Statement of the Purpose and Mission of the Women’s Center at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
The Women’s Center at Louisville Seminary is established to further the full humanity and dignity of women in the enterprise of religious education, the larger religious context and the world. It does its work in recognition that God created women to be full partners with men in the work of justice and love that brings about health and well-being for the whole creation. It does its work also in recognition of the traditional and historical devaluing of women, their voices and experience, in arenas where male leadership has been the norm. We recognize, moreover, that the goal of full equality and dignity for women has yet to be reached across the world, in our country, and in our different religious communities. The Center will recognize the reality of women’s lives and varied experience in its attention to records and descriptions of women’s activities, in its openness as a gathering place, and in its fostering of women’s voices in speaking and writing.
Specifically, the Women’s Center plans to address issues of concern for women in the following manner:
- Support and celebrationBy offering consistent programs that support and celebrate the ongoing presence of women’s voices and experience in the arena of theological education, the religious community and the world, and that offer a critical analysis of traditional patriarchal structures, ideologies and modes of thought. In this effort voices of women who in U.S. culture belong to dominated groups will receive special privilege.
- AdvocacyBy advocating the study, writing, theology and leadership of women and men that challenge existing structures and ways of thinking that create and perpetuate inequality among women and men. By learning to speak of and to God in ways that counteract the limitations of patriarchal God-perception and God-talk. By becoming informed about and advocating for the needs of women and men who suffer burdensome marginalization because of gender orientation, class and/or ethnic identity.
- Education and networksBy collecting and making public information concerning the reality of women’s lives in all groupings, in religious as well as social settings, in our nation and across the globe, in order to overcome ignorance and hiding of the realities of injustice that reinforce existing structures. Providing information and education will be a necessary part of the formation of networks of solidarity across race, class and gender, networks that are crucial for bringing about needed change.
Wimminwise 