Mary T Condren

The substantive safety of radiological and other medical procedures can be radically reduced by unconscious factors governing scientific thought. In addition, the historical exclusion of women from these disciplines has possibly skewed their development in directions that now need to be addressed. This paper focuses on three such factors: gendered libidos that privilege risk taking over prevention, fragmented forms of knowledge that encourage displaced forms of responsibility and group dynamics that discourage critique of accepted practices and limit the definition of one's group. The substantive safety of the practice and scientific contribution of radiologists might be considerably enhanced were the focus to switch from radiology to diagnosis. Such enlargement might redefine the brief of radiologists towards preventing as well as curing; evaluating some non-invasive and low-tech options, adopting some inclusive paradigms of clinical ecology and enlarging group identities to include those currently excluded through geography or social class from participating in the benefits of science.

Work-in-Progress Sacrifice and Political Legitimation: The Production of a Gendered Social Order Mary Condren For the last twenty-five years images of political violence in Ireland have been splashed across the world: car-bombs, snipers, civil demonstra-tions, and political ...

... The serpent and the goddess: Women, religion, and power in Celtic Ireland. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: ... SUBJECT(S): Ireland; Antiquities, Celtic; Church history; Women; Patriarchy; Church and state; History; Religious life. DISCIPLINE: No discipline assigned. ...

The substantive safety of radiological and other medical procedures can be radically reduced by unconscious factors governing scientific thought. In addition, the historical exclusion of women from these disciplines has possibly skewed their development in directions that now need to be addressed. This paper focuses on three such factors: gendered libidos that privilege risk taking over prevention, fragmented forms of knowledge that encourage displaced forms of responsibility and group dynamics that discourage critique of accepted practices and limit the definition of one's group. The substantive safety of the practice and scientific contribution of radiologists might be considerably enhanced were the focus to switch from radiology to diagnosis. Such enlargement might redefine the brief of radiologists towards preventing as well as curing; evaluating some non-invasive and low-tech options, adopting some inclusive paradigms of clinical ecology and enlarging group identities to include those currently excluded through geography or social class from participating in the benefits of science.

Could the sacred be, whatever its variants, a two-sided formation? One aspect founded by murder, and the social bond made up of murder's guilt-ridden atonement, with all the projective mechanisms and obsessive rituals that accompany it; and another aspect, like a lining, ...

Page 1. Brigit: Soulsmith for the New Millennium Mary T. Condren Concilium 2000/5 The nuns went to Mass. The circle-dancers danced. A yoga group was in full session in the corner. A tree-hugging group swayed around the trees. Chanters wafted Indian music in the distance. ...

... many occasions of human sacrifice, the priests used to masquerade as pregnant women, having sent all the real women out of ... For Francis Sheehy Skeffington, see Padraic Colum, "Francis Sheehy-Skeffington," in The Irish Rebellion of 1916 and Its Martyrs: Erin's Tragic Easter ...

Work-in-Progress Sacrifice and Political Legitimation: The Production of a Gendered Social Order Mary Condren For the last twenty-five years images of political violence in Ireland have been splashed across the world: car-bombs, snipers, civil demonstra-tions, and political ...

In addressing an audience such as this, I am very conscious of the diversity here in the room today. I know there are women here from the various religious traditions represented in the North of Ireland. For some women this meeting will be their first on the topic of women and religion; there are some who maintain very close personal links with the Christian churches, and I know that there are others whose life-history and experience have taken them in very different directions. Some would describe themselves as "post-Christian." Others might be searching for new ways of reclaiming an ancient religious heritage where women and female symbolism were valued and revered. Their journey might have taken them beyond the Christian churches, and indeed the Christian story itself. Addressing an audience such as this is a very daunting task because we have come with very different expectations. The question that has been foremost for me as I prepared to come here was this: What is it that unites us? What is it that divides us? How can I speak a word that might make sense, and that might offer us a way of understanding our experience in relation to the religious traditions represented here? How can I speak a word that might make sense to us in the context of a province whose political and religious agony has been splashed across the world for the past twenty years? Does the question of the relationship of women to religion have any bearing on what has happened, or is it simply a peripheral issue of very restricted interest? I would like to begin by telling you a little bit about my own personal journey, and then come back to the question again. What is it that unites us; what is it that divides us? I was born in Dublin, and brought up by very pious parents in the Roman Catholic tradition. My father's greatest ambition for me was to see me becoming a contemplative nun. I was called, as I was frequently reminded, after the "Little Flower," St. Therese of Liseaux. Her picture hung over my bed all through my childhood. At the age of twenty I did indeed enter an enclosed Carmelite convent in England, not to fulfil my father's ambitions, but in response to my own religious journeying and questing that throughout all my adolescence had been extremely painful and intense. But my journey did not end there, and within several years I found myself at the University of Hull, in 1970, studying theology, sociology, and social anthropology. There I became involved with the movement for the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic Church. During this time I wrote many articles, gave many lectures, and interviews on television and radio, on the question of women and the church.

