the same range of observations and emotions.
What I recall was coming to terms at some level with the categories we shape as to how we look at the world around us. My background was unusual; my parents were at some level dropouts, and the boundaries of what was our culture and another were fuzzy anyway. So that vivid moment of experience in my childhood spoke to the source of all the thousands of questions I have explored about religion, culture, cultural change, violence, power, and gender. I was very drawn to those indigenous women and felt something in their spirit. So, in a sense, everything that I have occupied myself with since then grows out of those experiences. It was a crucible for presenting cross-cultural and interreligious differences. And it was a challenge to work to bridge the differences.
What were your parents doing, and how did you move to the next chapter?
My parents were essentially living off the money from the sale of all their assets. My sister and I went to Mexican schools, and my father tried at various points to start an import business, working, among other commodities, with onyx. It was not successful, and he faced bankruptcy, and the money ran out, so we returned to the United States, to California (where my mother was from). The reason we were given was that it was time for us to go to American schools. There, we moved around several more times, and I went to two junior high schools and a high school. We were in many respects living on the margins.
I then left home and went to Wheaton College, following in the family’s rather evangelical tradition. In Mexico, in the places we lived, we were often the only American family. But there was one other family that we saw quite often, a family of missionaries who lived in the mountains. They were Wycliffe translators, and the father was trained in linguistics. However, seeing the problems people faced where he was working, he returned to the United States to get some training in medicine, to be able to help people more effectively, and that made some impression on me. So I was in the pre-med program at Wheaton, with a major in chemistry and plans to go to medical school and then return to Mexico.
But my life plan did not work out that way. I got married on graduation weekend, and medical school seemed a less certain plan. By then my spouse was headed for a Ph.D. in philosophy at Claremont. I worked as a social worker for a couple of years to support us, and I spent most of my time in the eastern part of Los Angeles, in the barrios. It was a profound education, working with clients in the realities of life. The families opened up to me in incredible ways, especially given that I was so young. They were dealing with every kind of crisis and challenge: medical, immigration, educational problems of children, marital, and the ever-present financial issues. It was an incredible revelation of how society works, from the standpoint of class and race, and the experience solidified my social consciousness and that sense of connectedness I had first felt in Oaxaca.
And then I began to think about graduate work. I knew that I would not be continuing my earlier studies in chemistry, and that I would have to work on something I truly cared about. I decided on religion and Christianity and began my program at Claremont. My first teaching position was in Germany, and that was an immersion in European culture for five years. I wrote and lived in the scholarly world. Then I returned to Virginia for a time, and moved back to California and to Claremont.
When did your interest in gender issues begin?
This was during the 1970s, and I look back on it as a period of consciousness raising. Women broke the silence with each other as women and began to share their experiences and how they felt about them. It was a powerful and revelatory period, and it enhanced a sense of connectedness. As we progressed we had the beginnings of ways to connect our idiosyncratic, individual experiences to see how they were part of larger patterns.
When I came back to the United States from Germany, it was 1982, and the women’s ordination movement was in full cry. Those who were arguing against ordination of women were arguing on the basis of tradition and the precedents and teachings of the early church fathers. Those fathers were the very people I had studied, and it was my field. I can get involved in that fight, I thought.
So I started writing a paper that included an analysis of gender, based on my work. I found myself thrust into the fray of the women’s ordination debates. I gave a first paper at the Academy of Religion meeting in San Francisco. It was a critique of the analysis of the church fathers. But my approach was to read the history as a historian, rather than prescriptively, as others were doing. In looking at the heated debates as a historian, it was eminently clear that because there were fierce debates around the roles of women in the early church, women were obviously doing the things that the church fathers were denying; otherwise there would not have been debate. Reading it all as a historian it was very clear that women in fact were doing many things in the church: baptizing and so forth. That was the beginning. A publisher asked me whether I had a book manuscript.
So I changed focus and began to work on a book on the topic. As I did, I got many invitations to speak in churches, to women’s groups, and retreats. I found myself doing research and working with women’s groups. I began to see the power of this kind of research, research that was tied in to action.
I had evolved a pretty elaborate theory, but as the book progressed, I had to answer the question of who I was writing for: academics or a broader public? I realized that my real interest lay in social change. And if I wanted to have an impact on social change, I had to write for general public. I could present all kind of evidence about the church fathers, in academic terms, with all the paraphernalia of European academia. But people will never be persuaded by that kind of presentation. Harper, my publisher, urged me to take a different approach. And it took a lot of work, rewriting the book three times so that it would be in an accessible form. I learned that in fact that was far more demanding intellectually to write for a general public. You have to understand at a far deeper level.
So the book emerged, When Women Were Priests [1993]. It was about the women who did hold church office in the early church, and the gradual eclipse of their roles, and of women’s space, as public space took on a far greater role and women were relegated to the private space around the late third century. I spent a good deal of time on talk shows, doing public speaking, as there was so much interest in the topic.
