Welcome the editors of the new anthology, Beyond Belief, The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

I'm so excited to offer you a giveaway of the anthology Beyond Belief, The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions. This is also your opportunity to join Cami and Susan for a discussion on: "Why Women Stay in Religious Communities." 

Thank you, WOW Women on Writing, for inviting me to host Cami and Susan today.

Beyond Belief addresses what happens when women of extreme religions decide to walk away. Editors Cami Ostman (a de-converted fundamentalist born-again Christian)and Susan Tive (a former Orthodox Jew) have compiled a collection of powerful personal stories written by women of varying ages, races, and religious backgrounds who share one commonality: they’ve all experienced and rejected extreme religions.

Covering a wide range of religious communities—including Evangelical, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, Calvinist, Moonie, and Jehovah’s Witness—and containing contributions from authors like Julia Scheeres (Jesus Land), the stories in Beyond Belief reveal how these women became involved, what their lives were like, and why they came to the decision to eventually abandon their faiths. The authors shed a bright light on the rigid expectations and misogyny so often built into religious orthodoxy, yet they also explain the lure—why so many women are attracted to these lifestyles, what they find that’s beautiful about living a religious life, and why leaving can be not only very difficult but also bittersweet.


Please welcome Cami and Susan in conversation.  

Why Women Stay in Religious Communities

Cami: We often get asked why women stay in religions which restrict their movements in the world or limit their freedoms. As you might imagine, Susan and I have talked a great deal about this; it was one of our primary guiding questions as we sorted through submissions for Beyond Belief. Why would a smart woman (perhaps even a well-educated woman) stay in a religion that restricted her actions and opportunities or, as in some religions, downright blamed her—by virtue of being Eve's sister—for sin existing in the world? Let me first speak for myself.

I adopted my faith as a teenager, at a time when I needed guidance and structure. By the time I was an adult ready to guide my own life, my whole worldview was informed by my theology and my entire sense of community was built around my church. Although fear of outsiders wasn't as strong in my situation as it was for some of the other women who contributed to Beyond Belief, my community nevertheless had an "us and them" attitude that made me feel I was in a very special, very chosen group. Far from this feeding my ego, it gave me an overwhelming sense of responsibility toward the rest of the world—to evangelize them. And the only people who understood that responsibility were those who shared my faith.

Though every woman who stays in a restrictive religion has her own story, one of the commonalities is that tight knit religious communities provide a sense of safety and of being understood—until you step outside of their expectations.

What would you add from your experience, Susan?

Susan: Traditional religions offer women great support and encouragement especially in so far as they uphold the roles of wives and mothers. In my faith community, Orthodox Judaism, I felt, for the first time, valued as a stay at home mom. My role was honored and reinforced not just with passing lip service but with actual laws and rituals that celebrated the importance of family and home. Before I joined I had searched for but hadn’t found that kind of structure in the secular world and I knew if I went back out there I would lose a way of life that had helped me find meaning in my role as a woman and a mother. It’s never easy to give up structure, identity and security even if you have it because you are trading your rights and freedoms for it.

In my case, as with some of our other writers, I stayed because of the real threat that I might lose my children if I left. It took me many years to finally gather the strength I needed to make the break.

As many of our writers have noted leaving can be disorienting and downright scary. Women who leave must walk away from a way of life in which they have put their whole hearts. Their own identity, sense of meaning, purpose and place in the world is bound up in their faith. Add to that the fear of the how to function in the outside world as many religious communities tend to isolate women and you can see why leaving is such a huge and heroic decision to make.

Cami: Exactly, in order to leave, one needs to have resources elsewhere. The only thing I would add to this is that, much as with an abusive marriage, the sweet times can be very sweet. Sometimes there can even be long periods when the feelings of being protected and accepted are at least as intense as the sense that one is slowly dying of spiritual/psychological/personal starvation.

We obviously don't have all the answers, but we are glad to have had the chance to explore the question and we'd welcome hearing from readers. What have you stayed in too long (maybe it was a relationship or a job instead of a faith community) that asked you to be less than who you knew you could be? Why did you stay? What helped you decide to leave?

