Christian Feminism Today

June 2022 Poetry Selection
The north star has fallen
It's still there, in the sky
but we've tilted away
and it's no longer a reliable guide

Most Christian feminists can tell a story of how something Rosemary did, said, or wrote changed them. It's not many people who end up having such influence over an entire movement. 

"It’s argued by theologians that equal participation by women in church masses and services resulted from Jesus’s revolutionary treatment of them and worked its way outward into secular Christian societies, eventually resulting in the gaining of female secular rights and freedoms."

May 2022 Poetry Selection
I looked out upon the white-cloaked mountain
and All that is Holy, She said “That is you.”

April 2022 Poetry Selection
Thanks to that plucky holy man,
I’m happy to report they are packing up.
I filched his trick: invite them to live in harmony.

"Wirgau uses sights and sounds to convey experiences: the oppressive heat on the train rocking through India; the agonizingly slow maneuvering through the Suez Canal by the ship, the gorgeous view as the ship passes Morocco, and the first blast of cold wind on the faces of passengers arriving in Southampton, England."

"I am in awe of foremothers who were martyred for their faith, of those who pushed their way into unknown lands to proclaim the gospel, and of those who chose celibacy to better care for the poor and sick in their communities."

March 2022 Poetry Selection
With all due respect, I call it “The Boss’s Dinner.”
We’d hang out in this upper room frequently
to debrief and strategize...

February 2022 Poetry Selection
She told me
that she believed in the covenant of marriage,
that she had decided to leave her husband...

To linguistically portray God as a father, or God as a woman giving birth, or an eagle, or a sacred wind, all of those things put a limiting image up to represent God. And, for that matter, so do the three letters, G-O-D. All the ways we choose to refer to God are images, all are limited representations, all are potentially idolatrous symbols. But all our metaphors and ways of referring to God are not necessarily idolatrous. Only potentially.

But in the larger context of the New Testament, both “kin-dom” and “kingdom” make sense. The Apostle Paul plants small house churches, and when he writes to them, he calls them adelphoi—sisters and brothers—united in a kin-group not by blood but in a common loyalty to the Lord Jesus, over against the Lord Caesar. To these tiny outposts, Paul promises the coming victory of God over all other empires, through the return of his representative, Jesus.

If someone is being abused, they feel responsible for the abuse. Why this logical inconsistency? Because if everything is the victim's own fault, they have the power to change it. I would advise you not to take that sense of power away, but, instead, to model what it is like to not accept responsibility for what the abuser is doing.

Survivors of spiritual abuse can feel justifiably averse to anything having to do with God or spirituality after emerging from the war zone of spiritual abuse. However, cutting off the aspects of oneself that are yearning for healthy, edifying connection to something other than the self—the essential definition of spiritual expression—can be equaling damaging.

"There was a time in the not too distant past when the majority of Protestant Christians, including those who called themselves evangelical, did not consider the point at which a fertilized ovum or developing embryo or fetus becomes a human being to be clearly defined, indisputable, and settled for all time."