rude truth

#ows

2011-10-26T20:44:00.000-05:00

Too busy now for my own words. Am borrowing from Elizabeth Johnson's Quest for the Living God, from chapter 4, "Liberating God of Life," which we are covering in class for this week:

"Idolatry entails putting alien gods before the true God of the Bible, worshiping something which is not divine. In the Latin American situation these gods are money, the comforts it brings, and the power necessary to make and keep it. Starting with the conquistadores and continuing for five centuries through successive ruling systems up to multinational corporations today, greed has divinized money and its trappings, that is, turned them into an absolute. Core transgressions against the first commandment have set up a belief system so compelling that it might be called moneytheism, in contrast to monotheism.
Like all false gods, money and its trappings require the sacrifice of victims. Whether the poor are offered up indirectly through the economic conditions necessary to produce profit, or directly through the violence necessary to sustain those conditions, their lives are the sacrifice. What is most insidious is the way traditional preaching and theology put a superficial veneer of Christian belief over the face of these idols...Neutral in the face of injustice, the racist, sexist, classist image of God perverts the actual contours of the living God in the service of moneyed interests" (79-80).

It won't fit on a sign. But it is to the point. I don't know if Jesus would #ows, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Sister Elizabeth there.

breaking bad

2011-10-13T10:42:00.001-05:00

FTR, I am ripping through these episodes like a, well, like an addict or something. (Thank you Netflix, you're such an enabler.)

And I love it. Not least because it makes me miss those gorgeous views of the Sandias I got to enjoy those brief summers I got to live in ABQ.

But two things really irk me.

First. Yes, this is highly personal and has to do with the constant, chronic and let's just own up to it, debilitating sleep deprivation I'm currently experiencing (the number of record screw-ups in the last few weeks! like, leaving my phone on the hood of the car, and misreading my own course schedule re the midterm date). I am so utterly pissed off at the way in which TV pregnancies, births, and babycare are depicted. The Whites are supposed to be living on a teacher's salary, and yet Skyler has a maternity wardrobe that never repeats itself? Come on. I will admit that the whole birth sequence was less annoying than is typical. No ridiculous scenes of women lying prone in hospital beds, screaming, cursing their spouses, and demanding immediate medication. But what's really bugging me at the moment, at episode 29, is that Baby Holly is the world's most autonomous, care-free infant. It's just No Big Thang to load her up and take her along to the bookkeeping office, where of course, she does nothing to interrupt getting work done. (I have yet to make good on my intention to book some office hours at NBTS with Baby Z in tow, and I struggle to do my course prep on a laptop on the living room floor beside her jumper contraption thing. It's pretty difficult to write a coherent lecture in 15-minute blocks of time interrupted more or less regularly by various demands for attention.) And at the hospital vigil? "Where's Holly?"/"I got a sitter." Right. Because it's No Big Thang to first, find a sitter, and second, feel completely comfortable leaving your newborn infant in someone else's hands for an extended and indefinite period of time. WTF. But for TV this is typical. The moment the drama of seeing the hotties morph into hot mamas with their baby bellies stuck onto curiously otherwise unmodified female frames (and then of course, morph smoothly right back to "normal" afterward...no postpartum bods to be found on American television), and the drama of the unexpected public waterbreaking and screaming cursing medicated hospital-practice-dictated birth sequence is done...well, the baby's just not that interesting, and stories about people who function just above zombie level due to the intense energy drain that is actual care of a real infant just don't cut it. So TV babies are magical--they don't need feeding, certainly not breastfeeding, (oh the logistical horror of negotiating that on a TV show, right?), and they don't require any actual interaction on an ongoing basis. A symbolic bottle waved in the air, a symbolic diaper change--and then they disappear from the viewer's sight. You'd forget that they exist, except for the perfunctory references to them here and there in the dialogue. And all this from a show that, really, does a better than usual job on this stuff. SIGH. It makes me want to tear my hair out, but Baby Z's already regularly doing this for me.

And second, I was so totally struck by Walt's line to Jesse re the airplane crash: "I blame the government." The irony of this willingness to pin something like this on the government just blows me away, in this context where Breaking Bad as a narrative wouldn't even exist if Walt's cancer treatments weren't completely inaccessible for financial reasons. There's plenty of personal moral failure here, but really, on some level...I blame the government.

First Day of School!

2011-09-07T10:04:00.000-05:00

This morning we woke up to an alarm. For a long time Clare herself has been our morning wake-up service. Her techniques have varied from pouncing to simply picking up midsentence with whatever conversation we were having prior to her falling asleep. It sounds lovely but in reality, it's just as brutal as having an electronic thingy yell at you from the bedside table. Worse, actually. You can turn the electronic thingies off.

But not today, and maybe not ever again. This morning was the First Day of School and from now on, for the next thirteen years, everything will be different. Clare's not so aware of this, but I am. She's a Big Girl now, for realz, even if I still can't break the habit of calling her "baby." From now on, we have a schedule, a place to be, and a place we have to be on time. And this place will be what defines her day: shaping her conversation topics, her interests, her friendships, her moods... And who knows what-all this is going to change? It's the First Day. We'll have to wait and see.

But for now, Brent is back to work after his time off, Clare is at school, and it's me & Baby Z hanging out at home, wondering what our days will look like together as we slide into our own new groove of working-from-home and playing-with-baby. Possibly on Wednesdays we might go put in some office hours at NBTS together--but not today. Today is for contemplating the First Days of School and enjoying the sound of the rain. And doing some laundry. :)

2011-08-14T17:17:00.000-05:00

and in case you were wondering, this is the next little project we'll be undertaking: http://babytoolkit.blogspot.com/2007/12/clear-unsightly-blemishes-case-of.html

I'll keep y'all posted on whether or not I have as much success with the acne cream + sunlight solution to the ballpoint penned doll face issue.

a gospel for cyborgs and other unnatural creatures. (that is, everyone.)

2011-08-14T12:03:00.000-05:00

If I asked you, what's the most unnatural thing you can think of, what would be your answer?

Clones?

Artificial intelligence, robots, androids?

Gay sex?

Would the Incarnation even make your list? Because seriously, what could be more unnatural than divinity assuming human flesh?

The gospel is good news because it is unnatural. It defies the "natural" opposition of Creator and created, of God versus humanity. We are not doomed to forever relate to God as God's opposition. The unnatural act of reconciliation has taken place, initiated by a God who doesn't care about pretentious and ignorant human categories of the natural.

I know what God looks like

2011-08-14T11:49:00.000-05:00

Clare: "I know what God looks like."
me: "and what does God look like?"
Clare: "He has brown hair. And a white jacket. With red and yellow stripes."
me: "and what does God look like when God is a girl?"
Clare: "She has blonde hair in a ponytail. And a red dress. With pink flowers on it."

Okay, then.

2011-08-12T11:59:00.000-05:00

We worship at the altar of a petty God
a God who sweats the small stuff
and demands that, for righteousness' sake, we sweat the small stuff too.
Not just any old sweat. The right kind of sweat, worked up in the right kind of way.
Most acceptable is the holy sweat lathered up in the frenzy of outraged righteous indignation,
second best, that which drips from the effort of perfecting symbolic sacrifice.
Getting it just right is important. (Ask Cain.)
Getting those who don't get it right is even better.
This God cares: cares about how we love, who we love, what we love--
but not really why. Why is a big question, and this is a petty God we worship;
it's easier than worshiping a God we don't get.

the F word on Christian campuses

2011-06-24T12:43:00.000-05:00

I think I've blogged about this before. I like the F word. I wear it on a t-shirt. I say it a lot. Freely. Gratuitously. Egregiously. With feeling. In appropriate and inappropriate contexts. Like this:

Feminist, feminist, feminist, FEMINIST!

So, I'm musing about this again because of a comment at a session I attended at the CSC last week. It was the first response to a question about what we can do on Christian higher ed campuses to support and promote scholarship among aspiring female academics, both students and faculty. And this responder made the case that we need to hear from women who don't identify as feminists if we want to make progress on this.

It was an odd and unexpected sentiment to hear--at least from my perspective--after the full-throated fem roar of the presentation itself, which did not shy away from the abysmal stats regarding female presence in the academy and the even worse data on female presence in Christian higher ed. Simply to state these things is a feminist act--so why is it that the solution is somehow to hide our feminism? How would you even do this? Are we supposed to privately encourage our female students, but not do anything to rock the boat because that would be "counterproductive?" Covert support like that is not exactly real supportive: it simply encourages more women to throw themselves into a hostile environment, without challenging the expressions of hostility. Here ladies, gird up your loins for battle--you're strong and smart, you'll survuve it. And hey, here are my battle-scars--pretty soon you'll have some great ones yourself. Come back in a few years and we'll compare. Good luck!

Okay, I'm being unfair. No doubt this was not the intended message. Though I'm pretty sure that, regardless of intent, this is what shying away from feminism gets us.

More than likely, the intended message was more something along these lines: "find something you want to do, and go be great at it." Ditch the feminist whining and just do your thing. Feminist whining will hold you back, distract you, brand you as troublemaker, make you depressed and angry... So don't bother with being "feminist," just go be what you want.

And "go be what you want" is a great message--one which I try every day to hand to my precocious 5-year-old (baby Z is a little young for indoctrination, though I do my best not to gender-code her onesies. It's the least I can do). But it misses something important. And that is, it's f-word hard to "do what you do" when what you do is something that, wittingly and unwittingly, you keep getting stopped from doing because you're a girl. Whether you're in that male-dominated math-and-science world, or getting an MDiv within a tradition that doesn't ordain women, this is what you face: a culture which has for so long assumed that a girl can't, shouldn't, and really deep down doesn't want to, do these things means that simply trying to "do what you do" makes you a walking-around in-your-face F-word. You can try to mitigate that by not labeling yourself with that offensive word...but I don't see how that helps you navigate reality. Instead, you've taken on the additional burden of resolutely not naming the problem you navigate. And if you can't name it, the boys can't either. And it will persist.

So I use the F word. Lots. And I think you should too. Until we get over that ridiculous Rush-Limbaugh-femi-Nazi caricature we've been indoctrinated with, and realize that feminism is, simply, about supporting women who are trying to "do what they do." We absolutely don't need women who don't identify as feminists. We need men and women who do.

CSC 2011: Faith, Science, Babies

2011-06-23T11:36:00.001-05:00

Before it all sinks down into that inaccessible fog of forgottenness that swamps everything prior to, say, a week or so ago, I'd like to try to say something about the Christian Scholars Conference.

This is a conference I don't skip and always look forward to, and I'd been looking forward to this one for a solid year or more--ever since learning that the theme was "Science, Theology and the Academy." And, since I was lucky enough to be informally included in some of the brainstorming and planning, I got invested in it early. And though I had exhausted myself in 2010 with multiple sessions and vowed not to ever do that again (mainly, because it means that you're always missing out on sessions you really, really want to attend but can't), I couldn't just sit on the sidelines for this one. In fact, I was so excited about it all that I made all sorts of plans, sessions I wanted to convene and papers I wanted to write and present--and it was months before a basic fact of life clicked: a baby due in April = babe-in-arms in June. Yikes! So then I had to revise expectations a bit, and figure out how I was going to make that work.

But, I'm very happy to say, it did seem to work, and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Teresa Pecinovsky a.k.a. TKP, who volunteered to be my child-care-support (especially since it turned out that Plan A, a.k.a. "Nana," my mom, Pat Thweatt, could not attend as originally planned!). I'm sure that there were some sessions and networking and whatnot that TKP missed out on, and walking a howling desperately hungry babe around is no fun (Baby Z is quite unaccustomed to being made to wait 10 minutes for meals. She thought the world was ending.) However awesome my baby Z is--and she IS--it was still a sacrifice and one without which I could not have done the introducing/presenting I needed to do.

And, although one effect of having babe-in-arms at the CSC was a definite sense of being only half-there, perpetually late and a little unfocused and in general, just a little less than my professional best--I am super glad that I did it (with help). First, because I simply could not miss this conference. And second, because it just shouldn't be impossible for a woman to be a scholar and a mother, and simply walking around with a baby in a sling at an academic shindig makes that statement better than grousing about it on a blog.

And, next time I present something at a conference (coming up in November, where I present something on Haraway cyborg & theology in front of Haraway her very own self), if I get nervous, I can now say to myself, "Self, you got up in front of folks with about six episodes of spit-up evident on your shirt and pee on your foot. You can get through this."

My favorite question from the conference (apart from: "how old is she?"): "you're listed as 'Independent Scholar'--what exactly does that mean?" Um...polite euphemism for unemployed, and thank you for asking. Do you know of anyone with a need for some professional God-talk? I'm available. (Got a tip the other day from a friend about hawking my God-talk services--apparently someone is having some success with this! Who knew?)

Re the academicking side of things, I am very pleased to report that the session I organized on "Theology, Science and the Hermenautics of Interdisciplinary Reason," starring my superstar colleague Ken Reynhout, my ACU prof & advisor Fred Aquino, and fellow ACU alum/SMU PhD candidate David Mahfood, was a huge success (IMO). I was not anticipating a huge turnout, but the room, with 50 seats, was about 3/4 full, and the Q&A time had less awkward downtime than any AAR session I've ever been to. Apparently people are way hungrier for epistemological musing than I bargained for! So--while I have a mental list of self-critical "do this better next time" notes, I think the session itself was brilliant and I am very proud to have brought such a marvelous bunch of guys together.

My other session was also brilliant, though only a handful of folks know that firsthand. :( And again, it's Ken who really shined there--I was pretty fatigued by Friday afternoon, plus I had pee on my foot, so I was less than awesome. But despite my less than awesomeness, the topic of our session--the Science for Ministry Institute that Ken & Wentzel direct at PTS--is such a great program and model for interdisciplinary science and religion dialogue that the session rocked anyway. Just wish more folks had found their way to our little room to hear about it!

There were, of course, lots of sessions I wish I could have attended and couldn't--not just those that conflicted with mine, but sitting through a session with a babe means, really, not sitting at all, and hoping that coming in & out multiple times is less annoying to everyone than baby noises. Chris Dowdy's panel session, "After Apology: A Conversation with Royce Money on Apology, Race and Christian Higher Education," was the first session I half-attended (an incredibly important dialogue, and I have the impression that it went extremely well.) There were also several sessions on gender in the CofC, most of which I couldn't go to, but which add an important dimension to the ongoing dialogue about this within our tradition in their contribution of empirical research into attitudes and practices about gendered roles in (and out of) church. One session I did attend addressed specifically the overlap between academia and theology on gender issues: Christian institutions of higher education and the specific challenges faced by female scholars and administrators within them. Academia in general is not, ahem, very "woman friendly"--if you doubt this, cruise on over to the blog What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?--and in a Christian context, this atmosphere is often additionally entrenched with theological justifications. To hear this said out loud, bluntly, to a roomful of interested women and men who then proceeded to ask the constructive question--how do we change this? what practices need to be changed and what new practices invented? what structures need to be torn down and what new ones built? who are the key players in the institutions for doing these things and how do we teach them what needs to be done?--while I sat there, an un(der)employed academic with a baby at my breast, while the topic at hand was the how-to promotion of women scholars--I can't even really put into words what that sort of affirmation felt like.

One regret that won't go away: I missed my chance to meet John Polkinghorne. Baby Z got a little hungry for second breakfast right before the Saturday morning session, and so I was late making my way to the room. Session was already underway when I got there--and I had to catch my plane. That chance won't be coming back, and I'm a little heartsick about it.

However, I did get to meet J.J.M. Roberts, finally! Since we just missed each other at PTS, it took years and a trip to Malibu to make that happen.

But, there's next year in Nashville to look forward to, for lots of reasons. The theme is "reconciliation," I'm honored to now be a part of the science & religion planning committee, and middle TN is Home. See y'all there.

2011-06-08T21:21:00.000-05:00

Clare and I often engage in a little verbal competition to see who can create the most hyperbolic I love you's. Tonight's contest spawned a bit of theological reflection for my almost 5-year-old.

Clare: "I love you bigger than...bigger than God!"

me: "but baby, God is love. So when you love, you just make God even bigger."

Clare: "so God is the biggest thing there is?"

me: "sure. God is everything, so nothing is bigger than God."

Clare: "and if you hate someone you make God smaller."

me: "yes, you could think of it like that. and when you love, it makes God bigger, and brings God right where you are, where the love is."

"so he's everywhere? even right here in the bed?"

"sure."

"I want to call God a girl." [this just as I was about to ask why lately she's been exclusively using the masculine pronoun in her Godtalk.]

"That's totally okay. God is a big girl too. God is everything, so you can call God a he or a she."

"I want to call God 'Universe.'" then, flinging her arms out and embracing the air, "I love you Universe!"

the New York Times, an open letter, and my two cents

2011-04-21T10:43:00.001-05:00

I think just about every ACU alum in my 500+ Facebook friends has picked this up and posted it, or hit the "like" button on someone else's link: "Even on religious campuses, students fight for gay identity" by Erik Eckholm in the NYT.

If you've read the piece, you know that it references Harding University and Abilene Christian University, as well as Baylor University, Belmont University, and North Central University (a Pentecostal university in central MN).

You may also know that in response to the occasion created by the NYT article, my husband wrote an open letter to the administrations of both Harding and ACU, speaking as an alum of both universities and as Rector of Grace Church in Newark. (Brent has followed up with a brief clarification, here.)

I have no wish to write an open letter (not sure that it would matter much to anyone what an unemployed theologian and mom of two who works unpaid from her home office has to say?), but both the article itself, Brent's letter, and the dialogue and personal responses from our ACU mentors and colleagues have prompted a lot of thoughts--exactly the kind of thing this blog serves as my dumping ground for. And so, since Baby Z seems content so far to ignore Google calendar's kind reminder that today is "DUE DATE" (lest we forget?!), I will do some cognitive dumping. (Yes, I expect that this scatty metaphor is entirely appropriate for the level of organization and polish this post will exhibit.)

No one knows better than two alums of both schools, Harding and ACU, how different these two institutions within our Church of Christ tradition truly are. (Y'all, we lived it.) The response that HUQP received, censorship and public condemnation from the chapel pulpit, was as unsurprising as it was disappointing. The point of The State of the Gay, according to HUQP, was to start dialogue about the presence and experiences of gay students at Harding--and while HUQP succeeded in starting a dialogue much bigger than they had originally anticipated, they did so despite Harding University's efforts to end the conversation before it even got started. This is starkly different from ACU's recent track record of actively, respectfully and officially engaging this issue on campus (read, for instance, this 2006 account from Robin Reed of SoulForce, entitled "Grateful for Abilene.")

Further, even at Harding, as the authors of The State of the Gay attest, there are individuals within both the student body and the faculty who are welcoming not just of dialogue but of actual gay people, even in all their gayness. I certainly know this to be true at ACU. But the NYT article, focused as it is on institutional policy and working with a broad and generic category of "religious campuses" that stretches to include everything from the largest and best-known Baptist university in the country to a small Bible college in MN, does not drill down to this level of (highly relevant) detail. Official spokespersons' statements of official policy are the end of that story; and this, as the HUQP's voices remind us, is just the beginning of the real story, and the reason for having a conversation.

