Sarah Ruden on Truth, Power, and Responsibility

What happens when sacred stories are used to justify oppression—and when telling the truth feels like rebellion?

In this episode of The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope, host Dwight Dunston speaks with Sarah Ruden, an award-winning translator, essayist, and Quaker writer whose work exposes how language, power, and faith intersect. Known for her acclaimed translations of The Aeneid, The Gospels, The Confessions of Augustine, and Perpetua: The Woman, the Martyr, Ruden brings deep historical insight and moral clarity to this conversation about love, responsibility, and truth.

Drawing on the biblical story of Hagar and Ishmael, Sarah unpacks how ancient hierarchies still shape the present. She traces the lineage of propaganda around women’s bodies from Ovid’s Rome to today’s reproductive politics—and challenges the spiritual evasions that allow injustice to endure. She also draws on her forthcoming book, Reproductive Wrongs: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women.

Key Quotes

“The silence of women in the Hebrew Bible is very interesting—very provocative to think about.”

“People, especially men, don’t want to take responsibility for what actually happens.”

 “We have to start by telling the truth.”

Together, Dwight and Sarah explore what it means to live with integrity in a time of crisis, how Quaker faith can both guide and confuse, and why empirical truth—science, evidence, and witness—matters for spiritual survival.

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Reproductive Wrongs: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women – forthcoming from Knopf
• Perpetua: The Woman, the Martyr – Yale University Press
• The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible – Vintage
• The story of Hagar and Ishmael (Genesis 16–21)
• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “When Peace Becomes Obnoxious” (1957) https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/when-peace-becomes-obnoxious
• Grace Lee Boggs and “The Clock of the World” – The Harvard Crimson

Learn more about Sarah’s work at https://sarahruden.com/

NEW Video Version available at Pendle Hill's YouTube page.

The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/
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Transcript

