Research Paper on:
Feminist Perspective on Religion

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
image of God as being neither male nor female. Rather, people today tend to think of God as being spirit, and embodying both the masculine and the feminine principles.  Nevertheless, God in traditional religion is still spoken of as masculine. Christian tradition speaks of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Judaism honors God the  Father. Islam sees Allah as definitively masculine. These facts has precipitated a feminist movement in theology that has examined the history of religion and the role of women from  prehistory to today. As this suggests, to critique the entirety of a feminist approach to religion is to cover quite a large territory. However, this discussion will attempt to give  an overview of the feminist critique of religion and its implications. First of all, feminism has been very vocal about the issue of language. About 30 years ago, a  Roman Catholic, emerging-feminist Mary Daly made the observation that "As long as God is male, men will be God" (Toole 44). As this suggests, feminists see a direct connection between  language and the power of patriarchy to relegate women to second-class citizenship. In her book on this topic, Elizabeth Johnson points out the power of language. While  ostensibly, the use of the masculine pronoun is suppose to encompass both men and women, Johnson argues that to consistently use the masculine form conveys the message that it is  more "fitting" that God be "addressed as male than as female" (She Who Is 5). Additionally, she points out that this exclusive "speech about God" serves to "support an imaginative  and structural world that excludes or subordinates women" (She Who Is 5). To understand what feminists are talking about when it comes to this issue, men should simply rephrase a