JUDAS

Born as Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana in 1648, Juana is the reason I renamed my 'Ancient Women of Power' series to the 'Historical Women of Power' series. Despite being born far from the classical period, her feminism and strikingly modern thought were too inspirational not to include.  She was born in New Spain, Mexico, to descendants of Spanish immigrants. Despite her link to the noble Spanish, she seemed destined for a middle-class life, as she was born out of wedlock. Her father, a Spanish military officer, left her mother to raise Juana and her sisters alone. Despite her illiteracy and Mexican society's misogyny, Juana's mother successfully ran one of her father's estates and was determined on educating her children in the way she never was. It was perhaps her mother's revolutionary ideas about a woman's role in society that inspired Juana to pursue a life in scholarship.  A painting of Sor Juana, rocking what I believed were micr...

  An illustration from 'TimTum: A Trans Jew Zine.' In the modern day, religion is seen as incompatible with queerness. Because traditional biblical and Talmudic readings have historically enforced conservative ideals on religious communities, we see religion as anti-Queer. In reality, whilst much biblical interpretation is anti-Queer, the original scripture is either ignorant or inclusive of gender non-conforming identities. Today I'd like to talk about the diversity in gender identity that we see in the Talmud - the primary source for Jewish law, tradition, philosophy, ethics, and history. The Talmud defines six genders, six! That means that when the Babylonian Talmud was written, in the year 500sih - Jewish authorities thought that the populations of non-binary genders were significant and diverse enough to fall into four non-binary categories. The six genders defined in the Babylonian Talmud are as follows: - Zachar (זָכָר) - AMAB, living as male; - Nekevah (נְקֵב...

The Israel-Palestine conflict is an incredibly complex issue at the intersection of religion, politics, sociology, and economics - an ever-evolving affair that is both multifaceted and extremely hard to comprehend, let alone attempt to resolve. I apologise if this month's instalment is the Frankie Robinson anthology is a little downbeat, the conflict is an incredibly serious topic that I am very passionate about. This article is not supposed to be non-partisan or non-biased - I have bias that is very obvious: I'm pro-Israel, I identify as a Zionist, I observe rabbinical and Talmudic scripture on the topic, and I am ever aware of the conflict mostly from the view of Israeli media, and Jewish news outlets. There are plenty of very compelling pro-Palestine arguments in the aether, and I'll be pushing for one of our own writers to release a contrasting piece on the topic, to balance me out. With that out of the way, let's begin.      An Israeli and Palestinian flag hang, s...

Yesterday, on my regular post-school depressing Twitter scroll, I came across a repost of an article entitled "Mormons Aren't Nice People: a bitter victims [sic] deep dive into very old theology." Firstly - brushing past the fact that   victims  is misspelt because I'm not an educational classist - I'd like to point out how incredibly generalised this statement is, just in the title. This author, that's 'Sadie Lee' on Medium, isn't looking for a resolution, and place to unload, a resolution, or even an apology. She's looking for conflict. As a rather devoted agnostic, I'm not known for running to the rescue of horribly oppressed theists, but I will argue against the public slander of a really quite legitimate belief system.                                             The Book of Mormon. Ignoring the inflammatory title, and proceeding to the main bo...

                                 Jehovah's Witnesses in St. Petersburg, Russia. Sitting at my desk, checking emails, waiting for a pot noodle that just won't cool down fast enough, the faint sound of Lady Gaga's   Artpop  filling the air, I come across an email from the Jehovah's Witnesses. I signed up for their mailing list along with a couple others - The LDS, The Messianic Jews, and The Quakers. I just like to keep up with what the smaller denominations are doing. I think their whole sitch is really quite cute, and I love an underdog. I opened up this email from the Jehovah's Witnesses, and it had a link to an article on their website. It was really a very generic blog promotion email, that I doubt was even authored by a human, but I clicked on it anyway as the article's title hooked me, it was titled "Why Did the Holocaust Happen? Why Didn’t God Stop It?" I must admit, I wa...

So,  in the 17th Century, the Portuguese were really into God. This meant that people were also really into being buried at their local church, cathedral, or other Christian-flavored places of worship. Over time, these place's cemeteries became full of bodies, and most churches resorted to stuffing skeletons behind the walls, underneath the floorboards, or just deeper into the cemetery. This meant that after a while, Iberian churches were just absolutely full of bodies, which wasn't exactly sustainable. Skeletons aren't exactly known for being that decomposable, even if their flesh vanishes pretty quickly, which led to churches literally overflowing with bones. During times of disasters and plague, churches would have to bury thousands of bodies at once, which left little room for other bodies.                            An ossuary in Portugal. The solution for this, the Portuguese Catholic establi...