For all that, I have to say that spokesperson reiterations of official institutional policy are significant. For one thing, they're what make it into print in the New York Times, and they're the articulation of the stance of the institution in the public square. Things may be much more complicated--they always are--on the ground of these "religious campuses" (and praise God for that!). But the official policy is not complicated. It is simple and straightforward, and it tells gay students that they are welcome...but their gayness is not:

“We want to engage these complex issues, and to give help and guidance to students who are struggling with same-sex attraction,” said Jean-Noel Thompson, [ACU]’s vice president for student life. “But we are not going to embrace any advocacy for gay identity.”

Many people, of course, find themselves stuck between an understanding of the Christian imperative to love and welcome all people, as Jesus did, and their understanding that the Bible clearly condemns same-sex relationships as sin. The uneasy, and unstable, result, is a compromise in the form of the mantra "hate the sin, love the sinner," a phrase which neatly sums up the reasoning behind the statement of official policy above, which walks the same fine line. You are welcome here, but your gayness is not.

This makes sense to a lot of people. And as far as I can tell, all those people are straight.

This is the problem: "hate the sin, love the sinner," and its official policy counterpart of insisting on reparative therapy and the characterization of all gayness as "struggle with same-sex attraction" only works as long as you refuse to listen to what actual gay people around you will tell you about being gay.

Are there people with ex-gay narratives? Yes. Are these people flourishing, at peace, spiritually blessed and transformed as ex-gay? I'll take their word for it. By the same token, if these narratives matter as testimonies and witness to the possibility of transformation, I must by my own reasoning take the word of the many, many more gay Christians I know for whom the demand to be ex-gay was soul-crushing and literally life-threatening, and for whom coming out was a salvific act. We can't pick and choose among the narratives our gay Christian brothers and sisters give us; they are as complicated a set of life stories and faith journeys as any other. We don't get to privilege the ones that tell us what we already believe to be true, while shutting out the ones that contradict our presuppositions. We have to face the necessity of reconstructing, over and over again, what we think the Bible teaches us and what God demands of us in our attempts to lead holy lives. Because that is what the Christian life is.

Is this sort of dialogue and attentive listening and faithful Christian living in community happening at ACU? Yes. But is it reflected in the official policy as articulated to the New York Times? No.

And this is, as I see it, the point of the open letter. We know the kind of community and ethic that exists at ACU, and we know that the full realities of ACU's actions and attitudes towards its gay students is not reflected in a one-size-fits-all official policy of reparative therapy for the "struggle with same-sex attraction." And that is both encouraging and problematic, in that it indicates a disconnect between on-the-ground practice and policy. The point of the letter, as I see it, is to publicly urge the university to fix this disconnect. The point of the letter is that this is not a vain hope.

This may indeed get lost in the media's bottomless ability for amplifying conflict and ignoring the possibilities of reconciliation which are the heart of the Christian gospel. But we know better. The work of reconciliation is already evident, if not complete, and in this work everyone must discern and play their part. This is difficult, and sometimes we get it wrong--and yet, even so, my faith is unshaken that this, indeed, is not a vain hope.

Calling a Time-Out: on Gender, Evolution, and Neon, or "Pink Polished Primate Piggies"

2011-04-14T08:11:00.000-05:00

A 5,000 year old burial site with male remains buried in a typical female manner suggests, to researcher Kamila Remisova Vesinova, that this burial site contained a man who was gay/transsexual. This was no Jimmy Castor Bunch troglodyte virilely grunting to himself in the mirror "gottafindawoman, gottafindawoman, gottafindawoman, gottafindawoman." What could possibly explain ancient evidence of such gender deviant behavior?

Well obviously, Mr/s. Troglodyte's misguided mama stumbled upon a small time capsule sent back in time by the diabolical mad scientist that the pink-polished J. Crew ad boy is clearly destined to become, thanks to the warped notions of his own mother, in a desperate effort to undermine the social fabric and family values of America and thereby validate his deviant gender-bending neon-pink polish preferences, before America even comes into existence.

Obviously.

Like Melissa Wardy of pigtailpals.com, my first reaction to Toemageddon was to roll my eyes at Faux-News and continue thinking about relevant things (like finishing my book before these Braxton-Hicks thingies turn into The Real Thing.) But--as Melissa points out--the story in this non-story, the Thing That Should Be Talked About, is:

...the gender constraint and gender policing going on in this hullabaloo. From the moment go nearly two years ago, Pigtail Pals has put a direct challenge to the marketing and products that I know to be objectifiying, limiting, stereotyping and sexualizing our girls. What we must know as parents and people who care about children – we must afford this same right to our sons.

So this troglodyte-turned-cyborg mama is calling a TIME-OUT. Fox Friends, you need to go sit in a quiet place, get calm, and think about the stupid things you've said that were wrong, and mean, and when you've figured out what it is you did that was wrong, you need to apologize. Nicely, like you really mean it. First, to Jenna and her adorable kid with the awesome toenails, and then to the rest of America for making us take the time out of our busy adult lives to address this ridiculous gender-bending behavior, and by that I mean, yours.

why don't they just leave (once again, sigh)

2011-03-16T11:02:00.000-05:00

It must really suck to have this aimed at you from both sides of the Great Divide: those firmly within the CofC, and those who have left and don't understand why everyone else just won't grow a pair and do the same.

Those of us who, like Paul Tillich describes, are "aliens" within our own churches (his summation of the existential predicament of theologians) are pretty used to hearing this occasionally from CofC people who are tired of putting up with us and our tiresome oddity and annoying vocality. Certainly I've heard it enough, as this blog's archive testifies. If you decide to dwell within the CofC as alien anyhow, you learn how to screen this out--or at least, armor yourself against the hurtfulness of it. I imagine that the HU students & alumni who comprise the HU Queer Press anticipated this kind of reaction from the pious faithful. In fact--the overall message of The State of the Gay seems to be a response to this question, an answer to that reactionary attitude: Why don't we just leave? Because we're part of you--and we always have been. And because we're invested in making this community that we're all a part of a better one, for everybody.

In case there were any doubt about this, the latest statement from HUQP ought to clear it up. Demanding that hate mail to the HU administration cease, HUQP writes:

We are frustrated that others would pervert our message of compassion and open dialogue by speaking with hate and violence. We wish to create a better campus for all, queer and straight. This cannot be achieved by alienating or attacking those with whom we disagree. Anyone who uses or advocates violence, in word or in action, has completely misunderstood our zine's message.

And they end the statement with this:

"The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of unity, the violence that wills to beat weapons into sickles for work"

- Archbishop Oscar Romero

It is the same message I tried to express after a couple years of wrestling with the emotional aftermath of a truly awful experience in a CofC, in which I felt personally targeted and deliberately ambushed--despite having said and done nothing to express any of my heretical theological views within that church community. You can read the full blog post here. But here's an excerpt:

I've wondered if I really should just give up, and go away. I can't count how many people over these intervening years have asked why I don't--students, friends, family, colleagues. My answer used to be that this church is my home; how do you leave your home? But that Sunday I wondered for the first time if maybe my home might leave me, instead. Later, in defiance, my answer was, why should I? This is my home, too. Then I wondered if it was true that my presence was divisive and harmful to the church, an act of self-gratification and arrogance. I began to be afraid that I really was the kind of person described in your sermon.

For a long time, that was my fear: that my sincere wish to remain a part of the body of Christ into which I was baptized and raised in the faith would be divisive and contentious no matter what I did or didn't do, because of what I do (or don't) believe on this (or that, or that other thing).

But now, I know what I will do next time I'm in the neighborhood. I will be walking through those church doors. I will take a seat in a pew and I will sing, and pray, and listen, and contemplate scripture. I will praise God with you. Because I am certain now that it is not divisive for me to remain. It is a conscious act of unity.

the turnaround

2011-03-10T21:22:00.000-05:00

So, I have to be "dangerously maternal" for a bit and relate this marvelous conversation with Clare from a few days ago.

Clare's request for her new room was that it have rainbows on the walls. She asked for this months ago, so I called my interior-designer sis and got her advice, which was: wall decals. I found these online at a ridiculous discount--spent about $15 total for 2 packages of rainbows, clouds & stars. And so, last week, at the top of the unpacking priority list and second only to "find the damn dinner plates already" was, get the rainbows up in Clare's room.

I also consulted her about where she wanted the rainbows and how she wanted them to look. She was very specific: she wanted 2 full rainbows on opposite walls. And I said okay.

And then I didn't do it like she said.

Instead, the wall opposite the one pictured above has 2 half-arches, one beginning in the corner and coming down, and the other coming out of the window. It looks great.

But it's not what she wanted. And she let me know. Like I knew she would.

She was super excited about coming home after school to see her rainbow room. And she walked in and saw the first wall: rapture. Then she turned and saw the second. And turned to me, mad face on, and said, "I don't like it." Pause. "It's not what I said." Flopped down in the chair, very prissy-pissed-off-princess. Longer pause. Then: "It's not all about you."

Oh, I knew it was coming. I was tired, I had put off other things to get this done, my arms ached, my back ached, I had spent all day putting together this beautiful room just for her...but she was right. I had asked what she wanted; she had told me exactly what she wanted. and I hadn't done it like she said.

So I said to her, "You're right. It's not all about me. What is it all about?" She looked at me and said. "Me. I get to give the instructions." Then, "You didn't do it like I said." And I said, "You're right. I didn't do it like you said. I did it this other way. Can I tell you why?" She looked at me darkly, but didn't object, so I went on. "I tried it your way, and the wall with the window is smaller than the other wall. It just didn't look the same and I thought it would be prettier this other way. I know it's not what you said, but I wanted to make your room the prettiest it could be. So I did it this way instead." There was silence. And then, after about a minute:

"Okay, mom. I see you had a good reason." Then: "I think I could like it." Then: "Those can be the baby rainbows hugging the window, and this is the mama rainbow smiling at them from over here."

I mean, damn. "You had a good reason"?! She's not even 5, and it took her about 5 minutes to process personal disappointment and outrage, listen and understand another point of view, and come up with some forgiveness and acceptance. I know so-called adults who can't seem to do that.

link: covering up is a feminist issue

2011-02-27T20:24:00.001-05:00

Annie @ PhDinParenting has produced a video version of her blog post, "covering up is a feminist issue." In some ways, it reminds me of the Vagina Monologues bit entitled "My short skirt"--applied to breastfeeding. And in some sense, that's right: it seems that part of the motivation for the video includes recent comments about women avoiding rape by not dressing like sluts. But it's the more direct public square commentary, often from other women, about how "inappropriate" it is to "NIP" (that's nurse-in-public, for the uninitiated) or to do so without hiding yourself and baby under some kind of massive tent-like cover, that's the real issue. What the video does is connect these, as well as throw in a visual cue that there are other cultural and religious standards at play as well (early in the video, you see a burka), and draw the conclusion that the more general problem is that standards of dress are imposed externally on women, in all sorts of contexts and for all sorts of reasons. Breastfeeding in public is just one of those.

One of the more subtle points in the video happens right up front, in the pairing of conflicting cultural messages to Western women--"cover up"/"strip down." While the video doesn't spell this out, this highlights the way in which women's breasts, in our culture, have become public objects in sexual contexts--but stick a baby on there, and suddenly it's gross. So we're left with a situation where cleavage is fine, but God forbid you let a curve show if you're a mom with a hungry babe.

Personally, one of the many gains I experienced as a woman finally loving and appreciating my body through experiencing pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood was learning to see my body as functional and vital--and part of that happened through redefining my breasts, not as sort of pointless objects on the front of my chest that other people seem to enjoy for some unfathomable reason, but as a necessary, important and life-giving functional part of my amazing body. This meant thinking of them as special and awesome--while at the same time, thinking of them as something akin to my elbow--just there for a reason, because I needed them to do their milk-making thing. Not just hang there and look, I guess, pretty.

I loved nursing Clare, at home, in church, on trains, wherever. She hated being under a cover and so I didn't use one--and nursing tops make them, IMO, unnecessary. Clare's big ol' beautiful baby head completely blocked whatever wasn't covered by the nursing top. And I'm looking forward to nursing Baby Z...and reinforcing with Clare that breasts are awesome milk-making things and she's right to look forward to the day when hers get great big--so she can feed her babies.

2011-02-25T19:26:00.000-05:00

Today I got my first open-mouthed, total shock reaction from someone when I said I was moving to Newark.

in defense of Planned Parenthood, because every child should be a choice

2011-02-23T16:59:00.000-05:00

"It's not a choice, it's a child."

Every roadtrip I've taken in that last decade and a half, I've seen that bumper sticker on the Covenant Transport trucks while I pass on the left. And over that decade and a half I've gone from a single college kid, far from marriage and motherhood, nodding in knee-jerk agreement, to a mom of two who grimaces in philosophical pain at the simple-minded misdirection of this ubiquitous bumper sticker slogan. (But hey, at least all the words are spelled correctly, and there's no Hitler mustache--which is more than you can expect from most slogan-toting peeps these days.)

I would like to see some bumper stickers that say, "Every child should be a choice." That's the goal, right? That every child conceived is a child whose conception is desired, whose growth in the womb is deliberately nurtured by both mother and community, whose birth is welcomed with the kind of joy that only comes after a ridiculous long period of anticipation? Isn't that what we want? Isn't it a measure of the brokenness of the world that this isn't, in fact, how it often happens?

So why is it that we separate these things, as if they were an either/or? Why don't we, instead, acknowledge the basic biological reality that a child is in fact a choice? And then get busy with making sure that people can in fact choose their children?

I don't mean the "you chose to have sex, so you chose the consequence" line, either. I mean, bringing a child into the world is not just a single choice, much less is it simply the statistically-more-or-less-likely sperm-meets-egg consequence of a single sex act. Bringing a child into the world is a series of choices: a series of choices which begin as soon as you realize that you're not just coming down with the flu because the flu doesn't make your boobs sore, and go to the store to get yourself a package of pee sticks. I don't just mean abortion here--although that is the starkest and most obvious form that this existential choosing can take. Choosing to nurture a life in your womb is a series of choices, one that has a definite starting point but no foreseeable ending point. It starts with prenatal vitamins and yoga and cloth diapers and escalates into something so large and complicated it encompasses the entirety of your life. It's on you: the health and well-being of a completely helpless human being. It's on you: the health and well-being of an increasingly independent little person. Everything from the food they eat to the answers they get to the impossible questions they ask, it's on you. Choosing to nurture life does not have an end. It just keeps going.

We forget--or do we just willfully ignore the obvious?--that women who face down that stark, inevitable, existential choice, do I nurture this life?, aren't answering a question about pregnancy. Pregnancy is the easy part. They're facing down the question about the cascading, unending, exponentially multiplying, choice of nurturing that life, for the rest of their lives.

If you're a fortunate and blessed woman, like I am, then your choice has already been made prior to the pee sticks, because you know that you want this to happen and when it does, your answer is ready: yes. Maybe you've already stocked the cupboard with prenatals and bought a copy of What to Expect (though, for my money, Smart Woman's Guide to Better Birth is a better purchase), you're so ready to say yes to this tiny life. Because you've already chosen this child.

In a different life, I might not be one of the fortunate, blessed ones whose children are predetermined choices. Brent and I were married six years before Clare. (Those, we refer to as "BC.") Not to get too personal about it, but believe me, there was plenty of opportunity for sperm-meets-egg in those years. (FTR, we're doing fine now too, no worries.) For those years--really, for the first full decade of our married lives--we were students, living off of loans and scholarships and part-time jobs of all sorts (between us, we've waited tables, sold orthopedic shoes, sold books, babysat, substituted in public schools and bank-tellered)--that is to say, we were permanently officially broke. And busy. And not interested in or able to even seriously ponder parenthood, except to watch the parents we knew with incomprehension and wide eyes at the amount of sheer energy and time that went into it, and think--no. Not yet. We cannot possibly do that.

So thank God for Planned Parenthood. I re-upped my pills through them the whole time we lived in Abilene, and stocked up there for the year we were overseas in Changsha. And since it turns out that I'm 'Fertile Myrtle' and Brent's 'Virile Cyril' (both times we've gotten pregnant within two months of tossing contraceptives), it's a helluva good thing we weren't left on our own. (Can't say that I see six years of married abstinence in the name of pursuit of theological scholarship as a real option. The world of academia still seems to largely operate on the assumption that scholars are celibate medieval monks--but in the real world, we've all got bodies and sexual drives attached to these putatively floating heads.)

Clare knows that she is chosen; it is another way of saying that she is and has always been loved. Baby Z will know that she is chosen, too. They'll know this because we'll tell them, and because we'll keep choosing them for the rest of their lives, in all those uncountable ways that you choose to nurture and love a kid every single day.

Every kid should know this. It should be the basic expectation with which kids grow up and experience their world. Every child should know that they were chosen--know it in a way that makes asking the question impossible. It should be the tacit foundation for life, that unspoken assurance that you are chosen, wanted, desired, loved.

Supporting Planned Parenthood ought to be a no-brainer. Instead we've let things get to a point where the health of women and children are potentially at risk because no one can think past the word "abortion." This is not about abortions. This is about doing the concrete, practical things that will get us closer to a world where every child born will be a child who is wanted: about enabling women and men, no matter who they are, to make childbearing and childrearing something they can choose to undertake gladly and readily. Every child should be a choice.

aaaarrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh

2011-02-17T17:19:00.002-05:00

There are so many more things I'd rather be blogging about than Sarah Palin. Like, what does it mean that a computer named Watson just beat a couple of human Jeopardy champs, and is this really a harbinger of the "shape of things to come"--good or bad, and all that. And I've refrained from blogging at all about anything of late simply because I am too busy: with the move less than two weeks away, I desperately need to get a reworked draft of chapter 4 complete prior to sealing up the last box of my already mostly-packed-up office.

But Sarah Palin. I'll feud over this tidbit from HuffPo till I get it out of my system, so--commence the bloggy exorcism.

First: I was right. I was so, totally, right ON. Back in 2008, I called it. My ire with SP began with her calculated, manipulative use of that great big lie, the SuperMom. She worked it back then, and she's still working it. All she's done is move on from lipsticked bulldogs to mama grizzlies as her go-to SuperMom animal mascot. But now she's come right out and said it:

The former Alaska governor suggested there's "no one" more qualified to handle the demands of the presidency than "a woman, a mom," according to Politico.

Don't get me wrong. Being the primary caregiver of a child really is, absolutely, the most time-consuming, emotionally wracking, philosophically challenging and physically exhausting thing I've ever attempted. And I wouldn't hesitate to agree with the somewhat cliched insistence that it's the most important thing I'll ever do--hell, look at the sidebar, I'm doing it again in +/- 63 days!. Being responsible for the holistic formation of another human being? Does it get any scarier or more important than that? But what does any of this have to do with, say, grasping global geopolitical realities? The only potential crossover I see, frankly, between momming and presidenting is diplomatic negotiation with hostile, unwilling and not necessarily fully rational partners.