When did you return to Claremont and in what capacity?
I was back in Claremont in 1985. By then, I was single again, after a traumatic transition. I had spent some time at Fuller. They were under considerable pressure at the time to do something about women on the faculty. I got involved in that struggle and left there under the accusation of being a feminist! But the idea of creating a women’s studies position and program was born there at Fuller, and essentially I took that idea to Claremont. It led to the establishment of the women’s studies in religion program. I was given three years to develop the program, with a donor committed to endow the program if it proved successful.
The full program took 10 years to develop: an M.A. in women’s studies in religion, then a Ph.D., and now we have an M.A. in applied women’s studies. It has been a grand time, working in a field that has expanded over time and where we were on the leading edge. At first, there were only some Christian feminists, then we added Jewish feminists. From there it exploded. Within five years we had woman feminist colleagues who included a Buddhist nun who taught Buddhism and gender, a specialist in Hinduism, and an Islamic scholar. I took much from these experiences when I became dean of the School of Religion and set out to develop an interreligious studies program.
We were working to carry into reality a vision of what we thought a school of religion should do now, in this century. We were shaped and influenced by our region, Los Angeles, with all its diversity and dynamism. We set out to form partnerships with religious communities in the region. This took the form of nine councils for different faith communities. We also had a close relationship with the Claremont School of Theology. Our faculty became bilingual, in the sense that they were insiders in the seminary and outsiders within the broader university and community, and they learned to communicate in both settings. The students also needed to be bilingual. Claremont offered a space where that was possible, and in reaching out to different religious communities in the metropolitan area, we were able to offer them that space. We have different communities on campus and profiled their traditions. We also had a board of visitors to provide leadership. The councils worked to develop events and courses and to raise funds for the chairs. They all came to the table at the board of visitors, so that all were committed to the interreligious vision. It was an incredible process.
What led to your most recent transition, away from serving as dean? How do you look back on the experience, and what changed over the period as dean?
At the events marking the transition, as I left the deanship, some of the messages that people gave reflected what we had, together, accomplished. One message was that each community was profoundly grateful to have been part of and present at the table, to have had a voice. They felt they had in earlier times been marginalized, in American society and at the university, so the inclusiveness was new and welcome. Equally powerful was their sense of what it meant to sit down at the same table with colleagues. A member from the Islamic Council found it rewarding to have Copts and Zoroastrians sitting at the same table. Within that circle were communities that had caused enormous pain to each other, historically and in contemporary times. The experience of coming together was powerful and successful.
And that experience, of developing the interreligious studies program, was very much rooted in the experience we had had in developing the women’s studies program.
What is increasingly clear is that gender differences play a role. What we were struggling for in era of women’s studies was that we wanted to have a voice, to be heard, to tell our own story. We wanted to be able to talk about what it meant to be women, to have a place at the table, and to participate in the larger world, be part of the ongoing creating of our society. We wanted our story to be part of the master narrative, visible and celebrated. The same aspirations were what we found to be true in our interreligious work. It was basically no different. These communities had exactly the same aspirations. We understood that, and that is why it was successful.
The irony is that the religious communities we were working with were essentially patriarchal traditions. So I had to suppress my feminist tendencies. There was one group that would not meet me at first because I was a woman, though eventually they came around and found a way so that I could participate. And in the end, the fact that the school had a women’s studies program, which attracted women from the communities as our partnerships developed, had an impact on the traditions themselves.
So what is next?
I have stepped down as dean, and the programs are continuing. The interreligious piece is expanding within the School of Theology. It has increasing credibility, with more people consulting it, and it is offering an academic degree in Islam and other faiths. The programs are moving into other people’s hands.
I have learned an enormous amount through this interreligious experience, and it has transformed me. One part of the transformation is that it has connected me in a new way globally. I grew up cross-culturally, so this is not new. But the experience has connected me to a different, broader global vision. In the American context, that kind of leadership is visionary. We were trying to understand and see what the different communities need in 50 years, the kinds of protections and inspiration, how they could contribute to the larger world. We were thinking globally in unexpected ways, because communities living in America are also part of other worlds and countries, and their transformation here has an impact on their home cultures. That is the way they understand themselves, and the vision is inspiring.
Also, because of this work in the interreligious field I ended up traveling quite a bit. I went to China, and, because we had hosted the minister of religious affairs at Claremont, when I visited there he hosted me. Our partnerships have taken me to Egypt, where I worked with Coptic Christians and with Al Azhar University. But of all these trips, my participation in the Fes Festival of Global Sacred Music and the Fes Forum (where we met some years ago) was pivotal. Fes gave me a new language that allowed me to talk about these issues of global citizenship and dialogue in new ways. Above all it put the focus on the challenge of educating for a global world.
