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Roundtable Discussion: Best Books on Gender & Sexuality

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So our sexuality series has been something of a victim of my busy fall travel schedule this year, but we pick things up again today with a roundtable discussion meant to help you explore the topic further on your own time. I asked some of my favorite people—from a wide range of perspectives and areas of interest— about their go-to books on gender and sexuality, and here’s how they responded: 

Leigh Kramer

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Leigh blogs at Hopeful Leigh about her faith, the church, singleness and relationships, grief and joy and everything in between.  (@hopefulleigh

I wish everyone would read Singled Out: Why Celibacy Must Be Reinvented in Today's Church(Christine A. Colon & Bonnie E. Field) regardless of marital status and sexual history. We often fail to recognize that sexuality is about more than the physical act of sex. We are all sexual beings. The authors shift the discussion from "how do we remain pure until marriage?" to "what does it mean to be a single Christian apart from the possibility of marriage?". 

Celibacy is not simply the absence of sex but a spiritual discipline, by which we learn to place God, sex, and Christian community in the right perspective and understand the value of controlling sexual desires. By properly defining celibacy and chastity, the authors present a healthy and freeing framework for the Christian single and married alike. I'm grateful for their solidarity and insights.

Tara Owens 

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Tara is a spiritual director with Anam Cara Ministries and the senior editor of Conversations Journal. Her book on spirituality and the body will be published by IVP in 2014. (@t_owens) 

Sexuality and Holy Longing: Embracing Intimacy in a Broken World by Lisa Graham McMinn: There aren’t a lot of good books out there that address the totality of sexuality—what it means to be a sexual person, married or single and how our sexuality affects our relationships with each other and God. One of the things that I love about McMinn’s book is that it takes on everything from menstruation to masturbation while holding a non-judgmental, open space about how God speaks through every part of our sexuality.

Christianity and Erosby Philip Sherrard: This is a slim book of theologically dense essays by an Orthodox theologian. It’s not for someone looking for a casual read, but I’ve found it to be one of the most enlightening and convincing takes on how marriage becomes sacramental through the expression of erotic love over time. You also don’t have to be Orthodox to appreciate and learn from his scholarship.

Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spiritualityby Rob Bell: People have strong opinions about Rob Bell, and I get it. His writing style isn’t for everyone, and for some people his theological trajectory isn’t worth following. I get it. That said, don’t let those things keep you from reading Sex God. It’s an accessible look at how our sexuality is a powerful force in our spirituality—every. single. day.

Matthew Vines

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This is Matthew's first "visit" to the blog, and I do hope to have him back! Matthew is the founder and president of The Reformation Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to changing church teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity. In March 2012, Matthew delivered a speech at a church in his Kansas hometown, calling for acceptance of gay Christians and their marriage relationships. Since then, the video of the speech has been seen more than 500,000 times on YouTube and has been featured inThe New York Times.  His book on the topic will be published by Random House. (@vinesmatthew

1.Bible, Gender, Sexualityby Jim Brownson. Brownson is a New Testament professor at Western Theological Seminary (affiliated with the Reformed Church in America), and he makes the strongest biblical case in favor of same-sex relationships I have yet encountered. He gently but forcefully rebuts the arguments of Robert Gagnon, whose book The Bible and Homosexual Practice is regarded by many non-affirming Christians as the gold standard on this issue. Brownson's conservative approach to Scripture will win over many skeptical readers, and his book should be required reading for anyone who wants to make an informed judgment about the Bible and homosexuality. 

2. Roman Homosexualityby Craig Williams. This book does not address Scripture, but it sheds important light on the cultural norms and practices that would have shaped early Christians' understandings of same-sex sexuality. Williams convincingly argues that the modern concept of sexual orientation did not exist for the Romans. Given that the most important passage in Scripture concerning same-sex behavior appears in Romans 1:26-27, this historical study will help readers develop a clearer picture of the world in which Paul wrote his letters.

3. Homoeroticism in the Biblical Worldby Martti Nissinen. Nissinen's study of ancient Near Eastern attitudes toward same-sex relations offers a necessary backdrop for understanding the Old Testament's references to same-sex behavior. He argues that same-sex relations were condemned primarily because they undermined patriarchal gender roles, meaning that Christians should acknowledge a significant cultural component to biblical passages about same-sex behavior.

Grace Biskie

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Grace blogs at Gabbing with Grace about faith, race, surviving sexual abuse, depression, justice, hope, and more.  (@gracebiskie

1. The Wounded Heartbook & workbook (Dan Allendar) - this one has more of a focus on being an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse, so it's specific but very helpful if in it's specificity.

2.  Breaking Free: Understanding Sexual Addiction & the Healing Power of Jesusby Russell Willingham (again, it's specific about particular sexual addictions but it's good, solid theology & a very good read).  

3.Real Sexby Lauren Winner.  I'm guessing you all ready know about this because it's so good.  She's just incredible.  It's such an interesting take on chastity, purity & all that jazz.

Matthew Lee Anderson

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Matthew is the author of The End of Our Exploring: A Book about Questioning and the Confidence of Faithand Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith.He blogs at Mere Orthodoxy. (@mattleeanderson)

What two books do I find myself returning to and learning from?  On the contentious question of what good news the church has for gay Christians, few books are more sober, plodding, or poignant than Oliver O'Donovan's Church in Crisis. He manages somehow to disappoint nearly every camp, yet proceeds with a patience that is rare.  Few works I have read have more clearly stated what's at stake in the debate. 

The other that I continue to return to is Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body. Yes, I'm a happy evangelical and so find myself occasionally disagreeing with the author.  But those disagreements are always fertile, and I walk away understanding more than I did in advance.  It's a big book, yes, but when read slowly it has an astonishing formative effect:  it shapes how I see the world without me always realizing how (which is why you should skip the various popularizations of it and just dive in). 

Dianna Anderson 

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Dianna blogs at diannaanderson.net. Her first book, Damaged Goods, examines evangelical purity culture from a Christian feminist lens and is due out in 2015. (@diannaeanderson)

Hmmmm, I don't know if I could choose a favorite...but some that are helping me (as I'm reading my way through) are: 

What You Really Really Want: the Smart Girl's Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety by Jaclyn Friedman. I believe knowing yourself is the most important part of making sexual decisions, and Friedman offers a rubric/approach that is useful and helpful for beginning that journey, especially if you come from a culture where you've received negative messages about sex.

All About Love, by bell hooks. I'm offering this with a precaution that I've only read a couple chapters, but what I've read, I like. hooks examines and discusses the social mores and conditioning around the concept of love in a way that inspires people to be better within the basic concept of being human.

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Now it's time for you to join in. What are your favorite books on gender and sexuality…and why? Which have made the biggest impact on you personally? 

 


13 Things I Learned About Church History From ‘The Story of Christianity, Vol. 2’ by Justo L. Gonzalez

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See also:  “10 Things I Learned About Church History From ‘The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1’ by Just L. Gonzalez"

Last Sunday was Reformation Sunday, which I celebrated by being a know-it-all, thanks to Justo L. Gonzalez’s The Story of Christianity, Vol. 2. I am nearly finished reading. Here are a few things I learned: 

 

1.People who say religious dialog is more vitriolic than ever know nothing about church history. See the Martin Luther insult generator for some examples. 

2.Luther wasn’t a biblicist. While he insisted on the centrality of Scripture in the Christian life, he believed that final authority rested neither in the church nor in the Bible, but in the gospel of Jesus Christ, who is the Word of God incarnate. The purpose of Scripture, he believed, was to point to Christ. (And he wasn’t a fan of the Epistle of James or the book of Revelation.) 

3.Fun story: This dude named John Knox really, really, really hated Catholics. He also really, really, really hated women. So he wrote this book called The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, attacking many of the Catholic women who then reigned in Europe.“His work,” writes Gonzalez, “was poorly timed, for it had scarcely been circulated in England when Mary Tudor died and was succeeded by Elizabeth.” Elizabeth was Protestant and a potential ally of Knox’s. “Although the book was written against her now dead half-sister,” continues Gonzalez, “Elizabeth resented much of what it said, for its arguments based on anti-feminine prejudice could just as easily apply to her. This hindered the natural alliance that should have developed between Elizabeth and John Knox, whose retractions did not suffice to appease the English queen.” LESSON: Don’t expect women to forget your sexist remarks the minute you need their political help. Also, I call dibs on “The Monstrous Regiment of Women” for a band name. 

4.More Anabaptists were martyred in the 16th century than Christians as a whole in the three centuries of persecution that preceded Constantine. 

5.At a time when Christians were condemning, expelling, and killing one another over doctrinal differences, a guy named Georg Calixtus had the crazy idea that perhaps one could hold to one’s convictions (his were Lutheran) without condemning as heretics those with whom one disagrees. He argued that there was a difference, after all, between heresy and error. This made far too much sense, and Calixtus was largely written off by his contemporaries. But he sounded cool to me so I gave him hipster glasses and a hat: 

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6.Every so often, someone convinces a bunch of people that the end of the world is at hand. They are always wrong. 

7.One of these guys, an Anabaptist named Melchior Hoffman, convinced his followers to take over the city of Münster and make it the New Jerusalem, where everyone had visions and practiced polygamy. It’s kind of a skeleton in the Anabaptist closet. But that’s okay. Pretty much every denomination has several thousand such skeletons...many of them literal... so none of us should get too proud. (You Calvinists have Michael Servetus.)

8.King James—like of the King James Bible—was probably gay.  

9.Christians have been using the Bible/religion to support violence, colonialism, slavery, ethnic cleansing, misogyny, anti-Semitism and religious intolerance for centuries. We cannot gloss over this reality. (Also, I know there’s this big push among the neo-Reformed crowd right now to make the Puritans seem not-so-bad, but the Puritans did some pretty bad things…to women, to  Native Americans, to Quakers, and to religious dissidents. Seems like we should be able to look at the Puritans with a bit more nuance, without glorifying them on the one hand or demonizing them on the other.) 

10.John Wesley did NOT want to break from Anglicanism. He never set out to start a new denomination, but felt compelled to reach those whom the church was not reaching and as a result, inevitably generated a separate church, due mostly to practical concerns rather than theological ones. This really bothered him until his dying day. Another interesting fact: Wesley didn’t support the American revolutionary war “because he could not fathom how the rebels could claim they were fighting for freedom while they themselves held slaves” (p. 272). 

11.Teresa of Avila is the only woman in the history of the church to have founded monastic orders for both women and men. 

12.The center of Christianity is shifting from the global West to the global South and East. Gonzalez does a great job of exploring this shift. 

13.I cannot see how anyone can study Christian history and come away from it thinking, “Well good thing I’ve finally got Christianity figured out once and for all!” 

Semper Reformanda. 

 

My scary airplane story

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'Sky symphony' photo (c) 2007, Kevin Dooley - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Fine. I’m ready to tell it. But only because it’s Halloween and you people keep pestering me to spill it…and because maybe this will count as therapy. 

***

“They have a flight manifest that includes everyone’s seat number,” said the middle-aged lady next to me. “That’s how they identify the bodies.” 

In her lap was a red, heart-shaped pillow that had postoperative instructions for heart patients printed on its side. She squeezed it each time the airplane lurched or shook, which was about every 5 seconds. 

This body here is in 18C; must be Mrs. So-and-So,” she went on, imitating the voice of an imaginary, far-too-cavalier search and rescue officer. “That’s how they do it, if there’s anything left, of course.” 

Lightening flickered outside the window and the sensation of falling returned yet again.  Someone behind me whimpered in fear and I could feel my blood pressure rising. 

“That most recent crash in San Fran wasn’t so bad, though,” my seatmate went on. (Think Melissa McCarthy’s character in “Bridesmaids.”) “Just a few fatalities if I’m not mistaken.” 

I wanted to rip that pillow out of her hands. 

It’s all about your seatmate, isn’t it? 

When you fly nearly every week you know exactly what to wish for: A compact, recently-bathed person who smiles as you take your seat, listens to music or sleeps as you fly, and makes pleasant small talk as you land. 

You also know exactly what you don’t want: the evangelist, the dude who won’t stop barking instructions over his cellphone even after the cabin door has been closed, the lady who for some reason processes fear by chatting casually about death. 

But I had no one to blame. This was Southwest, School Bus of the Sky. I’d picked my own seatmate. 

Pretty much everyone on the plane had been gripping their armrests for last 45 minutes.  We were in the final hour of a 3 ½ hour, late-night flight from Phoenix to Louisville, Kentucky and had begun our descent….or so we guessed. The flight attendants and pilot had been silent for at least an hour. 

“You know, statistically, you’re more likely to die in a  hippopotamus-related incident than a plane crash,” I told the lady, citing some internet resource to which my mind was clinging at this desperate hour.  

“Seems like the odds would change depending on your proximity to the plane or the hippo,” she replied. 

Which is exactly what Dan had said. Damn it. 

I never used to be afraid of flying.  I never used to be afraid of anything, come to think of it. But something happened about the time I turned 30 and now thoughts of tragedy, death, and destruction occupy my thoughts. I’m afraid of cancer, of airplane crashes, of terrorism, of tornadoes, of tsunamis, of choking, of that weird mole, of losing Dan, of losing my parents, of losing my sister, of war, of flesh-eating bacteria, of living smack dab in the middle of THREE nuclear power plants (thanks a lot, TVA), of there not being a God, of ceasing to exist, of having kids which will mean having even MORE people to worry about, about everything. I didn’t used to be this way. And I wonder what changed. 

My faith? 

My physiology?

My experience? 

My TV viewing? 

