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Feminist Theologian Mary Hunt Addresses
CPCSM Audience on the Need for Religious Maturity
in Today's Church and Society

How can a religiously mature person respond to such current crises in today's world as the War in Afghanistan, the Enron debacle, and the pedo- phile priests' scandal in Boston and elsewhere in the US? In an inspiring and thought-provoking presentation to a CPCSM-sponsored gathering of 60 people on March 20th at the Church of St. Philip in North Minneapolis, widely renowned feminist theologian and author, Mary E. Hunt, attempted to answer that question.

The fourth speaker in CPCSM's 2001-2002 Speakers' Series, The Sacramentality of Human Experience: Empowerment Toward Prophesy, Dr. Hunt entitled her talk Religious Maturity: A Feminist Perspective. She also had engaged in more informal discussions around similar issues the previous evening with a group from the local chapter of Dignity and earlier that same day with a gathering of CSJ and SSND women religious.

Dr. Hunt began her CPCSM presentation by congratulating and thanking the organization for its nearly 25 years of work in helping to bring about the acceptance that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) persons now enjoy in the Catholic community, which she feels has grown exponentially over the past 20 years.

Next, she defined some of the current theological terms that she would frequently use later in her talk. Considering the essence of Catholicism to be its combination of sacraments with solidarity, Dr. Hunt defines sacra-ments much more expansively than simply signs of grace, as taught in the old catechism. Rather, Dr. Hunt considers sacraments to be "communal acts of lifting up certain common human experiences to public expression, not to make them holy, but because they are in themselves holy." Exam- ples of sacraments would be celebrating and lifting up the beginning of a life, the end of a life, a young person's coming of age, a new relationship within a community, and even "coming out."

Dr. Hunt sees solidarity as the twin component with sacrament in the Catholic tradition as an alignment of the search for love and justice with the lives and struggles of those who are marginalized and live on the fringes of society.

Finally, she defined religious maturity as "the sense that one is living in concert with the cosmos and in harmony with one's fellow human beings and with the creatures of this earth." Further, religious maturity requires that we seek to live the values and models that we envision in the here and now, not just for the generations to come.

There are people in other religious traditions, such as Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Jews, she reminded the audience, who are striving for religious maturity and from Catholics can learn. However, Dr. Hunt prefers to focus on religious maturity from a Catholic perspective because she feels committed to and responsible for the Catholic tradition's uniqueness in how it links sacrament with solidarity.

Having laid the framework for her talk, Dr. Hunt then proceeded to show how religious maturity could be applied to three of the most startling crises in today's world: the War in Afghanistan, the Enron collapse, and the scandal regarding pedophile priests that is currently rocking Boston and other parts of the US. She also stated that it was her hope that her application of the principles of religious maturity to these three interna- tional phenomena could be generalizable for the members of the audience in their own everyday lives.

She began her analysis, by citing three important factors that are common to each of these current tragedies -- underlying values that are antithetical to those seeking religious maturity, the role of lies and duplicity in making each crisis possible, and the abuse of power as the primary moving force in each crisis. Then, as she looked at each of the tragedies, one at a time, she identified the common factors and how they contributed to each crisis.

Next, Dr. Hunt suggested how religious maturity might help us all better cope with the results from each of the crises, by showing how it can be used to counteract the effects of the three important factors she cited earlier: the objectionable underlying values, the role of lies and duplicity, and the abuse of power.

Those seeking religious maturity can name and then challenge the values that underlie the systems that bring about such crises of abuse, and they can help search for better foundational values. They can also base their own lives on telling the truth and facing reality and on helping to create and participate in organizations and structures that encourage and reward truth, not lies and duplicity.

Finally, since changes in a power structure never take place from within without pressure from the outside, religiously mature persons can do their part to help minimize the abuse of power by continuing to work for change from the outside.

Dr. Hunt's formal presentation was then followed by a 30-minute question and answer interaction with the audience members which resulted in a very creative interchange of ideas.

Please click here, for a complete transcript of this presentation.

Please click here, for information about
ordering an audio tape of this presentation.

More About Mary Hunt

Mary E. Hunt, Ph.D., is a feminist theologian who is co-founder and co-director of the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) in Silver Spring, Maryland. A Roman Catholic active in the women-church movement, she lectures and writes on theology and ethics with particular attention to liberation issues.

Dr. Hunt received a Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. She also received a Masters in Divinity degree from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley and a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Her undergraduate degree in Theology and Philosophy is from Marquette University. She completed Clinical Pastoral Education and is fluent in Spanish.

After graduation, she spent several years teaching and working on women's issues and human rights in Argentina as a participant in the Frontier Internship in Mission Program. She continues that work through WATER's project, "Women Crossing Worlds," an on-going exchange with Latin American women. Dr. Hunt was Adjunct Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Georgetown University for five years. She has lectured and taught at numerous institutions. For the 2000-2001 academic year she was at Harvard Divinity School as a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life.

She is the co-editor, with Patricia Beattie Jung and Radhika Balakrishnan, of Good Sex: Feminist Perspectives from the World’s Religions. She is the author of Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship, which was awarded the Crossroad Women's Studies Prize for 1990. She edited From Woman-Pain to Woman-Vision: Writings in Feminist Theology by Anne McGrew Bennett. Among her many publications are articles in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, America, Concilium, Conscience, The Witness, and Open Hands as well as chapters in books such as Ecofeminism and the Sacred (ed. Carol Adams) and Sexuality and the Sacred (ed. James Nelson and Sandra Longfellow) and Feminist Theological Ethics (ed. Lois Daly).

Mary Hunt serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, the Journal of Religion and Abuse, and is an advisor to the women's issues of Concilium. She is a member of the Society for Christian Ethics and the American Academy of Religion, where she co-chaired the Women and Religion Section. She is an advisor to the Women's Ordination Conference and part of the Clergy Advisory Committee of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.

She lives in Silver Spring, where she enjoys cooking, swimming and golf. She volunteers at the Chi Child Care Center in Washington, DC.

Click here for more information about WATER.

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