April 7, 2014
In a post reflecting on her feelings after the World Vision employment policy reversal, blogger Rachel Held Evans writes:
“I think a lot of us are working through some feelings of grief as we find ourselves struggling, perhaps for the first time, with our religious identity. “
I was struck by the similarity to what it was like for me coming out as a lesbian later in life. I THOUGHT I knew everything about myself, what what I felt, what I believed…and suddenly I realized I had no idea. No clue about what’s true because if part of what I was taught to believe isn’t actually true, then what happens to the rest of it?
Read the article on Rachel Held Evans’ blog.
And with this post, some of the comments are well worth reading.
Rachel Held Evans is lucid and insightful — as she struggles with issues that women in mainstream Christianity struggle through forty years ago or more. I feel for her, I admire her spirit and her intellectual honesty. But she regularly shocks me by how much effort it takes her, here in the second decade of the twenty-first century to catch up with twentieth-century theological thought. And by how many others identify with her struggles, as they too struggle free from their atavistic restrictive thinking. It is no wonder that secular society is so dismissive of Christianity, and sees so little relevance in our discourse.