Outside a storm raged. Louisville received nearly 6 inches of rain that Saturday and multiple thunderstorms.  (Later, a lady who flew in hours earlier with Delta told me her pilot said theirs were the last flight allowed in.) I’d just finished speaking at a the Youth Specialties National Youth Workers Convention in San Diego and was on my way to speak at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Louisville the next morning. 

I decided to try talking to the guy across the aisle who had been using the plane’s spotty Wifi to watch a football game on his iPad, which meant we were kindred spirits.  He was a graying businessman with a calming presence who for some reason made me feel more secure, perhaps because I’m a horrible feminist who needs men to feel safe, or perhaps because anyone’s better than a recovering heart patient who has made peace with her own death. 

“Do you fly often?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from shaking. 

“Every week,” he said. “Louisville is home.” 

“Is it always this….bumpy?” 

He laughed. “Definitely not. But about every six to eight weeks I have a flight like this that makes me reconsider my line of work. Too much flying.” 

In my head, I started composing an email to my agent explaining why I had to cancel every appearance on my calendar. 

“The good news is, we always make it home,” Mr. Businessman added, sensing my anxiety. “You have to remember this is just another day at the office for this pilot.” 

We chatted for a while and I found myself relaxing. When we hit another patch of heavy turbulence I focused on taking deep breaths. Mr. Businessman rested his elbows on his knees and concentrated on the floor.  I can say with some confidence that everyone on the plane was either scared or medicated. 

Rain streamed across our windows as the plane descended. Finally, a few orange lights blinked from beneath the clouds and within seconds, we could see the runway. 

“Thank you Jesus,” I breathed. 

But Mr. Businessman looked concerned. 

Sure enough, seconds before we should have landed, the plane suddenly pulled back up into the sky. 

“I think we were coming in a little high,” Mr. Businessman said. “The UPS building wasn’t in the right place.” 

“You mean we’re going back up?!” I demanded. 

“Looks like it.” 

This is when I began quoting from the book of Job and cursing my speaking agent for getting me into this mess. It’s also when I realized that the lady next to me had fallen asleep, the heart shaped pillow lying loosely in her lap. 

Maybe once you've faced death, you learn to accept it. 

After about 5 minutes of flying to God-knows-where, the pilot finally started talking to us in that weird, overly-casual tone pilots always take when announcing a flight ETA or informing passengers of their impending death.  

“Uh…. ladies and gentlemen….from the flight deck….uh…. your captain here.” 

Long pause. 

“As you can see…uh….we haven’t landed. We’ve got some heavy rain here in Louisville and…ugh…. wouldn’t you know it? My windshield wipers broke.” 

I’d only known Mr. Businessman for 30 minutes but I could tell he wasn’t buying it.  

So we circled around and tried it again, and sure enough I lived to tell the tale. When the wheels hit the runway, everyone applauded and it occurred to me in that moment that maybe human beings just weren’t meant to fly; maybe we’re pushing the limits of what God designed us to do; maybe it’s not a good idea to live in such a way that not falling from the sky to your death is an occasion for celebration. 

When I got to the hotel I couldn’t sleep. It’s amazing, really, how your body continues to pump adrenaline even when you’re safe. 

I read an article once that said when a human gets stressed, her hypothalamus sends a message to her adrenal glands and triggers the same response her very distant ancestors would have experienced upon getting chased by a tiger.  The article said that even if we’re just running behind on a deadline or confronting someone at work, our bodies still think we’re getting chased by a tiger.  

It may have been a bunch of bunk, but it sounded true to me. Some days, for no good reason, my body thinks it's getting chased by a tiger.  

I suppose I should end this story with a reference to 1 John 4 about how perfect love casts out fear. But I think maybe that’s a reference to how love keeps us from fearing one another or fearing God’s judgment,  not about how love keeps us from fearing death by fiery plane crash. In fact, sometimes it seems like the more l love, the more awful and dreadful it is to face the inevitability that everyone I care for will experience pain and suffering in their lives. Everyone I love will die. And I will die too. No exceptions. 

And, frankly, God has yet to prove definitively, and to my complete satisfaction, that the afterlife thing is taken care of. 

I wonder why this didn’t bother me before, why the message is just now getting sent to my adrenal glands. 

It’s nice to know that Anne Lamott hates flying too. She likes to tell the story of how once, before an international flight, she asked her church for prayers to keep her safe from hijacking, and engine malfunction, and snakes, and her pastor Veronica said, "Once you get on the plane, it's a little late for beggy prayers. That's when it's time for trust, and surrender."

Perhaps the lady next to me had been reading Anne Lamott. Perhaps surviving heart surgery had taught her to let go. Perhaps that’s why she released her grip on that pillow and just surrendered to the flight and nodded off to sleep. Perhaps she knew that ultimately, love demands surrender. 

…Or perhaps she was just really heavily medicated. 

I should have asked her for some drugs.  

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(See also: “Why I Don’t Witness to People on Airplanes”

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Okay, I know everyone’s got one. What’s your crazy flying story?Ever sat next to someone strange? (I’m going to share Dan’s crazy seatmate story in the comments…because it’s WEIRD!)

Also, what do you find yourself fearing these days? Do you find you grow more fearful as you get older? Why is that? 

And finally, what are your thoughts on Xanax? 

 

Sunday Superlatives 11/3/2013

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IRL…

There were no superlatives last week because Dan was busy securing his superlative as BEST HUSBAND OF ALL TIME by surprising me and my parents with last-minute tickets to the Alabama vs. Tennessee game in Tuscaloosa in honor of our anniversary. 

It's been a while since I've been to a game, and I confess that the vast sea of people, the music and singing and food,  the giant elephant statue making it's way down the boulevard in the back of a pickup truck, and general religious fervor of the whole enterprise reminded me a bit of the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in India, which honors the Elephant deity. A good time was had by all...except perhaps the sprinkle of Tennessee fans there. 

The light is God's presence...typically visible at Bryant-Denny Stadium

The light is God's presence...typically visible at Bryant-Denny Stadium

Pretty great seats, huh? 

Pretty great seats, huh? 

This is what a Bama fan wears to a game. 

This is what a Bama fan wears to a game. 

This is what a crazy person wears to a game. (Yes, that's a snuggie, and yes, Dan's tall enough to wear it like a smock) 

This is what a crazy person wears to a game. (Yes, that's a snuggie, and yes, Dan's tall enough to wear it like a smock) 

This week’s travels…

I’ll be in Asheville, North Carolina on Tuesday, November 5, speaking at Mars Hill College at 11 a.m. (for chapel) and at First Baptist Church of Asheville at 7 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public, and the evening event includes childcare. The morning lecture: “Thick Skin, Tender Heart: How to Handle Criticism.” The evening lecture: “My Year of Biblical Womanhood.” Let me know if I’ll se you there!

Around the Blogosphere…

Best Half-Time Show:
Ohio State University Band Michael Jackson Tribute 

Best Reporting:
John D. Sutter at CNN with “The Most Unequal Place in America”

“The rich largely live north of the lake and the poor on the south. They go to different churches and attend different schools. They have different friends and work different jobs. Many of the richer people in town own land and run farms that produce corn, cotton and soybeans. Poorer people used to work on those farms, but they've largely been replaced by the Transformer-size machines you see driving along the road during harvest.”

Best Writing: 
Micha Boyett with “Body of Christ, Cup of Salvation”

“I had this physical need to live the metaphor each Sunday. I wanted to experience the burn of the wine in my throat. I couldn’t help putting my lips to the chalice where all those lips had gone before me. I wanted connection to our community, germs and all. I wanted a physical faith.”

Best Response:
Shane Claiborne responds to Mark Driscoll

“Fight-club theology is nothing new, but it is always sad, and it is a betrayal of the cross.”

Best Question: 
Forrest Wickman at The Slate with “When did two-strapping get cooler than one-strapping?” 

“If your back hurts, after all, it’s no longer effortless to one-strap. And it you’re no longer effortless, you’re no longer cool.”

Best Profiles: 
Yonat Shimron with “Ellen Davis Unearths an Agrarian View of the Bible”  and Robert Long with “Christian, Not Conservative: Why Marilynne Robinson’s literary—and liberal—Calvinism appeals” 

Best List: 
Serious Eats with “21 Ways to Upgrade Your Grilled Cheese” 

Best Imagery: 
Josephine Robertson on salvation 

“Salvation doesn't let us into heaven, it pulls back the curtains that have hidden heaven among us all this time.”

Best Halloween Costume:
My friend Bob Zurinsky from Seattle dressed as the botched Ecce Homo painting

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Wisest: 
Maria Popova at Brain Pickings with “7 Lessons From 7 Years of Reading, Writing, and Living”

“Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.”

Bravest (nominated by Esther Emery): 
Osheta Moore with “A Scary Invitation”

“And I cried like a baby and then Jesus whispered, ‘Now invite your friends over to watch it.’” 

Cleverest: 
Sam Apple at Slate with “God’s Workshop”

“A few thoughts to consider as you work on your revisions: It’s great that you took Professor Weinberg’s advice about using specific details to heart. And you have some terrific descriptions in these pages, especially when you’re going over the instructions for building the Tabernacle—I didn’t even know you could make curtains out of goat hair! Still, at times I can’t help but wonder if all of the specificity becomes too much of a good thing. For example, you start Leviticus with seven consecutive chapters on how to sacrifice unblemished animals in your holy name, whereas I think one chapter might very well do the trick.”

Truest: 
Kristen Rosser with“Saved by Being Right” 

“Dogmatism in Christianity, I think, comes primarily from fear.  If we believe we are saved by faith, and we define faith primarily in terms of having the right set of beliefs, then anything that challenges those beliefs must be resisted as evil.  Our thinking becomes defensive rather than inquiring, didactic rather than exploratory, closed rather than open.  We see our role as the instructors and correctors of others, rather than as listeners and learners.“

Most Encouraging: 
Mark Love with “Why I don’t leave, even though…”

“I am for full gender equality in congregational practice. Period. Everything. Preach. Teach. Eldering. I sojourn within a tradition where this is far, far from the normative practice. I have friends in other traditions or churches with fully inclusive practices and they wonder how I can stay. And often I do as well. Because this issue is not just about one practice over another, e.g. acapella vs. instrumental worship. This is about human identity and dignity and about the image of God in the world. This is an issue of justice and mercy. It’s big stuff for me. And I certainly understand others who leave, especially women with ministry gifts. In fact, I think some who leave serve the interests of change within the tradition they are leaving. Change will require that some leave and that some stay….But I stay.” 

Most Honest: 
Stina KC with “I’m a Downward Mobility Dropout” 

“I have felt guilty for leaving, for not fighting my landlord like the “midwives of justice” that my church sings about. I know it isn’t God’s will for my daughter to breathe in lead dust. I also know it isn’t God’s will for any child to breathe in lead dust, to live in poverty, to attend crappy schools… Still, I return every Sunday to my old neighborhood for church. I smile at the corner stores and familiar graffiti murals from my car window. I keep showing up, singing the hymns, making small talk over coffee cake. I keep leaning into the body of Christ, this holy community of which I am one imperfect part. And I pray small short prayers, asking God for more faith, another opportunity. Asking God for courage and obedience and grace.”

Most Fascinating: 
Your Ancestors Didn’t Sleep Like You

Most Eye-Opening:
Black Man, White City 

"I change my disposition; I change the tone in my voice, the way that I’m standing, everything."

Most Beautiful: 
John Blase with “The Bravest Thing”

Most Powerful:
Pete Enns with “When God is Unfaithful” 

“Churches should be the most honest place in town, not the happiest place in town.”

Most Likely To Evoke a Face-Palm:
“The Nines” Conference: 112 Speakers. 4 of them women

Most Likely To Make You Feel Better:
Idelette McVicker with “Dear Patriarchy” 

“I see girls running, free and loved. I see women, their full size. Not shrinking, not over-compensating. Not hiding Not cowering. Not covering. I see women taking our place where we belong. Owning our power. Not power at the cost of another. Not your kind of power. Not your kind that takes, starves, cuts, diminishes, demeans, hates, wars, orders, chokes, enslaves. I see a power that brings, enlarges, serves, sees and loves. And the way I see it: Your days are counted. Just you wait, Patriarchy. Just you wait. Revolutions start in the margins."

Most Likely to Be A Little Too Familiar: 
The 12 Types of Procrastinators 

In Book News… 

Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half released her book this week and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. 

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Our friend Addie Zierman’s book, When We Were on Fire, was named one of the year’s best religion books by Publishers Weekly.

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Don't forget. Sarah Bessey’s AMAZING book, Jesus Feminist,releases on Tuesday! Let's be sure to support this woman of valor and her brave book. 

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And if I'm not mistaken, this may be the last day you can get A Year of Biblical Womanhood for just $2.99 on Kindle. The sale was supposed to last through October, so if you're looking for a deal, pick it up while you still can.  

On the Blog... 

Most Popular Post:
 13 Things I Learned About Church History From ‘The Story of Christianity, Vol. 2’ by Justo L. Gonzalez 

Most Popular Comment:
The comments after "My Scary Airplane Story" were amazing and freaky and funny and oddly encouraging. Jake Meador's story was the most popular, but a little long to include here, so be sure to check it out after yesterday's post. 

***

So, what caught your eye online this week? What’s happening on your blog? 

 

Homosexuality, Evangelicalism, and The Danger of a Single Story

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My favorite TED talk of all time was delivered by the brilliant Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s entitled “The Danger of a Single Story,” and Adichie, a Nigerian writer, thoughtfully and humorously describes the human tendency to project a single, simplistic story onto groups of people who we perceive to be different than ourselves. 

