We’re currently featuring a variety of articles and reviews that seem to speak to the current disregulated and almost unfathomable situations that have descended upon the United States. How did we get here? How can we respond? What does the Bible have to say?
Faithfully Dissident Daughters: Reclaiming Christian Womanhood Beyond Patriarchy
"We do not have a God who is unfamiliar with the realities of a female existence or a body with a womb—we have a God who bleeds and swells, loses and mourns, births and nourishes, just as we do."
You First: A Love That Will Not Let Me Go
"While it is neither easy nor common for seekers, both willing and hesitant, to integrate their inner and outer selves, this luminous collection delivers the welcome message that it is possible."
What the Church Taught Me About Womanhood—and What Jesus Unlearned
"Maybe the church will look more like Christ when women no longer have to choose between being faithful and being fully human."
Anger Is Powerless: The Gospel of Truth’s Wisdom for Today
Anguish and terror grow when we lose sight of what is real. They thicken into a fog that distorts perception until we can no longer see clearly enough to imagine a way forward.
Believing In the Midst of Betrayal: A Chaplain’s Reflection
"Through Christ’s resurrecting power, betrayal does not get the final word. Instead, betrayal can become a steppingstone on our way to becoming stronger Christians and women of excellence."
There’s Room for All the Colors
Maybe God is the colors, the cracks, the things that don’t fit into the perfect outline. Maybe God’s the messy, uncontainable spectrum of creation itself.
Christian Ecofeminist Theology Today or Gaia, Sallie McFague, and You Walk...
Patriarchy and an industrial military complex, whether implicitly or explicitly, promote masculine conquering of the feminine or the perceived weaker "other," as is common in complementarian and/or hierarchical understandings of the world and Christianity.
Love More: Trump and the Country We Know
We can react by demonizing those who brought the next four years upon our country. We can judge them and denigrate them and turn on them. And in doing so, we will perpetuate the very situation that led us all to this point. Or we can try to figure out how to love more and love better.
Ordered Order—Conservative Christians’ Love Affair with Hierarchy
"In times of social change, any hint of change in the status quo stirs up fears of disorder. The more rapid the change, the more loudly come the calls for clamping down, holding back, conserving the status quo, stressing hierarchy over equality, law over grace."
Two Books by Eric A. Seibert on Violence in Scripture
For Christians who see the Bible as authoritative, two main steps should be involved in properly interpreting and applying these ancient texts. First, understand what a text meant in its original literary and cultural context. Only then can we wrestle with what it means today.
Climate Change and Neighbor Love
"What is neighbor love in an era of climate change? That ancient question, 'Who is my neighbor?' remains pertinent. I suggest that two shifts may help focus our ecological lenses for neighbor love— how we understand neighbor love, and who we understand our neighbors to be."
Hurtful Words Hurt
There are millions of new combinations of words created every day, combinations that are put here, on the web, for anyone to view. And there’s one thing that nobody seems to notice, or care about, or even comment on, one important thing about all those words. A lot of them are hurtful. Some intentionally so.
Revelation—Whom Will You Worship?
Lesson 1 - “This may be the most misunderstood book in our entire canon. Some Christians ignore it entirely because of its bizarre imagery, while others pore over it attempting to unlock a chronological key to the future. [In this series], we will challenge some current end-time predictions and schemes based in part on Revelation, as well as seek to understand its genre, its cultural context, and what it might say to Christians in the 21st century.”
Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence
Armstrong defines war as “a psychosis caused by the inability to see relationships, “ and describes the First Crusade as particularly psychotic. In Jerusalem the “half-crazed” First Crusaders slaughtered some thirty-thousand people in three days” (p. 214).
We Can’t Just “Move Beyond” the Struggle for Gender Equity
"The people who want to “move beyond” debates over questions of equality and inclusion are, most often, the people who already hold power. They do not see a significant problem with the status quo because the status quo is not holding them back from pursuing their goals..."
Taking Back God: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality
This is a compelling, swift-reading collection of the voices of the women who are leading movements of change in their mosques, synagogues, and churches. Taking Back God provides a meaningful view of religious feminism from the macro level.
Untold Volumes Poetry
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Until then, Mercury was the ultimate
messenger in Rome,
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Feminist Bible Studies and Related Material
Living Water and Eternal Light—John 8:12-59
Lesson 20 - These rituals lie behind Jesus’ proclamation of himself as the Water of Life in John 7:37-39 and the Light of the World in 8:12. As light, Jesus claims not only to replace the law but to physically represent Lady Wisdom herself (see Lesson 2). As living water, his Spirit fulfills Zechariah’s prophecy of cleansing Jerusalem on that great “day of the Lord.”
Coming Back from Coming Out
"Coming out ruined my life. At least, that’s the way it seemed. To claim my identity as a lesbian meant sacrificing everything on the altar of my own selfishness, of my need to be “true to myself.” To come out as a 43- year- old woman meant walking away from a tolerable twenty- year marriage, leaving behind a career in church ministry, and learning to negotiate custody arrangements and a new solo life. To come out, for me, meant walking away from God."
My First Gay Pride Parade— #ResistMarch
My Episcopal church participated, as did many other churches. Quite a few signs were carried by people coming from a specifically Christian perspective. “This is the gay that the Lord hath made” was my favorite, carried by a young man.
Biblical Interpretation: Can We Get It Right?
Lesson 1 "This new series of lessons in Reta’s Reflections will not be a book study, as earlier studies have been. Rather, it will deal with the broader issue of hermeneutics, the science of interpretation as it relates to how we understand our Scriptures. The question of how we interpret authoritative texts becomes acute when current social, economic, or political issues divide believers who look to these texts for answers."
A Charleston Lament – #BlackLivesMatter
I am convinced that this is the lesson of Gethsemane / Not Jesus crying humanly about his own impending suffering and death / But rather Jesus's awareness of the depth of the intractable ruin of us / The universal suffering of the other who threatens the status of the entitled just by being
I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
"I’m Still Here" clearly articulates that Christians are called to seek justice, and compellingly argues that systemic racism, white fragility, and the myth of “nice” white people means that true racial reconciliation has not been realized.
Immortal Moral Reminders of Henrietta Lacks
One might ask how differently Lack’s story would have gone if the social injustices that disregarded her as a person with agency had long ago been undone. The science and healthcare industries must help address unjust socioeconomic structures that deny the basic humanity and rights of disempowered groups of people before any lasting changes in care can be expected.
Most Recent Book Reviews
You First: A Love That Will Not Let Me Go
"While it is neither easy nor common for seekers, both willing and hesitant, to integrate their inner and outer selves, this luminous collection delivers the welcome message that it is possible."
From the Archives
Child-Free Again. Sort of.
Hello Church. I’m looking at you. Let’s stop assuming that all women want to help with children’s programs. Invite men AND women to participate. I have helped out here and there over the years, but I chose support roles that did not require my spending time with small children when I was home with my own all week.
