Category: Demeter

The ASWM Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality

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Dr. Lucia Birnbaum Receives 2016 Demeter Award

Dr. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum
Dr. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum

Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, says of Dr. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum “You are one of the most forward thinking, history conscious, and integrative thinkers… You are doing the work that truly turns the tide.”

In a break with tradition, the ASWM Board of Directors awarded both Dr. Birnbaum and Dr. Elinor Gadon the 2016 Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality. Dr. Birnbaum was honored in recognition of decades of visionary scholarship as a Founding Mother of Feminist Spirituality, Cultural History and Political Awareness. Her continuing intellectual leadership ,as a cultural historian, educator and mentor, focuses on questions about the origins of submerged cultures.

Beginning over thirty years ago with the English and Italian publications of Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy (1986, l988), and Black Madonnas: Feminism, religion, and politics in Italy (1993), Dr. Birnbaum’s work has enlightened and continues to inspire readers with knowledge concerning the hidden herstory of our quintessential African cultural heritage and foremothers.   Incorporating knowledge from history, anthropology, and genetics, she examines the transformative power of the image of the primordial Dark Mother and female divinity that was carried out of Africa on waves of human migration.

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Charlene Spretnak Wins 2012 Demeter Award

Charlene Spretnak is the 2012 winner of the Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality. Her presentation for the ASWM conference is entitled, Modernity, Mythology, and the Elusive Gestalt.

Ms. Spretnak’s work is internationally recognized in the areas of spirituality, cultural history, feminist and other social criticism, and ecological thought (Green politics, ecofeminism, ecophilosophy). In 2006 she was named one of “100 Eco-Heroes of All Time” by the publication of the British government’s Environmental Department.

She is one of the founding mothers of the Women’s Spirituality movement, through her work in the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s.  Her first book, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths reconstructed pre-Olympian myths for the first time in more than 2500 years; the Los Angeles Times called it “a poetic revelation.”

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Margot Adler Receives 2010 Demeter Award

On April 2010, ASWM conferred the first Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality to journalist and cultural commentator Margot Adler.

Margot Adler is a long-time correspondent for National Public Radio, based in NPR’s New York Bureau. Her reports can be heard regularly on All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Weekend Edition. From 1999-2008, Adler was also the host of NPR’s Justice Talking, a weekly show exploring constitutional controversies in the nation’s courts.

Adler is the author of the ground-breaking study of alternative spirituality in America, Drawing Down the Moon, which introduced nature religions to hundreds of thousands of readers.  She is an active lecturer on pagan studies and women’s spirituality.  The presentation of the first Demeter Award to Adler recognized her influence in changing public perceptions of women’s religions, past and present.