She uses several examples—the story that all Africans are helpless and in need of white saviors, the story that all Mexicans are sneaking across the American border to steal jobs, the story that all writers must have difficult childhoods to write well, the story that people in poverty are to be only pitied, etc. One of the funniest examples is when Adichie’s American roommate asked to listen to some of her “tribal music” and was disappointed when Adichie produced her favorite Mariah Carey album! 

 “I recently spoke at a university where a student told me it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel,” says Adichie with a wry smile, “I told him that I had just read a novel called ‘American Psycho’ and that it was such a shame that young Americans were murderers.” 

“The problem with stereotypes,” Adichie concludes, “is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” 

You really must watch the whole video. It’s the best 18 minutes you will spend today. Trust me. 

It occurred to me recently that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are often subjected to this single-story treatment, both from myself and from other people. 

I bumped up against this recently when a local pastor invited me to attend a lecture by Rosaria Butterfield. Ever since her story was featured in Christianity Today nearly a year ago, Butterfield has become something of a celebrity within the conservative evangelical world, and every time I’m in conversation with someone about the potential dangers of “conversion therapy” (which seeks to change a person’s sexual orientation through counseling and prayer), her name invariably comes up. 

“Rosaria is proof that gay people can change!” they say. “If she can change, anyone can!” 

In her testimony, Butterfield describes leaving behind her partner, her feminism, and her liberalism to become a Christian, married to a man. “As a leftist, lesbian professor, I despised Christians,” she said. “Then I somehow become one!” 

Her story left me feeling unsettled the moment I read it, not because I didn’t believe Butterfield, but because I didn’t like that she drew a dichotomy between liberalism and Christianity, feminism and Christianity, and lesbianism and Christianity…as if converting to Christianity requires leaving all those other things behind too.  

But the story appeared over and over again in my Facebook feed, as Christians used it as an example of what it means to convert to Christianity and as definitive proof that all gay people can change their sexual orientation if they just want to badly enough. My friends had taken this single story and projected it onto all gay and lesbian people, and it was unfair. 

Because there are other stories too—like the story of the gay teenager who begged God to make him straight and when his prayers went unanswered killed himself in despair, or the story of the parents who were taught that it was their “fault” their child was gay and were ostracized by their church because of it, or the story of a popular Christian ministry that shut its doors when it became clear that changes in orientation are in fact rare and that “reparative therapy” has no scientific basis, or the stories of gay and lesbian couples who have formed faithful partnerships with one another and remain committed Christians. 

One doesn’t have to doubt the truth of Butterfield’s story to see the danger in projecting it onto all gay people. 

Justin Lee expresses the danger of the single story in his book, Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays vs. Christians Debate. Justin grew up Southern Baptist and certainly didn’t choose to be gay…and yet, he was (and is) attracted to other guys. Upon first facing this reality, he wrote: 

“I already had an image of what gay people were like. They were sinners  who had turned from God and had an ‘agenda’ to mainstream their perverse lifestyle. I didn’t actually know any gay people, but I had seen them in video footage of Pride parades, where they were dressed in outrageous outfits or wearing next to nothing at all, and I knew that they engaged in all kinds of deviant sexual practices. I had nothing in common with people like that, so how could I be gay?” 

Justin’s own story didn’t fit the narrative with which he had been presented. And this single story proved truly dangerous in his life, as it does in the lives of many other LGBT people who are told by their pastors and parents that their sexuality represents deliberate rebellion against God and that if they would just try hard enough, they can be delivered from this "deviant" lifestyle."  

Justin expresses frustration with many of the testimonies with which he was exposed, where men spoke of being “delivered” from homosexuality—which they tended to define not as same sex attraction, but as engaging in gay sex with multiple partners outside of marriage—only to learn that many of these men were in fact still attracted to other men. But their pictures were splattered across brochures and Web sites as examples of how gay people can change. 

Indeed, my alma mater, a conservative Christian college that has shied away from bold conversations around homosexuality, will be hosting Christopher Yuan as a chapel speaker next semester. Yuan’s testimony is about how he indulged in a promiscuous, drug-fueled lifestyle with multiple same-sex partners and contracted HIV until encountering Christ and turning his life around. 

Now, I don’t want to cast doubt on Yuan’s story; it’s an important one to hear. But I fear that if his remains the only story presented about what it means to be gay…or what it means to have HIV, for that matter….then it will continue to perpetuate the sort of stereotypes that prove seriously unhelpful in this conversation. 

I love it when my friend Kimberly, a lesbian and fantastic writer, posts her “gay agenda” on Facebook. Here’s what she wrote yesterday: “As for the whole gay agenda thing, here's mine for tomorrow: tomorrow my agenda is to get up early enough for a walk with the dogs (plus make breakfast and pack lunches), get to work a little early, eat a healthy lunch (NO FRIES DAMNIT), pick up kids from school, make a nominally healthy dinner, help my wife get ready for travel, watch the day-after episode of The Walking Dead, read a little Nadia, write, pray, kiss my family good night and sleep to be ready to start all over again tackling the big fat gay agenda the next day.

Kimberly's point is that not all "gay lifestyles" look the same.  

Can you imagine if people spoke of the “heterosexual lifestyle” and pointed to footage of women flashing their breasts at men to receive beads at Mardi Gras as the single example? Or if they spoke of the “heterosexual agenda” and used Miley Cyrus as the single spokesperson? 

If it bothers us when atheists use Pat Robertson as evangelicalism’s “single story” or abusive churches as Christianity’s “single story,” then it should bother us when Butterfield’s story is used as the single story of what it means to be gay…particularly when, statistically, changes in orientation appear to be rare. 

Of course, there is always a tendency to highlight and endorse the stories that fit most comfortably into our worldview. I am as guilty of this as anyone else. Whereas conservatives tend to ignore stories that suggest sexual orientation is not usually a choice, progressives tend to dismiss stories that suggest sexuality may be more fluid in some cases. 

But anytime we take a single story and use it to make a statement about an entire group of people, we have to ask ourselves—who really has the agenda here? 

 

In which today is a good day....

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Today is a good day because today our friend Sarah Bessey releases her beautiful book, Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible's View of Women. 

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And today is a good day because I believe this book captures the spirit of a movement—of stay-at-home moms and biblical scholars, CEOs and refugees, artists and activists, pastors and poets, midwives and baristas, men and women—bringing to life a Kingdom vision for the dignity and equality of women.

In this movement, Sarah Bessey has become one of my favorite storytellers. I have followed her for several years now, and what I love most about her work is the quiet strength with which she goes about it, the way in which she proves you don’t have to speak in anger to speak a hard truth. 

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I think of Sarah a big sister in the faith, a woman whose wisdom and maturity challenge me, but whose honesty and vulnerability remind me that she’s walking by my side in this journey, one arm over my shoulder. I have learned so much from Sarah—about patience, about maturity, about stopping to breathe for just a moment before I type out that angry response to whatever so-and-so said on the internet today. When I imagine what sort of person I’d like to become, Sarah’s one of the first women to come to mind. 

On her blog, and in this wonderful book, Sarah does what all good storytellers do:  she gives us permission—permission to laugh, permission to question, permission to slow down a bit, permission to listen, permission to confront our fears, permission to share our own stories with more bravery and love. As she puts it, “There is more room! There is more room! There is room for all of us!” 

Jesus Feminist is about gender equality certainly. But it takes a step back to get the wide angle of where gender equality fits into the story of Jesus, the story of God’s redeeming work in this world. And for those who feel bogged down by the seemingly endless debates about women in the Church, it offers a fresh, grace-filled take on what the Bible really says about women. 

I was honored to write the foreword to the book, a task for which I felt totally unequipped. (Don’t tell the editors at Howard Books, but I actually googled “how to write a foreword”! Ha!) But I hope my words there serve as something of a reminder that we Jesus Feminists don’t all look (or sound or write or minister) the same. 

My voice sounds a bit different from Sarah’s, whose voice sounds a bit different from, say, Nadia Bolz-Weber’s, whose voice sounds a bit different from my hero, Leymah Gbowee’s, whose voice sounds a bit different from Sojourner Truth’s, whose voice sounds a bit different from Dan’s or my dad's or yours. 

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But when we raise them together, they sound an awful lot like freedom. 

So today is a good day.  

*** 

Get Jesus Feminist today! 

And say a prayer for Sarah too. Releasing a book...particularly one about gender equality...can be scary.  

And check out Sarah’s interview with Christianity Today. I really love her thoughts on coming to see the apostle Paul as a brother. Definitely worth a read. 

*** 

What's your first reaction to the phrase "Jesus Feminist"? Does it resonate or inspire or rub you the wrong way? Why do you think that is? 

 

Ask a (liberal) rabbi…

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We’re picking up our “Ask a…” series today with “Ask a (liberal) rabbi….” For this entry, I’m pleased to re-introduce Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, who you will remember wrote an excellent guest post for us during our series on Esther last year. 

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat was ordained by ALEPH: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal in 2011. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is author of three book-length collections of poetry: 70 faces: Torah poems (Phoenicia Publishing, 2011), Waiting to Unfold (Phoenicia, 2013), and the forthcoming Open My Lips (Ben Yehuda, 2014), as well as several chapbooks of poetry.

A 2012 Rabbis Without Borders Fellow, she participated in a 2009 retreat for Emerging Jewish and Muslim Religious Leaders in 2009, and in 2014 will serve as faculty for that retreat. Since 2003 she has blogged as The Velveteen Rabbi; in 2008, TIME named her blog one of the top 25 sites on the internet. She has been an off-and-on contributor to Zeek since 2005. She serves Congregation Beth Israel, a small Reform-affiliated congregation in western Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband Ethan Zuckerman and their son.

We’ve already interviewed an Orthodox Jew.Since Rachel is a Jewish Renewal rabbi who serves a Reform congregation, she can introduce us to several other expressions of Judaism. 

You know the drill!

If you have a question for Rabbi Rachel, leave it in the comment section. Please take advantage of the “like” feature so we know which questions are of most interest to readers. At the end of the day, I’ll choose 6-7 questions to send to Rabbi Rachel for response. You can look for the follow-up with her responses in about a week. 

Check out the other interviews in our “Ask a…” series here. 

Ask away! 

 

Diana Butler Bass thinks I'm wrong (and she's probably right)

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Diana Butler Bass is one of the smartest women I know. A historian with a hand on the pulse of contemporary religious culture, I admire her like crazy, so when she expressed some disagreement with my post at CNN, "Why Millennials Are Leaving the Church," my first instinct was to curl up in a ball and cry. My second instinct was to listen. Because it's Diana Butler Bass. She's probably right. 

Anyway, Diana gave a lecture on the topic which is super-informative and insightful and gently corrective. Her thesis is that “rather than being particularly unique in their generational concerns, millennials have inherited three significant sets of questions that weave throughout American religious history with some regularity. These are questions related to doubt, disestablishment, and diversity.”   

In other words, the questions and issues I raise in the post aren’t new; these questions and issues are recurring ones in American religious culture (though they have manifested themselves differently through the years) and have been inherited by my generation. This observation is really helpful because it helps me understand where we millennials are situated in the larger story of American religious history.  

So I suppose it's less that she thinks I'm wrong and more that I need a little context. Point taken!  

I learned a lot from the lecture, and if you resonated with my post, I suspect you will too. (The lecture itself is only 40 minutes or so.) 

Enjoy! 


 

 


Sunday Superlatives 11/10/13

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Around the Blogosphere…

Most Persistent: 
This Mouse

Most Creative:
Whimsical Illustrations Merge with Everyday Objects

Most Enlightening: 
David B. Benner with “Love and Fear”

“Fear works in such a way that the object of the fear is almost irrelevant. Fearful people are more alike than the differences between the foci of their fear might suggest. Fear takes on its own life. Fearful people live within restrictive boundaries. They may appear quite cautious and conservative. Or they may narrow the horizons of their life by avoidance and compulsion. They also tend to be highly vigilant, ever guarding against life’s moving out of the bounds within which they feel most comfortable. Because of this, fear breeds control. People who live in fear feel compelled to remain in control. They attempt to control themselves and they attempt to control their world. Often despite their best intentions, this spills over into efforts to control others.”

Most Powerful: 
Tamara Rice with “The Hole in Our Complementarianism” 

“I can’t say I noticed it immediately, but at some point I realized that the large wooden pulpit usually adorning the stage had been replaced with a small music stand off to Ms. Elliot’s side. At approximately the same moment I took note of this, it occurred to me that this woman, Ms. Elliot, was in fact preaching to us. Preaching in chapel. And a sharp little nagging began in the back of my mind….”

[See also April Fiet’s “When God Calls a Complementarian Woman to Ministry”]

Most Heartbreaking: 
Larry Lake at Slate with “No One Brings Dinner When Your Daughter is an Addict”

“Friends talk about cancer and other physical maladies more easily than about psychological afflictions. Breasts might draw blushes, but brains are unmentionable. These questions are rarely heard: ‘How’s your depression these days?’ ‘What improvements do you notice now that you have treatment for your ADD?’ ‘Do you find your manic episodes are less intense now that you are on medication?’ ‘What does depression feel like?’ ‘Is the counseling helpful?’ A much smaller circle of friends than those who’d fed us during cancer now asked guarded questions. No one ever showed up at our door with a meal.”

Most Fascinating: 
John Burnett at NPR with “To Stave Off Decline, Churches Attract New Members with Beer”

“There must be 100 people here tonight, most of them young, the kind you rarely see in church on Sunday morning. They're swigging homemade stout from plastic cups — with a two-beer limit. They're singing traditional hymns from a projection screen like Be Thou My Vision. And they're having way too much fun.”

