Feminist theology and the Turn towards publishing in feminism and capitalism

Last night I starting thinking about Revelation 16:15, and how it melded with the Tanakh, and, perhaps, the teaching of the time of Elijah before the period of judgement. I remember once reading a very compelling study that laid out extremely detailed “evidence” that Revelation was a Jewish text that was refashioned and rewritten to fit the Christian message. Of course, I didn’t save it as a PDF and have never been able to find it again since. It was rather scientific, linguistic, looking at the oldest known copies, and I agreed with the theology behind their argument. I could probably paraphrase it, but suffice it to say it was compelling. And in line with exactly what the older Jewish texts and older, obsolete regional religions did to each other all the time. But I was thinking about God “arriving” as a thief and for a time it all made sense, I didn’t know what to do with that information. If that was true, what else is, too. As I have said I million times, I abandoned Abrahamic texts, but I still know them well. After that many years of study, I know them.

But, at the end of the day a basic, elementary problem with the Abrahamic texts is that you can’t have some parts be inspired and some written by men to protect their positions of power, no matter how women’s theology might still find meaning it in. If parts are so obviously false, it is all false. Or at least, unreliable to a reasonable observer. Feminist theology is powerful, and well researched and can enlighten historically, as well as spiritually, even those parts so obviously written by men and not God, but that is nothing more than literary criticism. I don’t know, perhaps feminist theology is nothing more than a cross between Northrop Frye’s literary criticism of William Blake and Derrida’s Of Grammatology. At best. Hitting lows and highs, hitting truth as well as the surface level.

Anyways. I’m seeing a lot about Liberation Theology. Catholics didn’t invent it. A few individuals adapted those close readings for their specific denomination and gained followers. It has always been my personal opinion a believer with a conscience would have left Catholicism after the late 1990s. It was all so overwhelming. How could you stay and still call it God?

It wasn’t until well into Third Wave Feminism that Asian feminist theology started getting published, but those scholars where there for some time. And that was where, to the best of my knowledge, we started getting real theology on Third World feminism and Colonialism. And then white women in the US picked up on it and it became a thing, worth going to the source. Like anything, people of a certain stature have to do it before the original source gets attention.

Though it is certainly true that Third Wave was the most inclusive, it was only setting up the surface tents for Fourth Wave. White women were still in control. Fourth Wave has been mostly focused on technology instead of on the ground experience. I am not saying movements at the hands of technology are not involved, but a great deal of all that was being prepared during the Third Wave was left out. In the last few years publishing on all that fight for progress halted, stalled, and has not been given a chance to develop. Not completely, mind you. I have texts on Native American feminism and Palestinian feminism that were technically part of Fourth Wave and only exists because of Third Wave, but there was so much more to do. There has been a extreme detour, a Turn, towards feminism and capitalism. White women controlling the narrative. Making everything interdisciplinary. This “Turn” towards feminism and capitalism has stolen publishing at large. It is not that those texts are wrong. They aren’t. But that is not all. Not close.