Tag: EEWC History

"Another measure of change: for decades our goal was to be inclusive, but now intersectional better expresses our understanding of how oppression works and how we can work for change."

And claw her way up, hand-in-hand with others, is exactly what Letha Dawson Scanzoni has done, empowered by her expansive love of neighbor and by her enduring love for the One who forever sets the prisoners free.

Learn about the the work of the organization.

As a college instructor for the past fifteen years, I’ve never liked that feeling of the students departing loudly as I was still talking. Eventually I hit upon a solution, a counter-ritual to leave-taking behavior I refer to as the “Ruggerio Benediction.” On the first day of class, I explain that the students are not permitted to pack up and go until they have been formally dismissed with the sentence I use to close every class session: “Go forth and use wisely every heartbeat.”

The academic study of EEWC helps to make certain that the story of biblical feminism will be included in the larger narrative of multivocal feminism in the United States. Each book and each dissertation, however, offers only one version of how to tell the story of biblical feminism.

If this organization is to survive and persevere; if we as individuals are going to sustain our work of love and justice, we need to know that behind the ebb and flow of waves and water there is a Power, an Energy, a web of Wisdom we call God, creating, empowering, sustaining. "Blessed the waters that rise and fall to rise again."

Some limit use of the word evangelical and call themselves "biblical feminists" or "Christian feminists," as did the women who published Daughters of Sarah.

I recall a friend from San Francisco telling me that one should never write a dissertation on a topic that has personal meaning. I told him that those rules just didn't apply to a feminist person such as myself, but I now understand that such passion invested in a long research and writing project does indeed deplete the body and can stir up surprising emotions.

EEWC, with its mix of young and old and every age in between, and its sense of contemporaneity -- we're all in this together at the same time and place in history and each of us has something to contribute -- provides countless opportunities for demonstrating what it means to be a feminist and Christian at any age.

A surprising number of the women attending, perhaps half, were new to feminism. They came out of interest and out of a sense of alienation from their churches; for the first time this weekend they began to identify themselves as feminists.