Most Relatable: 
Addie Zierman with “5 Churchy Phrases that Are Scaring Off Millennials” 

“’The Bible clearly says…” We are the first generation to grow up in the age of information technology, and we have at our fingertips hundreds of commentaries, sermons, ideas, and books. We can engage with Biblical scholars on Facebook and Twitter, and it’s impossible not to see the way that their doctrines – rooted in the same Bible – differ and clash. We’re acutely aware of the Bible’s intricacies. We know the Bible is clear about some things– but also that much is not clear. We know the words are weighted to a culture that we don’t completely understand and that the scholars will never all agree. We want to hear our pastors approach these words with humility and reverence. Saying, “This is where study and prayer have led me, but I could be wrong,” does infinitely more to secure our trust than The Bible clearly says…"

[Regarding the millennial conversation, be sure to check out my post from Friday, which features Diana Butler Bass pushing back a bit on the notion that concerns expressed by myself and by Addie are unique to millennials.] 

Most Informative: 
Scot McKnight with “Who ‘attended’ those earliest church services?”

“The earliest churches, then, are not made up of pietists who wanted to study the Bible but ordinary Romans from all sorts of backgrounds, needs, yearnings, and connections — each bringing to the table different ears for the gospel.”

Most Insightful:
Andy Campbell with“Empathy and the Conservative/Progressive Theological Divide” 

““The ultimate art form for the age of outrospection,” continues Krznaric, “is empathy.” When most people think of empathy, they often think of a kind of emotional mirroring. When you see someone in distress and you feel badly for that person, you are empathizing with them. This is affective empathy. It is the ability to recognize what the other is feeling and respond appropriately. We often characterize this kind of empathy as soft and passive, largely emotive. Contrast this with cognitive empathy, which is the ability to understand or put on someone else’s perspective, when you don’t necessarily share that same perspective. It is the ability to move past labeling the other and step into their shoes, so to speak. This empathy is more potent for change, asserts Krznaric. In contrast “touchy-feely” affective empathy, cognitive empathy ”is actually quite dangerous, because [it] can create revolution . . . a revolution of human relationships.”

Most Stunning:
"Before They Pass Away" - Portraits of World's Remotest Tribes

Wisest: 
Nish Weiseth with “What Do I Know About Marriage?” 

“But, it's not always about the other person, nor is it always about you. It's about us. It's about the union, the "we," the mutual submission to each other in all things. I'm learning that marriage is a profound, earthly relationship that's meant to transform you, change you, and mold you more into the image of Jesus. Is it about you?  Yep. Is it about your spouse?  You bet.”

Coolest:
Julian Peters’ Comic-Book Adaptation of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

Truest: 
Ann Voskamp with “How the Hidden Dangers of Comparison are Killing Us and Our Daughters”

“And the thing about meausuring sticks, girl? Measuring sticks try to rank some people as big and some people as small — but we aren’t sizes. We are souls.  There are no better people or worse people — there are only God-made souls. There is no point trying to size people up, no point trying to compare – because souls defy measuring.”

Happiest (especially if you’re a Bama fan): 
Nick Saban Jumps into quarterback A.J. McCarron's Arms

Bravest (nominated by Amanda): 
Tara Livesay with “For National Adoption Month” 

“In recent months I have been inspired by multiple families and couples that have been choosing the more difficult path. They are entering into the adoption arena having done exhaustive research. They are turning back when they see red flags. They are choosing painful things in order to stand up for others. I am cheering for these families and their bravery and desire to stand up to injustice is a refreshing encouragement to us all… Adoption is not about finding a child for a family who really desperately wants one. Adoption is about finding a family for a child who really desperately needs one.” 

Best Question:
Jessica Parks with “Kenosis, Cruciformity, and Feminism”

“If feminism is about empowerment and the establishment and defense of equal rights for women, can it at the same time be cruciform?  If the Christian life is a call to reject “selfish exploitation of status in favor of self-giving action” how does the Christian participate in (what I would argue is) the necessary work of feminism?"

Best Reflection: 
Joy Bennett at Deeper Story with “Proud of You”

“The older I get, the more I realize how hard they worked, and still do. The older I get, the more I understand them. Every once in awhile, understanding crashes in the way my youngest barges into every conversation ever. Like last night. A question: could parents want their children to be proud of them too?”

Best Observation: 
Soong-Chan Rah with “The American Church’s Absence of Lament”

“How we worship reveals what we prioritize. The American church avoids lament. Consequently the underlying narrative of suffering that requires lament is lost in lieu of a triumphalistic, victorious narrative. We forget the necessity of lament over suffering and pain. Absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. Absence makes the heart forget. The absence of lament in the liturgy of the American church results in the loss of memory.”

Best Conversation:
Black Female Voices: bell hooks & Melissa Harris-Perry

 

Best Advice (nominated by Connie Esther) 
Adam McHugh with “When Someone is in a Storm” 

“I once heard a ministry colleague say: “I’m going to be with a person in the hospital tonight. Time to speak some truth.” This idea prevails in many Christian circles, that preaching is the healing balm for suffering. Whether it’s sickness or divorce or job loss, a crisis calls for some sound Biblical exhortation. I have a number of issues with this. First, it assumes that the hurting person does not believe the right things or believe with enough fervency. They may end up receiving the message that their faith is not strong enough for them to see their situation rightly, or that something is wrong with them because they are struggling. Second, preaching to people in pain preys on the vulnerable. It’s stabbing the sword of truth into their wound, or doing surgery without anesthesia. Unwelcome truth is never healing. Third, ‘speaking truth’ into situations of pain is distancing. You get to stand behind your pulpit, or your intercessory prayer that sounds strangely like a sermon, and the other person is a captive audience, trapped in the pew of your anxious truth. Suffering inevitably makes a person feel small and isolated, and preaching to them only makes them feel smaller and more alone."

Best Sentence (nominated by David Mantel): 
Rob Bell in "What is the Bible? Part 4" with:

The story is extremely subversive because it insists that your enemy may be more open to God’s redeeming love than you are.”

Best Series: 
Rob Bell with “What is the Bible?” – Part 1, Part, 2,Part, 3, Part 4

In Book News…

Christena Cleveland talks about her new book, Disunity in Christ"

 

Peter Enns is blogging through Molly Worthen’s book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. See “Evangelicalism and Anti-Intellectualism: Blame the Leaders” and “Worthen on Inerrancy and the Evangelical Crisis of Authority” and “Evangelicals and the Uneasy Relationship with Academic Freedom”

Quotes of the Week…


“When Jesus wanted to teach his disciples about atonement, he didn't give them a theory; he gave them a meal."-  N.T. Wright, (at the Simply Jesus conference this week) 

“Sometimes I'm so focused on the ‘Not Yet’ of the Kingdom of God that I miss the ‘Now’ of it, too.” – Sarah Bessey

“Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.” – Henri Nouwen

“Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God." - Thomas Merton

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain't so." Mark Twain

"That love of God is hard and marvelous. It cannot and will not be broken because of our sins." - Julian of Norwich

Check it out…

My interview with Pulpit Fiction Podcast: I talk about my new book project, Proverbs 31, handling criticism, and football. 

This week’s travels….

This week I’m headed to New York City for the Q: Women and Calling event, which you should be able to watch via a live stream on Friday. (I believe I’m speaking in the first session in the morning, but it’s worth catching them all!) Other speakers include: Lauren Winner, Shauna Niequist, Kathy Khang,  Deidra Riggs, Nicole Baker Fulgham, Rebekah Lyons, Kathy Keller, Katelyn Beaty, Kate Harris, and Bobette Buster. Y’all can probably guess why I’m a little nervous! 

On the blog…

Most Popular Post:
“Homosexuality, Evangelicalism, and the Danger of a Single Story”

Most Popular Comment:
In response to the above post, Eric Atcheson wrote: 

"’Can you imagine if people spoke of the ‘heterosexual lifestyle’ and pointed to footage of women flashing their breasts at men to receive beads at Mardi Gras as the single example? Or if they spoke of the “heterosexual agenda” and used Miley Cyrus as the single spokesperson?’ -  I think this line of logic can extend across a variety of identity demographics (which you point to with the Pat Robertson reference, Rachel)--as a man, I don't want Chris Brown as my spokesman. As an American, I don't want the Tea Party as my spokespeople. And as a Pacific NW Christian, I definitely do not want Mark Driscoll as my spokesman. So if I do not want that for myself, I must see the uniqueness and humanity in others that I want them to likewise see in me. As Kierkegaard put it—‘once you label me, you negate me.’ Intersectionality of oppression is real. A stereotype that hurts one person has the very real potential to hurt everyone.”

***

So, what caught your eye online this week? What’s happening on your blog? 

 

From the Mailbag: Can we teach our children modesty without guilt?

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Last week, I received this message from Sharon via my Facebook page

I read with interest some your prior blog posts on modesty and the modesty/purity movement. [See “Elizabeth Smart and Purity Culture” and “Modesty: I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means.”] As a reproductive biologist, and mother to a daughter, I thoroughly agreed that much of what we do or have said about these issues can harm girls and women and destroy healthy sexual relationships. At the same time, I want to empower my daughter not to engage in reckless sexual activity and to dress modestly, not because she's bad or ruined if she chooses otherwise, but because I want her to value herself, rather than making the appearance of her body the core of her value. How would you say that we, as Christians and parents can go about teaching modesty without it becoming about hem lines, guilt and worthlessness?

Sharon’s question reminded me of a conversation I had with another mom at a women’s retreat not long ago. She asked me a very similar question about how to teach her daughter about modesty, sex, and self-respect when, as she put it, “I can’t just tell her ‘the Bible says so’ anymore; there's more to it than that.” We ended up talking for a while, trying to work out the answer together, because the truth is, we’ve been immersed in these narratives for so long that it’s hard to know how to change them. 

I’m not a mom, so I’ve yet to have to work all this out in the context of parenthood, and I confess I do feel like some folks, in their reaction to purity/modesty culture, perhaps swing in the opposite direction and defy common sense by suggesting it’s wrong for a parent to have misgivings when their daughter picks the “Sexy Alice-in-Wonderland” costume for Halloween. 

So since I feel a little out of my depth tackling this one by myself, I’m going to leave my response in a comment and then open Sharon’s question up for discussion. If you have thoughts or experience with this, please leave a comment, and I’ll pick some of the best, most helpful ones to feature in a separate post. 

Can’t wait to read your thoughts. Thank you! 

Ask a (liberal) rabbi....Response

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Last week, you posed some excellent questions to Rabbi Rachel Barenblat as part of our ongoing "Ask a...." interview series, and Rabbi Rachel rose to the occasion with some really thoughtful and informative responses I'm thrilled to share with you today. 

 Rabbi Rachel was ordained by ALEPH: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal in 2011. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is author of three book-length collections of poetry: 70 faces: Torah poems (Phoenicia Publishing, 2011), Waiting to Unfold (Phoenicia, 2013), and the forthcoming Open My Lips (Ben Yehuda, 2014), as well as several chapbooks of poetry.  

A 2012 Rabbis Without Borders Fellow, she participated in a 2009 retreat for Emerging Jewish and Muslim Religious Leaders in 2009, and in 2014 will serve as faculty for that retreat. Rachel serves Congregation Beth Israel, a small Reform-affiliated congregation in western Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband Ethan Zuckerman and their son.  She blogs as The Velveteen Rabbi

 

We’ve already interviewed an Orthodox Jew. Since Rachel is a Jewish Renewal rabbi who serves a Reform congregation, she brings a different perspective. 

 

I hope you learn as much from this interview as I did! 

 ***

From RHE: Are there any common assumptions that Christians tend to make about Jews that bug you?

I think the assumptions which bug me tend to be about Judaism writ large, not about Jews as individuals. For instance: the assumption that the Christian understanding of covenant has superceded and obviated the Jewish one, or that Judaism isn't a legitimate path to God in its own right. That Jesus rendered Judaism moot or obsolete. That Judaism is a tradition of dry, unforgiving legalism while Christianity is a religion of love. That last one probably frustrates me the most, not only because it's been used to justify some real unpleasantness toward Jews over the last two thousand years, but also because it's so antithetical to my experience of Judaism.

 

From Karl: Who do you feel you have more in common with, religiously - Christians who take a progressive/liberal theological approach to their faith similar to the way you approach Judaism, or Jews (conservative or Orthodox) who take a significantly more literal/conservative approach to the Jewish faith than you do?

I have a different kind of common ground with progressive/liberal Christians (or Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus or members of other religious traditions) than I do with Jews on the very-conservative end of the religious spectrum. Progressive religious folks of all stripes tend to share a post-triumphalism (a sense that it's time to move beyond the old triumphalist paradigm in which one religion is The Right Path to God and all the other paths are wrong), as well as an inclination toward reading our sacred texts through interpretive lenses which take into account changing social mores and changing understandings of justice. We experience God and revelation as perennially-unfolding, which means there's always room for new ways of understanding divinity and sacred text, especially when the old ways of understanding them (e.g. antiquated readings of Leviticus 18:22) turn out to be hurtful or to seem misguided.

My teacher Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi teaches that each religious tradition is an organ in the body of humanity. We need each one to be what it is and to bring its own unique gifts to the table. (If the heart tried to be the liver, the body would be in trouble.) But we also need each one to be in conversation with, connected with, the others. (If the heart stopped speaking to the liver, that would be a problem, too.) It's easier for me to connect with people of faith who share that kind of view -- who see all religious paths as legitimate paths to the One Who is beyond all of our imaginings -- than to connect with fundamentalists of any stripe.