So, fine. I'm still pissed about the SuperMom act, which I am still convinced is a damaging cultural image for women in our culture, and to have her flat-out say that being a mom qualifies you to be President makes me want to grow Mama Grizzly claws, put on some lipstick, and do something violent.

And then. When you and I both thought it wasn't possible to feel any more contempt for this egomaniacal caricature of a politician, she goes and does this:

...mocked Michelle Obama to make her point. The first lady is encouraging mothers to breast feed their infants as part of her campaign to reduce childhood obesity - an effort that has drawn scorn from some conservatives. "No wonder Michelle Obama is telling everybody you better breast feed your babies," Palin said. "I'm looking and say, 'Yeah, you better because the price of milk is so high right now.'"

You know, if you're going to construct your pres campaign platform around the SuperMom image, the least you could f-ing do is actually support real moms.

2011-01-31T14:55:00.001-05:00

from Brian McLaren on postcolonial theology:

Call me cynical, but here’s my suspicion: Adjectives in front of theology are deceptive. Yes, they’re needed; no, I’m not against them, but still, they’re deceptive. Here’s how.

By distinguishing some theology with a modifier — feminist, black, Latin American, eco-, post-colonial, or indigenous, we are playing into the idea that these theologies are special, different — boutique theologies if you will. Meanwhile, unmodified theology — theology without adjectives — thus retains its privileged position as normative. Unmodified theology is accepted as Christian theology, or orthodox theology, or important, normal, basic, real, historic theology.

But what if we tried to subvert this deception? What if we started calling standard, unmodified theology chauvinist theology, or white theology, or consumerist, or colonial, or Greco-Roman theology? The covert assumption behind the modifier post-colonial thus becomes overt, although it is generally more obliquely and politely stated than this: Standard, normative, historic, so-called orthodox Christian theology has been a theology of empire, a theology of colonialism, a theology that powerful people used as a tool to achieve and defend land theft, exploitation, domination, superiority, and privilege.

If that doesn’t sound disturbing, I’m not writing well or you’re not reading well.

Noting that "If standard Christian theology has indeed been colonial, then we would expect it to have certain characteristics," McLaren lists the following:

It would explain — historically or theologically — why the colonizers deserve to be in power — sustained in the position of hegemony.
It would similarly explain why the colonized deserve to be dominated — maintained in the subaltern or subservient position.
It would provide ethical justification for the phases and functions of colonization — from exploration to settlements to land acquisition to minority marginalization to segregation to hegemony-maintenance, even to ethnic cleansing.
It would bolster the sense of entitlement and motivation among the colonizers.
It would embed the sense of submission and docility among the colonized.
It would facilitate alliances with political and economic systems that were supportive of or inherent to colonialism.
It would camouflage or cosmetically enhance its ugly aspects and preempt attempts to expose them.

As a little thought experiment, replace "colonizers" with "men" and "colonized" with "women," and ask yourself, does this describe typical Church of Christ doctrine and practice? I think you know what I think you'll find...

this is why women know better...

2011-01-29T11:10:00.000-05:00

...than to "go to the church" for help in abusive situations.

the HUPS blog

2011-01-28T10:19:00.001-05:00

I'm not real invested in this, as I've made my peace with the fact that being an alum from Harding University is now something like a curious and unrepresentative factoid of an earlier life--and having a semester of adjunct work for the HU English department on my CV is even more unreal. (Unfortunately...but I almost feel like I'd have to go undercover to attend a Homecoming at this point. And my ornery streak makes it more likely that I'd wear my "this is what a feminist looks like" T-shirt while carrying a gay pride flag, and beg Brent to wear his collar.) But anyway: it seems that HU is on the cusp of a search for a new university president.

The folks at HUPS have put together a list of first-, second- and third-tier candidates. On that list of about 10 candidates, there is one female name. Here is what the HUPS bloggers have to say about her (putative) candidacy:

Let's face it: Cheri Yecke has no chance to become Harding's next president. Is it because she's too conservative? Absolutely not. One can't be too conservative for the Harding presidency. It it because she's too liberal? Of course not. She's Sarah Palin with a Church of Christ pedigree. Is it because she's incapable? No, she ran the state school systems of Florida and Minnesota. It's because of one reason and one reason alone: she's a she.

No one on the Harding campus today has a bigger rolodex than Cheri Yecke. Her political connections are impeccable, especially for the political connections the university would deem key. She has a PhD from the University of Virginia. She's smart, tough, and PR-savvy in a way that is currently lacking in the HU administration. Her fundraising abilities would be superb. In any other university, selecting Yecke as the university's next president would be a no-brainer. But Harding is no ordinary university. For the most part, it still must feel like its president can go into churches of Christ and preach, an outmoded view of CoC higher ed that needs to be put to bed. The job of a university president is to manage and fundraise. Period. Do you really think there's anyone better on the HU campus to do this than Cheri Yecke? We at HPS think not. But until the Churches of Christ get a little less misogynistic, she's hit her glass ceiling at HU.

It's not that this is (at all) surprising--in fact, I'm a little curious as to why there's even a female name on the list at all, since the HUPS analysis is (IMO) unarguable. But the real question this raises for me is a legal/theological one. I'm aware that religious institutions of higher education may legally discriminate on the basis of religion (though not, of course, on other bases, such as ethnicity or race.) So what would the inclusion or exclusion of a female candidate in the upcoming presidential search indicate? It seems that if gender is ruled to be outside the bounds of legal discrimination on the basis of religion, there should be more than one token female candidate--and they should have a real shot. So female candidates might have a genuine basis for legal grievance if things go down like the HUPS folks predict. But, if female candidates do not appear on the list--then the only way for that to be legal would be to make it official that gender discrimination is part of the religious practice of the Churches of Christ. This, it seems to me, would then imply strongly that (contrary to the noises people make about the "women's role issue" being a matter of secondary importance, a matter of opinion, not something we should invite contention or schism over, etc., etc., ad nauseam), this is a kind of admission that silencing women is at the heart of CofC practice.

I'm curious to see which way this will go.

only girls have eyelashes

2011-01-10T16:20:00.000-05:00

Clare's been telling me this for months now: only girls have eyelashes.

She's right, you know. The most reliable way to determine the intended gender of any character in a little kid's media world is their eyelashes. If they're a girl, they have long sweepy eyelashes to bat at the camera. If they're a boy, they don't. Generally that's not the only gender signal, of course. Girls also generally have to have bows in their hair and all sorts of accessories. Good grief, Minnie Mouse still prances around in 1950's style high heeled shoes. But you could delete all that, honestly, and you'd still know the girls from the boys without any trouble because, as my perceptive 4-year-old has accurately pointed out, only girls have eyelashes.

So a few weeks ago, I proved to her that boys actually do have eyelashes "for realz" (that is to say, empirically). I made Brent take off his glasses so Clare could see that not only does he have eyelashes, they are way awesomer than mine. She accepted this but maintained: on TV, only girls have eyelashes.

I haven't thought much more about it, other than to grumble to myself about yet another manifestation of the ubiquitous "female-gender-as-marked" thing that my daughter is observant enough to note without understanding it. Then yesterday I came across this: Toys Receiving Makeovers. Apparently in the 80's version of these toys (including Care Bears, My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite and Strawberry Shortcake), girl characters didn't have to have Tammy-Faye mascara in order to be recognizable as girls. The worst thing about the side-by-side pics is that the toys in question were already nauseatingly girly to begin with--how much more gendered can you get than Care Bears and My Little Pony?!

So, when Clare draws girls (and her human representations are evolving quite rapidly these days! No more amoeba-spider-people!) they get two--yes, precisely two (?)--carefully drawn eyelashes. Otherwise of course you would never know that they are girls.

from BBC News: Female Torah scribe observes and battles tradition

2011-01-06T10:52:00.000-05:00

I heard this on the way from St. Stephens Preschool this morning. Read the written story here, but take the time to play the embedded video, too.

Several things struck me while listening to the interview: Aviehlah's description of her work, how she came to her vocation, and how she views her unique status as the first female scribe in a few hundred years. She engages in her work as a sacred vocation--a vocation whose first glimmering came to her at the age of 3, with her first sight of the Hebrew script, which of course she did not understand fully but which she felt, instinctively, was important in some way.

But it's her description of her determination to live "sincerely and 100% within tradition" that struck me most forcefully. People regard her in a variety of ways: some people reject her, some people are fine with her, and some people seem to assume that she does what she does as a way of "sticking it to the man." This is not how she describes her vocation or her intent in pursuing it. Instead, she emphasizes how many years she spent learning from men--teachers and fellow scribes, all of whom are male--and how many years she has spent earnestly delving into tradition, seeking an answer to the question of whether it is permissible for a woman to do this work. This is, she says, as if stating the absurdly obvious, is obedience, not rebellion.*

Truthfully, it is absurdly obvious. And maybe (dare I hope?) the absurdly obvious is more easily seen in an example of a woman's devotion to a sacred calling in a tradition outside of our own CofC tradition.

Now, we don't have an authoritative body of leaders to sign off on something (or not). And we don't have an accumulated body of textual commentary describing authoritative traditions (at least, not in the same sense). What we do have, we "speak where the Bible speaks" people, is the biblical text. So for women in the c'sofC, our version of Aviehlah's obedient and diligent years-long search of tradition for permission to practice her vocation is going back to the Bible: back to those verses and the authoritative interpretations we've received, in an effort to understand, an effort to discern how we are called and what our scriptures truly say about that. This is, to state the absurdly obvious, obedience--not rebellion.

*note: some of these details are pulled from my memory of the audio interview aired on the BBC, not all of which appears in the video or the written text.

sending out the wolves

2010-12-20T13:34:00.000-05:00

"We let a wolf into the church," Rexrode mused, "and now we can't get him out."

I wish I could say that this story about a small CofC in VA frightens me because it surprises me. Instead, it frightens me precisely because I don't find it that surprising.

I've never blogged directly about the things in my experience which render this narrative unsurprising. I've alluded to them only once, writing,

...[our] churches generally don't concern themselves with psych profiles or background checks for people who voluntarily go overseas to do mission work--these people raise their funds, typically from several churches, and so at least some of those churches don't necessarily know them personally or well, and yet we give people money at the drop of a hat and send them off--just trusting that we can take them at their word, because they say they're wanting to do this great work for the Lord. Even if we don't really know them from Adam.

Maybe that's awesome. But it's also naive.

And it totally backfires. Sometimes.

Because sometimes the people we fund are not good people. Sometimes they are terrible people, who do very bad things, all paid for out of church budgets by people who feel comfortable assuming that they can just take someone's word for it that all they want to do is serve God.

I see the exact same issue here in this story of the Harrisonburg Church of Christ--and for that reason, I wish I could agree with the reporter that this small church community "is an unlikely setting...for the kind of Southern Gothic tale involving murder and mendacity and money and treachery and, by many accounts, the handiwork of Satan himself." Instead I find it, sadly, a quite predictable setting. The only difference between what I've seen and this story is geography: this time, they invited the wolf in, instead of sending him out into the mission field.

And so, of course, this means that this time, the wolf got caught. What happens to the wolves we send out into the world outside of our little red brick churches?

"God, hear me rage" @ feministing.com

2010-12-16T13:53:00.000-05:00

Don't miss this post in feministing.com's Faith and Feminism series.

crowdsourcing

2010-12-14T10:37:00.000-05:00

The question on overt instances of sexualization of women and girls in church came up in discussion on the soccer field-church post. I've heard some strange things from pulpits over the years--strange, and yes I have no doubt unintentional, things...and you may have too. I'm wondering what examples come to your mind of the sexualization of women and girls in your experience of the c'sofC.

One simple one that occurs to me at the moment--pegged to a specific memory, but something which I must have seen dozens of versions of at this point--is the way in which a missionary and his wife were introduced during a Sunday morning service. He was introduced by name, lauded for his work and his talents and his willingness to sacrifice, etc., and then his new bride was brought up, introduced as "his lovely wife" and then--if I remember correctly--he was publicly congratulated on his fine catch.

It's like the Sunday morning version of that awful commercial I've been nauseated by during the Daily Show the last few weeks--the one where the wedding is "the jungle" and the dude is on the prowl, so skillful that he gets "his prize" to come to him. Pardon me while I go vomit. And no, it's not morning sickness.

toward a zombie cyborg theology

2010-12-10T10:53:00.000-05:00

Because cyborgs are cooler.

But also because zombies, as cultural figures, are inherently anthropologically dualistic. Think about it: you take a human person, give'em a zombie bite, and the person dies but their dead body, who is not the person you used to know, becomes reanimated by an external force of some kind and then tries to eat your brains. This is precisely why, of course, we can kill zombies with impunity and without remorse: they are not human anymore. They are not the person they were; that essential self is gone, and the body that looks like the person you used to know is just a dead vehicle being driven by something else. --You just don't get more dualistic than that!

So it's curious to me that the read of The Walking Dead in the blog post from religiondispatches.org, "Toward a Zombie Theology," is that the working anthropology is materialistic:

"But even with Christian overtones the writers of Walking Dead end up coming down in favor of brain-based consciousness. In death, including the death of the brain, Dr. Jenner says, “Everything you ever were, or will be…[is] gone.”

Note: I haven't been watching this show, so the interpretation of the show may well be right on target...which means that the writers of the show should be wrestling with how to reconcile the inherent dualism of zombies with their attempt at materialism. In any case, my point is that zombies, as a symbolic monstrous posthuman figure in our cultural landscape, are much more at home with garden-variety dualism of body/soul than they are with materialism of any sort, reductive or non-reductive.

Whereas cyborgs, on the other hand, are resolutely materialistic. What makes a cyborg? Some sort of bodily merging of biology and technology--flesh and machine. Now, we think of human persons and machines as categorically different, not least because machines don't have "souls"--which we can just define here very loosely as that essential inner thing which animates a creature. Machines are not animated; humans are--basic categorical difference. So, what the cyborg does, conceptually, is render that categorical difference highly questionable. If a single creature is part human and part machine--then what is the difference between human and machine? And if we can create (and we regularly do, let's note) humans that actually are to some degree "part machine" and they are much better off thus--that is to say, able to flourish as humans because of their part-machine-ness--then, part of being human includes the potential of interfacing and merging with technology and making it a functional part of ourselves. Here, then, the definition of human shifts into one with an emphasis on embodiment, and the surprising ways our bodies are configurable. That's moving away from dualism with a vengeance.

So the question posed in response to zombies is actually much better posed in response to cyborgs:

"So does this leave theology out in the cold? The dominant theological understanding for anthropology in Christianity is still dualistic, a synthesis of the physical body and an immaterial spirit or soul, but in recent years those advocating a monistic view of human nature have arisen, articulating a perspective they call “nonreductive physicalism.” This view, advocated by scholars like Fuller Seminary’s Nancey Murphy, recognizes the significance of the cognitive neurosciences that have cast doubt on philosophical and theological concepts of the soul, but argues for human significance and the divine as opposed to materialist interpretations in the field."

Do we need a concept of the soul in order to faithfully interpret the biblical canon and the Christian tradition? I would argue, rather, we would probably do better to dump it in order to better understand both our own scripture and Christian tradition and the best available (and constantly evolving) scientific witness on the anthropological question.

a quick note

2010-12-08T16:15:00.000-05:00

The blog post "gender, identity and the church" is now up as a podcast via Half the Church. You can find it here.

if the church were a soccer field

2010-12-08T13:50:00.002-05:00

I came across an article today about girls playing sports--and the way in which excelling or simply participating in a sport gives girls a way to think about themselves and their bodies in a context free of sexualization. In playing sports and becoming athletes, girls learn to value their bodies for "what they can do" and not just for how they look, or how other people perceive them as sexually desirable.

This rings anecdotally true for me--I played center fullback on my high school soccer team and I loved it, though, admittedly, I was as anxious a performer on the field as I was anywhere else. Even so, on the field, I was a necessary and competent part of a team. When I subbed out, they missed me. I remember a game where we were five goals up in a shut-out and the coach took me out in the second half for a bit; while I was on the sidelines the opposing team scored two goals. I was told to get back in there. Now that's validation. Someday when I have an office I'll hang my senior MVP award on the wall next to my PhD.

The article on girls & sports links to an APA report on girls' sexualization. Toward the end of the report, the authors name several possible agents and avenues for the construction of alternatives to the overwhelming sexualization of girls present in US culture. One of those possible agents, as you might expect, is parents & family. One is sports and extracurricular activities. One is religion. And it should be; this makes sense. Our churches should absolutely be able to and active in providing a context of validation and self-definition for our girls that is free of the cultural context of sexualization.

And I had to ask myself, do our churches do this?

I'm afraid that if I answer honestly, I might have to answer no.

It is a sad thing to reflect that playing soccer may have done more for me as a girl than sitting in church. And I'm not alone; Naomi Walters writes,

In retrospect, maybe part of the reason I was so drawn to soccer is because I was good at it and my skills were utilized there. In my youth group, the females were the most consistent members. When it came to “Youth Sunday” we did all of the planning, and yet, were forced to delegate everything we had planned to male execution. It was clear from an early age that I was born to be a leader, and since I couldn’t do that at church, maybe I played soccer instead? It feels good to be a vital part of a team, a leading force, a fully participating member.

Is the practice of silencing women in our churches an overt form of sexualization akin to the onslaught of sexualized media images, Bratz dolls and pinkified princessing our girls endure as a routine and mostly unremarked aspect of girlhood? No. But is it a covert reinforcement of the hypersexualized message that girls' bodies are objects that define and restrict them?

Yeah. I think so.

Maybe you're disposed to think that there's no obvious connection between our practice of silencing women in the church and the sexualization of women and girls in our surrounding culture. After all, the most common defense of our practice is that it's biblical and therefore counter-cultural in the best possible way. And what does being silent in the assembly have to do with sexuality? How does accepting the God-created differences between men and women and their concomitant different roles have anything to do with sexualization of girls and women in the larger culture?

But these practices are not counter-cultural. These doctrines and practices fall right into step with messages from our culture that female bodies define women and girls differently than male bodies define men, and that these female bodies fall under the authority of others--others who get to define when and where and how these bodies should be used, when and where and how these bodies are valuable. This is the same message that women and girls get in the form of sexualization, in which others define when and where and how their female bodies are valuable--that is, desirable. The only difference is the lack of an overt sexual component--but this does not, IMO, make the underlying message any less disconcerting or anxiety-producing. And it certainly does not provide a basis from which the sexualized message of our culture can be subverted.

And this means we need to take a good hard honest look at the knee-jerk defensive claim that we're being "biblical" and "counter-cultural." We need to take a good, hard, honest look at what our doctrine and our practice really does to the women and the girls in the pews of our churches. It's not that we're getting it all wrong--as I've said before. But the gospel message that could--and does--subvert the dominant cultural sexualization of girls and women, the message that God has created and chosen and gifted and loved and called without qualification, is one that isn't consistent with the church's practice of silencing and restricting of women. And we need to take a good hard honest look at this inconsistency.

If the church were a soccer field, little girls could discover just how much they could really do--and we would cheer for them.