Susan: One thing that has surprised me about our writers is that very few of them have become bitter or anti-religious by their experience. The majority while no longer religious are still very considerate of the faiths they left behind and will openly admit to what they miss about their religious life and what they still carry with them. One of the goals for Beyond Belief was that by giving women the opportunity to tell their stories we could create a dialogue that would be healing and helpful for both writers and readers. It’s gratifying to see that the anthology has achieved that goal.

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Thank you so much, Cami and Susan. Even though I'm not from an extreme religious background, I find this a fascinating subject - one that I've been introduced to many times in the last few years. I admire the bravery of these women to break away and still remain whole and productive.

Please leave a comment here at Choices to be in the running for a free copy of Beyond Belief. The winner will be picked at random next Wednesday, October 2, 2013.

Author Bios:

Cami Ostman is an author, editor, life coach and a licensed marriage and family therapist with publications in her field. She blogs at 7marathons7continents.com and on the psychologytoday.com blogger team. She has appeared in several publications, including O, The Oprah Magazine, Fitness Magazine, Adventures Northwest, the Mudgee Guardian in Australia, and La Prensa in Chile. Cami is a runner and a dog lover who lives in Bellingham, Washington.

As a writer, editor and researcher Susan Tive has worked on a variety of academic articles exploring psychology, feminism and religion. Susan’s interest in these subjects led her to become an editor for several non-fiction titles including Faith and Feminism and Rachel’s Bag. Her new anthology Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions was published in April 2013 by Seal Press.

Find out more about these ladies by visiting them online:

Book Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Beyond-Belief-The-Secret-Lives-of-Women-in-Extreme-Religions/341371765891595

Cami's Twitter: https://twitter.com/camiostman

Book Information:

Paperback:  328 PagesPublisher:  Seal Press (April 2, 2013)ISBN-10:  1580054420Twitter hashtag: #SLWExtreme

Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions is available as a print and ebook at Amazon.

A huge welcome to author Judy Mandel

I think I’ve found a soul mate in Judy L. Mandel, author of Replacement Child – a memoir (Seal Press/Perseus, March, 2013). Like I, Judy reinvented herself from a writer in the corporate world to a creative Writer in the last several years. So I thank WOW! Women on Writing for inviting me to host Judy on Choices and introducing me to her heartfelt and well-received memoir. 

Here’s what Judy has to say about how she found out exactly what she should do with her life.

Switching Gears to a Writer’s Life 

They say that when you find out what you should be doing with your life, you will have already been doing it. At least someone said that to me once. Which always confused the hell out of me. But, now, finally it makes sense.

I was always a writer, although now the title seems to be written with a capital “W” instead of a small one. For many years, I wrote about other people’s lives, or a company’s products. As a newspaper reporter, I found interesting stories for features—because I hated writing police reports and attending long town hall meetings. The hours were terrible, and I left to work in public relations, advertising and later, corporate marketing, thinking the stress would be less. Not so much.

It was good though. As a single mother for several years, the stability of my corporate gig helped me provide for my son and myself, buy a home, and keep him in mac and cheese. I liked a lot about the work; the spurts of creativity it allowed, and some of the great friends I met. But, the workaday world in an office, with the undercurrent politics that I had no stomach to manipulate, scraped me raw.

When I was downsized, or right sized, or whatever they were calling it that year—I took the opportunity to run fast. My son was grown and in college, and I had figured out how to provide that for him. I was married again and begged my husband for a reprieve.

“Don’t make me go back there!” I may have groveled at his feet.

I wrote up a business plan for my own marketing firm and built a roster of clients over the next year—continuing the same kind of work I had done for the last 20 years. But, my resolve shifted the year both my parents died within seven months of each other. There is something about being slapped with your own mortality that makes you take stock of your life and re-evaluate how you are spending your precious days, now that I knew for sure they were limited. I wasn’t sure that selling insurance products or the latest risk management technology was the only legacy I wanted.

