Rosemary Radford Ruether
Faculty Photo – Claremont College From Conscience Magazine’s Retrospective – June, 2011
Biographical Comments from Conscience Magazine
Ruether’s life was imbued with the contradictions of Catholicism from the start. Her mother was Catholic and her father Episcopalian and she was raised, as she puts it, “Catholic in an ecumenical context.” It was perhaps inevitable that she herself would become a scholar of the classics and church history and one of the hierarchy’s most constructive critics. “My mother took seriously what she thought of as the high intellectual tradition of Catholicism but she was also critical of what she saw as superstitious, dogmatic Catholicism,” notes Ruether.
After receiving her BA in philosophy and history from Scripps College and marrying political scientist Herman Ruether in 1957, she entered Claremont Graduate School, where she earned her MA in ancient history in 1960 and her PhD in classics and patristics—the study of the early church “fathers”—in 1965. Despite her academic interest in church history, reproductive rights were never far from her mind. In 1964, when the question of whether the Vatican would officially approve of contraception was on everyone’s mind and she herself was a young mother balancing family and a career, she wrote a piece for the Washington Post Magazine entitled “Why a Catholic Mother Believes in Birth Control.” It eventually cost Ruether her first teaching job at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles.
In 1967 Ruether published one of her most famous works, “The Church against Itself,” in which she criticized the inability of the hierarchy to “delve deeply enough to create a viable theology of radical change” on issues like birth control, marriage and sexuality because of its irrational commitment to outdated doctrines from the past. Ruether taught at Howard for 10 years, taking time in the early 1970s to teach courses about women and religion at Harvard Divinity School and Yale Divinity School.
Ruether has influenced generations of scholars from her teaching positions at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary, where she taught from the mid-1970s until the early 2000’s, and the Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University, where she teaches today.
In the 1970’s she joined the board of Catholics for a Free Choice – now Catholics for Choice (CFC) – and helped to develop the theological underpinnings for that organization’s work. She also has had a long and personal involvement in CFC’s Latin American work with its partner organization Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir (Catholics for the Right to Decide— CDD), traveling to Latin America to network and speak, and as in the United States, providing a theological underpinning for CDD’s work.
Education: B.A. Philosophy – Scripps College M.A. Ancient History - Claremont Graduate School Ph. D in Classics and Patristics - Claremont Graduate School Selected Writings (Bolded item is the source of our reading selection):
The Church Against Itself, New York, 1967, Herder and Herder. Gregory of Nazianzus. Oxford: 1969, Oxford University Press. The Radical Kingdom, The Western Experience of Messianic Hope, New York: Paulist Press, 1970 ISBN 0809118602 Faith and fratricide: the theological roots of anti-Semitism. New York 1974, Seabury Press, ISBN 978-0-8164-2263-0. "Courage as a Christian Virtue" in Cross Currents, Spring 1983, 8-16 Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, Beacon Press (1983) ISBN 0- 8070-1205-X Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing, Harper-Collins (1994) ISBN 978-0-06-066967-6, ASIN 0-06-066967-5 In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women’s Religious Writing (ed. with Rosemary Skinner Keller), Harper-Collins (1996) ISBN 0-06-066840-7 Introducing Redemption in Christian Feminism (editor), Continuum (1998) ISBN 1- 85075-888-3 Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family, Beacon Press (2001), ISBN 978- 0807054079 Fifth chapter of Transforming the Faiths of our Fathers: Women who Changed American Religion, edited by Ann Braude. (2004) ISBN 1403964602 The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Augsburg Fortress (2002) ISBN 0-8006-3479-9 Integrating Ecofeminism Globalization and World Religions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (2005) ISBN 0-7425-3529-0 Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2005, University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-23146-5 America, Amerikkka: Elect Nation & Imperial Violence, Equinox (2007) ISBN 1-84553- 158-2 Feminism and Religion in the 21st Century: Technology, Dialogue, and Expanding Borders (ed. with Gina Messina-Dysert), Routledge (2014). ISBN 9780415831949.
Ted’s additional personal comment: This woman’s work is summarized wonderfully in a June, 2011 commemorative issue of Conscience, the newsjournal published by Catholics for Choice. It contains a biographical summary and 23 articles/commentaries/book reviews by Dr. Ruether spanning 23 years. The above bibliography is a goldmine.
The link is: http://wordpress.consciencemag.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/RRRspecialedition.pdf