0:01

Hey I direct my concern for being fundamental and telling the truth. We don't know the ultimate truth about God, about destiny, about the future of this planet. We know what happens in front of us. You're listening to The Seed, Conversations for Radical Hope, a Pendle Hill podcast where Quakers and other seekers come together to explore visions of the world growing through the cracks of our broken systems. I'm your host, Dwight Dunstan. This season's theme is inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his book, Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community? In it, he wrote, power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. My guest today is Sarah Rudin, an award-winning translator and writer whose work brings the ancient world to life with honesty, clarity, and care. you you Thank you so much for joining us for this episode. And so as you're arriving here, I'm so excited for our guest, Sarah, to join us in just a bit. But as you know, this season, we ground each episode in a short reading. And today's reading is a summary of the story of Hagar and Ishmael found in Genesis, chapter 16 through 21. Hagar is an enslaved Egyptian woman. in the household of Sarai and Abram, later Sarah and Abraham. Sarai cannot have children. So she says to Abram, the Lord has kept me from having children. Go sleep with my slave. Perhaps I can build a family through her. Abram agrees. Hagar becomes pregnant. Instead of honor, she meets jealousy and hostility. Sarai blames Abram. And he replies, your slave is in your hands. Do with her whatever you think best. Sarai mistreats Hagar so harshly that she runs away. Pregnant, desperate, and alone, she's in the wilderness. At a spring, an angel of the Lord appears and calls her by name. Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going? The angel tells her to return, but also gives her a promise. I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count. You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery. She returns and gives birth to Ishmael. For more than a decade, they remain in Abraham's household. But when Sarah miraculously gives birth to Isaac, conflict flares again. At a celebration, Sarah demands, get rid of the slave woman and her son, for that woman's son will never share in the inheritance with my son, Isaac. Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael into the desert with bread and a skin of water. When the water is gone, Hagar places her teenage son under a bush and steps away. She says, I cannot watch the boy die. She weeps, but God hears Ishmael's cries. Do not be afraid. God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. God opens Hagar's eyes. She sees a well. They live. Joining us on the show today is Sarah Rudin. She is one of the leading translators of the ancient classics. Her work spans Greek and Roman literature, as well as sacred texts. Sarah is known for setting a new standard of accuracy and style, while also making these works accessible to today's readers. Beyond translation, she writes about culture and human rights, always with a concern for power and truth shaped by her Quaker faith. She has received major awards, including Guggenheim, Whitting, and Silver's grants. Sarah, welcome to the SEA. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. How are you arriving to our conversation? am stuck indoors mainly because I have proofreading for a forthcoming book, Reproductive Wrongs, a short history of bad ideas about women. As I work on that, I of course think about the political crisis that we're going through. So this is a very worrying time for me. Mmm. I spent quite a bit of time earlier in my life in countries that were recovering from authoritarianism. Spent two years in Germany, right around the time of reunification. Then I spent around 10 years in South Africa, right after apartheid. I was, of course, very happy that both nations had emerged from authoritarianism, but I could see that it was a disease that embedded itself very deeply in the body politic so that many generations would be paying for the excesses of past regimes. I'm very worried that the United States is sliding into the same situation. We're not just going to pass through this present crisis. We're going to be trying very hard to put ourselves back together again over 50 years, 100 years. I'm feeling a lot of grief and a lot of pain about our situation. I'm writing reproductive wrongs, finishing it now in fact, because I didn't know another way to contribute in a more powerful way to the moment that we're in. I'm a translator of Latin and Greek and a bit of Hebrew. So what do I contribute? I thought, well, I know a lot about authoritarianism. because I've lived in its aftermath. And I'm also an expert in text. My business in life is words. Over the past number of years, I have been working with a lot of concern on the problem of language and truth. And you confront that problem as a translator. You see in translations of the Bible and the standard English text how truth has been distorted because of ideological concerns because of what Western authorities want out of the Bible in the modern world. They want it, for example, to support imperialism, to support materialism, war, and authoritarian ideologies. We, of course, have a crisis in reproductive rights here in the United States. I decided to look at texts dating from around uh 17 BC, we don't have a precise date. From then clear up to the present concerning the rights of women and couples and families to make their own decisions about having children or not having children. The earliest anti-choice propaganda, and this is anti-abortion literature in this case, dates from right around 17 BC. It's a pair of poems by the poet Ovid. These are mind-blowing. because they hit on major points that are made by propaganda of the anti-abortion movement here in the United States. The same ideas are there. One idea is that women must not be allowed reproductive choice because they will not choose to bear the holy child. Pagans said this, Ovid was a pagan. Christians say this still today. It's the same idea. This area of propaganda makes women particularly vulnerable because their intimate reproductive lives are not such as they can just stand up and answer back. Because we're talking about very private matters. We're talking about very vulnerable and sensitive matters. So women are not going to be slugging it out in the public arena and risk, for example, their relationships with their partners, their relationships with their children, with their parents. with all these people who are concerned with their reproductive rights and with their reproductive lives. So women are, well in the past, they've been nearly compelled to be silent. So you could