We had a fantastic day in Manchester last Saturday at the ‘Reclaiming the F Word’ event. Sally Rush joined us and blogged about her experience of the conference. Read on to find out more!

Yesterday I was at Reclaiming the F Word, an event organised by the Christian Feminist Network (CFN). It was a day where a fairly diverse group of people spent time looking at various aspects of what it meant to be a Christian and a Feminist in contemporary society. This post is a reflection on the day and the thoughts it prompted.

The event started with a talk by Dr. Kristin Aune, one of the co-authors of Reclaiming the F Word, (an excellent book which has recently seen publication of an updated second edition). Within the talk she gave a brief outline of the history of feminism and different strands within it before moving on to discuss what contemporary Feminism looks like and encouraging us to think what Christian Feminism may look like.

I have to confess I spent much of this talk with teacher head on noting down the details of the social survey she had been involved in conducting and thinking about how it may be incorporated into my course. One of the bits which I found most interesting both as an A Level tutor thinking about the Sociology of Belief unit and as a Christian who wants to be able to engage with this stuff in a practical and missional way was the way in which the study showed how spirituality and religion are often quite different things. The focus for many was on their practice not on institutional involvement. There was a very clear link between the findings being discussed and the view put forward by Heelas and Woodhead in the Kendal Project, but with reference to a quite different age group to that which was dominant in the Kendal study.

The conference provided an excellent networking opportunity to just chat with people in the breaks. This for me was one of the most enriching aspects of the day, because it was in that discussion you realised quite how diverse those attending and participating in the day were.

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