SJWD

2010-11-08T09:55:00.000-05:00

On the way home from Atlanta last week, we saw lots of amusing and picturesque things. Clare liked the cows. Brent liked the great big water tower painted like a peach that also happens to resemble a human butt, IF you approach from the north (but not, we observed on the return trip, from the South. Coincidence? Maybe.) And I was greatly amused by the water tower labeled "SJWD," which prompted the mental exercise of creating a list of things that would fit the acronym for "Sh** Jesus Would Do." (It's nice to have something to keep you awake and alive on long roadtrips, after all.) Alas, my list is incomplete, but what's a blog for, anyways? Help me out. Add your contributions in the comments pls!

Sh** Jesus Would Do:

bring the liquor
speak the rude truth!
play in the dirt
knock stuff over
tell weird stories and then tell people it's their fault if they don't get it

2010-10-25T15:29:00.000-05:00

Heresy detection costs extra. No refunds.

gender, identity and the church

2010-10-15T11:29:00.003-05:00

About a year ago, I was sitting in my therapist's office, answering for her a question I've answered many times before, to interlocutors both hostile and friendly: "why do you stay? why don't you just leave?"

Let me back up a bit. My very first appointment with this therapist, where you go through all the basic obvious stuff like who you are and what's driven you to seek therapy, I felt compelled to begin with, "Okay...well, to understand me and why I'm here, I'm going to have to explain something else first. Have you ever heard of the Churches of Christ?"

So, it shouldn't have been surprising to this doctor--and she was a pretty good therapist, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't, actually--that when I answered her "why don't you leave" question, I started talking about issues of identity. After all, I had begun my answer to "who are you" with explaining that to understand who I am and what my "issues" are, first you have to understand something about my church.

So, I said to her what I've said to many people in various ways: how can I leave something that is my home, a community that has shaped who I am, a people who have helped form me into the person I am today (however much they may not like the result)? How do you "leave" your own self?

It's not that it's impossible to do. I've had a front-row seat to observe what it means and what it takes to "leave." And so I know, not just by my own instincts, that it means redefining who you are.

I came across an observation just this week, from a friend of a friend, that leaving the CofC was harder than coming out of the closet. Think about that for a moment. Yeesh.

My therapist was slightly confused by this strong correlation of personal identity and church. I have a feeling she refrained from suggesting this was slightly cult-like. When I insisted to her that I was not alone or unique in this--that everyone I know in a similar situation to my own expresses this dilemma in the same way, as an issue of identity, I think she was even more confused. It didn't make sense to her that my sense of self would depend on this community that was less than affirming of the entirety of who I am. It seemed masochistic, backward, undifferentiated, and problematic--and if this wasn't simply my personal hangup but a broader problem for other people like me, then something must indeed be systemically wrong.

I parse it differently. Yes, there's something wrong, something systemically wrong, in our communities that are producing identity crises in people. But what's wrong is parasitic on what we're actually doing right.

So what is that we're doing--both rightly and wrongly? What we're talking about is one of the main functions of the church, the process of spiritual and personal formation. In our churches, this starts with "Cradle Roll" and never stops--adult Bible study classes in your average Church of Christ are a huge ministry priority. Now, if you're someone who's seriously interested in the process of catechesis and spiritual formation then there are a million things to talk about, positive and negative, about how churches in our tradition go about this ministry and how it might be better. My point is simply that it happens.

Within this process of spiritual and personal formation, we teach something important and theologically fundamental, again and again. We teach people who they are. This begins in Sunday school with felt boards and internalizing the narrative of God's creation. Who are we? We are creations of God. It continues up through elementary school age classes on topics like baptism and even in youth group studies on topics like how to avoid backrubs from the opposite sex. Who are we? Baptized believers, the elected and saved, children of God, joint-heirs with Christ, ambassadors for Christ.

In a broad but real sense, we get this right. We teach people who they are. We teach that everyone is a creation of God, a child of God, elected and saved, baptized and gifted with the Spirit, joint-heirs with and ambassadors for Christ. We teach that this gift of beloved, sought-after, dearly paid for, identity is intended for every human being on this planet. We get this part right.

So what goes wrong? How could someone brought up learning that their identity is chosen, loved, cherished, elevated, and gifted by God end up in an identity crisis fostered by the same community that taught them these things?

Answer: that someone is female.

Here's how it happens. (This is not theoretical. Nor, I hasten to add, is it merely personally anecdotal. This is a pattern traced out in the multiple narratives here on this blog and at Half the Church.) It happens like this: we believe it. We believe what the church teaches us about who we are. We internalize it. It becomes how we define ourselves and our relationships, not just to the church, but to the world. It shapes how we envision our future, our goals, our entire life. It shapes our desires, our choices, our sense of vocation.

And one day, when we bring the gift of who we are back to the church who taught us who we are, we are told: No. No, that's not the whole story of who you are. Or, yes, but. Yes, these things apply to you because they apply to everyone, but. They apply, but they apply differently. Yes, you are a creation of God and a child of God; yes, you are elected and saved; yes, you are baptized and gifted with the Spirit; yes, you are joint-heirs with and ambassadors for Christ--but, despite all of that, here are the things that you can't do. Because although these things apply, they carry an implicit limiting condition on what they can mean...for a woman.

Identity crisis? You bet. Because it's not simply about roles. It's not simply about a list of do's and don't's. It's about what it means to be a woman in our churches: someone to whom all the adjectives of Christian identity apply--until you take them seriously in all their fullness. Most women in our churches learn the implicit conditional on their Christian identity--soak it up at the same time they soak up everything else, and, most women in our churches, I dare to say, don't recognize the theological limits it implies. Which means that it's just a handful of women who, believing these lessons so utterly and staking their identities on them so thoroughly, find this theological limitation and reject it as impossibly contradictory to all they've been taught in their church their whole lives about who they are.

Ever wonder, along with my therapist and they countless others who've asked me this question, why these women don't simply leave? This is why. They are bringing to the church its own teaching about who they are, and asking it, "weren't you serious about this? didn't you mean it?" Ever wonder why these women typically spend years banging their head against the altar, saying these things over and over, until finally if they leave, they do so with bloodied foreheads and weary spirits? Because they're coming back again and again to the church with its own message of Christian identity, asking the church to simply recognize its own teachings.

It's not a Messiah complex, no matter what my therapist (probably) thought. It's not altruism. It's simply inevitable. Rightly or wrongly, wisely or foolishly, at some level, we're returning to the ecclesial authority of our lives, seeking affirmation of our identity where we were first taught to embrace it as our own: creations of God, children of God, elected and saved, baptized and gifted with the Spirit, joint-heirs with and ambassadors for Christ. Isn't this for me? Or are you going to take it all back?

humility

2010-10-09T17:05:00.001-05:00

Maddeningly, it's the virtue someone like me is presumed not to have--a "lady preacher" and PhD, I couldn't possibly be anything but an arrogant power-seeking female. Maddening, because, ironically, if I have learned anything at all in my pursuit of knowledge of God and God's cosmos, it's that humility is the prerequisite for learning anything at all. Seeking knowledge means admitting you don't know stuff, and that some of the stuff you thought you knew--that you were sure of, sure enough to correct other people on, defend as self-evident, stake your life on--was wrong.

When anyone brought up in the CofC comes to the theological conclusion that the silencing and categorical subordination of women is unbiblical and morally wrong, it is because of humility. Without it, you just don't change your mind about something you were previously sure of.

I would love to see some reciprocal humility from those defending the practice of women's silence and categorical subordination. But what I see, instead, is the opposite--a refusal to acknowledge, even as a remote possibility, that we as a church have historically gotten this wrong. I see a preference for believing evil of others over considering the possibility of repentance.

and to think...

2010-10-06T10:13:00.000-05:00

...that I once naively assumed that academia would be my haven from sexism.

What is it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy? (h/t Jamey Walters)

2010-10-04T19:11:00.000-05:00

I've always hated the way every housecleaning product on the market is sold by smiling women who wipe, mop, sanitize, launder, spray, freshen up and scrub down everything in their shiny happy homes so that their children don't eat germs from raw chicken off the countertops and noone has to suffer from garbage can stink.

But I really really hate these Electrolux commercials with Kelly Ripa.

happier things

2010-10-02T13:42:00.000-05:00

So, because lately this blog has been such a downer...

Baby #2 is due sometime mid-to-late April. Official due date at the moment, April 21. (Naturally, this falls right in the middle of Holy Week. Not the best timing for a priest, but I keep reminding Brent, Clare was 15 days post-date, so I'm decently sure baby #2, officially designated "Tinkerbell" by guess-who while in utero, will stay put till after Easter...but, of course, no guarantees.)

That puts me about 10-11 weeks along at this point, our first appointment at Avalon Midwifery went nicely, although since Tinkerbell is still snugged under my pelvic bone we couldn't hear the heartbeat. Mostly what we heard was my stomach growling...

I find myself hoping Tink's another girl, but of course it'll be awhile before we know. As a fem-cyborg-mama I am a judicious technophile--not all technological doo-dads associated with pregnancy/birth are actually beneficial--but the 20-week-ultrasound is IMO the awesomest!

men we can trust. women, on the other hand...

2010-10-01T10:59:00.002-05:00

This past week, I feel like I did some honest engagement with people of all sorts of theological opinions on the topic of women's silence in our churches. It was a lot of work, it took up quite a bit of time, it took a lot of focus, and it took a lot of strategic reading to avoid getting stuck on the horribly insulting things that do get said in pretty much every discussion I've ever seen/heard on this topic. While commenting, I read past the insults, the suspicions of character, the easy ad hominem stuff. But it's not that it isn't there--go back through and count up how many different ways that the moral character of women who want to serve God gets assassinated. It's a constant theme.

One of the things I've been pondering for the last several years is the way in which CofCs take for granted the upright, upstanding character of the people in our churches and in our tradition more broadly. Some of this has to do with our theological anthropology, and some of it has to do with our ecclesiology and the pragmatics of a strict "congregational autonomy" set up. We don't typically require a lot of fuss or background checks for Sunday school teachers or youth group volunteers, for example. And churches generally don't concern themselves with psych profiles or background checks for people who voluntarily go overseas to do mission work--these people raise their funds, typically from several churches, and so at least some of those churches don't necessarily know them personally or well, and yet we give people money at the drop of a hat and send them off--just trusting that we can take them at their word, because they say they're wanting to do this great work for the Lord. Even if we don't really know them from Adam.

Maybe that's awesome. But it's also naive.

And it totally backfires. Sometimes.

Because sometimes the people we fund are not good people. Sometimes they are terrible people, who do very bad things, all paid for out of church budgets by people who feel comfortable assuming that they can just take someone's word for it that all they want to do is serve God.

But if it's women making that claim, right in their own church community...forget about it. Obviously, there is something heretofore unknown that's wrong with their moral character. They have an agenda. It's about power. It's about money. It's about arrogance. Whatever it is, it's not what they claim--we can't take their word for it that they just want to serve God the best way that they can.

Do you see the disconnect? Men, we can trust. Women, on the other hand...

open question

2010-09-30T19:21:00.000-05:00

Does affirming a "principle of male spiritual headship" logically imply that men are inherently better equipped to be spiritual leaders?

Yes or no, give me a thumbnail sketch of the reasoning. Am curious about the consensus/dissensus on this point.

a short random personal observation

2010-09-30T11:12:00.000-05:00

So today, as I sit down to finalize prep for a class at Calvary on Sunday on religion & science perspectives on the creation narrative, I realize once again the complete absurdity of my personal situation. Here I am, about to prep for an adult forum as a completely normal and routine part of my workday, because I was invited to teach a class on a subject I've spent years now acquiring a certain level of expertise on--after spending days in the rabbit-hole of arguing for the possibility, the ability and privilege of my doing such things. Sometimes--most of the time--it's really healthy for me to inhabit this whole other world where this debate doesn't exist. But today, stepping from one to the other is jarring.

on scripture

2010-09-28T20:52:00.001-05:00

Imagine with me, for a moment:

You're in church, on a Sunday morning, a little rumpled but not late--a sincere Bible major about to graduate from one of our "brotherhood's" institutions of higher ed, and you're listening closely to the sermon, which is on the parable of the talents. You've heard this story since the womb, practically, maybe (who knows) even a couple times in utero--after all, it preaches pretty well. But this Sunday, you hear it differently. This Sunday, like you are all the time these days, you're wondering just what exactly you're going to do with your life, constantly barraged by the question from well-meaning friends and relatives "so what are you going to do when you graduate?" You're not ready to answer that question, despite four years of college nearly completed and a steady, unwavering conviction that majoring in Bible has been the right thing to do. You don't feel ready for a pulpit--not by a long shot. You're not even sure you're up for youth ministry. You certainly don't feel equipped for mission work in some faraway place. So this Sunday, you hear that parable differently. Rather than shake your head in pity for the fool who didn't have the sense God gave a (capitalistic-minded) goat and at least invest in a bank and draw interest, for the first time, you're afraid that might be you. This time, you hear in that story a challenge: what are you going to do with your talent? And you sit there, listening to the familiar text, the familiar sermon theme, and you think--no. No, that's not me. I'm not going to bury my talent. And I'm not going halfway, either. I'm going all the way, because that's what God asks of me.

Now, imagine that that's you, and you're a girl.

Or is that bit just for the boys?

women in ministry and the impasse of scripture

2010-09-25T09:22:00.000-05:00

From Jamey Walters at Becoming What We Are: http://jewalters.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/46/

hope sinks

2010-09-24T09:50:00.000-05:00

Don't get me wrong. Underneath all this grumping I have a boundless optimism that indeed human beings have the capacity to desire good, to change, to shift, to repent, to act. I do, I really do. Otherwise I'd be outta here.

But damn it, I hate these online discussion like pure pizen. They, more than anything else, send me as close to the Pit of Despair as I ever get. I can sit through a service with its all-male revue and not sweat it. I can hear casual benevolent sexism, and sigh and move on. I can hear these stories, note that in the last decade nothing has changed, grumble, and then roll up my sleeves in determination that this must change. But these online things...I should skip them.

It's not even just that they are inevitable stalemates and dead ends, with the same hermeneutical arguments deployed futilely from both sides and (best case) the same polite incomprehension in the end. Or, even, worst case, ending in things like accusing women of "spiritual abortion" because somehow advocating the giftedness of women to do all sorts of things necessarily implies not teaching other women like the Bible says. (??)

The real problem is, the faith I had in the ability of narrative to crack open the possibility of real dialogue, conversations that won't just repeat ad nauseam as they swirl around the drain, is waning. I really thought this was the key, the sort of magic key, that might make our endless discussions productive. I haven't entirely lost this hope, but it's starting to be hard work to keep it afloat. Its initial buoyancy has been shot full of holes.

This is why (excerpted from my downer of a comment on preachermike's post):

the real disconnect is that one side of this discussion perceives the relevance of women’s experiences as part of the dialogue, and one side views all human experience as something basically sinful and untrustworthy, to be submitted to the corrective lens of (received interpretations of) scripture. In short, gals, it doesn’t matter that you experience an internal crisis of life-shattering proportions because you are caught in the middle of hearing God’s call and hearing the church you want to serve deny that this is possible or genuine or righteous. It’s not relevant, because what you need to do is “get your mind right” (in the immortal words of the Captain of Road Prison 36 in Cool Hand Luke). Somehow, it’s become a badge of righteousness to deny one’s own experience, and by extension, the lived experiences of these women.

To be "rude" about it, I'm stuck with an image of incredibly sincere, faithful, loving people opening their Bibles, staring fixedly at the text, and sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "lalalalalalala" to drown out the sound of these women's voices. Because we can't allow ourselves to hear, to understand, to care, to examine what these women are saying. That itself would be to dangerously flirt with unfaithfulness to the Word, a sign that we were wavering in our conviction that the only thing that matters here is our received interpretation of scripture.

The women thing is not about women. It's not. But it should be.

haaaaaaaaappy anniversary, cy-boys and cyber-girls!

2010-09-24T08:59:00.000-05:00

If you're into this sort of thing, you won't want to miss the celebratory 50 posts about cyborgs in honor of the cyborg's 50th anniversary (since its etymological debut in 1960, in the Clynes and Kline article on space exploration in the now defunct Astronautics journal).

Half the Church

2010-09-22T16:42:00.000-05:00

Go to http://halfthechurch.wordpress.com and listen/download the podcast! I haven't been able to listen past the introduction of the four women featured in the podcast--had to go pick up Clare--but just hearing the names (Naomi Walters among them) and knowing the people involved in putting this together, I know this has got to be good.

From the site:

The site was launched in September 2010 as a companion to two presentations at Abilene Christian University’s Summit. The two presentations were titled “Half the Church” and were a part of a track on Women in Ministry in Churches of Christ. The title of the class was both a (not so) subtle play on the New York Times Best Seller Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn and a line from an interview with a female student in ACU’s Graduate School of Theology. She said, “It’s not good for the church to be silencing more than half its members.”

The two presentations were the product of two research projects:
“Half the Church: Calling and Vocation for Women in the Churches of Christ”
“Half the Church: Women in Gender-Inclusive Churches”
The purpose of this site is to archive the audio podcast titled “She Is Called” presented in the first session and to extend the research of the second session that seeks to identify Churches of Christ “that have found gender inclusivity important enough to talk about openly and act upon positively.”

sweat girls

2010-09-09T10:27:00.002-05:00

Last week, I woke up from an unplanned exhaustion coma-nap on the couch, particularly grumpy as it didn't alleviate the exhaustion really, to find Clare staring wide-eyed at a Bratz dolls commercial. "What is she watching?!" I hissed at my poor spouse. "Those are SLUT DOLLS! Don't you have any judgment whatsoever?!"

Okay, so among the things wrong with this scenario is being mean to Brent, who, after all, let me sleep. And I have never wanted to be a parent who refuses to let her kids watch TV or go to the movies or whatever because it's eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil; I've always wanted to be a parent who encourages a sort of fearless exploration of the world. And, as Brent pointed out later that night, labelling female figures with epithets like "slut" is pretty judgmental and anti-feminist. Sigh.

But, she's four. And she doesn't discriminate in her susceptibility to commercials. I've blogged before at the hilarity of her wanting a Turbo-snake for Christmas--and just yesterday in Shoprite she berated me up and down the laundry aisle for not buying any OxiClean because it gets clothes the cleanest and brightest. Skechers Twinkletoes, Zhu-zhu Pets, slut dolls, housecleaning products, you advertise, my child wants to Buy.It.Right.Now. I mean, shit.

So, of course, Clare immediately proclaimed: "Mommy I want one! ...What's a sweat doll?"

Double sigh.

I told her that what I meant was that I did not like those dolls, she would not be getting one ever, and that Mommy had said a mean thing that she shouldn't have and she was sorry for calling them a mean word.

But the sweat girls have been haunting us ever since. They are now an ontological category in Clare's developing worldview and they will not budge.

A few days after that it became apparent that Clare had put together that one of the offending characteristics of sweat-girls is lots of makeup. But this was confusing to her, because as little makeup as I occasionally use, Clare has seen me putting it on and has the inevitable corresponding envy/curiosity about it. And worse, my little logician concluded that makeup = sweat girl, Mommy + makeup = Mommy is a sweat girl. And she used it against me as her verbal logic super-weapon to argue me into conceding that she could have one of those godawful dolls.