say anything about them you wanted. The silence of women in the Hebrew Bible, I think, is very interesting. very provocative to think about. Women speak up not often and at quite late points in the story. You know, in the story we're concerned about here, Hagar has actually very little to say. The people who are in power, Sarai and Abram, they get to speak. They are the ones early in the story who are conversing with God about the fate of this poor woman and the fate of the this poor woman and her child. The people in power pretty much own the God who is supposed to be presiding over the situation. It's just kind of pitiful, the voicelessness of women, where they are most concerned. As you know, this season we're exploring themes of love and power. I'm curious how you see these forces interacting when it comes to reproductive rights, women dignity in your work and in the world. Well, it's a very difficult question to start to address it. A couple days ago, I contacted my beloved Hebrew teacher who taught me at Yale Divinity School. She's got five daughters herself. She's certainly an authority on motherhood as well as an authority on the Hebrew Bible with a special concern for the women depicted in the Hebrew Bible. I asked her, what about love and justice in this story here. She addressed the justice part and she said, what does it have to do with justice? You want justice, you go to Exodus and all those commandments about dealing fairly and stuff. She's quite right. At this stage of the Hebrew Bible's narrative, the Jewish people, the Hebrew people are just coming into existence. Their father is Abraham and his means of becoming father is his reproductive life, particularly his fatherhood of this miraculous baby, Isaac, from whom all the uncountable descendants will come. This is not really at this stage a story about rules and laws except for one law, the law of circumcision, very, very important. You have the big compendium of laws that come later after the delivery of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt. In that sense, you have a concern for justice and you have the legal structure shown arising, which will be deeply identified with the Jewish people. at this later stage, you really have a fairly, I think, straightforward depiction of the way things are. This is just the way things are. We have slaves, we treat them however we want. Slavery is just the norm here. We don't even have rules around it. Powerful men will have multiple sex partners. They will have a lot of children, only certain children will have rights. The men will determine who has rights and who doesn't. We should maybe take a step back in this discussion and not talk about love and power because We just have these clans who are wandering around doing their thing, trying to survive in this wilderness, their seasonal migratory people. Let's actually take a step back, forget about justice because that seems to have to do with the legal system, forget about love, which is barely mentioned in these stories, and just talk about responsibility, which is a matter of truth or if you like fact. You And that's who is doing what to whom and why. My concern always as somebody who studies text is once this question is raised, who's faking you out? Who's lying? Who's manipulating the story and why? That's what I've always been really deeply concerned with. In this story, the manipulations are hard to count. There are so many of them. you'll notice that responsibility is shoved off onto Sarai, the matriarch, mother of the Hebrew race. We don't actually know precisely how these clans are structured, but they are pretty plainly patriarchal. She doesn't have a say in anything. It's not true that this bondswoman belongs to her. No, he belongs to Abraham. He bought her, he controls her, and he controls how others under his power treat her. All of this or sanctioned by God, allegedly, that this is Sarah's responsibility and Sarah's fault if anything bad happens, and that God will kind of make it all right. And someday with his great providence, as the generations roll on, we will see how this all had meaning. You strip down all of that fancy rhetoric from your text and you have the story, which was probably very typical at the time. You buy a slave woman, you treat her any way you like, you impregnate her. If she causes conflict in your camp, she's gone. To, again, avoid responsibility, you don't just kill her, you dump her out in the desert, give her little bit to eat and drink so that you feel better about what's happened. You have washed your hands of the situation. And you can tell yourself that you tried, and she dies. And her helpless child with her. This is what actually happens. So you have this whole ornamentation of providence, of decency, of morality. And it's just obviously glazed on the top of this story. Because people, especially men, you know, don't want to take responsibility for what actually happens. It's a removal of responsibility for the main human actors here. the human actors with the most power. I found that exact same kind of thing throughout the propaganda that attacked women's reproductive choice. attacked their right to have children if they wanted them, attacked their right not to have children if they didn't want them. And one really electrifying, disgusting instance of it comes from a witch hunting guide that was published in the late 15th century. And this guide inspired the stepped up witch hunting that happened, you know, in the early modern period. This free for all of torture and murder. against women and it was directed against not women in general, but against fertile women and their midwives. So we're talking about young women, married women, women with families and the women who took care of them medically for trying a witch. She didn't even have the ordinary rights of this period for having representation, for example, being able to mount a defense. Hmm. Once you had hounded, tortured, imprisoned, maimed a woman and forced her to confess to fairy tales of witchcraft, you turned her over to the secular authorities to burn. If they didn't burn her, there would be hell to pay. They had to burn her. um But you said to excuse yourself and to whitewash what you doing, you were required to say, don't harm her physically. That blew my mind. eh You come out of this research really angry. I wrote this book with a certain black humor style. I didn't really know how to approach such disturbing material, but it is everywhere. Those in power do not, it's not just with women, course. eh Well, that was the subject I was looking at, know, the oppression of women. But you could find it with the oppression of anybody. Those in power did not take any responsibility. And that's a matter of the truth. And bringing