That said, over my years of learning in rabbinic school, I've come to feel a deeper connection with Jews of all denominations. I believe in the ideal of klal Yisrael, the Jewish community as one family -- even though some members of that extended family do challenge me in a lot of ways! There's certain ground which I have in common with all Jews, even if our ways of being Jewish are very different.

 

From Keith: How do reformed Jewish clergy address the questions raised by the historicity of scripture? For example, the Exodus clearly plays a significant role in the scripture, yet no historical evidence exists that it actually happened.

To me, the question of whether or not the Exodus "really happened" is kind of beside the point. What matters to me is the fact that we keep telling this story. The telling and re-telling of this story is central to Jewish peoplehood.

The Exodus narrative -- that we were slaves to a Pharaoh in Egypt, and God brought us out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; that a mixed multitude left Egypt with us, which teaches us that freedom is not for us alone -- is central to Jewish identity. We retell this story each year during the Passover seder, of course, but there's more than that. We refer to it every day in our standard liturgy when we praise God Who redeems us from the narrow places which constrict our lives. (The Hebrew word   מצרים/ Mitzrayim, usually rendered as "Egypt," can also be read as "The Narrow Place" or "The Place of Constriction.") We refer to the Exodus every Friday night when we bless wine; the kiddush prayer which we sing over wine speaks both of God's resting on the seventh day of creation, and of our obligation to remember the Exodus from Egypt. And we do this regardless of whether or not we think it's historical truth.

Far more interesting, to me, than scripture's historicity (or lack thereof) is the way we interact with scripture devotionally, and what our continued attachment to this story can teach us. I've written on this subject before; my 2005 post, "Story and truth", is all about this question, and my 2008 post, "The historicity of revelation" may be relevant to your interests, too. The short version is: I don't think the Exodus did happen in historical time, but that doesn't at all detract from its powerful spiritual truth, or from the ways we've constituted our community through telling this story in the first person plural, and through embracing the teaching that the Exodus didn't just happen then but unfolds even now.

Of course, I've just answered this question on a personal level and you asked about the views of Reform clergy in general. Here's one Reform answer: "Were the Jews Slaves in Egypt?" by S. David Sperling. But one of the principles of Reform Judaism is that revelation is a continuous process, which means that it's perfectly "kosher" for our understandings of scripture to continue evolving and changing -- and also means that it's incumbent on each of us to learn enough to determine how to understand this story for ourselves.

For a Jewish Renewal perspective on the Exodus, you can't do better than Freedom Journeys, co-authored by Rabbi Arthur Waskow and Rabbi Phyllis Berman, which I reviewed for Zeek a while back. If you check out that review, you'll see that they begin with this very question ("Did the Exodus really happen?") and that their answer is really beautiful (and has informed my own.)

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From Hannah: I'm interested in reading about the Bible from a Jewish perspective but don't know where to start. I love the idea of Midrash, but the literature seems so vast and I feel overwhelmed. What would you recommend for a Christian who wants to try reading some Midrash?

The first text I'd recommend is Bereshit Rabbah, which has been widely-translated into English. (I don't own this Jacob Neusner edition but I trust his work and I expect it's both solid and true to the original.) Bereshit is the first word in the Torah; it means "In the beginning" (or "as God was beginning" or "in a beginning"), and it's also the name we use for the book known in English as Genesis. Bereshit Rabbah is midrash arising out of the Book of Genesis, and it's full of fascinating stuff.

I also recommend Hammer on the Rock, edited by Nahum Glazer, which is an anthology of short teachings from Midrash. And Barry Holtz's Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts offers useful context, though it can be a bit dry at times. I put this question out to some of my Rabbis Without Borders colleagues, and in addition to seconding the Bereshit Rabbah idea, they recommended Searching for Meaning in Midrash: Lessons for Everyday Living by Michael Katz and Gershon Schwartz and Reading the Book: Making the Bible a Timeless Text by Rabbi Burt Visotzky.

If you're interested in contemporary / feminist midrash, don't miss The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman's Commentary on the Torah, edited by Ellen Frankel, which offers creative contemporary womens' response to Torah. I also love Rabbi Jill Hammer's Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women; Rabbi Shefa Gold's Torah Journeys, which exemplifies her personal midrashic way of relating to Torah; and Alicia Ostriker's The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Re-Visions.

And let me mention as a meta-point: before you dive in, find someone who wants to study with you! The classical Jewish mode of study is never solitary; we learn in hevruta, which means a study-pair-of-friends. That way you can talk about what you're reading, and puzzle over it together. If there's something which confuses one of you, the other might see it clearly. Two minds really are better than one. And in the interplay between your two understandings arises the potential for learning a lot more -- and for deepening your relationship with each other and with God as you deepen your relationship with the text.

 

From HT: How do you interpret the passages where God seems to command things that are immoral? As God-inspired for a point in time? Or purely human writing? (i.e. Kill unruly children, Deut 21:18-21; Kill people who work on the sabbath, Ex 35.)

The classical Jewish answer is that these rules were never intended to be taken literally, and were in fact never followed at all. For instance, in the case of the commandment to stone an unruly child, our sages placed so many conditions and qualifications on that commandment that it could never have been carried-out. (You can see some of this back-and-forth in the Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, chapter 8, which is summarized for non-Aramaic-readers in the post, "Rebellious Son", at Jewish Virtual Library.)

Why am I talking about Talmud when you asked about Torah? In Jewish tradition, we frequently speak in terms of "Written Torah" (the text of the Hebrew Scriptures as they have come down to us) and "Oral Torah" (the ensuing centuries of conversations and interpretations of our sages and rabbis, which are also considered to be holy.) We always read Torah in the context of generations of commentators and interpreters, Rashi, Talmud, Midrash, all the way to new interpretations in the modern age.

We also frequently speak in terms of finding four levels of meaning in Torah: the simple / surface meaning, the hinted-at or allegorical meaning, the midrashic meaning, and the deepest secrets of the text at its root. (The acronym for those four levels of interpretation, in Hebrew, is פרדס / Pardes, which means Paradise. Any time we delve deep into the meanings of Torah, we get a taste of paradise!) So when we encounter a commandment which is problematic or immoral to our modern sensibilities (like stoning a disobedient child), we have a lot of hermeneutical tools at our disposal. The God to Whom I relate doesn't command the stoning of a disobedient child (nor the other "texts of terror" in Torah.) So either we need to accept that those texts are mired in the moment when they were written down, or we need to find a new way to read them.

My own belief is that Torah is a document written by human hands, which reflects the human sensibilities of those who wrote and codified it -- and that it is also a reflection of our encounter with God, both then and now. I see Torah as a mirror for our own spiritual development, a roadmap for our spiritual journey, a repository of our tradition's wisdom teachings. Jewish tradition holds that Torah has 70 faces, which tells me that Torah has many facets and can be understood in a variety of different ways -- indeed, it's that very richness and multiplicity which allows us to continue to experience it as holy. It's incumbent on us to find ways of reading it which are consonant with our most deeply-held morals and values. That is our obligation and our joy. As our sages say, "Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it."

(On that note, I recommend Alicia Ostriker's For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book.)

 

From Josh: Hi! I was wondering your thoughts on the eschatological views on Israel and the Middle East held by many Christian Evangelicals. How do they compare with your own views about the end times, and how it relates to present-day Israel/Palestine?

Thanks for asking. I'm troubled by the Christian Evangelical understandings of Israel to which you refer. First and foremost, those understandings arise out of a theology that's incompatible with my own. What I mean by y'mei moshiach, "the days of the Messiah" or "the messianic age," is not the same as what Evangelical Christians mean by that. (Here's an excellent article about the Messianic Concept in Reform Judaism, which articulates a Reform Jewish understanding of what messiah / messianic age mean. There's emphasis on tikkun olam, healing the world, and on our partnership with God in bringing about the day when the work of perfecting creation is complete.) I'm also affiliated with the Jewish Renewal movement, and in Renewal, we frequently use Hasidic metaphors -- which in turn draw on kabbalistic metaphors -- of raising up the sparks of divinity in creation in order to heal creation's brokenness. Again: very different from the Evangelical sense of eschaton as I understand it.

I also don't like the sense that for those Evangelicals, we're a means to an apocalyptic end. They value us, and our presence in the Middle East, not on our own merits but as a stepping-stone to bringing the end times. As Jay Michaelson wrote in his recent article, "George W. Bush Embraces Jews for Jesus", published in the Jewish Daily Forward earlier this month, "To make a rapture omelet, you’ve got to break some human eggs." Thanks, but no thanks. (That also relates back to my answer to Rachel's first question, about Christian misconceptions of Judaism. I suppose another one of those misconceptions would be "Jews exist on this earth for the purpose of moving to Israel and bringing on Armageddon.")

And, this whole conversation renders Palestinians and their love of/rootedness in that land invisible, which troubles me greatly. How can one seek to create peace with another people when one doesn't even acknowledge that they're there? I yearn for a future in which Jews and Palestinians can live side-by-side in respect and peace. But I fear that those who seek to bring about Armageddon by shipping all of the world's Jews to Israel and/or rebuilding the Temple on the Temple Mount don't care about peace in this lifetime. (For a glimpse of one Jewish Renewal teaching about the Third Temple, try my post, "Reb Zalman on Chanukah, the Third Temple, and God's Broadcast." I really like his teaching that the Third Temple will not be built of bricks and stone, but already exists as a beacon of compassion, and our task is to attune our hearts to that compassion.)

Instead, I'm invested in the work of continuing to create a strong and vibrant Jewish Diaspora as well as working for peace, justice, and harmony in the Middle East.

 

From RHE: I'd love to hear more about Emerging Jewish and Muslim Leaders. What did you learn about interfaith dialog from that experience? What strategies for productive conversation around religious differences proved most effective from your perspective?

I participated in a retreat for Emerging Jewish and Muslim Leaders when I was in rabbinic school, and it was amazing. (I wrote an essay about it which opens up some of what I found so meaningful and beautiful -- "Allah is the Light: Prayer in Ramadan and Elul.") A group of ten Jewish rabbinic students (from across the denominations) and a group of ten emerging Muslim leaders spent three days together on retreat. During that time, we studied the story of Joseph as it appears in both of our traditions -- in holy text (Torah and Qur'an) and in commentary (midrash and tafsir) -- and also learned a lot about each other. I'm looking really forward to helping to facilitate a similar retreat in 2014, this time just for women. Jews and Muslims have a tremendous amount in common, though that's often overlooked or ignored in both of our communities.

Some of what I learned about interfaith dialogue: we need to speak to each other face to face. It's good to break bread together. We need to be ready to hear truths which may discomfit us. We need to be able to de-center our own experience in order to hear someone else's perspective wholly. There's a kind of sharing and intellectual / spiritual intimacy which is only possible after a few days of dining together, learning together, studying our sacred texts together. We frequently carry the same stereotypes about each other without knowing it. It's incumbent on all parties to try to recognize their own prejudices and assumptions, and to be willing to set them aside. We have more in common than we think.

 

From Sarah: As a clergywoman in a Christian denomination, I wonder what your journey was like – were you always accepted because you were in Reform congregations, or were there still struggles over gender issues?

I am delighted to be able to say that this was never an issue for me. The first woman rabbi was actually ordained in 1935, though no others followed her until some decades later. But the Reform movement has been ordaining women since 1972, and I grew up knowing that women could be rabbis if we wanted to. My teacher Reb Zalman ordained the first woman in Jewish Renewal in 1981 when he ordained Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb. (For more information: A History of Women's Ordination at the Jewish Virtual Library is decent, though a bit dated; it doesn't speak, for example, of happenings in the contemporary Orthodox world such as the ordination of women under the new title Maharat. For more on that, try the Forward's The Maharat Movement.) The Reform movement and the Jewish Renewal community have also been ordaining members of the GLBT community for many years. I'm humbled and honored to be part of this chain of learning and teaching.

I hope these answers are helpful and satisfying. Thanks for inviting me!

 ***

So great, right? 

Be sure to thank Rachel on Twitter. And you definitely want to check out her blog. (Her latest post is about Dinah and rape culture!) 

Check out the rest of our "Ask a..." series.  

 

On being ‘divisive’….

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'Splintered' photo (c) 2009, Steve Snodgrass - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

For writers, tone is a tricky thing to get right.   

It’s also one of the most important things to get right.

And like most writers, sometimes I get tone right and sometimes I get tone wrong. As a Christian, I work especially hard to make my writing as irenic and winsome as possible, while remaining faithful to my authentic voice. Which is hard. Because my authentic voice is kinda snarky. 

But when I began writing about gender equality in evangelicalism, it became apparent to me that no matter how careful my tone, no matter how reasoned my arguments, no matter how gentle my critique, my work would inevitably be characterized as “divisive.” 

“How dare you challenge a man of God?”

“The world can’t see us disagreeing like this; it hurts our witness.”

“We should be talking about more important matters.”

“Let’s just focus on what we agree on and let these minor issues go.”

“Can’t this be settled privately and not publicly?”

"You need to calm down and stop being so emotional."

“Stop being so divisive. Jesus wants us to be unified.”

Just yesterday, when I raised some challenges about an evangelical leadership conference in which just 4 out 112 speakers were women, another writer characterized the situation as a “meltdown…from which no one has seemed to emerge more Christlike” and then issued a call for unity, complete with a prayer.

Similarly, when a group of Christians in the Asian American community recently released a letter detailing some of their concerns about common stereotypes and prejudices within the evangelical community, I saw many on social media critique this action as “divisive” and “harmful to Christian unity.” One person asked why this group had to “air the church’s dirty laundry” before a watching world?

This is a common response to those of us who speak from the margins of evangelical Christianity about issues around gender, race, and sexuality, and it’s an effective one because it appeals to something most of us value deeply: Christian unity.