This has propelled me to the next step after serving as dean, to go back to women’s studies and to take that globally. I want to build on these connections and see what is happening with women’s issues in a global context. The applied women’s studies program is a first expression of sense of urgency to reconnect theoretical work in gender analysis with practical work on the ground. As I have started to explore, I realize that all the women working in the global arena are activists. This becomes a very compelling vision for what the next era should be about. And students respond to this readily, because they want the practical experience alongside the academic. The global consciousness is beginning to dawn.
I have spent most of the past year traveling and exploring new paths, but I am now back at Claremont with my base in women’s studies. I have a chair at the Claremont Graduate University and also run the Global Women’s Institute. The Claremont structure lends itself well to this kind of cross-cutting work, because the eight universities and colleges are essentially a consortium, modeled on Oxford. The Women's Research Institute is grounded in all the Claremont institutions, and it is interdisciplinary. The Claremont Graduate University is the larger base for the project. So I will be directing and teaching.
In the institute, we will pursue two dimensions. One is educational, and that will involve developing programs and approaches that will get students involved in new ways of thinking, combining activism and research, theory and practice. This will involve exchange programs and internships of various sorts. We will be creating opportunities for various options, like semester studies and internships, along the lines of an example of an exchange with a South African women’s NGO. The students come to the NGO to make a contribution to its work and at the same time do theoretical work. The other part is to be a catalyst in projects that work through partner universities, for example in southern Africa, that facilitate projects linking activists and academics looking to social change. There is also an important dimension of assessment, that allows the interventions to be measured.
What kind of social change are you looking to?
The biggest challenge is how to do research on culture. This kind of research has normally been done in the humanities. What we are exploring is how it can be made really useful for development, for example on issues of HIV/AIDS. There, the crucial issue is stigma, and of course stigma has a great deal to do with culture. How do we do the kind of analysis of how culture produces stigma that will lead to conclusions about what kinds of interventions could engage the problems? There are significant interventions now underway for HIV/AIDS, many aiming at cultural change, but they are not being assessed or measured in any real social science rubrics. Another important issue is domestic violence. That brings in beliefs about gender, sexuality, and community, and all of them need to be surfaced and studied. That points to ways that bring about social change. We are looking for models of how that is done.
Are there models or examples that point the way?
The Center for Women’s Leadership, led by Elizebeth Khaxas, in Namibia, may offer a model. It is teaching women to write, and on a large scale. It brings women together, and it addresses a construction of gender and what it is that makes us women. Women work on it together and tell stories. It is a collective kind of analysis that is achieved by having them write. This can lead to more academic dimensions, with more research. But what is most interesting are the forms of participant research that are already producing social change and empowerment.
What does this offer to the challenge we are exploring, of how women and religion are involved in conflict?
First, the interreligious part of the work I was doing involved conflict at every stage. It was a daunting task to bring those communities together. I began to understand that I would have to enter deeply into the communities and their cultures to understand the kinds of conflicts they were experiencing. One conclusion I came to was that I needed to go to Israel, and I have now been there roughly once a year, to theology conferences and other events. I have worked with the Hartman Institute, an Orthodox Jewish think tank, and got connected with the Israel Interreligious Coordinating Committee there. So I have had at least a first introduction to the kind of peacemaking they were doing. That led me to reflect much more on the nature of conflict and conflict resolution, reading Lederbach and others.
One model that resonates for me is an Indonesian woman, who right after the outbreak of Christian-Muslim violence there sprang into action. She called together women in her community and asked them how they were responding. What she found was that various women had been going something, reaching out to neighbors and those in trouble. She then had them sit and tell their stories, pairing them with an academic to help with writing and formulating what they said and helping to get the process well set up. Her next conclusion was that the stories should be published, and published by a women’s press, which did not exist, so she set one up. That is the kind of action model we should be looking for.
The route of surfacing stories has special importance. We need to know what women are doing. As we document activism, one of the projects is getting the story out.
And what do you think women bring, uniquely or differently?
That is obviously tricky. One of my students did her dissertation on Code Pink and the history of the debate about whether or not women are essentially better peacemakers. I have some skepticism about the generic arguments. But there are many who agree that women have special insights because of the taboos they have faced. So it is not women’s nature, but women’s social place, their connectivity, and the resulting sensitivities that offer different perspectives tools. That’s how I would approach the question.
And how about women and religion? Are there special, almost unique barriers here?
Yes, there are. But it is useful to remember that everywhere, Africa for example, religious structures and institutions have modeled themselves on political structures. However, wherever you have new religious energies, the patriarchal structures tend to disappear. You see this in the new African Christianities, and even among conservative, Charismatic Christianities. So it is important to make a distinction in terms of what history has brought, and the length of the tradition and its stability. Also when and how reforms have come. Essentially, when and where spaces open up, where there is ferment, women leaders come into the open space.