it to our present, I'm thinking sacred texts that undoubtedly shape our present day, right? The kinds of laws that we see, the ways patriarchy continues across time and shows up, you know, in not only here in American society, but the ways that it influences, its influences are found in lots of different cultures and places, but Certainly thinking about here in the US, the ways these texts have been used to justify the treatment, the power over certain bodies in this country. I mean, you've certainly done your research and work around birthing bodies in this country, but we know that the ways oppression is able to continue to function depends on people Using stories about certain bodies being it's justified to treat certain bodies this way. And it's justified that people make decisions about other people's bodies or well-beings or livelihoods and. I'm coming back to this idea of power and love and you are a Quaker, Sarah. I'm imagining that part of your identity informs and inspires the way that you write, the way that you tackle these topics, these issues. I'm curious as a Quaker, if you could share a little bit about how your faith and spirituality has shaped your understanding of love, of power, and of justice. We'd love to hear that, especially for our listeners there who are Quaker seekers on the path in their own spiritual ways. How has your Quaker faith influenced you? To be quite honest, my Quaker faith leaves me confused. I don't know how to deal with the more complex questions. I don't know in particular and most painfully how we get out of this horrible place that we're in as a nation. I don't know how we do this. My mind goes around and around as to how we will get out of it with the least pain, with the least damage. I don't have answers there, but I do have a sense that you start with telling the truth. You just start with telling the truth. And that has actually led to a looser relationship of mine with institutional Quakerism. I'm not nearly as active as I used to be. And part of that is because my local meeting was laid down. We didn't have enough people to support it. But the other thing is that I am not as trusting as I used to be toward Quakers, just to tell the truth. I had a major falling out with my yearly meeting because of a declaration they made about the war in Ukraine, which absolutely appalled me. called for humanitarian help for both sides in this conflict. That is the United States. was to send material aid to Russia and assist them in their invasion of Ukraine and their attempt to conquer Ukraine. I was furious because that is a total denial of the truth. Russia is the invader. Russia is the bad guy. You don't, and I don't think Quakers ever have before, support the aggressor in violence. You don't. Quakers, we believe we are led by the Holy Spirit to utterly deny violence, but that means we don't participate in it ourselves. Or we are not active in violence. We do not kill, we do not wound, we do not strike. Yeah, that's our calling. And we pay the price for that. We are faithful Quakers. But to say to someone else, you're not entitled to defend yourself. It's a lie. It's a refusal to recognize the truth of human evil that people who are powerful visit violence on the defenseless. They may not want to take our advice that you lie down and die and let an invader say, walk over you, take your children away, burn your homes, subject you to political slavery. So yeah, I direct my concern for just being fundamental and telling the truth. We don't know the ultimate truth is about God, about destiny, about the future of this planet. We know what happens in front of us. I appreciate the vulnerability and the honesty, the truth telling you're doing by just saying outright, I don't know, I'm confused. I have a non-complete relationship, non-settle relationship right now with Quakerism and for this reason. And I think what you're bringing to light, and I imagine that some of the folks listening here who are part of Quaker communities might have similar feelings around potentially different issues, but perhaps a similar issue that you're lifting up. it's something that I think about in myself of the places where the Quaker faith feels like it's taking a stand for peace or the places where it feels like it's being complicit and what Martin Luther King called an obnoxiousness, an obnoxious peace. King wrote a beautiful article after authoring Lucy was kicked out of the University of Alabama, Tuscalooska, the first black woman to be accepted. She went to school. It was only a couple of days. There were riots. The local newspaper said, finally, peace has returned to the University of Alabama after she was expelled. And King wrote this beautiful article in 1957 called when peace becomes obnoxious, basically saying if peace is going along with the status quo, I don't want it. If peace means being treated as a second class citizen. I don't want it. I don't want that kind of piece that you're trying to serve up to me. And back to your point about truth and responsibility as related to these biblical texts. But even in today, there's something fundamental about what you're lifting up. I just want to be able to tell the truth. I want there to be responsibility taken for what I see what's happening to not be served up some obnoxious definition or reality of peace or of truth, but to really be able to tell the truth. I love that testimony of Martin Luther King. He's essentially saying, don't choose your sacrificial goat and just turn your back on that person or on those people. You can't do that. I saw that happen in South Africa while I was living there in the form of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which got uh much better press over here than it deserved. But it was as a whole an enterprise in manufactured forgiveness and sweeping victimization under the rug. was a machine to put a functional legal system aside and tell hundreds of thousands of victims of apartheid, gonna forgive and go without compensation or any meaningful compensation. that we're going to orchestrate forgiveness. We're going to put on a drama of forgiveness for the world. We're not part of your drama. We have lives. We lost loved ones. We lost land. We lost livelihood. We lost everything to this tyranny. We're supposed to give up any hope of justice. We're moving towards a close. There's so many themes, questions and ponderings. This conversation has opened up for me. I'm so grateful. I'm excited to now be in this relationship and in conversation with hope to continue to be. Just as a way to close, I'm thinking about a listener out there, someone who's hearing this conversation and thinking, I want to be more committed to living into and speaking truth. I want to be more committed to living a