Like most Christians, when I read the prayer of Jesus from John 17, my heart aches for the day when the Church will be unified, when our love for one another and for the world will be our greatest witness to the truth of the gospel message. And any time another Christian suggests I’m not doing my part to help make this happen, I feel a sharp stab of guilt.

Maybe I shouldn’t say anything.

Maybe I should just let it go.

Maybe I was wrong to bring it up.

At times, these are good instincts to follow and it’s best just to let something go. But far too often, the “stop-being-so-divisive” line is used by those in power to diffuse, or even silence, difficult conversations about why things might need to change. 

In fact, I know from speaking with several survivors that in some extreme cases, this same rationale—“You don’t want to cause division in our church, do you?”—has been used to discourage victims of abuse from reporting their abuse to the authorities.

One of the easiest ways to discredit another Christian is to label their questions,  concerns, or calls for justice as too "divisive."  

Obviously, there are issues of privilege at play here. Because the reality is, some folks benefit from the status quo, and it is in their best interest to characterize every challenge to the status quo as wholly negative and a threat to Christian unity. This makes it difficult for those who perceive inequity within the status quo to challenge it without being labeled as troublemakers out to make Jesus look bad.  

In other words, the advantage goes to the powerful because things rarely change without friction. And if friction is equated with divisiveness, then the powerful can appeal to Christ’s call for unity as a way of silencing critics. This was an effective strategy for white clergy who opposed Civil Rights. 

Meanwhile, those on the margins are typically working with less power, smaller platforms, thinner finances, and fewer numbers and in the face of subtle but pervasive stereotypes, prejudices, and disadvantages that make it nearly impossible to advocate for change without causing friction.

For example, it always makes me laugh when I’m told that women shouldn’t use social media to advocate for gender equality in the church, but should instead do so quietly within their own congregations. These people seem to have forgotten that social media is often the ONLY platform women have for speaking to the church! That’s kinda what we’re trying to change! And when it comes to discussing gender issues in particular, things get extra challenging because where outspoken men are often described as “passionate,” “convicted,” and “strong,” outspoken women are often perceived as “shrill,” “emotional,” “whiney,” and “bitchy.”  So women speaking about gender issues in the church have a lot working against them when public questions or critiques are automatically dismissed as divisive and whiney. 

I don’t like being divisive. Believe me. 

But I don’t like being silenced either.

There has to be a way to discuss controversial, difficult topics—even on social media—without resorting to outright hostility on the one hand or sanctimonious silencing on the other.

And I wonder if it begins with acknowledging that friction doesn't mean division.  

We Christians suffer under this rather fanciful notion that no one in the early church ever argued about anything, that the first disciples of Jesus sat around singing hymns and munching on communion bread, nodding along in perfect agreement about how to apply the teachings of Jesus to their lives.

But the epistles would suggest otherwise. The epistles would suggest that when you throw together a group of people from vastly different ethnic, religious, socio-economic, and religious backgrounds there is going to be some serious friction. Within the early church raged debates over everything from the application of the Mosaic law, to whether Christians should eat food offered to idols, to how to handle the influx of widows in the church, to disagreements around circumcision, religious festivals, finances, missions, and theology.

So when Paul urged the Ephesian church to “make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace,” he followed this with an acknowledgement of the Church’s diversity, in which there are “apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers…so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”

This Body is still growing, so there will be growing pains. 

But if we love one another through these growing pains, “then we will no longer be infants…instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.  From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.”

I suspect Paul combined this call for the Body’s unity with an acknowledgement of the Body’s diversity because he knew that unity isn’t the same as uniformity.

We’re not called to be alike; we’re called to love.

We’re not called to agree; we’re called to love.

We’re not even called to get along all the time; we’re called to love each other as brothers and sisters, as people united in one baptism, one communion, one adoption.

Maybe we need these differences to be animated, to be alive, to mature. Maybe friction isn’t a sign of decay, but of growth.

The world is certainly watching. But this doesn't mean we hide our dirty laundry, slap on mechanical smiles, and gloss over all the injustices and abuses, conflicts and disagreements, diversity and denominationalism present within the Church;  it means we expose them. It means we talk about them boldly and with integrity, with passion and with love. I suspect that talking about our differences is better for our witness than supressing them, and I'm sure that exposing corruption and abuse is better for our witness than hiding them.

And when it comes to injustice, a far more important question to me than "What will the world think if they see us disagreeing?" is "What will the world think if they don't?"

So when we find ourselves in a position of privilege in the Church, this means listening with patience to the concerns of our brothers and sisters from the margins, even when their calls for change strike us, at first, as bitter or unwelcome.  

When we find ourselves speaking from the margins, this means putting in extra effort to ensure that our challenges are issued respectfully and kindly, even when it seems exhausting and unfair to do so. And it means responding to shaming tactings (deliberate or inadvertent) by pressing on and continuing to speak the truth, even when it makes people uncomfortable.  

For all of us, I think it means abandoning the notion that unity requires uniformity and that arguments, even heated ones, mean we don’t love one another.

We are, after all, brothers and sisters. 

Let's fight like them. 

***

[P.S.: I think Jonathan Merritt responded in a helpful way to the situation by taking a few steps back and examining the overall Christian conference culture here.]

The day we made the Berenstain Bears laugh

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From Monday:

It started after several of you commented on this little piece of Facebook hilarity

Which led to this fun conversation: 

Then a bunch of you jumped in and shared your favorite Berenestain Bears stories and I counted the whole day as an internet win. 

You rock. 

Ask a Reformed Pastor…

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Photo Credit: David Vanderheyden

Photo Credit: David Vanderheyden

So I’ve heard from more than a few of my Reformed brother and sisters that I have a bad habit of painting the Reformed tradition with a broad brush (especially when I’m disagreeing vehemently with more conservative groups like the Gospel Coalition!). So I figured since we’ve already featured Justin Taylor for “Ask a Calvinist…” it was time to interview someone from the more progressive end of the Reformed spectrum. And I think we found the perfect interviewee. 

The Reverend Jes Kast-Keat is a Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Reformed Church in America. She currently serves as the Associate Pastor at West End Collegiate Church in Manhattan. Roman Catholicism and American Evangelicalism influenced her while growing up. It wasn't until seminary that she encountered the Reformed Tradition and fell in love with a wide stream of robust theological thinkers and vibrant spiritual leaders. She is originally from Michigan and has lived in New York City for the past three years. While theology makes her heart sing, you will also find Jes enjoying a show on Broadway, sitting in Central Park with the poetry of Mary Oliver, or hitting up a concert.

Jes is one of the twelve voices that writes for "The Twelve. Reformed. Done Daily" which is a collaborative project of diverse theologically Reformed voices. Her theological inspirations include John Calvin, Serene Jones, Oscar Romero, Teresa of Avila, and the countless everyday theologians who ask questions and "ponder anew what the Almighty can do". Preaching the grace of God and administering the sacraments is what gives life to Jes. You can follow her on Twitter here. 

You know the drill!

If you have a question for Jes, leave it in the comment section. Please take advantage of the “like” feature so we know which questions are of most interest to readers. At the end of the day, I’ll choose 6-7 questions to send to Jes for response. You can look for the follow-up with her responses in about a week. 

Check out the other interviews in our “Ask a…” series here.  

Sunday Superlatives 11/17/13

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IRL…

Best Conversations/Connections: 
I had an amazing time at the Q: Women and Calling event in New York City and, to my surprise, left feeling profoundly encouraged about the progress of gender equality within evangelicalism. I’ll share more about that in the week ahead, but you can get a little peek at what our conversations were like by watching this dialog with myself, Shauna Niequist, Kathy Khang, and Rebekah Lyons above (and here.)

Best Teacher in the World:
My mom, Robin Held, who was honored as "Educator of the Week” by a local news station.

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Mom teaches 4th grade science & history at Dayton City School and creates a fun, family-like atmosphere in her classroom where her students learn to be as compassionate and curious as she is. Right now her students are tracking the phases of the moon by observing it each night. Later in the year, they will work together to build an awesome model of the Jamestown settlement. She teaches through storytelling, song, art, rhythm and rhyme and she goes out of her way to love on the kids who come from difficult home situations. We can’t go anywhere in town together without her getting stopped by dozens of former students eager to give her a hug.

I am so blessed to have had this amazing educator as my mom. She made our childhood incredibly rich and fun and memorable. Eshet chayil, Mom! You are a true woman of valor! 

Around the Blogosphere...

Best Feature:
USA Today features our friend Caleb Wilde in “An Undertaker for the Overshare Generation” 

“He tweets. He blogs. He embalms. Caleb Wilde is a sixth-generation mortician, working for the family business in small-town Pennsylvania — a Victorian-style funeral home where the only visible concessions to modernity are two big-screen televisions used by overflow crowds to watch a service.” 

(We featured Caleb in “Ask a Funeral Director”

Best Satire: 
Micah J. Murray with “How Feminism Hurts Men”

“Because of feminism, church stages and spotlights are often dominated by women. Men are encouraged to just serve in the nursery or kitchen. Sometimes men are even told to stay silent in church. Because of feminism, women make more money than man in the same jobs Because of feminism, it’s hard to find a movie with a heroic male lead anymore. Most blockbusters feature a brave woman who saves the world and gets a token man as a trophy for her accomplishments.”

Best Writing (nominated by Kelley Nikondeha): 
Antonia Terrazas at Deeper Church with “So Great A Cloud of Witnesses” 

“…We sing at the end of the night. Heart cracked open, this feels like a petition. My voice is lost in the crowd of witnesses.”

Best Open Letter: 
Lea Baylis with “An Open Letter to Paleo Diet Enthusiasts”  [Language Warning]

“There is one thing that would impress me about the Paleo Diet, and that’s if you went full on. Like, move into a cave and start hunting your meat and gathering your vegetables. Go on, hunt some big game with a bow and arrow. Prepare your meat without the benefit of running water and antibacterial soap. Carve your own knife that’s sharp enough to cut through bone.”

Best Storytelling: 
Benjamin Moberg with “On Football, Incognito, and What It Means to Be a Man”

“And he made that star quarterback understand that his value was not in his arm, his speed, being the captain was not just about athletic ability. His value was in how he treated others, how he led others with grace and understanding, how he could be a friend to the freshman full of athletic insecurities, how he could be an example.”

Best Song: 
Audrey Assad with “I Shall Not Want” 

Funniest: 
Jamie Wright with“This is my Brain on Hugs” 

“As soon as I saw my son's friend's dad, my arms began to rise like a hungry zombie, “We are going to hug you, Semi-familiar-Dude-in-the-grocery-store!”, and my brain was like, “WHAT IS HAPPENING?!”. So my arms were indicating they wanted a hug but my face was implying that a hug was a really bad idea. That poor guy. I'm just so confusing, with my arms that say “hug” and my face that says “stab”. But it gets worse!Because. My mouth was going non-stop during this terrible, terrible interaction.”

Scariest: 
11 Terrifying Kids From Vintage Advertisements Who Will Freeze The Very Marrow in Your Bones 

Wisest: 
Halee Gray Scott at Her.Meneutics with “The Church’s Missing Half”

“A failure to proportionately and adequately represent women is a failure to steward the giftedness of half the individuals in our midst. The spiritual gifts are not gendered. The genesis of leadership is grounded in the spiritual gifts, which are freely given by God without respect to gender, race, or social class. When we don't showcase enough women's gifts and voices within the body, we fail to steward the corporate giftedness entrusted to us. Like the unfaithful servant, we bury the one talent entrusted to us. How would the church account for a similar stewardship of financial resources, that half of the resources were burned away?”

Bravest: 
Abby Paternoster and Nathan Groenewold at the Calvin College Chimes with “Listen First: Introduction to LGBT Feature” 

“Last summer, I walked into Pastor Mary’s office and forced out the deepest, darkest secret this CRC pastor’s kid had to offer: I’m gay. I never thought I would say those words out loud. To anyone…” 

It looks like the response to this series has been overwhelmingly positive on the Calvin campus, which is so encouraging. 

Best Response (nominated by Bob Keeley): 
Debra Rienstra with “Love Reality” 

“As the older generation, our job is not only to teach but to bless. So I want to bless the students who’ve courageously told their stories on this campus. I want to bless the many gifted, beautiful students (and friends, colleagues, acquaintances...) I’ve known who happen to be LGBT—I have been greatly blessed by them, and grateful for their trust and honesty. And I want to bless this current generation of Calvin students who are doing difficult theology, in real time, in real life, right now. Thank you for what you are teaching us, what you are demanding of us in this moment.”

Best Reminder: 
Donald Miller with “The Story You’re Believing May Be a Lie” 

“Imagine how much unnecessary negativity floats around in our brains because we’ve made up a story in our mind, convinced the narrative is true?”

Best Reflection: 
Jennifer Lundberg with“You Made Me Brave”

“Because of you, because you were my friend, I was now brave enough to stand up to those around me that pushed me to vote against my conscience, against you. Because you were my friend. Not my gay friend. My friend. And your marriage, your family are important to me. Very important to me.”

Most Thoughtful:
Chaplain Mike at iMonk with “Are we more gracious than God?” 

“But even on the cross, Jesus uttered the words, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34). That is not the language of penal substitution. Those are words of generosity — Jesus is asking God to overlook the ignorance of his executioners. Maybe sometimes Jesus just looks us in the eye, touches us, and says, “Go in peace.” Maybe sometimes he just runs down the road, throws his arms around us, and welcomes us home. Maybe sometimes he just lets us off the hook. His love covers a multitude of sins.”

