Hedgerow Initiative

The Hedgerow Initiative offers sustained, systematic programming in feminist theological education, spiritual integration, and leadership for a just and holy world. In a particular way, the Initiative highlights the scholarship of women who since the 1950s have worked to reclaim women’s presence and significance in scripture, church history, theology and culture. The Initiative takes its name from the hedgerow schools in Ireland that kept alive the language, faith, culture, and community of the people during the time of the British penal codes. A hedgerow is a biosphere and a haven.

About the Fall Series
Today, scholars, especially women scholars, engage scripture out of their experience and social locations. New methods actively engage readers in critical and creative dialogue with scripture and demonstrate how big the questions can become. Ecofeminist, womanist, and other liberation theologies give voice to women, to people of color, people in poverty, people once colonized, and all of us in these seminars. Like sacred stories in every culture, the bible holds stories that open us to the mystery in which we live. Memory is vital to hope. In dialogue with our experience and the needs of our world, reading the bible can nourish our spirits and draw us into working for a just and holy world.

The fall Hedgerow seminar will engage participants in critical and creative dialogue with the Hebrew scriptures. You will read and reflect with scholars, especially women scholars, who in asking new questions, initiate transforming conversations for us today.

Fall I: Embracing Promise
A sense of human life having promise and purpose arises and lasts in the ancient Middle East.
September 21 - Primal Womb
September 28 - Women of the Promise
October 5 - A Way Where There is No Way (Guest Instructor: Rabbi Amy Eilberg, Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning, University of St. Thomas)
October 12 Victims and Survivors

Fall II: Imagining Peace
As war rages and kings fail, prophets encounter Mystery in dreams of peace and plenty.
October 19 Prophets That Rock the Royals
October 26 Intimacy and Blame
November 2 Finding a Bigger God in Defeat, Exile
November 9 Imagining a Way Home

Fall III: Encountering the Holy
Wisdom writing finds the holy in creation, personifying wisdom as a woman, Lady Wisdom, who is with God from the beginning as artisan of creation, who is the spotless mirror of the activity of God.
November 16 Religious Identity
November 23 Wisdom Incarnate’s Abundant Household
November 30 Friends of God and Prophets
December 7 Writing Outside the Canon

TEXT: New Revised Standard Bible. Biblical Foundations of Spirituality: Touching a Finger to the Flame by Barbara E. Bowe. This book is available through Good Ground Press.

VIEW THE SYLLABUS.

PRESENTER: Joan Mitchell, CSJ, MTS, Harvard Divinity School; PhD in New Testament, Luther Seminary, St. Paul.

WHEN: Mondays, September 21 to December 7, 6:30-8:30 pm

COST: $90 per section of four classes; $245 for the twelve sessions in the Fall

If you have ever participated in a Hedgerow course, you are welcome to participate
in the September 21 evening free of charge.

The spring sessions will include:
Wisdom’s Prophet: Communities of Equals; Spirit, Fire, and Social Order; Spirit Animating Every Generation. Mondays, February 8 through April 26, 6:30-8:30 pm.

Click here to read about the Soul Conference

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