Tuesday, February 10, 2009

A brief history and an introduction

I've been remiss in not creating a post to introduce myself and set the tone here. I'm a Comparative Religious Studies major at a large public university in California. I started working on my undergraduate degree in 1984, but was unable to successfully combine being a student with being a wife and mother. (I'll write about that at some point; it's remarkable how things have changed in 20 years.) When I started college, my intention was to dual major in biology and computer science, so that I could go into genetic engineering, which was a brand new field at the time. I joke that my freshman year at the women's college I attended I was exposed to too much Chaucer too soon, which led me to liberal arts over the hard sciences. I fell in love with comparative literature, linguistics, poetry explication, women's studies, and myth theory. I ended up in the Religion department at a big ol' southern university, because my major advisor there agreed to let me focus on myth theory and take any course I wanted in any department, as long as I could convince him it fit into the larger picture of my major.

I enjoyed studying theology there, but I found the department restrictive. I was interested in the intersection of women's studies and theology, but there was nothing combining them in the department. I was captivated by the writings of Carol Christ, Judith Plaskow, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Mary Daly, Starhawk, and women like them, but voices like those were absent from my coursework. On the other hand, I was exposed to The Big A's (Aquinas, Augustine, Anselm) and the variety of American religious expression -- things I love to this day.

Eventually, I had a religion professor tell me he thought it was time for me to be a mother, not a student. It was the last straw in an ongoing battle to combine motherhood and college. Even after I left school, I still considered myself to be a myth theorist and student of theology. For almost 20 years since I left that big southern university, I've been parent, wife (and ex-wife), writer, activist, and customer service techie. Now I've come full circle; I have the opportunity to focus again on those academic passions and finally complete an undergraduate degree.

And after that? I'm not certain, but grad school is looking pretty good.

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