Most Convicting: 
Marlena Graves with “Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover” 

“Even though I’d like to think that I am generous and mostly unprejudiced, that I’m immune from judging people based on superficialities, I know I do. After my family, and what amounts to be a small church full of people, were maliciously harmed by Christian leaders of a certain theological and denominational bent (despite an uproarious public outcry calling these leaders to account and condemning their actions), I find myself recoiling when this particular denominational group is mentioned. I have visceral reactions. I associate much that is wrong with the church with them and people like them. I am prejudiced. I am judging a person by denominational trappings."

Most Challenging: 
Rebecca Wanzo with “12 Years a Slave and the Problem of (Black) Suffering” 

“Looking away has become a national pastime -- from the poor, the sick, and the civilians killed by war and drones. It is unclear to me what kinds of representations of suffering can always escape condemnation as sentimental, or manipulative, or "suffering porn." But when we disparage 12 Years a Slave for trying to capture the essence of pain in chattel slavery, we are disavowing people whose pain can never totally be represented. There are, of course, other stories about slavery and black people that can and should be told. But that does not lessen the importance of this one.” 

Most Likely To Make You Ugly Cry (nominated by Abby Norman
Esther Emery with“Letter to a Woman Called to Ministry” 

“The darkness does not want you to use your voice. You are so full of light. The darkness will tell you that you are too much. Too loud. Too greedy. Too masculine. Too angry. Too emotional. Sometimes you will believe this. Sometimes you will try to make yourself small, and quiet. Sometimes you will hurt yourself trying to be small and quiet. Do this with me. Walk outside and look up to the sky. Reach your hands up to the wide, expansive sky, far above the crowdedness and the jostling. There is room for you up there. There is room for every bit of you up there. That place is yours.” 

On my nightstand…

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Birmingham Revolution: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Epic Challenge to the Church by Edward Gilbreath

On the blog…

Most Popular Post: 
On Being Divisive

Most Popular Comment: 
In response to “Can we teach our children modesty without guilt,” Ben Irwin wrote: 
 

"As the parent of a three-year-old girl, I wonder about this a lot, too. Here's one thing we've started doing, and one thing I've stopped doing that will hopefully make some kind of difference (even if it feels like we're just making this up as we go)...

One thing we've started doing: teaching our daughter about her body...minus the euphemistic names for certain parts. We want her to grow up knowing (a) her body is not something to be ashamed of and (b) it belongs to her. She doesn't need to flaunt it or use it to conform to someone else's expectations. And she doesn't need to feel like it's something dirty or shameful either.

One thing I've stopped doing: making jokes about how I'm going to invest in a shotgun collection when she starts dating, or how I'm not going to let her out of the house till she's 30. I know they're just jokes, but they can still affect someone's mindset — hers, mine, etc. In particular, these jokes reinforce the patriarchal view of a girl as someone else's "property" ... her dad's, her husband's, etc. It contributes to the false notion that her body is something dangerous, something to be kept locked away, something to be ashamed of. I'd rather take my chances letting my daughter out the door someday with a healthy view of herself than keep her under lock and key with a skewed view of herself.” 

Ben followed up with a great blog post as well. 

*** 

So, what caught your eye online this week? What’s happening on your blog? 


Lament for the Philippines

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Today’s post comes to us from Tim Krueger. Tim was born and raised in the Philippines, where his parents served as missionaries with Wycliffe Bible Translators. He is the editor of Christians for Biblical Equality's magazine, Mutuality (@Mutualitymag), and enjoys finding God's fingerprints in history, culture, and language. He is an occasional contributor to the CBE Scroll, but gave up his personal blogging endeavor years ago after realizing he lacked the time and interesting material needed to sustain a blog. But as time or quality material are less crucial for Twitter, you can find him there (@kruegertw) tweeting maps, puns, and occasionally something of consequence, like gender, faith, and culture. He and his wife, Naomi, live in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

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I moved from the Philippines to Minnesota when I was fourteen, but part of my soul is forever bound to those 7,000 islands. When Typhoon Haiyan approached the eastern islands of the Philippines, that part of me began to stir. I scoured the internet for updates. A photo here, a shaky cell phone video there. It just looked like a lot of rain and wind. Not so bad—I’ve always liked rainstorms, and this one could set a record! Haiyan was moving fast, which meant less chance for damage. Nervous excitement turned to hope and almost relief.

Then the rest of the pictures began appearing. The casualty reports began to trickle in. The wave of nervous excitement and hope crashed, replaced by a deep sadness I can only describe as mourning.

I mourn for my home. I’ve never met the people in the pictures, but I feel like I know them. What remains of their homes, stores, schools, streets, and markets looks familiar to me. The giant tangles of power and telephone lines are no different from the ones I used to marvel at through my dentist’s window. I don’t see a foreign country; I see my home.

Usually, when I see rubble, I’m amazed by the power of the storm. Now all I see are the homes, the livelihoods, and the bodies, all drained of life. I see a family who has scraped by all these years, taking two steps forward, now finding themselves three steps back.

Filipinos have a reputation for being the happiest people in the world. Joyous, resilient, and religious, Filipinos are always smiling. But not now. And I wouldn’t expect them to, but it still doesn’t compute. It’s not supposed to be this way. Yet, even through the sadness, I see them on the news thanking God for sparing them. That doesn’t computer either, because in my world, we just complain that God let so many lives be lost. 

I mourn because the sex traffickers are circling like vultures, ready to grab up the desperate and newly-orphaned girls and boys walking the streets. 

I mourn the silence of many Christians I respect. I’m not talking so much about my immediate church community, who has been bathing the Philippines in prayer this week, but those voices that stake their reputations on biblical justice and reconciliation, demand that the church be more like Jesus and less like white America, and call us to enter into the narratives of pain and oppression in the world.  When disaster strikes our shores, they have no shortage of ink to spill reminding us to have compassion on the victims, or to weigh in on the theological implications of so-called “acts of God.” But when thousands of bodies, caked in mud and pierced with splintered boards and rebar, lay baking and swelling in the ninety-degree heat, where is their ink? Where is their lament?

I believe it’s there, but it needs to be spoken more loudly and more often. 

I mourn my own silence. Because I know that if this disaster had been an earthquake in Iran, a monsoon in Bangladesh, or any number of other disasters, my soul wouldn’t be troubled. I’d see the news, say “oh that’s so sad,” and move on. I’m keenly aware of the fact that the only reason I feel the way I do is because this happened to my home. When the tidal wave hits a piece of dirt that I don’t identify as my home, where is my voice? Where is my lament?

I’ve never really been one to ask “why does God let these things happen?” I’ll never know, except that our world is broken and that means death and disaster are always around the corner. I’m convinced God is more pained by this than I am, so let us mourn with God and with each other. 

But now I find myself asking “how am I meant to mourn?” How are we meant to mourn?

I mourn because I don’t know how to mourn. I believe we’re called to enter into the suffering of our neighbor. But I don’t believe we’re called to live our lives paralyzed by sadness. I don’t know how to live in that tension. My sadness is fading, and normally I would say that’s ok, natural, and probably good. It’s necessary for survival. But maybe it’s just because in my world, when I’m tired of being sad, I can exercise my privilege to step away to YouTube and distract myself with other pressing questions, like “what does the fox say?”

So tell me, because I really don’t know: how should the body of Christ mourn together? How do we hold mourning and joy in tension? How do we enter in, yet stay afloat? What should we care about, and how deeply, and for how long? Are we all meant to mourn deeply, or are we meant to mourn what’s close to us, while our community surrounds us with love? I think maybe that would work, but that means we need space for lament. We have Facebook walls, but no Wailing Wall—where can we gather to listen and mourn, and then to heal together, to break bread together, and to serve the broken together?

***

Note from Rachel: If you want to help, consider donating to Samaritan's Purse. As many of you know, my brother-in-law Dave, his wife Maki, and their family live in Cebu City, where they have been working closely with Samaritan's Purse in relief efforts. In a beautiful coincidence (?) my sister Amanda, who works for Samaritan's Purse, has been helping to coordinate those efforts. We've all been impressed by this organizations' speedy and effective strategies. 

Other fantastic organizations on the ground include:  World Vision,the Philippine Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and Oxfam. Give what you can. 

Are you being persecuted?

The Dark Stories (A Tribute to Victims of Violence)

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'Hejaab' photo (c) 2006, Khashayar Elyassi - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

In honor of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, I'm reposting this excerpt from A Year of Biblical Womanhood. 

 

"There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you."
—Maya Angelou

I’m glad I have a biblical name.

It’s a name as old as the storied shepherdess of Paddan Aram—a woman so captivating her husband pledged seven years of service in exchange for her hand, a woman whose determination to bear children sent her digging for mandrakes and bargaining with God, a woman brazen enough to steal her father’s idols and hide them in a camel saddle, a woman who took her last breath on the side of the road, giving birth, a woman whose tomb survived obscurity, conquest, earthquakes, and riots to become one of the most venerated and contested sites of the Holy Land.

Beautiful, impetuous, jealous Rachel. Rachel who fought to legitimize her existence the only way she knew how. Rachel who, though it killed her, won.

With Rachel, I notice the details. I absorb her stories as a child does, wide-eyed and attentive, the distance between long ago and yesterday as close as a memory. And like a child, I long for more, wishing at times that I could sit beneath Anita Diamant’s fictionalized Red Tent, where Dinah learned the history of her family from four mothers—Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah—who Dinah says “held my face between their hands and made me swear to remember.”

We recall with ease the narratives of Scripture that include a triumphant climax—a battle won, a giant slain, chariots swallowed by the sea. But for all of its glory and grandeur, the Bible contains a darkness you will only notice if you pay attention, for it is hidden in the details, whispered in the stories of women.

My quest for biblical womanhood led me to these stories late at night, long after Dan had gone to sleep, and I conducted my nightly research by his side in bed, stacks of Bibles and commentaries and legal pads threatening to swallow him should he roll over. The darkest of these stories mingled with my dreams, and I awoke the next morning startled as if I’d been told a terrible secret.

Perhaps the most troubling of the dark stories comes from the lawless period of Judges.

Jephthah was a mighty warrior of Gilead and the son of a prostitute. Banished from the city by Gilead’s legitimate sons, he took up with a gang of outlaws in the land of Tob. Jephthah must have earned a reputation as a valiant fighter because, years later, when the Gileadites faced war with the Ammonites, the elders summoned Jephthah and asked him to command their forces.

When Jephthah reminded them that they had expelled him from the city, they promised to make him their leader if he agreed. The opportunity to rule over those who once despised him proved too much for Jephthah to resist. As Jephthah charged into battle with his countrymen behind him, filled with “the Spirit of the Lord” (Judges 11:29), he made a promise to God: “If you give the Ammonites into my hands, whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites will be the Lord’s, and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering” (v. 30).

The text reports that God indeed gave victory to Jephthah. He and his troops devastated twenty Ammonite towns, thus deterring the Ammonite king from further attacks. When Jephthah returned home, glowing with sweat and triumph, “who should come out to meet him but his daughter, dancing to the sound of tambourines” (v. 34). She was his only child. The Bible never reveals her name.

When he saw her, Jephthah tore his clothes and wept. Surely he had expected an animal to come wandering out of the first floor of his home where they would have been stabled, not his daughter. He told his daughter of his vow and said he could not break it. The young girl resolutely accepted her fate. She asked only that she be granted two months to roam the hills and weep with her friends over a life cut short.

Unlike the familiar story of Isaac, this one ends without divine intervention. Jephthah fulfilled his promise and killed his daughter in God’s name. No ram was heard bleating from the thicket. No protest was issued from the clouds. No tomb was erected to mark the place where she lay.

But the women of Israel remembered.

Wrote the narrator, “From this comes the Israelite tradition that each year the young women of Israel go out for four days to commemorate the daughter of Jephthah” (vv. 39–40).

They could not protect her life, but they could protect her dignity by retelling her story—year after year, for four days, in a mysterious and subversive ceremony that perhaps led the women of Israel back to thesame hills in which Jephthah’s daughter wandered before her death. It was a tradition that appears to have continued through the writing of the book of Judges. But it is a tradition lost to the waxing and waning of time, no longer marked by the daughters of the Abrahamic faiths.

I wanted to do something to bring this ceremony back, so I invited my friend Kristine over to help me honor the victims of the Bible’s “texts of terror.”

…We prepared for the ceremony for weeks—Kristine with wood and paint, I with poetry and prose. Finally, just before Christmas, while the tree was lit and paper snowflakes hung from the windows, Kristine came over with a heavy paper bag in her arms. We sat on the living room floor with the coffee table between us and began the ceremony.

We started with the daughter of Jephthah, whose legacy inspired me to honor her the way Israel’s daughters once did. I read her story from Judges 11, followed by a short poem by Phyllis Trible recounting the young girl’s tragic end. Kristine lit a tall, white taper candle on the coffee table, and together we said, “We remember the daughter of Jephthah.”

Then Kristine read the story of the concubine from Judges 19 who was thrown to a mob by her husband, gang-raped, killed, and dismembered. I lit a tiny tea candle, and together we said, “We remember the unnamed concubine.”

Next we honored Hagar, whose banishment from the house of Abraham nearly cost her life. I read her story from Genesis 21 and a poem by Tamam Kahn titled “No Less Than the Prophets, Hagar Speaks.” For Hagar, we set aside a damask votive, which we lit before saying together, “We remember Hagar.”

Finally, we remembered the Tamar of the Davidic narrative, whose rape in the king’s house left her desolate and without a future. A heartbreaking poem from Nicola Slee pulled each of the stories together and connected them to the silent victims of misogyny from around the world. We resolved as Slee had to “listen, however painful the hearing . . . until there is not one last woman remaining who is a victim of violence.” We lit a white pillar candle and said together, “We remember Tamar.”