This is enough to make me sincerely want to dump every bit of lip gloss and zit concealer in the trash, along with the TV and every pair of high heels I own. And moving to a cave and home-schooling and in all other ways super control-freak indoctrinating my daughter in the way that she should go. This is not the mom I want to be. But I have got to deal with the sweat girls.

happy golden princess

Like phdinparenting, I have a daughter who cannot resist anything pink, sparkly, and conventionally girly, and I've already struggled with that. And of course, I'm still engaged in (slightly stalled and currently stowed out of sight) The Great Barbie Project of 2010, which touches on these same problematic gender constructs. And I've sewed my girl a gold lame and tulle princess dress with my own two hands, for crying out loud. And so my basic parental strategy is already set, I reminded myself: subversion, not opposition. Constant, quiet, insistent, hopeful subversion. I can't keep her away from pink and fluff and sparkle. And I shouldn't have to--pink sparkle fluff is fine, as long as what she is doing is enjoying herself, her body, and her imagination in healthy ways. I do think that's possible. It just means my task as a parent is creating the space for that possibility, when the rest of the world doesn't.

But the sweat girls? Are they redeemable? Barbies--frankly--are barely on the edge of redeemability, and possibly out of my reach, given my limited skills and available tools. The Bratz dolls seem less pliable to me--more frozen in their hyper-sexualized, exaggerated features and more locked into rigid fashion-obsessed roleplay.

So in response to my 4-YO's sweat-girl logic-bomb, I sat her in my lap and we had a seriously intense chat about what it means to be "pretty." I told her that there are good ways of being pretty and bad ways of being pretty. I told her that using makeup to be pretty can be good, or bad. I told her that I wanted her to know that she is pretty everyday, just exactly how she is, and that I want her to feel good about how she looks and what she wears, but that anytime being pretty means making an ouchie on your body (like wearing ouchie shoes), that's a bad kind of pretty. Or anytime choosing something because of what someone else likes instead of what she likes, that's a bad kind of pretty. Or anytime wearing something "pretty" means she can't do something she likes to do (climb trees, or run fast), that's a bad kind of pretty.

I'm not exactly sure how much of it got through. But she did stop talking about sweat girls. Praise God.

fun with data visualization!

2010-09-03T08:46:00.001-05:00

The best resource for getting acquainted with the complicated terrain of transhumanism and its permutations, and the various oppositions to transhumanism or the idea of human enhancement technologies generally, is Dr. James Hughes' "Overview of Biopolitics" chart, a version of which is in his book Citizen Cyborg and a version of which is published on the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) website. It's so useful, in fact, that I wrote to get permission to include it as an illustration in my dissertation text, which he was gracious enough to grant.

I have some quibbles with certain categories, but any sort of typology will generate those sorts of questions--that's part of why typologies are useful, as they force you to think "why would I do this differently, here?" And for the last couple days, I've been experimenting with an increasingly adapted form of Dr. Hughes' original typology, through a very fun little website called Many Eyes, a data visualization site. Ya uploads yer data, and out comes a purty picture. Very very nice for someone like me who often feels visually challenged, but wants to incorporate visuals into her pedagogy as often as possible (as a text-based and auditory learner, I can respect that not everyone learns best just by reading and listening and scribing).

So here's an in-progress look at what I've been putting together: the JTB Matrix Chart version of the Hughes/IEET Overview of Biopolitics:

Overview of Biopolitics Matrix Chart (adapted)

If you go to the manyeyes site, you can interact with this chart--there are five variables represented by the color blocks (views on citizenship/personhood is shown here, but in the full chart you can click between views on personhood, humanism, accessibility, technological risk, and environment).

I'll be tinkering with this more in the weeks to come, and possibly constructing a separate biopolitics and religion typology (one of my quibbles with the Hughes/IEET typology is that all religious views are "religious right" type Christian literalism/conservatism, so that I don't quite fit the typology...but then again, I like floating between categories, existentially speaking...).

from Mike Cope (at HCC on January 16, 2005)

2010-08-30T22:50:00.000-05:00

http://www.highlandchurch.org/resources/audio/mike-cope-jan-16-2005

Glenn Beck: about as good a preacher as you'd expect

2010-08-28T21:40:00.000-05:00

HuffPo characterizes Beck's rally at the Lincon Memorial as "more like a revival."

Yeah, I get it. There's a lot of artless God-talk in it (so far, I'm only 5 minutes in, and he doesn't seem to be slowing down any. Oh wait, a prayer break. Excellent. There's nothing more inspiring than hearing the name of Jesus invoked in tones of wroth. I can almost feel the spittle, and I'm not even there, and this thing was over hours ago.)

Beck begins with, "America today begins to turn back to God." What is this, performative speech? He says it and it is so? (Like, say, "let there be light?") Or perhaps, let's be generous, it's a declarative, a simple description of what he sees happening. Alrighty then, what's the evidence of such a felicitous occurence?

Beck: "For too long this country has wandered in darkness...[here Beck's sentence seems to wander about in darkness a bit too, thank God for ellipses]...this country has spent far too long worried about scars, and thinking about the scars and concentrating on the scars. Today, we are going to concentrate on the good things in America, the things that we have accomplished, and the things that we can do tomorrow."

Um, okay. Well, first of all let's play along and pretend that direct speech about America and American history and American people and America's future is not, ahem, political, because Beck assures us that this rally is not political. Whatever. But I'll play along, and treat this as a purely theological sentiment.

This theology SUCKS. (Sorry, Mom. It sucks so hard that not only do I have to say it, I have to capitalize it.) This is cheap grace in an American uniform, Glenn. Or how about another phrase, from an article I just read recently, about the reason why American young people are leaving churches in droves: "moralistic therapeutic deism," a "mutant form of Christianity" that "portrays God as a 'divine therapist' whose chief goal is to boost people's self-esteem." We've spent too long thinking about our "scars" and now it's time to stop all that half-hearted repenting and just think about the good stuff, so we can feel good about being Americans?! Turning back to God=being proud of our American selves. WTF? Glenn, I'd've rather heard a Jimmy-Allen-style hellfire-and-brimstone bit. I'm serious.

Worse, here's a quote from an attendee, from the HuffPo article: "This country was created by God, our creator. The problem is, the country is becoming Godless," said Greg Rinehart. "[Beck] said that a lot of people have lost Christ. The country is on the verge of becoming chaotic."

Religious message? Certainly. But apolitical? Hardly. In an atmosphere of hostility toward people of other faiths, by which I mean Muslims, which seems only to be increasing, how is this religious sentiment NOT an incendiary, divisive, politically laden sentiment? People without Christ are making this country chaotic. They must be stopped. Hey, let's go torch the mosque site. That'll show 'em Jesus is the Way. Then we can forget the scars and go on being proud of our badass American selves.

despicable me

2010-08-28T19:07:00.000-05:00

So, I'm on the train coming home from CCfB brunching and this family of four settles in 3 seats down from me. The older kid, a girl, between 2 and 3 is my guess, reminded me of Clare--all garrulous and girly, she was. And at first, for say, a good three minutes or so, I really enjoyed getting a sense of the family dynamic. A sorta crunchy mom, with a bag full of farmer's market produce and 7 mo. old babe, a quiet dad, a curious toddler. The first thought I had was, wow, that mom interacts with her daughter like I do with Clare--on a good day. Encouraging curiosity, conversing with her, lots of teachable moments, lots of silly wordplay, even, yes, silly impromptu song-singing.

Then I thought, okay, that mom is like me--if I were really extroverted, loud, and on speed.

Then I thought, okay, this lady is annoying.

But the thing is, she really was like me. I mean, eerily like. As in, even our favorite colors are apparently the same. And her pet peeves about punctuation misuse. And her penchant for using outsized vocabulary with her toddler ("I'm a pedant," she says. Pedant?!)

So I spent the rest of the train ride home pondering how I could recognize both this woman's similarity to me and her annoyingness. Do I annoy myself? Do I secretly think that I'm an annoying person? Is there a kernel of self-hate buried deep within my psyche?

This didn't seem quite right. Sure, I'm as screwed up as any GRITS but I do love myself pretty sincerely.

So finally it hit me: what annoyed me about this woman is the same thing that annoys me about any group of obnoxious teens on the subway--that pseudo-unself-conscious performance of the idealized self for the benefit of the audience within earshot. I'm not part of her family. I'm not supposed to be the target audience for the performance of super-smart-crunchy-mommyness. But me and everyone else around me were co-opted into it, just like you are when giggly gaggles of teenagers are oh-so-nonchalantly proving to everyone who can hear how cool they are. Blurg.

Anyway, that's my best guess. And I suppose the take-away for me is to make sure I don't over-perform my own pedantic-ecofriendly-breastfeeding-feminist-super-PhD-mommy self in public places for people who would really like to be able to sleep on their train.

2010-08-25T09:46:00.000-05:00

from Pigtail Pals: The Congresswomen, Stripper Barbie and Myself

Obviously, Stripper Barbie needs some modifications. Or, at the very least, a maternity dress just in case the inevitable happens.

iftar

2010-08-24T08:50:00.000-05:00

(In case you don't already know, iftar is the evening meal during Ramadan when Muslims break fast.)

I don't have a lot to say about our evening, in part because I've scarcely had any time to sit and think--about anything at all--over the last few days. St. Stephen's doesn't begin for Clare till the 31st, and until then, she's got Mommy's 100% attention and energy, until it runs out (typically, at about 10:00 a.m., sigh). But I am determined to share something about it, since it is a rather nifty idea on the part of the IDC to organize these "cultural exchange" type opportunities for people.

It was a bit awkward (how could it be otherwise) to just go to someone's house when you've never met them before and share a dinner, especially such an important (and lavish!) one as this, but awkwardness is a small price to pay. And it's kind of a crazy thing to do, sign yourselves up to entertain total strangers in your home, so I reckon if you're going to do it, then you're ready to welcome whatever crazy lot shows up on your doorstep. And we were probably an intimidating crew: me with my visible tattoos and bare arms, my husband with his priest collar, our wild-eyed 4-year-old in tow. And we were, absolutely, welcomed without reserve.

Our hosts took their teaching role very seriously, offered a lot of information and answered all sorts of questions. Wikipedia can now teach me nothing about iftar I didn't learn firsthand. :)

It occurred to me while talking about the Quran, and the translations of it for personal use and study versus the use of liturgical Arabic for prayer, that there must be some really sophisticated and interesting discussions on hermeneutics in Islam, and in interfaith or comparative religion discussions drawing in an Islamic perspective on the notion of interpretation. Something to look into. I said something about it before I could stop myself--the sort of theology-nerdy thing I do. :)

I didn't, however, talk much religion or theology (whether Christian or Muslim) with the women. Mostly, we talked about kids (our hosts had a daughter slightly younger than Clare), teaching (one of the women was a high school science teacher in Turkey), travel (wish I remembered more about my long-ago trip to Turkey), and whatnot. It didn't feel any more awkward, to me, than trying to get to know people outside my teensy nerdworld of theological acedemia generally does. Brent wondered--asked me on the way home--if the general silence of the women (not total) during the general conversation at the dinner table and during dessert bugged me. To be truthful (should I tag this #badfeminist?) it didn't, particularly, because 1) I wasn't given signals that I shouldn't contribute, and 2) I more or less assumed that the women's unease with conversing in English had more to do with it than anything else. I could be wrong, of course. But these men were proud of their wives, spoke of their accomplishments and (former) careers in Turkey with respect, and showed a lot of regret that relocating meant starting over and a lot of social isolation for them.

And frankly, as I said to Brent, I have a hard time faulting another religion for its symbolic manifestations of patriarchy (modest dress, hijab, possibly, silence) when I grew up in a tradition no less patriarchal, only our signals of it are so culturally acceptable to us that they are invisible. We'll call it a problem when we see it in a hijab, but we'll gloss right over it when it comes to women speaking with a mic from a pulpit. What's the difference? Who gets to throw the stone, here? I'm certainly not going to generically condemn a whole religion as hopeless and evilly sexist...because I'd have to condemn my own right along with it, just to be consistent.

[aside: I'm bracketing violence against women here. but again, I suspect it's easier to see and condemn violent acts against women when they confront you in unfamiliar forms. and, of course, Christianity is not blameless in this respect either--the stats on battered woman seeking shelter and advice from pastors, for example, are dismal, and the advice they often get justifies why.]

Anyhow. That's not much of a description of the evening as a cultural experience, I mean, I haven't bothered with talking about the food (delicious, unbelievably delicious) and whatever. But the whole point, as far as I can see, is less all of that than just the act of "breaking bread together in peace" (Abilene Interfaith Council's motto, and I've never heard a better).

the pattern

2010-08-18T16:24:00.001-05:00

Barbie Maternity Dress

needle size: 2
yarn: sport or baby sport weight
gauge: about 7-8 sts/inch

CO 36 sts, divide across 3 dpns, join and knit in rd.
Begin with stockinette st for a rolled hem, or if you prefer, a few rows on 3 X 3 rib for a ribbed hem.
Knit in stockinette till 2", or desired length of skirt (measured from inseam, not ridiculous teensy waist).

Designate needles 1, 2 & 3, with needle 1 as the front.

Begin increases for baby bump as follows:

needle 1: k3, m1 (right slanting*), k6, m1 (left slanting*), k3; needles 2 & 3, k to end.
k 1 row
needle 1: k3, m1*, k8, m1**, k3; needles 2 & 3, k to end
k 1 row
needle 1: k3, m1*, k10, m1**, k3; needles 2 & 3, k to end
needle 1: k3, m1*, k12, m1**, k3; needles 2 & 3, k to end
needle 1: k3, m1*, k14, m1**, k3; needles 2 & 3, k to end
(if you're going for Octomom proportions, you can keep going, but this is enough for a decent size baby bump, for a six-month-ish-along Barbie)
k 3 rows

Begin decrease rows:

needle 1: k3, ssk, k to 5 rem sts, k2tog, k3; needles 2 & 3, k to end
repeat until 12 sts remain on needle 1.

knit in rd a few rows until you are ready to divide for armholes (I didn't count rows here, so give your Barbie a fitting or two to determine this.

needle 1 (front): 18 sts; needle 2 (back): 9 sts; needle 3 (back): 9 sts. If needles 2 & 3 are in your way, place those sts on a holder temporarily.

needle 1: knit 10 rows stockinette
row 11: k4, BO 10, k4
rows 12-14 (knit each strap separately): stockinette st, then place sts on holder for 3-needle BO later.

needles 2 & 3: knit 14 rows stockinette, then 3-needle BO with the front strap sts. leave a long tail after BO to use as a string tie closure. Or if you're fussy, sew on a snap. I can't be bothered with that myself.

Finally, pick up some sts on the inside of the dress where the bottom of the baby bump begins, and knit a square flap. Anchor the top and side of the flap on the inside, stuff with some extra yarn or whatever you've got on hand, then stitch closed.

Congratulations, you've knocked up Barbie!

m1* : right slanting increase. Insert left needle into horizontal strand btw sts from back to front. Knit this through the front loop to twist the st and avoid a hole.
m1**: left slanting increase. Insert left needle into horizontal strand btw sts from front to back. Knit through the back loop. (from Vogue Knitting Quick Reference)

Sheryl WuDunn at GlobalTED 2010: Our century's greatest injustice

2010-08-17T14:07:00.000-05:00

by Rachel Wylie

2010-08-16T08:57:00.000-05:00

I had my first child, a daughter, in September of 2003. Shortly thereafter, my dear friend had her first, a son. One evening, I was babysitting her son, and he was asleep in my daughter's swing. I sat there that night, watching him swing back and forth, sleeping in that blissed out way babies do, and I started ruminating on what his future might be like. Knowing he would be raised in a strong Christian home, I remember thinking about all the wonderful, powerful things he might do as a man-- it was thrilling to think of all the great things he could accomplish for the Kingdom of God. In the same second that thought formed itself in my mind, I was struck cold by a second, sobering thought. In the 6 months I had been mothering my daughter, I had imagined a lot of things for her, but I had never considered that she might do “great work” for God. I allowed the distress of this realization to bother me for about five minutes, before I shoved it out of my consciousness by soothing myself with platitudes about all the “great work” women can do for the Kingdom – teach sunday school, bake casseroles, vist nursing homes, and clean the church building.

The uneasy feeling I first faced that evening of Maya's infancy surfaced now and again over the next five years, but I always rationalized it away – I know all the words about “separate but equal” when it comes to men and women in the Church of Christ.

And then, in August of 2009, a few things happened. I read through rude truth, I read a couple of Mike Cope’s blog posts on the subject, and then I read the statement Jimmy Carter released when he separated from the Southern Baptist church, and instead of hearing all of the proper responses in my head (too heavily influenced by evil feminism, doesn't take the bible seriously, etc), I began to hear the hum of truth. It was nearly like a switch.

Here is what I wrote to Jennifer a year ago this month:

It occurred to me that I had better make dang sure that I believed what I have grown up believing about women in the church…traditional gender roles in the church is not an issue I spent much time considering. My spiritual gifts are such that I have never felt constrained (mostly relieved) that I would never be expected to teach or pray or lead singing in an assembly.

But I have these 2 daughters, and they are beautiful and created in the image of God…and if that God did not intend for them to remain silent in church, if he has not determined that it is a bad idea for them to publicly share from their knowledge and wisdom about him…if this is not his design…then teaching them that He did, and it is…well it breaks my heart.

And so, for the first time in 28 years, I gave myself permission to consider that I might have it wrong.

And I did. I had it wrong. And even though I never consciously felt damaged or belittled by this tradition that I was raised in, I cannot describe the relief and the gratitude and freedom that has washed over me. It absolutely brings me to tears to think that I will not have to think of a way to explain to my children, whom I love more than life, why, even though they are all created in the image of God, who also loves them more than life, God only wants to hear one of their voices in Church.

As I grapple with this and unpack it a little bit more I expect to find the implications of growing up with the set of assumptions that I did has been damaging and stunting in more ways than I have considered. It is very strange to realize that one of the basic things I have always understood about myself and my place in the body of Christ was just plain wrong.

I was right. As I unravel all of my previous understanding of “Women in the Church” I am continually stunned to find how far reaching the effects have been. I have been moved to tears more times than once this past year, realizing for the first time that I am not less valuable (to the world, or to God) because I am a woman.

I cried just last week, when I really really let it sink in that not only is God not male (or female)--which I have always believed, in theory-- but God is not even *more* male than he is female. I cried reading Women in the Church: Reclaiming the Ideal when Carol Osburn explains Marrs’s proposal that “the actual “order of creation" (man first, woman last) intends not a move from superiority to inferiority, but through inclusio (man/woman) a move from incompleteness to completeness.”