life that feels grounded in integrity. want to be someone who does not shun responsibility but moves towards it or calls other people to be in right relationship with responsibility. But I don't know the first step. What's, from your perspective, a simple first step that someone can take to be in right relationship with truth? with responsibility, with justice. this point, we've maybe been talking about religion and ethics and scripture, things in that realm. I can point to science. Somebody that I admired in South Africa a great deal was George Ellis, who was a physicist. He was an activist. He opposed apartheid forthrightly and at considerable cost to himself as someone who had spent his life pursuing a hard science, he trusted empirical fact. He trusted our ability to know things. If you look, say, at climate change, yeah, you see, science is very persuasive. Not always absolutely right, not always absolutely dominant in our conversations, but it is very persuasive. Empirical fact. is something that exists. So if you look at climate science, we can get a start on how to think about a better life, a decent life, about how we would express love and justice, how we would reform our broken system, because there are things that we can know. We ought to trust what we can know. um Well, I want to thank you, Sarah, for modeling for us ways that we can trust what we know. Your research and your commitment to truth and your scholarship and the way that you are living your life is a model for connecting to and being grounded by. by truth, by knowledge, not shunning. I just feel so much of the ways that you've committed to really facing the truth, whether it's hard to do or easy to do. Some of the things you lifted up in our conversation today from your scholarship, I imagine aren't the easiest, simplest, nicest things to digest and then write about. But it feels very quakerly of you, if I can just reflect it back, to look out into the world, to trust the information that you have gathered empirically, experientially, and to speak on that clearly, concisely. For me, when I do that, that takes courage. It takes courage, it takes bravery, it takes a sense of uh and level of hopefulness and you embody all those things in a way that is so tangible and so clear. And I'm grateful for all of the work that you've done, are doing and will continue to do, Sarah. So thank you and thank you for being in conversation. This is just completely brilliant. The topic, the setup, the open forum, and your patience. I certainly couldn't have done this without you, and I don't think I've ever done it before. This is kind of a revelation for me. I'm really grateful. Yeah, thanks awfully. Thanks, Sarah. Thank you to our listeners for joining us in that conversation with Sarah Rudin. Sarah's brilliance in scholarship and vulnerability was riveting and truthfully challenging at points for me. This idea that when we know something, we need to speak the truth of it in the way she wove together these ideas of truth and responsibility was very clear and also I know in my own life is not always easy to do, especially if saying the truth could mean being ostracized or criticized, hurt or harmed, or if it just will feel like no one's listening, we're speaking into the void. MLK was someone in my mind who spoke truth clearly and committedly and did so at a great cost. As we usher in the world that's growing up through the cracks of our broken systems, many of us will be called to speak truth to power, whether it's around reproductive rights, economic justice, racial justice, speaking out against wars, genocides, speaking truth in our neighborhoods, our families, maybe even our Quaker meetings. Responsibility to speak truth is something that I believe will continue to lay on the hearts and minds of many of us and how we find the courage and the commitment to do that will be important. I just come back to so many of the conversations we've been having on this season, embodying power and love in community through community, finding the resilience, the commitment through our loved ones, through people throughout history. As you turn away from this episode, maybe you're thinking about the last reflection or those last words from Sarah about how we take a small step to committing to truth and love and justice. I really heard her saying, when you know, you have to speak it into the world. When you know something, when you see an injustice, you have to speak to it. And it's going to sound different from how Sarah does it. It's going to sound different from how King did it in his lifetime. I know and I trust that in community you'll find out how best to speak that truth, committedly, clearly, concisely. If you want to learn more about Sarah and her work, one of her books is coming out, Reproductive Wrongs. That'll be in the new year, but she actually has a book right now coming out, published by Yale University Press, entitled, Perpetua, The Woman, The Martyr. And you can learn more about Sarah and all of her books at sarahrudin.com. That's sarahudn.com. So please make sure to check out her work, her research, and more about her on her website. The SEED is a project of Pindle Hill, a Quaker center open to all for spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We're located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania on the traditional territory of the Lenni Lenape people. Many of our guests are teachers, leaders, and speakers at Pindle Hill. We host retreats, workshops, and lectures all year round. For a full list of our upcoming education opportunities, visit PindleHill.org slash learn. This episode was produced and edited by Peterson Toscano. Our theme music is the I Rise Project by Reverend Reda Morgan and Bennett Kuhn, produced by Astronautical Records. Other music comes from epidemicsound.com. You also heard some of my music. You can stay in touch by following us at Pendle Hill on all social media platforms or by emailing podcast at pendlehill.org. That's podcast at pendlehill.org. For full episode transcript, links and show notes, visit Pendlehill.org slash podcast. You can also worship with me online through Pendle Hill once a month. I attend this virtual Quaker meeting on the last Friday of the month. The worship begins at 8.30 AM Eastern time and lasts about 40 minutes. To access the virtual worship space via Zoom, visit Pendlehill.org slash worship. If you're finding these conversations meaningful, consider supporting our work financially. Simply head over to Pendlehill.org slash donate. You can also support us by letting people in your life know about our podcast. We want to connect with other folks like you, so please subscribe, rate, and review us on your podcast platform. These seeds could not be planted without you.