What Mary Can Teach Us about Courage

December 22, 2014

In a thoughtful meditation on Mary, the mother of Jesus, Kendra Weddle writes:

“Mary’s song, often called Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1, conveys the perspective underpinning Jesus’ actions in the gospels. It is a theology of reversals, where the strong are made weak, and the weak become strong, where the powerful are brought low and the hungry are filled. We can imagine Mary knew the lows all too well. She had been on the receiving end of social systems that disregarded groups of people: women, the poor, the sick, the hungry.”

See Kendra’s post, “Mary, Can You Teach Us to Be Courageous?” from Ain’t I a Woman, the blog she writes with Melanie Springer Mock. (Both Kendra and Melanie are members of EEWC-CFT.)

You might also enjoy this brief video from “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly,” providing an overview of an exhibition called, “Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea,” currently being shown at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. The exhibition shows how images of Mary in paintings and sculpture have changed over history, reflecting the cultural, political, and religious climates of various periods and gradually depicting a more human Mary and a more intimate relationship between mother and child. (I especially enjoyed the marble relief in which Mary is playfully tickling her infant son, and Baby Jesus is giggling delightedly.)

 

Letha Dawson Scanzoni is an independent scholar, writer, and editor, and is the author or coauthor of nine books. In 1978, she and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott wrote Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?, one of the earliest books urging evangelical Christians to rethink their views on homosexuality (updated edition, 1994, HarperOne). More recently, Letha coauthored (with social psychologist David G. Myers) What God Has Joined Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage (HarperOne, 2005 and 2006). Another of Letha’s most well-known books is All We’re Meant to Be: Biblical Feminism for Today, coauthored with Nancy A. Hardesty (Word Books, 1974; revised edition, Abingdon, 1986; updated and expanded edition, Eerdmans, 1992). Letha served as editor of Christian Feminism Today in both its former print edition (EEWC Update) and its website for 19 years until her retirement in December 2013.

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