Everyday Life and the Sacred: Gender Sensitive Explorations Introduction
Feminist theologians and feminist scholars of religious studies traditionally question thinking in dichotomies, in particular, when binary distinctions capture or steer our understanding of religion and gender.1 Formative theorists of religion like Emile Durkheim, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade have enthroned the difference between the sacred and the profane in their efforts to touch the heart of religion in and for contemporary times. The need to scrutinize this common and widespread classification has been part of feminist scholarship from the beginning.2 Mary Daly already pleaded for the deconstruction of the distinction between the sacred and the profane, because both often served where they are extremely simplified or made absolute to exclude women from religious authority or religious rituals. Daly argued that the sacred is predominantly associated with transcendence and the masculine, while the profane is coupled with the mundane and the feminine.3 Melissa Raphael, the author of several ground breaking books on the sacred from a feminist theological perspective, provided important new impulses to this debate. She proposes not to consider the sacred and profane as ontological or universal categories, but rather