I know all of the appropriate arguments used to oppress women in our Tradition. I know the scriptures, the “proper” interpretation, I know all of the “flawed” arguments of the “other side.” For the longest time, I was so afraid of being wrong, of being ungrateful for the role I had been given, of endangering my eternal soul, to even honestly examine scripture and consider the “other side.” Nearly 7 months after my email to Jennifer, it occurred to me that the things I had been taught about myself and women in general in Churches of Christ are are not compatible with the character of God revealed throughout scripture. It was this realization that has finally allowed me to step away from the “party line” about women in the church, timidly at first, and with more boldness as time goes on and some of the twisted places in my faith sort themselves out in the light of my new understanding.

My family finds ourselves in a strange place these days. I cannot raise my girls in a church environment that implicitly surrounds them with the lie that they are “less than” and that the list of spiritual gifts that God got to pick from when he assigned theirs is shorter than it would be if they were boys. But where to go? Churches of Christ, from birth until now is all that I know.

okay, it was me. I knocked up Barbie.

2010-08-15T20:00:00.000-05:00

profile view

full frontal

view of back closure & goring

So, this is definitely a very rough first try--but I have to say, for a non-crafty chick who's never made up a knitting pattern as she goes before, I'm pretty pleased with myself. I hope to decipher my notes and turn them into some kind of reproducible pattern without all the blunders and false starts that are evident in this one...Definitely, the whole thing could be a little more snug, I'm not in love with the ribbing on the bottom (a feature I borrowed from a sweater dress pattern I saw somewhere that wasn't free, alas), the increases in the middle of the belly are redundant and yucky looking...but hey, at least she really does look sorta pregnant.

And Clare seems to like it.

Pattern to be posted shortly, I promise.

the lessons

2010-08-14T13:14:00.000-05:00

Gail Collins' op-ed in the NYT on the suffragist movement has some lessons for us c'sofC'ers: organization, persistence, and the importance of men.

Why Language for God Matters, by Naomi Walters

2010-08-14T11:00:00.000-05:00

Naomi's article in New Wineskins is available in full here.

the maternal is not an element of the Barbie collective

2010-08-13T11:27:00.001-05:00

Last night, after researching free knitting patterns for the off-brand "Barbies" I got for 75 cents at the Thrift Store (I got three of them: one with green hair, one with pink hair, and one blondie whom I'm going to shear and suit up a la' Rachel Maddow), I was drifting off to sleep, still thinking about all the wonderful morphological transformations I was going to make to these dolls in my subversive initiative to to render Clare's Barbie fascination innocuous (a la' Kim Toffoletti), and it struck me: the one thing I had not seen, anywhere, was a Barbie MOM. And for damn sure, no preggo Barbies. Sure: there's "Skipper," but she's like, a younger sister or niece or cousin or something, and like a pre-teen anyhow. Barbie's not her mom, she's more like the cool single aunt type.

Barbie's married friend, pregnant Midge

So this morning I sat down and googled "Barbie mother" and whaddaya know...there's more out there than you would have thought. There's the Barbie Happy Family collection--which'll cost you about $250 for the whole happy family. However, you can buy Barbie's pregnant friend Midge Hadley separately, for only $80. She's got a magnetic detachable belly with a teensy little baby inside. At this point, rumor has it, this is her second.

Now, don't get excited, like all of a sudden Barbie's problematic body image issues are benefiting from some long-overdue therapy. When preggers Midge first hit the market, there was an uproar. Rather than rejoicing that skinny bitch Barbie had finally allowed some real female bodily reality into her ranks, we were frightened. Frightened! OMG, what will this teach our children? How could they possibly look up to their Barbie as a role model if she's pregnant!? Oh, the horror!

Barbie and youngest sister Kelly

So, nowadays, having learned that actual motherhood is totally off-limits if you're going to retain your plastic yet rigid fantasy girlish figure, we're back to Barbie and Kelly. There is just no damn way that Barbie's gonna be a mom.

Which is weird, right? Because Barbie is the projection of quintessential American womanhood--and no matter what color they paint her universal face, no matter what professional outfits she may put on and off, she is still the impossibly long-limbed and big-breasted fantasy girl of the American Dream. And it seems to me that an important piece of this cultural message of essential American womanhood is the get-married-settle-down-and-take-care-of-your-family piece. That's why our country doesn't have "working women," it has "working moms." No matter professional outfit you may put on, at the end of the day, you're supposed to take it back off and come home and take care of your family.

The only explanation I can come up with for why Barbie can display maternal tendencies but not maternal bodily realities is simply that, in the end, a Barbie without the perfect Barbie figure is no Barbie at all. It's a Barbie face on top of some monstrously distended body, and we can't have that.

So, definitely adding a preggers Barbie to my subversive plan, along with: zombie Barbie, crossdressing Ken, prosthetic cheetah sprinting legs Barbie, and of course, cyborg Barbie.

More suggestions welcome...

things I have learned this week

2010-08-12T23:14:00.000-05:00

you can't assume the people on the sidewalks talking to themselves are crazy anymore.
there is such a thing as too much whipped cream in an espresso con panna.
you can find free knitting patterns for Barbies on the internet (don't worry, I have a subversive master plan at work here. and when I get my hands on a Ken, s/he's getting a makeover for sure).
the new name of the Childlike Empress in NeverEnding Story? "Moon Child."
Einstein was a mad genius at baby-killing rationalizations.

and you?

irony

2010-08-10T10:03:00.000-05:00

I will never understand why people running for public office choose to do so by badmouthing the guvmint. If it's so dang horrible, wouldn't it be more consistent to, say, picket buildings and protest, start eliminating political offices, or, say, work toward making all government work unpaid and pro bono, you know--actually dismantle the institution that is so dang horrible--since by joining, all you're doing is putting your own self on the dole and making the problem one person bigger? But apparently, the only person we can trust not to "vote themselves entitlements from the largesse of the government" is someone seeking public office...

Sharron Angle: "We’re right to that point in the graph where it says, “government dependency.” And we know that once we have a majority that are dependent upon the government, we will lose our freedom; it says we go into bondage. That’s the next stage. Our Founders warned against this. They said don’t… that your liberty is only as secure as the people are. Because once they, um, get the ability to vote themselves entitlements from the largesse of the government, liberty is done; freedom is over with. We were warned. We are there. We’re right on the cusp of it, and you’ve identified those numbers. That’s the war that we’re in. You know, when I talk about a war and a battle and soldiers we have to take up our…our cry for freedom. And we can do it right now at the battle box… I mean at the ballot box. I’m not sure what continues on after 2010. I know people are very frightened about what’s going on in this country. And these programs that you mentioned -- that Obama has going with Reid and Pelosi pushing them forward -- are all entitlement programs built to make government our God. And that’s really what’s happening in this country is a violation of the First Commandment. We have become a country entrenched in idolatry, and that idolatry is the dependency upon our government. We’re supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and for our daily bread, not for our government. And you’ve just identified the real crux of the problem. I’ve also been endorsed by a PAC out of Washington D.C. and the name of that PAC is Government is not God. And I thought that that was so appropriate because that is really what’s happening in our society and we need to take our country back." (source: Las Vegas Sun)

Oh! Irony, no no no, we don't get that here...

vampires, cyborgs, Christians

2010-07-31T12:01:00.001-05:00

So, Anne Rice quits, because people suck? What did she expect, anyway?

That was my first gut-check response to the statement she made this week on Facebook, subsequently picked up by Huffington Post: 'I Quit Being a Christian.' Why? Well, like I said, people suck--and apparently Christian people are the suckiest: "It's simply impossible for me to 'belong' to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else. ...I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of …Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen."

Okay, granted: Christian people really are the suckiest, if only because they suck just as bad as everyone else and claim to be doing God's will or loving Jesus the whole time they suck. And I hate just as much as anyone the fact that goofy Ted Haggards and odious Fred Phelpses and you-name-hims are the media face of Christianity. In fact, I hate it so much I refuse to accept it. Which is exactly NOT what giving up and publicly quitting being a Christian does. I get that she wants to indict these sucky Christians for their suckiness. But in the meantime, she grants that this is what Christianity really is, and must be, and all right-minded people must quit it because it will only ever be a religion of haters and that's what Jesus would do.

Actually I think Jesus stuck around and got crucified for it, but hey, that's a theological quibble for another day, right.

On my own Facebook page I groused, "why sell out and let the haters define Christianity? all she's doing is legitimizing the perception that this is in fact what Xny has to be. Lame."

Maybe that was a bit harsh. Susan Campbell's reaction is better: "Come sit by me, Sis. Anne. One can be a Christian and cling to none of those antis, I believe." (Amen and amen and amen!) Usually, I'm much more level-headed; I stick it out in my little corner of Christendom, but I have said (so often now it's practically become a mantra) that we need some people to go and some people to stay, and everyone should do what they do loudly. Well, you can't beat an Anne Rice Facebook statement picked up by HuffPo as a megaphone, so it seems like I am actually pissed off at someone conforming to my own advice. Which puts me in a bind. Mea culpa. So why is it that I still feel like what she is doing is misguided in some fundamental way? Why am I still pissed about it?

What makes Susan's reaction better and different from mine is that, I got pissed off at the idea of quitting--because I have chosen to not quit, despite the fact that I too feel very much an outsider in my own Christian tradition. I've decided not to quit because I am an outsider. It's the outsiders--the vampires and the cyborgs if you will--within the church that have the prophetic potential for changing the antis into pros. It's not so much that I'm angry that Anne Rice wants to publicly indict Christians for the unforgiveable anti-stances that have been so publicly and politically taken up by a very vocal some. I agree. It's that her chosen response to it indicts my chosen response to it as wrong: useless, hopeless, and worse, complicit rather than prophetic. As she sees it, her conscience cannot allow association with the horrors she sees perpetrated by those claiming Christianity. But me--I'm just not that interested in preserving the purity of my conscience. I'd rather spend my time trying to preserve other things.

Susan seems to agree with me that it's hasty generalization to conclude that all of Christianity is defined by the haters, but instead of getting pissed off and calling Anne "lame," she says "come sit by me." That's ever so much better.

[So, pssst, Sis. Anne, have you heard of The Episcopal Church? It officially welcomes you. Also, should you ever find yourself in Brooklyn, why not check out this awesome pro-gay, pro-feminist, pro-birth control (well, except for that one couple that doesn't seem to bother, and yeah, you know who I'm talkin bout, but hey, you make great babies), pro-Democrat, pro-secular-humanist, pro-science, pro-life church, CCfB...]

But in the meantime, use your megaphone while you exit--because we need this witness too. But I hope you decide to stick around. And, sorry for calling you "lame."

Philadelphia 11

2010-07-29T15:55:00.000-05:00

How long, O Lord? Will c's-of-C ever get to look back and celebrate a date like this?

http://www.episcopalchurch.org/41685_3311_ENG_HTM.htm

Soundcheck on cyborgs & music

2010-07-28T12:57:00.000-05:00

summer: a busy of monotony

2010-07-28T10:40:00.000-05:00

So, it's summer. And I like summer: I like hot weather, I like being outside, I like the idea of "vacation," I like hanging out with Clare (mostly) (and this mostly reciprocated). But arrrrrrrgh.

Because "vacation" is theoretical, it's been hellishly hot here just like it has everywhere else, and it seems like I've been on my own more the past two months than any stretch of time so far in a decade of marriage. It's a big deal just to extricate myself from Clare's proximity long enough to go pee, and generally, she scouts me out while I'm still mid-stream.

In an hour and a half, I will have some much-needed time to do some pressing and important work--my Science for Ministry elective course, "The Human Person in a Technological Age," starts Monday. I am counting the minutes. This blog post is happening only because I am delaying the inevitable trip to the playground while my iPhone rewrites itself from scratch (no idea why this is necessary but it is taking forever).

In other news, I remain a theologian-at-large and heretic-for-hire, so if there's anyone you know in need of faithfully irreverent God-talk...well, I could use some word-of-mouth buzz. It would be so nice, and not just for practicalities like paying student loans, to do work I actually get paid for.

Time for the playground!

informal review of Susan Campbell's Dating Jesus

2010-06-30T15:30:00.000-05:00

[from Christian Scholars Conference 2010]

Reviewing a book such as this, when your experience reading it has been as emotionally intimate as this has been, is a bit terrifying—knowing that whatever I say about it, I am saying much more about myself, in many ways, than I am about this text. But to say this is in some ways offering the highest tribute possible to Susan Campbell’s memoir of growing up in the [small] c’s-of-C: her journey precedes mine chronologically, is distanced from mine geographically, and differs in personal particulars, but nonetheless describes what it means to come of age as a girl in our denomination in words so honest that not only does my narrative echo hers at certain points, but the contributed bits of the many guest bloggers’ narratives at “rude truth” do, as well.

This is not actually a very happy thing to observe. One would have hoped, after all, that the church which Campbell describes as “frontier revivalism frozen in amber” (38) might have unstuck itself from its fossilized convictions about gender in the years that separate my coming of age from hers. But, as she rightly observes, anachronism can become a veritable badge of righteousness, and on this issue, there is still no quicker and more effective rebuttal to the attempt to voice women’s experiences as relevant than “we cannot let culture dictate the practice of the church.”

Campbell’s voice is strong, and compelling, and like many of us who have found that strong female voices are unwelcome—not just in our official assemblies, but in our formal leadership structures, and anywhere at all if they’re asking pesky questions—she has found an alternative venue for expression for this somewhat troublesome gift of God. It may be that, as Katie Hays observed to me somewhat wryly in conversation last year at this conference, no one misses these female voices when the women who possess them leave our churches—because they never got to use them in the first place. Perhaps years have passed without anyone wondering what happened to the voice of that pre-teen girl in Sunday school who asked, why a woman can’t be a preacher. She grew up and became a reporter for the Hartford Courant, and I suppose anyone who thought about it might have concluded, “and she lived happily ever after.” Luckily for us, the same courage that propelled Campbell to verbally spar—and hold her own!—with her Sunday school teacher has produced a memoir which once again brings her voice back into our midst, even if it has to happen cloaked in the “authority of the text,” the same evasive maneuvers performed historically by so many medieval women mystics. Now, we know what we’re missing; even better, we might even figure out why.

That is, we might, if we read, and read with ears ready to hear a narrative that is both heartbreakingly funny and gut-wrenchingly sad, with some moments of prophetic pissed-off-ness in between. Not everyone is, still. Like the comment I received from a first-year seminary student’s first encounter with James Cone, “I feel like he’s yelling at me through the pages,” there are moments of, say, “snark”—not least of which is Campbell’s habit of footnoting scriptural references for the c’s-of-C practices she describes, and it’s not an aspect of the memoir designed to court a reluctant audience.

In my opinion, to consider this a weakness of the book is to entirely miss the point. It is not the memoir’s only strength, but it is one of its strengths, and without the “snark” it would not be the honest narrative that it is. As one blog commenter observes, “it made me feel like I was sitting at the table with her”—and what better observation could there be of the profound, dare I say, sacramental even, intimacy made possible by the disarming honesty of an author, reciprocated in the receptive honesty of a reader?

Moreover, it misses the point—never articulated directly by Campbell, and perhaps I am over-interpreting—that snark is a coping strategy. Robert A. Heinlein—another quite snarky author, come to think of it—wrote that the difference between human beings and our primate cousins is that we have a sense of humor; we laugh, and we laugh because it hurts. It is when we can no longer snark, no longer laugh, no longer grin and bear it, that we find we must walk away.

It seems that Campbell reached that point, a point which I still hope will never manifest itself for me, and yet, as so many of us find, walking away does not exactly translate into leaving behind. There is a reason why my Episcopal priest husband still corrects himself in the instinctive use of the first-person-plural when speaking of the Churches of Christ. There is a reason why there is a thriving online community of ex-Cof-Cers. There is a reason why a successful Pulitzer-prize winning reporter and author finds herself revisiting the narrative of her coming of age and the way in which her life is mysteriously and inextricably bound up with the church of her youth.

And, fantastically, the reasons are not all bad. You have to willfully ignore Campbell’s words, selectively read only the sarcasm, to miss that the description “revivalism frozen in amber” is immediately followed with, “If that sounds grim, it isn’t. If it sounds soulless, it isn’t that, either. The traditions plant in the believer—even someone who walks away from the church—a deep and soulful need” (38).

Unfortunately, the reasons aren’t all good either, and the double bind which Campbell sketches from early childhood on, the message that 1) you must do everything you can to make yourself ready and 2) a woman can’t [fill the blank], becomes a message she describes as an adult as “hardwired” (149). “I was hardwired to understand that I don’t belong in the pulpit”—a dreadful perversion in modern metaphor of Jeremiah’s experience of the fire shut up in his bones. “As big a feminist as I am,” she writes, “I have on some level embraced the limitations set before me. And I fear bucking them. And that makes me both sad and angry” (149). Yeah. Me too. And how many, many others.

Unlike Campbell, my first experience speaking in a pulpit did not leave me sobbing in front of the congregation before I even got started. But, in the first unprecedented moment in which my body (thankfully) moved on autopilot from the front pew to mount the steps up to that honest-to-God pulpit in West Islip Church of Christ, I felt lightheaded, and my surroundings, misty and surreal. It is not an easy thing to do, rewiring your circuitry. But what else can you do, when you wake up in the middle of the night and realize that, after all, all those years ago, you’d been dating the wrong Jesus?

no more time-outs

2010-06-29T18:00:00.000-05:00

Clare: "what if I had no more time-outs ever? could we send all the timeouts all the way into outer space?"
me: "there's a way you could have no more time-outs ever for reals. wanna know how?"
Clare, eyes wide: "how?"
me: "You could always listen and then you would have no more time-outs."
Clare, excited: "Mommy, I GET IT!"

just for fun: 12 Arguments Evolutionists Should Avoid

2010-06-29T11:19:00.000-05:00

12 Arguments Evolutionists Should Avoid

Saw this link on Facebook the other day, and couldn't resist. Neither should you!

I think my favorite item is #2, under which the website notes "Darwin’s own deficit of formal education" i.e., "(he earned a bachelor’s in theology)". I am so pleased to know that within the biblical worldview, a degree in theology = a deficit of education. Awesome.

stat uncounter?

2010-06-10T08:55:00.000-05:00

So, apparently this blog has had 0 visitors since April of this year. I don't check statcounter much anymore, being content with simply naively trusting that there is something like a readership in existence. (Perhaps my alien friends don't get counted on statcounter? Which suggests a cosmic xenophobic bias in the statcounting technology, there. Get to work on fixing that, please.)

So...helloooooooooooo? Are you there, Readers? It's me, JTB...

the redemptive pleasure of being wrong

2010-06-09T10:45:00.000-05:00

an insanely wise excerpt from an interview with Ira Glass:

IG: Do you talk at all in your book about people who can never be wrong? I feel like I've known people who in an argument can never ever, ever admit they're wrong. And I find that such a fascinating and horrible thing. Those people are so embattled.

I do talk about it, yeah. Defensiveness and denial come up a lot; they really fascinate me. Part of the challenge for me in writing about it was almost like the interviewing challenge you described earlier—trying to approach this really problematic position with empathy, to understand where these people were coming from and what's so frightening or intolerable to them about the possibility of being wrong.

