Word: judaeo-christian
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...message of the joke would be lost in some cultures; in India, for instance, Kali-an incarnation of the Hindu mother goddess-is both female and black. But it bites enough in Western civilization, where Judaeo-Christian theology has intermittently taught white superiority over black and consistently taught male superiority over female. Color prejudice in theology has been largely expunged. Gender prejudice remains. God is the Father. Jesus Christ is the Son. Even the Holy Spirit, in the New Testament, is "he." And women? Women are the daughters of Eve, the original temptress...
Easy Divorce. Such simple categories are being questioned today, but the questioners are working against some 3,000 years of Judaeo-Christian thought. The trouble began, appropriately, with the creation narrative in Genesis, particularly when the first woman was molded from Adam's rib. Eve succumbed to the temptation of the serpent, and Adam in turn capitulated to her. "The woman you gave me," he was soon grousing to God. "She gave me the fruit." Ever after, Scripture notes with a certain masculine piety, women would bear children in sorrow and pain, and their husbands would be their masters...
Divine Presence. Despite such apologies and defenses, at least a few feminist theologians argue that Judaeo-Christian theology is still far too dominated by male concepts. Boston College's Mary Daly, a Roman Catholic laywoman, says a woman's revolution within the church is needed to overturn the patriarchal, male idea of leadership, which she describes as hyper-rational and aggressive. With it would go the masculine habit of constructing boundaries between "self" and "other." Gone, too, would be a God who keeps mankind in "infantile subjection." The new God would "encourage self-actualization and social commitment." Daly...
...TEMPTRESS. The Judaeo-Christian tradition and its offshoot, puritanism, run very deep in Western culture. By the preconceptions of this mentality, Eve is the initial occasion of sin. While women frequently seem like supernumeraries in Arthur Miller's plays, the preface to his distinctly autobiographical drama After the Fall is revelatory. He writes: "After all, the infraction of Eve is that she opened up the knowledge of good and evil. She presented Adam with a choice." The sin then seems to be Eve's, and Adam, we are to assume, would have been better off without a choice...
Williams, like his former pupil, Martin Luther King, espouses a basic integrationist philosophy. "The Judaeo-Christian teaching," he says flatly, "is simple on the unity of mankind. Those in the black movement who are moving toward separation are wrong. We have been criticizing the white Protestants for separatism. If they were wrong, I don't see how the black militants can be right. What sense does it make in the last quarter of the 20th century for a person to get in a corner all by himself...