Neuro-science has taught us the importance of symbols, rituals and music in regulating human emotions and in forming and shaping human consciousness. Do they inspire just relations between families and community? Do they encourage cultures of war or cultures of peace? Do they promote displacing responsibility onto politicians, warriors, priests, or even the Supernatural, or taking responsibility for the awful human condition in which we now find ourselves at global level? This paper asks if the "dew of mercy" used in seasonal renewal ceremonies in worldwide indigenous traditions, might replace the hegemonic "blood sacrificial discourses"  dominating religious and political discourses and legitimating cultures of violence, wars and terrorist activities.

This book, which surveys an extraordinarily wide range of material, is an invaluable, much needed, and very welcome, contribution to the study of gender in early Irish history. The sheer scope of the material analysed, and the author’s careful statements as to the limitations and restriction of her standpoint will make this book required reading for any further researchers in the field of women and gender in early Ireland.

Women Towards Priesthood is an important contribution to the current debates on women and ordination. Field-Bibb traces the history of these debates in the Methodist, Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches and argues persuasively that in times of great social upheaval, typified by the experiences of the early Christian Church, and the early revolutionary Methodist movement, the participation of women was both welcomed and essential. Using object relations theory, Field-Bibb argues that the exclusive sacrificial rights effectively creates women as "Others" and that the 'Other' is none other than the pre-Oedipal mother whose agency might fundamentally threaten the boundaries of the self.

These two books that engage with the work of Luce Irigaray contribute in different ways to contemporary debates on gender and religion, a discipline embodying the tensions in Irigaray's work outlined by Amour and Martin. Ellen T. Armour's concern is that while feminism claims to resist various forms of oppression, two factors undermine its promise. The first is an inability to deal adequately with the difference race makes for gender; the second, the failure adequately to follow deconstruction to its logical conclusion. Using the work of Irigaray and Derrida, Armour's particular project is that of subverting the totalising paradigms of contemporary feminist theology. Her aim is to put Derrida and Irigaray to work on a thorny problem within white feminism (p.42). The project takes its mark from the lines of force that rupture feminist discourse's claim to theorize and theologise on behalf of women (p.43). One cannot hold male theologians accountable for their failures while granting a general amnesty to white middle class women for their failure to take seriously issues of race and class (p.13). Nor can patriarchy function as the father of oppression, with race and class, his children. The answer to white solipsism will not be papering over racial différance, but…allowing racial différance to do its productive work p.62). Armour offers an invaluable explication of Irigaray's potential contribution to, and limitation for, feminist religious studies; in particular, her limitations with regard to race. She argues that Irigaray's work needs supplementation by an analysis that carries racial différance to the same depths in the specular economy (p.134). She claims that exploring the logic of opposition (an ambivalent move, both poison and cure), eventually strikes at the heart of traditional theology's notion of God, insofar as such constructions depend upon the différance between God and the world. Since such a God constitutes the center of the specular economy and its valuing of sameness, then undercutting his mastery will be an important aspect of breaking through the specular economy toward an economy rooted in différance p.63). For these reasons, Armour considers Irigaray's apparent late turn to metaphysical humanism and onto

In her paper ‘Mercy Not Sacrifice: Toward a Celtic Theology’ delivered in Dublin in 1996, Mary
Condren began by addressing the problem of ‘a way of knowing’, that is, the concept of knowing
and the relationship between power and knowledge, asking, ‘When we yearn for a Celtic or
female way of knowing what is the fundamental impulse behind it, what is the longing behind it?
What is the myth behind it?’[1]Is it possible to look to the Celtic past for answers or does any
epistemology emanating from a colonized people, (including a women’s way of knowing) need to
be examined carefully in regard to the inherent power politics and the question as to who owns
the past? Can the myth of a pristine past be used to empower?