IG: That's really interesting. There are definitely lots of things that I don't want to be wrong about and will fight to the death over, and I'm totally obnoxious about it all the time. But I also feel like there's a kind of discovery that you're wrong that, in a safe situation, can be a real pleasure. Do you know what I mean? Like when you're arguing with someone you love and you realize, "I'm wrong, you're right," and you come together in that moment. It's such a relief. To me it's so obvious that some kinds of being wrong are OK.

the low point: commenting on "mixed marriage"

2010-06-09T09:59:00.000-05:00

One of the low points--other than my unHappy Meal encounter--was hearing not one but two joking references to "mixed marriage" while in Nashville. The first came through a mike, immediately preceding a prayer. And, while it did occur to me at the time that it was tasteless and grossly inappropriate (especially since I had, just a few minutes before, from my vantage point at a corner table, been struck by the fact that I could count the number of black faces in the room on one hand and still have fingers left over), it didn't outrage me nearly as much as it should have. It just sort of washed past me, an enduring legacy of having grown up in the South. It wasn't until the next day, when I heard it forthrightly named as racist by someone who was paying more attention than I was, that I realized the full depth of what it means to casually joke about "mixed marriages."

The next day, I heard another joke about while standing in the middle of church. This second time, it reverberated in all of its unintentional overtones. And the nervous wry bark of a laugh with which I responded to the first reference was replaced by simply a deep sadness, without any tinge of judgment, because I too had had to learn belatedly that this is nothing to laugh about.

Once in high school I heard a pillar of our church tell a joke, standing in the center aisle of the auditorium, with a punchline that ended with the n-word. Not even tempted to laugh nervously, I just stared in confusion. We can recognize racism in our midst when it comes packaged in blatant and socially unacceptable forms. But what's the difference between a joke with the n-word and a joke about "mixed marriage"? In the end, both rely on the same categorical racism--without it, they are incoherent.

This adds a new dimension to the discussion from the Dating Jesus session at CSC 2010 about the relationship of theology and justice. I suspect--as does my bro Robert Foster, whose comment was very insightful--that dismantling injustice in one context is a gateway to becoming cognizant of the need for social justice in other contexts as well. But one problem is, many people simply don't seem to see that there's anything unjust about the role or status of women in our churches. How could that possibly be? I dimly remember not being outraged by it, but I can no longer recapture the logic of that former point of view--I can no longer remember how it feels to not be bothered by this. This leaves me with the necessity of constructing some kind of coherent intellectual explanation for what seems now to be an inexplicable blindness to justice matters.

There are surely multiple factors in this, but here is the one that seems the strongest to me right now. Men and women are supposed to be ontologically distinct--this is the crux of "hierarchical complementarianism" just as much as it is straight-up patriarchalism. (To borrow a phrase from another CSC session, hierarchical complementarianism seems to me to be the theological construct justifying "benevolent sexism." Perhaps a post for another time, there.) So it's no biggie that men do X and women do Y; they are just essentially different kinds of human beings and therefore women could never do Y and it's stupid to get angry over it.

Like the logic of "mixed marriage," the concept of hierarchical complementarianism doesn't make sense without assuming categorical difference. And if we are still, as a church, joking and laughing about mixed marriage--demonstrating that on some level we still are not questioning the working assumption that white people and black people are essentially different kinds of people--no wonder we're not able to question the same logic when it shows up with regard to gender. These two things are linked at a deep conceptual level. We cannot have gender justice without racial justice. And maybe we're banging our heads against a brick wall with some people about gender justice because we've never adequately dealt with the generations-old sin of racism that still permeates our vision of the world, even as we bow our heads to pray and stand in the middle of our churches.

unHappy Meal

2010-06-07T10:52:00.000-05:00

Warning: this is going to be one of those miscellaneous, personal complaint posts. But honestly...just wait till you hear this!

So, Sunday morning, after working through some massive attitudinal issues with Clare, we rendezvoused with Ally and Jarrod and kids at 4th Avenue CofC in Franklin, and had a lovely morning there. Not least because I was agreeably surprised to listen to a sermon on the necessity of creative non-violence! Which is lovely in itself but also relevant to what follows.

After church, it began to rain and so we revised our lunch intentions to take the kids to McDonalds so they could run around on the inside playground area. And while I am no fan of McD's, this is a compromise I am willing to make on occasion because it's way better than the consequences of three restless kids unable to play outside all day. So, we walk in and the kids immediately join a beautiful girl about Clare's age at the toy display and start identifying which one they want, which causes some kind of ruckus with Clare who starts bawling for reasons I have to try to figure out and satisfactorily address, which I do. Then we hustle them off forthwith to playground area before any more hungry energy causes another ruckus, and then I go to the counter to order. There's a couple standing in an ambiguous place, not quite in line or at the counter but standing around sort of in the general area, hanging back, so I ask, "are y'all in line?" and they say no, so I get in line behind my bro-in-law and place my order right after him. As we're clearly together they put our trays up and start putting stuff on them, six adult meals and six kids meals all together. Then I notice a little bottle of milk, which I'd ordered for Clare, right next to my tray, and I think, why isn't this on my tray? So I start to take it but then I notice it's chocolate, which I didn't want, so I put it down and consider whether it is worth pointing out the mistake and asking for plain milk. While I'm pondering this they put a kids meal sack on the counter and announce "cheeseburger" which I'd heard Jarrod order for Levi, so I pick it up to hand to Jarrod. And out of nowhere this blond woman comes up, practically shoulder tackles me, snatches it away and says, "That's ours, and thanks for putting your hands all over it," in a super nasty voice.

Now, if you know me at all, you know that I am absolutely supremely unobservant and often almost comically stereotypically professorishly absentminded, so, it shouldn't surprise you that the obvious 2 + 2 here that these were not our items totally did not occur to me. From my point of view, it wasn't at all obvious, and even in retrospect, I feel like there was some logic to my mistake. And of course, as she said, "this is ours," I immediately handed it to her and started to say, "oh I'm sorry, here you go," but she talked right over that instinctive reply with the nasty "thanks for putting your hands all over it" as she stalks off. So I'm greatly astonished, but, like the moment with the lady in the grocery store parking lot, I'm no longer one to let these things go by internalizing shame or accepting the notion that somehow I deserve to be treated like shit. So I try again with an innocent and sincere, "I'm sorry," but she snaps back with the same nasty statement, and I say (not particularly conciliatory here), "Look, lady, I was nice to you, I even asked if you were in line, what's your problem?" But she just walks off.

I turn back around, and the employees behind the counter, who got a free front row ticket to this drama, are all looking at me and at each other with big round eyes and shrugged shoulders. One of them even said out loud, "what was that about?!" And the girl putting our order together grinned at us a few minutes later and said, "Now, I just want you to know, I'm putting my hand into this bag to put your food in it, I'm touching your food, hope that's okay," and as I left she said to me, "I mean, I'm pregnant and hormonal and I don't act like that!"

Of course, it was too much to hope that we would sit on opposite sides of the place where we could easily ignore each other. Turns out they chose a table right next to where we'd plonked down our stuff already. So, I felt like it would be remiss of me to not attempt some sort of reconciliation with this blonde nutjob. And I did my best--after all, I felt bad about calling her "lady" which is very dismissive. Plus, it had occurred to me that maybe she was pissed about something else--maybe she had seen Clare do something to her little girl while they were swarming around the toy display, and maybe there was something actually problematic that needed to be addressed, which I should know about but somehow missed.

So I approach the table, and before I even open my mouth, this woman rolls her eyes and says to her husband, "OMG, can you believe this?" So I say, "I'm sorry to interrupt your meal, but I feel like I just don't know what I might hve done to offend you, so I'd like to say that I'm sorry but I sortof need you to tell me what to actually apologize for." And she's interrupting every few words of this simple statement to say, over and over, in that same nasty tone, clipping off the ends of her words, "I--don't--want--to--talk--to--YOU."

So I give up, because she's a brick wall and not even hearing that I truly am trying to figure out what the problem is, because clearly, she's got some sort of massive problem with me. But as quickly as I turn away, I turn back again, because this is so absurd and so totally unsatisfactory. And I begin again with acknowledging that I am interrupting their time together, and sorry for that, but in case she missed it, I am genuinely trying to apologize. "What is it that I did?" I say, and stops her robotic litany of "I don't want to talk to you" to say, as if she can't believe she has to explain it, "you TOUCHED the BAG." And I said, "really? That's it. Really? Okay, then I guess I'd like to say that I'm sorry for touching the bag." But she's gone back to the "I don't want to talk to you" thing, and so I just can't manage to filter out my last comment.

"But you know, I do wash my hands after I pee."

Oh, the irony of listening to a sermon on creative non-violence and walking into this crap. I think I failed to remember the take-home phrase, "don't hit back." But honestly...as Anne Shirley would plead..."if only you knew how many things I want to say and don't."

A final irony: we're all sitting there letting our kids romp around the plastic wonderland together, and at one point Clare comes running up to me in mad-tears because "Sol hurt my feelings because she growled in my face. And she won't say sorry." Me: "well, did you tell her you were hurt and why and ask for an apology?" Amswer: no. Of course not, my child is only almost 4. So I say, you have to tell her, and this is what you say. And when Sol comes up, straightway my little girl says, clearly and straightforwardly, "Sol, you hurt my feelings when you growled in my face" and Sol blinks and says immediately, "I'm sorry, Clare," and off they run together back into the plastic wonderland.

My four year old can do it. Take that, you blonde basketcase.

belated thoughts on CSC 2010

2010-06-07T09:57:00.000-05:00

I am EXHAUSTED.
Presenting in 3 sessions of 6 (plus various other stuff) means NOT getting to do all the things you really want to do at a conference, namely, go to the sessions you want to hear, and freely skip sessions in order to grab a coffee with people you only see once a year. It also means not being able to live blog/tweet and thus, catch-up blogging. Sigh.
Having food provided for every meal ROCKS. Way to go Lipscomb!!!
The session I most wanted to attend and couldn't: Monstrous Beauty. So many awesome posthuman figures in that one...
The session I most enjoyed participating in: Dating Jesus with Susan Campbell. It was not the only follow-up to last year's groundbreaking sessions on experiences of gender in the c's-of-C (and yes, I agree with JRB, when it comes time to write the next volume of Reviving the Ancient Faith for these recent and upcoming decades, last year's conference is going to be read as a turning point); there was a wonderful session convened by Dr. Sharp Penya of ACU on some results of ongoing research into gender attitudes and predictors of attitudes in our churches. But it was, I think, the session that provided that same voice of experience that last year's sessions did--and I am convinced that this is the thing most needed right now. This is not (only or primarily) an intellectual or hermeneutical matter--this is something that requires a conversaion experience of some sort. And for about 50% of CofCers, that means taking the leap into someone else's experience and making that vicarious experience their own in some sense--enough to prompt the realization that it really is and has been damaging, for many of us, and blindness to that reality is not a moral option. Not everyone will make that leap--there are lots of ways to armor yourself against it--but the immediate task is to make it impossible to be unknowingly ignorant of this reality. Some will choose to be willfully ignorant. And we can't coerce conversion. But we can--like Jesus with the rich young ruler--force people to the point of decision, and if they walk away, we can watch them do it sorrowfully...and turn to the next person, because we can also hope that not everyone will choose to be willfully ignorant of the reality of women in our midst. Not to keep blathering on too much, but again...this is the point of the "women in the CofC" blog experiment, which of course is still ongoing and the invitation is for YOU! (MOM!). I had a vision last year of women sitting primly next to each other in pews every Sunday, silently saying to themselves every week, "How long, O Lord?" and all convinced they were the only ones...while together they send up their silent collective cry to God. How long, indeed? It will remain forever deferred if we all sit silently in our pews frozen by anxiety and unable to speak, even to each other, about the vision of liberation and full range of opportunity of serving our God and our church and our world that we long for. And if you can't bring yourself to lean over and whisper something subversive to the gray-haired old lady next to you--say it here, anonymously if you must, because this is not "laleo in ecclesia" and this Theologian-at-Large and Heretic-for-Hire can take the hit. Plus, back to my original point after that massive tangential diversion, Susan Campbells ROCKS. And she said some of the things we most, most need to hear--like, why does it take a year to get a CofC on board with something which, once you see it, is (in the paraphrase of JRB) "silly right," something which makes our current typical practices obviously and untenably absurd? Why are we taking baby steps? And who are we hurting when we concede to those who require baby steps but those who are already walking wounded? Does that not matter? Why are we so unjustifiably proud of our faltering baby steps--shouldn't we be sprinting toward the goal of justice in our communities? There was also a good back-and-forth on the connection between theology and justice, which makes me wonder (and so I guess I am officially asking), was this experience of injustice within the church the door into Susan's convictions regarding social justice in the wider sense?
Really really really really REALLY stoked about CSC 2011. It'll be sad to miss my annual pilgrimage to middle TN, which really is Home for me, but I shall content myself with the second-best option of Malibu (sarcasm alert here, y'all). AND, of course, the theme is religion and science, and John Polkinghorne is slated to be one of several awesome plenary speakers. Awesome! And there is so much to think about...so many different possibilities for presentations and sessions...very exciting. Ken Reynhout, brace yourself, because I'm going to start begging you to come starting right now.
People seemed to like the posthuman stuff. Always encouraging. And getting a shout-out from James Elkins in the concluding dialogue session was certainly a feather in my cap, which no longer quite fits on my great big inflated head. :)

All right, that's it for now. Next step: go home, and label an empty mayo jar "CSC 2011" and start saving the pennies. :)

on the maleness of Godtalk, part 2

2010-05-24T13:29:00.000-05:00

don't miss this post from Jamey Walters over at Becoming What We Are: "Metaphor, Idolatry and Theology."

and, while you're there, find out why Battlestar Galactica kicks LOST ass.

"Barbie in comfy shoes"

2010-05-17T10:02:00.000-05:00

But if Rachel Maddow gave me a Barbie doll, I would treasure it. Very cyborg move.

I'm an (8 year old) single lady?

2010-05-14T09:42:00.000-05:00

I hesitate to even blog about this because I am uncomfortable about embedding this video or linking to it...

First: yeah, "not my daughter." Hell no. I won't even buy her a secondhand knockoff Barbie at the thrift store. Why? Because I want her to have more images of women than the caricatured sexuality that is Barbie to internalize as she grows up.

Beyond that initial parental instinct, though, this video presents a particular fraught and acute version of the dilemma I regularly face as the fem theologian mommy of a precocious daughter: how to separate out the genuinely childlike joy of dress-up, pretend play, movement and dance and song--and the horrible metanarratives our patriarchal--no, let me go further: subtly misogynistic--culture provides for the acting out of those beautiful children's instincts. How can I help my daughter separate out the desire to be beautiful and wear princess dresses from the helpless passivity of all these godforsaken ubiquitous princess narratives she soaks up like a sponge? How can I help her enjoy the gift of her body without learning that she can only enjoy it through the process of making others desire it?

(Further complicating that is the problematic stuff associated with any sort of public high-pressure competition for children, but let's just bracket that for a moment. Those concerns apply equally to children's beauty pageants, dance competitions and national spelling bees...)

So here's how I parse things out. Is it wrong for these girls to be up on stage dancing? Is it wrong for them to enjoy the ways their bodies can move and enjoy being good at moving their bodies? Absolutely not. But let's have a reality check here. Those girls did not choreograph their own dance routine, choose their music, make their own costumes. Some adult(s) in the background made those choices for them, and made them without any consideration (apparently) about what those choices would mean for the girls they were supposedly acting on behalf of. Do these girls have any idea what their skimpy outfits--outfits designed to display the sexual characteristics of female bodies they haven't even developed yet!--or movements like hip thrusts or shimmies are actually communicating, given the cultural context of this performance? Not to mention the awesome lyrics of a song that literally, verbally, reinforces the message that women are property who should be properly marked as owned before they give away their sexual favors. Maybe these girls have some dim idea--which is actually worse than having no idea at all, I would think. But what the adults in control of this situation have done is encourage these talented girls, who surely have developed their talents in dance at least partly out of the sheer joy of movement--to offer themselves as sexualized objects in order to do what they enjoy and are good at. Lesson learned: the only way to be who I am and do what I want is through the mechanism of being an outstanding object of sexual desire, even before I get my boobs.

Oh, that's awesome. Congratulations to everyone on that.

Not to mention, this gem of a video is on youtube, and when these amazing girls grow up and, say, apply to college, and later for jobs, there it will be. Forever archived on the ol' intertubes. That's gonna really help them out later on in life, isn't it.

cheap tricks

2010-05-12T17:34:00.000-05:00

Having lived the entirety of my decade of married life as a poor grad student bouncing from student housing apartment to another--till landing in this fabulous rectory, The Gwynne House, a year or so ago--I have my own set of "cheap tricks" for making it on a shoestring budget patched together from stipends, student loans, and part-time waitressing gigs. But I'm interested in your cheap tricks. What are your favorite ways of pinching pennies, making a meal out of the random oddities in the cupboard at the end of the week, etc.? I'm looking for everything from recipes for your favorite cheap meals to advice on navigating grocery stores without falling for those endcrap displays...

from JW: Passive Resistance for Gender Equality in the Church

2010-05-11T09:09:00.000-05:00

The assumptions about how scripture functions and the ability to “interpret” it within Churches of Christ have produced a number of faulty readings of Scripture. The most obvious example is the staunch stance that (many) Churches of Christ take on not using instrumental music simply because the NT does not discuss the use of instruments in music. However, the NT also does not address the use of technology in worship, but I hear no churches arguing that it is wrong to use microphones. Churches of Christ are inconsistent on the application of such principles as “speak where the Bible speaks, silent where the Bible is silent,” and it results in no small number of problems when describing the idiosyncrasies of our worship.
Some problems, however, do not result from the silence of scripture, but rather from the perceived certainty of what scripture actually does say. For example: the commands for the silence of women in the church (see 1 Corinthians 14:35-36; 1 Timothy 2:11-13). For many churches (not just the Churches of Christ), the interpretation of these passages is clear: women must be silent. However, there are problems with the certainty with which this conclusion is offered.

We do not actually require women to be completely silent. When Churches of Christ sing their characteristic a capella songs, there are female voices as well as male. Clearly, even we do not take this command to its fullest extent to require absolute silence.
The reasoning that a woman cannot teach/preach because the text says no woman can have authority over a man ignores other scriptural witnesses of the authority of women. I offer as an example Phoebe of Romans 16, who is both a patron and deacon of the church at Cenchraea, not to mention that she is likely the carrier of Paul’s letter and therefore the representative of Paul to Rome. So unless we presume that the churches in Cenchraea and Rome were completely made up of females, it is beyond doubt that Phoebe had authority over men and was appointed to such a position by Paul, the presumed author of the above texts in question.