Then Kristine unveiled her diorama. Constructed of a small pinewood box turned on its side, the diorama featured five faceless wooden figures, huddled together beneath a ring of barbed wire. Nails jutted out from all sides, with bloodred paint splattered across the scene. Glued to the backboard was a perfect reflection of the five feminine silhouettes cut from the pages of a book. Around this Kristine had painted a red crown of thorns to correspond with the circle of barbed wire. Across the top were printed the words of Christ—“As you have done unto the least of these, so you have done to me.”

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Kristine and I talked for a while after the ceremony was over—about our doubts, about our fears, and about how sometimes taking the Bible seriously means confronting the parts we don’t like or understand and sitting with them for a while, perhaps even a lifetime. Ours was a simple ceremony, but I think it honored these women well.

Those who seek to glorify biblical womanhood have forgotten the dark stories. They have forgotten that the concubine of Bethlehem, the raped princess of David’s house, the daughter of Jephthah, and the countless unnamed women who lived and died between the lines of Scripture exploited, neglected, ravaged, and crushed at the hand of patriarchy are as much a part of our shared narrative as Deborah, Esther, Rebekah, and Ruth.

We may not have a ceremony through which to grieve them, but it is our responsibility as women of faith to guard the dark stories for our own daughters, and when they are old enough, to hold their faces between our hands and make them promise to remember.

***

From A Year of Biblical Womanhood. 

Ask a Reformed Pastor...(Response)

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The Reformed tradition is much broader and more diverse than many of us realize, and since we’ve already featured the more conservative Justin Taylor for “Ask a Calvinist…” I thought it was time to interview someone from the progressive end of the Reformed spectrum for our “Ask a…” series. And I think we found the perfect interviewee. 

The Reverend Jes Kast-Keat is a Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Reformed Church in America. She currently serves as the Associate Pastor at West End Collegiate Church in Manhattan.  Jes is one of the twelve voices that writes for "The Twelve. Reformed. Done Daily" which is a collaborative project of diverse theologically Reformed voices. Her theological inspirations include John Calvin, Serene Jones, Oscar Romero, Teresa of Avila, and the countless everyday theologians who ask questions and "ponder anew what the Almighty can do". Preaching the grace of God and administering the sacraments is what gives life to Jes. You can follow her on Twitter here. 

You asked some fantastic questions, and Jes has responded with great thought and care. Enjoy! 

 

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From Jes: The grace and peace of the Triune God is yours!

Let’s rewind a few hundred years before we get to today’s questions, shall we? Imagine that it’s the year 1563 and we are living in a region of Germany called the Palatinate. The ruler of our land, Elector Frederick II, thanks to his wife, Princess Marie of Brandenburg-Kulmbach, is a new convert to the ideas of Calvin. He decides to gather a large group of ministers and commission them to write a Reformed confession in the form of 129 questions and answers that would serve the people as a devotional tool for preaching and teaching of Scripture. Little do we realize that some hundred years later this tool, called the Heidelberg Catechism, would be one of the most influential catechisms in the Reformed tradition.

Fast-forward to the year 2013 and let’s allow the Heidelberg Catechism to open up and frame our conversation for today:

Q 1. What is your only comfort in life and in death?
A. That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.

Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

Wandering pilgrim, resistant doubter, joy-filled believer – by the grace of Jesus, we belong to God. It is in that spirit that I offer my words.

 

From Ouisi:  “When you're doing pastoral care, you encounter suffering and sin in an upfront, here-and-now, personal and communal way. How does your Reformed faith impact your approach to human brokenness?”

Anytime I am in pastoral care with someone, I begin with the realization that I am sitting next to someone who is beloved of Christ. I am sitting next to someone who has the divine spark of God in them. Whatever suffering is brought into a pastoral care situations, I am reminded of Colossians 1:17, “In [Christ] all things hold together.” God is present; I am not God, but my role is to be keenly watching for where God is on the move, even (or especially) if that means God is crying with us in the immense pain that is present in our stories.

I am also not shocked by the ways things are not right.  Systematically and personally, goodness has been thwarted. This doesn’t mean that we aren’t capable of goodness and holiness; it just means that things are much more vulnerable than we like to realize. My job is to communicate the presence of God’s grace in the midst of things gone array. I’m constantly looking for the presence of God in unexpected moments and people.

 

RHE asks “So I guess my question is this: How do you understand election? Is it about individual salvation from hell or something else? And how is this compatible with the otherwise inclusive posture of so many progressive Reformed churches.”

Election is about mission. Election is about the type of people we are called to be in this world and not so much about the world after this. To be potentially cliché, election isn’t so much about what I’m saved from but what I’m saved for. Election is about being called to be lovers of the world. For God so loved the world, we are now to go and do likewise.

Or to directly link the two words from your question that everyone’s eyes immediately darted to (“election” and “hell”), election is about saving people from hell. But it’s not a furnace-in-the-future type of dystopia. The elect – that is, the people of God – are called to join God in working for the redemption of all things. This means quenching the thirst of those who spend every day on this earth in a hell without access to clean water and the myriad of other hell-on-earth realities that so many people are born into.

Election isn’t just Reformed fire-insurance. It’s a free gift of God’s grace for all the people of God. We don’t do anything to earn it or deserve it. But we receive it with gratitude. And it is from this gratitude, fueled by the grace of God, that we live lives as the called and chosen (but not frozen-chosen) and elect people of God in this world. 

This is why a progressive Reformed church will be so inclusive: our radical welcome is a reflection of God’s radical welcome. A God who lovingly welcomes all calls us to do the very same.

(Also, check out Nathan’s comments the first time you asked this. I don’t know who he is but his words are beautiful and accurately reflect how many of us in the Reformed tradition make sense of this!) 

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The following questions is from a colleague who I went to seminary with and is someone I recommend you all follow on twitter (@NatePyle79). He is a generous voice in the Reformed tradition.: What of the Reformed tradition do you struggle with most and how do you live with, and enter into, that struggle? What does the Reformed tradition uniquely offer the church and Christian thought?” 

I struggle when “Reformed” is past tense rather than present tense and we forget the living God is in our midst “doing a new thing” (Isaiah 43:19). My friend, Reverend Gretchen Schoon-Tanis, reminded me that our liturgy says, “I thirst for God for the living God, where shall I go?” I struggle when we forget this, when we disengage from the world, and when we forget that God is alive in our midst in places that some are quick to dismiss. The whole world is thick of the presence of the Holy.

I think we uniquely offer the marriage of the heart and head in worship, a unique liturgy and approach to scripture, and a sacramental worldview that implicitly cares for creation.

The marriage of the heart and head in worship: Reformed theology helped me realize I didn’t have to check my intellect at the door but it opened the door that all my questions/doubts/beliefs are held in grace.

Liturgy/Scripture: Our liturgical practices centralize around a rigorous engagement of Scripture. I’ve arrived to my progressive views in part because of Scripture, not in spite of it. The congregation I serve is welcoming and affirming of the LGBTQ community because of Scripture, we are involved in alleviating hunger because of Scripture, we think God calls all sorts of genders to preach because of Scripture, etc… I ask questions of the text and the text asks questions of my life; I love that.

Sacramental Worldview/Creation Care: Look, it’s the Reformed tradition where I was first introduced to a theological framework of creation care. In John Calvin’s Commentary on the Psalms he writes: “It is no small honour that God for our sake has so magnificently adorned the world, in order that we may not only be spectators of this beauteous theatre, but also enjoy the multiplied abundance and variety of good things which are presented to us in it.”

Put another way, the entire earth is full of the steadfast love of God (Psalm 33). The Reformed tradition provides a theological framework for caring for ground we walk upon!

 

From Aaron: I'll pickpocket Roger Olson and ask: "Do you believe God 'designed, ordained, and governs' sin and innocent suffering for his glory?"

Essentially this question is one of theodicy: why is there suffering and evil in this world? It’s a particularly fitting question for a Reformed theologian as our tradition is one that relishes in God’s sovereignty – all things are under God’s authority. 

Simply put, no, I do not believe that God ordains suffering. So what do I do with suffering? How do we make sense of it?  

The great Reformed theologian Karl Barth reminds us not to mistake God’s providence with an omnicausality, meaning that God is the cause of evil. There are so many theories on evil that I’m not sure always benefit us; there is a difficult mystery on this topic. Here’s what I do believe: I believe God suffers with us. I believe, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in Letters and Papers from Prison, “The Bible directs us to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.” A God who suffers with us is a God who is intimately connected to our personal and systematic liberation. God is not a divine puppeteer removed from creation wishing us luck. God is with us and for us. A Reformed theologian I highly respect, the Reverend Carol Howard Merrit, has a fantastic little piece on this idea of God being for us that I encourage you to check out. 

While I struggle with the brutality of the cross, I find that this is the time and place to talk about the cross. For in this horrific moment we know a God who grieves. The cross shows us a God who suffers with us when the hands of humans enact injustice. 


From William: My question: How do you cope, as a female minister in the broadly "Reformed" spectrum, with the conservative-types in your tradition who neither value nor validate you as a genuine minister or even as being genuinely "Reformed"?

I’ve been baptized. I’ve known I’ve been called to ministry since I was a child and played pastor with my stuffed animals by giving them pieces of bread and grape juice enacting the Sacrament. The greater church confirmed that inward call when I was ordained as a Minister of Word and Sacrament. How do I cope? I remember my baptism and I dance in those waters of grace fiercely!

It sure as hell ain’t easy. I lean into the spiritual practice of lament, often. (Did you know that just fewer than 50% of the Psalms have lament themes in them?) Lament is a way we can honestly tell God how things are disappointing and how we long for the full reign of God in the midst of the brokenness we experience. I’m really good at honest and raw prayers (that whole “I love Jesus but I swear a little” is true in how I pray). I lament and find hope again and again each time.

When I was ordained my Pastor, the Reverend Jill Russell, charged me to remember my baptism on the days it was hard and remember I am from dust and to dust I shall return on the days my pride becomes my anthem. I live between water and dust.


From Ben: People outside the Reformed tradition often write about it as if it were synonymous with "Calvinism." (I've probably been guilty of this a time or two.) What do you wish the rest of us knew about Reformed theology that's bigger than just Calvin, Five Points, etc? (And conversely, what do you appreciate most about Calvin?)

I personally identify as a theologian and minister in the Reformed tradition and usually not just a Calvinist (though I do love much of Calvin). Why? Because there are so many voices between the Reformation and today that nuance this tradition so beautifully. I think the Reformed tradition is wide and deep. It was because of the book Feminist and Womanist Essays in Reformed Dogmatics that I first became a feminist theologian. I remember writing a paper on traditional views of atonement in light of feminist theology in seminary and thinking “I love this stuff!” (I got a 100% on that paper, still proud of that!) Imagine that, Reformed theology helped me become a feminist! I also suggest checking out Serene Jones’ book Feminist Theory and Christian Theology for a Reformed perspective. 

I think John Calvin was more of a mystic than what many know of him today. He writes about our mystical union with Christ, particularly in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. We are raised up to God and Christ meets us. Something mystical happens in the feast of grace. Wine and bread, these are the gifts of God for the people of God, Amen!

 

What do I hope I leave you with? 

1)    I am one voice in a large stream and do not represent the totality of progressive Reformed theology. 
2)    Bread, wine, water. Gifts of grace for you.
3)    Simply, Jesus loves you.

Thank you for your questions! I also want to thank Reverend’s Wayne Bowerman, Stacey Midge, and Jim Kast-Keat for their conversations with me in responding to your questions. I believe in the collective voice of the church! Know God is with each of you in your questions, thoughts, and beliefs. 

Joy,
Reverend Jes Kast-Keat

***

Note: Kelly Youngblood is facilitating a conversation around the question, "What does it mean to be Reformed?" featuring a member of a church in the RCA, a CRC pastor, and a UMC pastor. Be sure to check that out! 

2 questions regarding the HHS mandate and religious liberty

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Okay, since the HHS mandate is back in the news again, I’ve got two questions: 


1.  If the owner of a private, for-profit company can make decisions regarding the healthcare coverage of his/her employees based on religious conviction, what’s to keep an employer who is Jehovah’s Witness from refusing to cover blood transfusions or an employer who is a scientologist to refuse to cover any costs related to mental health? How is it preserving “religious liberty” to allow employers to impose their religious convictions onto their employees regarding what they can purchase with their compensation? 

2.    I can’t for the life of me understand this new evangelical preoccupation with birth control. Providing easier/cheaper access to birth control has been shown to dramatically decreases abortions, so it seems like this would be something we pro-lifers would want to support. If cheaper birth control would decrease abortions, why wouldn’t Christians support it? 

 

Related: Christianity Today recently published a short article on how the morning-after pill does not inhibit implantation, but rather blocks fertilization. And for an interesting look at the problem of categorizing the pill as an abortifacient, check out Libby Anne’s piece on the topic, where she notes that “if your goal is to save ‘unborn babies,’ and if you truly believe that a zygote – a fertilized egg – has the same value and worth as you or I – the only responsible thing to do is to put every sexually active woman on the pill,” because the pill actually reduces the number of zygotes naturally rejected by a woman’s body. 

For another fantastic post on this topic—and a third question, really— check out Rachel Marie Stone’s piece, “What if Jesus is saying it’s okay to pay for things that are against your religion?”  I'm against the U.S. drone strikes that have resulted in the deaths of civilians. Should I refuse to pay my taxes? 

Finally, for my views on abortion, see “Why progressive Christians should care about abortion.” 
 

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