ABSTRACT

The philosophy of religion has been slower than theology and some of her other sister disciplines, notably moral philosophy and philosophy of science, to attract the scrutiny of feminists or to engage with feminist critique. It was a volume of the American philosophy of religion journal, Hypatia (1994), that most directly opened the discussion. Two monographs in feminist philosophy of religion followed in 1998: Pamela Sue Anderson’s A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief, and, a few months later, Grace Jantzen’s Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion. It is in the area of religious epistemology that feminist thought is having its largest impact, either in questioning constructions of rationality, or in challenging the very focus on epistemology that has come to dominate Anglo-American philosophy of religion. Anderson and Jantzen differ on this matter. Anderson remains epistemologically focused in her work, whilst Jantzen, who died in 2006, argues that we should sideline epistemological questions and engage primarily instead in ethical concerns. Both authors have been infl uenced by francophone philosophy, especially that of Irigaray and Kristeva, and behind them, Lacan and Derrida. Anderson also draws heavily on the thought of Michèle Le Doeuff. The francophone assessments of patriarchal rationality (cf. Joy et al. 2002) have informed their characterizations of Anglo-American philosophy of religion as ‘male-neutral’ (Anderson 1998: 13; 2004: 94) or ‘masculinist’ (Jantzen 1998; 2000; 2002), and infl uenced their endeavors to operate outside the usual boundaries of the discipline. Irigaray’s dialectical insistence upon the divine as that which stresses continuity (whether between mind and body, nature and culture), informs Jantzen’s critique of binary oppositions. That said, Jantzen bases her challenge to philosophy of religion on an unsustainable binary opposition between epistemology and ethics, whereas Anderson overcomes this binary in developing a virtue-style epistemology. Despite their deep disagreements with one another, they have been jointly criticized by Amy Hollywood for remaining within ‘the mainstream of analytic and continental philosophy of religion in focussing on belief’ (Hollywood 2004: 225). Hollywood studies the place of ritual, by which she means embodied practice, in religion. Following the work of Marcel Mauss and Talal Asad (1993), she argues that

our beliefs and emotions are themselves shaped by ‘the learned nature of one’s habitus’ (2004: 237). Anderson and Jantzen have also been jointly criticized by Sarah Coakley, seemingly in the opposite direction, for being unduly pessimistic about epistemological developments in Anglo-American philosophy of religion. Coakley (2005: 516-21) argues that various philosophical trends are already ‘feminizing’ analytical philosophy of religion, including interest in: desire in relation to claims of an immediate contact with the divine; apophatic discourse; and the effects of religious experience on religious epistemology. Coakley and Hollywood may seem to occupy opposite ends of a spectrum regarding epistemology, but both endeavor to write into their philosophy ways that religious practice informs thought and belief. Coakley’s specifi c interest is contemplative prayer (2002). Moreover, they both share with Jantzen and Anderson concern that philosophy of religion be practiced in ways that acknowledge rather than screen out our embodiment. This concern may be seen as the hallmark of feminist philosophy of religion, but not as its special preserve. The question arises (cf. Coakley 2005) whether there is specifi c work for feminists to perform that is not also being carried out by virtue epistemologists and by philosophers of religion such as Michael McGhee (1992; 2000) and Mark Wynn (2002; 2003), who are interested in the spiritual and emotional life.