Then, there was the matter of the story. The one my parents had wanted me to tell, about the plane crashing into their home, killing their seven-year-old daughter, and nearly killing their two-year-old girl. This was the defining story of my family, and the accident that happened before I was born was mythic to me. My mission was clear from the day I said my final goodbye to my mother; to tell their story of recovery from losing their child, seeing their other daughter through years of surgery and rehabilitation, and also having the hope to bring another child into the world. That would be me. I would write for two years; researching the crash, the faces of grief for the loss of a child, before I would come upon the term “replacement child” which changed the focus of the work.

Through the four years it took to write the book, I learned that I loved being in the midst of a writing project. Waking up each day with a goal to write a few good pages, or edit yesterday’s work, was the kind of adrenaline I used to seek from jumping out of airplanes or skiing (badly). Mostly, it got me out of bed early, and working late into the night at times. I cried at some memories, at my mother’s voice in my head, or the vision of my father’s eyes. Yes, it was a healing journey—cathartic in a way. But, I cringe at those proclamations—hoping my work achieves more than that.

In an effort to find a publishing home for Replacement Child, I attended several writing conferences and workshops and got hooked on being in a community of writers. It seemed to nourish a part of me that had been neglected. So, I applied for an MFA program and started going back to school in my fifties. Now, I am a fully committed and admitted writer-aholic. I can’t stop. I’m trying my hand at essays, short stories and even plays. The best part is that I don’t hesitate anymore when someone asks what I do, but proudly tell them, “I’m a writer.”

About Replacement Child – a memoir 

Judy Mandel is the replacement child for her sister who was killed in a tragic accident. It would be years before she would understand how the event, that happened before she was born, shaped her life.

A plane crashes into a family’s home. A two-year-old girl is critically burned and a mother is forced to make an impossible choice. The death of a child leaves a hole in the family that threatens to tear it apart.

In a great act of hope, the parents give birth to a "replacement child," born to heal wounds and provide a "salve for the burns." The child unwittingly plays her role throughout childhood, riding the deep and hidden currents of the family tragedy.

In this powerful story of love and lies, hope and forgiveness, Judy Mandel discovers the truth that changes her life forever and forces her to confront the complex layers of her relationships with her father, mother, and sister. When she has her own child, her epiphany comes full circle.

And what Publisher’s Weekly says about Replacement Child

"In this well-researched tribute to her parents, journalist Mandel explores how a freak accident altered the fate of her family in 1952. What began as a normal January school day ended with the crash of American Airlines Flight 6780 into the Mandel family home in Elizabeth, New Jersey, three miles outside Newark airport. In addition to the oldest Mandel daughter, the pilot and all 22 passengers died that day. Following the recent loss of her parents, the author decides to piece together the event that incinerated one sister, left another sister severely burned, and prompted her conception as a "replacement" child. By cleverly shifting between recent years and the day of the crash, Mandel weaves together chapters of real and imagined scenes building to the inevitable. "I read that replacement children often feel they can never live up to the memory of the dead children. I recognize myself in some of the descriptions of those with this affliction." Without seeking to give a greater significance to the issue, the book grapples with the random forces that shape modern life. The parents who survive and overcome the death of a child emerge as true heroes, celebrating family birthdays and, eventually, becoming grandparents."

About the author

Judy L. Mandel made her living as a marketing professional for over 20 years before writing her first book, Replacement Child. She grew up in New Jersey, but when she went to college in Connecticut, she knew she had found her home.

Her writing life began as a newspaper reporter. She later worked in public relations and advertising and somehow found herself in corporate communications at various insurance companies. Her memoir grew out of early essays and the promise she made to her family to tell their story.

Judy now balances her business writing for clients with writing fiction, nonfiction, and articles.

Follow Judy on:

Twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/judymandel

Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/replacementchild

Her blog:

http://www.judymandel.com/blog

Her book site:

http://www.replacementchild.com

Replacement Child is available at: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and IndieBound

PS: If you are an author with a new book out, I highly recommend you contact WOW! Women on Writing about hosting your virtual book tour. Take it from me, you won't be disappointed.