Given these two points, it seems reasonable to conclude that simply referring to 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 as “proof-texts” to not include women within the worship service is problematic. And we can come to this conclusion with a “naïve” reading of the text—that is, it does not require any special approach or interpretation to see that the example of Phoebe contradicts the injunctions against women having authority. It just requires good philological and historical tools. But for those who cannot read Greek, it requires honesty by our Bible translation committees—I’m looking at you NIV.
I do not believe it is possible for any person to arrive at the biblical text “objectively”—that is, without being formed by preconceived notions and experiences. However, this concept does not apply only to the readers of scripture, but also to the authors of scripture. In other words, those who wrote the words that we read as scripture could not help but be influenced by the assumptions of their various cultures.
One cultural assumption implicit within the commands for silence is that women were simply not intelligent enough to have authority over men. It was assumed that women were not as capable as men, and as a result of this assumption, women were not educated as men were in the ancient world. The practice of not educating women only perpetuated the assumption that women were not as intelligent. And thus, we have evidence of an oppressive system based on faulty assumptions of gender inequality that provides the (implicit) reasoning for the silence of women. The explicit reasoning of 1 Timothy 2—that man was created first and woman second—only serves as a “theological” justification of the culturally assumed place of women.
I hope that no one today still assumes that women are in any way inferior to men. If that assumption persists, there is nothing that I could say that would deter such willful ignorance. So, assuming that we all agree on the equality of men and women, we must take this into account when we read scripture. The authors assumed women were inferior, but we do not agree with their assumption. So how can we agree with their conclusion?
So now we come to the practical aspect: given the stance of the Churches of Christ on women, what should I do? Should I just leave and join a more egalitarian community? Should I become an activist and demand change immediately and loudly? Should I stay and patiently try to work it out with those who would listen? My lack-of-confrontation-personality wants to take option one and just leave. But my attempt to remain faithful to the community of faith that raised me and taught me the Gospel makes me fight against the gut instinct to leave. As for the second option, I do not have the personality to be an activist. That is not to say that I don’t think it is a viable option, I just don’t think it is for me. As for the third option, let’s just be honest here: I am not patient. I don’t want to spend 10 years trying to convince one congregation that it’s okay for women to read scripture publicly but restrict them from the “more important” jobs like eldership and preaching.
Given the fact that I have problems with each of the three options mentioned above, I have been trying to think of another option. For inspiration, I think of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. in the 1960s, and specifically I think of the examples of passive resistance (like sit-ins, marches, etc…). However, I do not want to stage sit-ins or march to the church house door. So I am still left searching for an expression of my passive resistance. And the more I have thought about this issue, the clearer my answer has become.
My form of passive resistance for gender equality within the church is: silence.
Clearly I do not mean complete silence because you are reading my blog post, so let me explain what I mean.
I think it is wrong for any institution, including the church, to deny someone the opportunity to do something for which they are capable and trained based on gender. For example: my wife, Naomi, has the same ministerial training that I have: an M.Div. from Abilene Christian University. Actually, she has more: an undergrad Bible degree from Rochester College with a minor in counseling. On paper, her credentials beat my own B.A. in Political Science. Moreover, not only is she better qualified based on training, she is better qualified based on gifting: I can write and deliver a sermon, but she can preach. However, despite the fact that she is better qualified on all counts, virtually no Church of Christ (with few exceptions) would hire her over me. This is not just unfortunate or unfair, it is morally wrong.
So, if our churches refuse to let her use her training and gifts, then I will refuse to use mine. Now, those of you who know me may say, well that’s convenient for you since you have chosen an academic career rather than a ministerial career. And I agree. But that does not mean that any church of which I would be a part would not ask me to do things like preach, lead prayer, lead songs, teach Bible class, etc…
To say it more succinctly: I will not work for or serve any institution that would not allow my wife, being equally trained as I, to perform the same job. Yes, this means that I will not work for any university that would not hire my wife to do the same job, but that is not as likely to cause a problem as the church scenario.
However, in order for this form of protest to mean anything, I must take it one step further. I cannot just refuse the opportunity to preach, lead prayer, teach, etc… without an explanation. I must express the reason for my refusal. Perhaps I will respond to any such invitation with a question: “You know, I’m not very good at preaching, but my wife is. Would you ask her to do it instead?” If the response is “No,” then I will decline and explain my reasoning.
I do not propose this as something that everyone else should do. I would be happy for other (especially my male colleagues) to participate in this form of protest, but only if you choose. This is the form of protest that best fits my personality, so it works for me. I encourage every one who reads this to think of creative ways that you can actively or passively call for change within our churches.
In conclusion: gender equality is not a worship preference issue; it is a justice issue. If you disagree, I hope that you will reconsider. If you agree, I urge you to think about what you can do about it.

originally posted here at Jamey's blog

what line?

2010-05-07T09:13:00.000-05:00

Interesting article in ACU's student newspaper, The Optimist, popped up on Facebook today: "Walking the Line: ACU seeks to balance faith, academia."

I'm not seeking to grouse about the article itself. It's not a bad article--does a good job of describing both the typical positive and negative reactions to the, let's call it, "dilemma" of the growing diversity of ACU students. For the first time ever, apparently, self-identified CofC'ers do not outnumber the heathen. (Oh, the horror.)

I'm just continually frustrated that we seem unable to frame this discussion in ways that avoid the dichotomy of Faith versus Reason. Walking the Line? What line? The line that describes the point at which we are supposedly required to turn off our brains in order to believe in God, or swallow CofC doctrine? Blurg. It seems to me that a Christian university ought to be the best place to defy this ridiculous dichotomy--a place whose very existence proclaims boldly that God actually intends for us to use the brains that God gave us, and is pleased and not threatened when we do.

It's not that I think ACU isn't doing exactly that--just that the rhetoric needs to catch up to reality, because rhetoric creates its own reality. And to implicitly accept the Faith vs. Reason dichotomy, as metaphors of walking lines and balancing acts do, actually hinders a theology of a parent-God who is pleased--perhaps sometimes amused, perhaps sometimes amazed--at the speculations and investigations of the brainy little creatures God has made. We gotta get over this!

defining marriage (not for the faint-hearted or easily offended)

2010-05-06T09:25:00.000-05:00

When a three year old asks you "what is 'married,'" it sends you down a surprisingly difficult and philosophical spiral. Just what is the basic "essence" (in quotes, because I hate this word) of this particular human relationship, which we set apart from other human relationships as unique, and grace with special social status and legal rights?

Now, I am not one of those parents who is squeamish or reluctant to chat to my toddler about body parts and where babies come from. When Clare made the intuitive leap that babies in big round bellies exit from their mama's bellybutton, the cuteness of her toddler logic did not stop me from correcting her misunderstanding of this important biological process. Babies come out of vaginas, and she will gladly tell you so, and add that that is a-MAZ-ing.

But for all that, when Clare asked me to define 'what is married,' my toddler-sized definition did not include an explicit reference to sex, or where babies come from. I think I could have managed a version for her that was not alarming and made some kind of sense, but I didn't.

Instead I cobbled together something like, "when two people love each other so much, and they want to be together all the time, they get married and live together in the same house and share everything." Clare's first reaction, after digesting this information for a couple days, was to let me know that she wanted to marry me. Actually, she clarified, we're like, already married, because we love each other and live in the same house and share our things. And now, as I've noted, I've been replaced--she is determined to marry her BFF S---- from school. Because if that's what getting married means, well, that's how she perceives these relationships.

Obviously my definition has some flaws. My little toddler polygynist is just logically applying the information (though she seemed to miss the part about 'two people'). But to be honest, I like it. Particularly because the sexual aspect of the marriage relationship isn't entirely missing--it's implicit, rather than explicit. Share everything.

In the context of these toddler dialogues, NPR's recent piece on challenges to DOMA just highlights the way in which opponents of "redefining marriage" are themselves seeking to literally "redefine marriage." It seems to me that to arbitrate which relationships count as marriage and which don't, on the basis of what sort of sexual acts are engaged in, is to discount as irrelevant everything I included in my definition of marriage for Clare. Is that a "defense of marriage?" (And, let me pause for a parenthetical tangent and note how absurd the name for this law is. "Defense" of marriage? Because people who love each other so much that they want to be together all the time and live in the same house and share everything are the metaphorical equivalent of a terrorist threat? Yes, clearly these people sound horribly deranged.) I thought that marriage is supposed to be a unique and sanctified human relationship, something that the biblical text dares to use as a metaphor for our relationship to God and God's relationship with humanity and Jesus' relationship to the church--but it seems to me that in so vigorously "defending" marriage, the definition of what it is that's being defended has been stripped down to the bare naked sex act. Defense of "marriage" is just defense of the holy and singular privilege of penile penetration of female passivity.

This is not a marriage my daughter would recognize as marriage. And I intend to keep it that way.

vote for Neal

2010-05-03T09:18:00.000-05:00

Here's one of those free and painless ways to help someone help someone else in potentially life-changing ways.

Go here: http://www.refresheverything.com/collegescholarshipfund and vote for Neal's idea.

I don't know Neal but it sounds like he has some good ideas in his brain! Definitely worth a click, and plus, I like conspiring to take $50K away from evil corporations. Very refreshing. ;)

on what it means to be invisible, from the other side of the racial divide

2010-04-30T10:18:00.000-05:00

In high school, I was invisible. But not in the way you might think. I don't mean that no one noticed me, or that I had no friends (strangely enough, I did have some friends, and very good ones, and how awesome is it that I am now Facebook-friends with almost all of them that I care to remember!), or that I felt some keen sense of not being quite counted as a full responsible person and citizen. I mean, my body was invisible: I never thought about the particulars of my body as having any sort of effect on my life or my future. My gender and my race were irrelevant to my ambitions. Invisibility was a privilege. And an invisible privilege at that: a privilege I never even knew I had.

I certainly wasn't racist. I mean, I had like, three black friends!

But I did notice, and fume, those times when my smarts and talents and invisible privileges were not enough to get me what I wanted and totally deserved. Like the time I was nominated for the North Carolina Governor's School, for Choral Music, and made Darren drive me all the way to wherever that audition was. I didn't get in. And while I knew, and knew right away even during the audition, that I had bombed the sight-singing test (I was so nervous I didn't even sing the octave jump right, and sang a fifth instead), what I focused on in my rejection letter was a sentence inserted, I suppose, to make the let-down easy: something to the effect of, you were a qualified applicant with the necessary skills but due to other considerations like diversity of race and ethnicity, we cannot invite you. The invisibly privileged high school kid that I was translated that into: a black kid got my space. It's not that I'm not good enough; it's that I'm too white, thought I.

I know now--actually I knew then, but now I am grown-up enough to admit it--that my nomination was a sort of fluke, and that a completely untrained singer like myself really just wasn't good enough, and I bombed the audition. There's no mystery here. No conspiracy. No systemic social dysfunction.

But I fumed. It was easier to believe that someone else got a space I deserved than accept that sometimes I would come up against a challenge I couldn't automatically ace.

A few years before that, a much younger and more naive teen, still new to my NC junior high, I auditioned for the senior high school musical (Finian's Rainbow, if you're curious, and yes, I still have the bright yellow T-shirt). During that fantastic experience, the 14-year-old me met a marvelous guy with a speaking role and crazy trumpet-playing skills, as well as a sense of humor, incredible smarts, and an unaccountable habit of paying attention to me. He was fun to talk to and easy to hang out with, despite the fact that he was a couple years older than me--a significant difference after all exists between 9th grade and junior year of high school. My first clue that he "liked" me was that all of a sudden he was kissing my ear, on the stairwell between scenes (definitely the first time anyone ever kissed my ear. I didn't know quite what to think about that). All of a sudden that put the easygoing relationship into new and strange and exciting territory.

But that territory didn't get explored. Because he was black.

And it wasn't that I cared. I was thrilled--I already liked him, and was floored that he was even paying attention to me at any level--but I got confronted, by a boy a friend was dating. And told that if I dated that n*** that I would be ostracized and I would certainly never speak to my best friend again. And he meant it. And I knew that because he was in my face, with the crazy eyes.

And so I told that marvelous boy I really liked that it just wouldn't work. I believe the phrase I used was, "it would just be too difficult."

My senior year of high school--and why this happened is still somewhat of a mystery to me--I would eat my lunch out on the lawn in good weather with a few friends. And for whatever reason, we started being attacked by flying fruit. I mean, someone or multiple someones were throwing apples and stuff at our heads--hard baseball throws that really hurt if the aim happened to be right. It seemed to be coming from a group of black guys not too far away, at least, they were aware of what was going on and found it amusing, so they were easy to blame as the culprits. I went and found the assistant principal inside the cafeteria to complain after it had proven to be a regular menace and not just a one-time thing. His suggestion was that we go sit somewhere else. I found this inadequate.

I was pissed. And I was the op-ed editor of the school newspaper, and I launched a full page spread on violence in schools and let the venom fly. It was a symbolic and impotent protest. It was also--I know now--subtly racist, in ways I was completely unaware of, though I suspect that's why Mr. Cockerell made me re-write that thing more times than I can even remember at this point. But what bothers me most, in remembering my outrage, is that I never once thought to ask, why is this happening? I never reached a point where it could even occur to me that there was some reason that might make sense--if not from my point of view, from someone's point of view. I never questioned the assumption that we were lily-white innocent victims of undeserved ire. It wasn't just that we personally were completely innocent--it was that even if it were nothing else than an explosion of racial tensions, that was their fault and had nothing to do with us.

Why tell these stories? Just to publicly confess? To make myself feel bad because white guilt is addictive? To make other people involved feel bad, or to publicly plead for forgiveness or prove, hey, I'm different now?

It's not that, although, of course, the whole premise of "rude truth" is that truth is best shared, crude and unvarnished. It's that I would have been horrified if anyone had ever called me a racist. Or the slightly less condemnatory, "prejudiced." Or suggested that I carried around some bias. Or, suggested none of those things, but pointed out that I was privileged in ways others were not.

It's embarrassing how long it took for me to put all these things together. The turning point was a moment in an ACU prof's office when a classmate came in, typically cheerful demeanor very subdued. Why? Apparently he'd been driving home, past campus, the night before and had gotten pulled over by a cop. Not just pulled over, but asked to get out of the car, and was patted down. Why? No particular reason. He didn't get a ticket, he hadn't done anything wrong. It's just that it was late, and he was black. I realized, listening to that story--told in a completely resigned tone of voice, not particularly angry, just sort of defeated, because after all, it had happened before and it happens all the time--that this would never, never happen to me. I've gotten pulled over. I've even gotten pulled over for no particular reason. But I have never been asked to get out of the car. I have never been searched or patted down. And if I were, I would sue the pants off of whoever violated my rights as a citizen. Because I have the privilege of expecting that these things won't happen to me. I'm not a black man.

A couple years later I tried to lead a discussion about race in my summer "Christianity in Culture" class. One memorable moment: having to stop a comment that began with the ominous phrase, "I'm not racist, but..." I know that phrase. I know what comes after it. "I'm not racist, but, I didn't date a black guy in high school even though I liked him, because he was black." "I'm not racist, but, it was totally unfair that I didn't get into Governor's School just because I'm white." "I'm not racist, but when scary black dudes throw apples at your head for no reason, it's clear that they have a problem and something needs to be done about it."

This is not new stuff, people. This is just my personal version of a conversion story that ought to be everyone's.

This week I've gotten to see the best and the worst of our difficult public discourse on race. The same week that Arizona passed what is, to my mind, an undeniably xenophobic and racist immigration law, I attended a forum at New Brunswick Theological Seminary hosted by the ARTT (Anti-Racism Transition Team) group. It's a weird, schizoid week for me on this issue, and it has me wondering, how do we get from AZ to ARTT? How did I get there? How can we talk about these things directly, honestly, personally, narrativally, in ways that get people to see the invisible?

JTB boobquake

2010-04-27T09:50:00.000-05:00

So, blogger Jen McCreight at blaghag.com took umbrage at this comment from an Iranian cleric, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedigric (Tehran's acting Friday prayer leader):

"Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes."

Now, of course, we should hasten to note that this is no more ridiculous than Falwell blaming the ACLU for the attacks on 9-11, or Pat Robertson's comments about Hurricane Katrina and gay people. Apparently, religious idiocy is cross-cultural and highly ecumenical. That should make us all feel good, right?

So anyway, Jen M. decided to make this cleric's empirical claim about earthquake causality a matter of actual quasi-scientific experimentation, and suggested that yesterday, April 26, as "boobquake" day. This of course is an irresistible hybrid of my own social networking, theology, and science interests, and it took about two seconds to sign on and commit myself to teaching last night's Foundations of Theology II class in my lowest cut blouse. (FTR, no one noticed, despite the fact that I even wore my one and only push-up bra to enhance the earth-shattering effects.)

As Stephen Colbert noted last night, there was indeed an earthquake off the coast of Taiwan (I'd like to take credit but my relationship with that island is one of two degrees of separation, so I really can't).

Anyhow, the results are in, and apparently, while you may feel the earth move under your feet in a highly metaphorical sense, unsurprisingly, immodest dress is a matter of indifference for tectonic plates. (Apparently Mother Earth isn't a lesbian?)

Now, some of you may notice that the well-endowed, and by that I mean to refer to her intellect, Jen M. describes herself as "a nerdy scientific perverted atheist feminist" and that she is the lame-duck Pres of the Society of Non-Theists at Purdue. So perhaps you're confused as to why I think boobquake is awesome, since part of the point (at least as Jen M. interprets the results) is not just to demonstrate that the immodest-dress-earthquake-causality thesis is absurd, but an entirely different thesis of God's existence as well. Somehow I feel obligated to say, this is over-interpretation of the results of the boobquake experiment. I'm pretty sure that, since God created this material existence, including our beautiful boobs, She was enjoying the whole spectacle immensely, and rather uninclined therefore to, um, shake things up.

Actually, to make a serious point, what drew me in the boobquake thing is the need for protesting absurd religious misogyny. And you can do that without presuming there is no God. In fact, I believe you can probably do it better, but in the meantime, I'm happy to momentarily join forces with any fellow traveler who's willing to call it like she sees it.

dear alien friends, "National" means you too...?

2010-04-26T12:06:00.000-05:00

Dear Alien Friends,

Since my "Blog in Space" html code has stopped functioning, I know that I'm technically no longer beaming my bloggy thoughts out to the stars in your general direction. But I assume that when I was, some of you caught on and no doubt have become loyal readers, because after all, rude truth is addictive. And I will further assume that your incomprehensible technically advanced culture will surely provide ways of alternative access to this blog even if I'm no longer blogging-in-space myself.

So I feel the necessity to offer an excuse and apology for my human, Christian brethren (and sistren) who have decided to start making noise about a National Day of Prayer. They're not apparently aware of the millions of God's chilluns that their strangely restrictive invitation is leaving out. I know that may seem strange to you, especially since God has always shown particular concern for the aliens among us, but--well, have you ever heard of the human idiom "blind spot?" There's this excellent parable, too, about specks in your brother's eye and logs in your own...Oh. You might not have "eyes." Never mind.

Anyhow, I hope you'll forgive this cosmic faux pas, and that this doesn't incite any hotheads on your side of the universe to, say, want to destroy the earth or something.

Thanks for sticking around, alien friends! It's nice to know we're all stuck in this same universe together...

awesomeness

2010-04-18T14:24:00.000-05:00

thanks, Travis Stanley! :)

a conversation

2010-04-18T14:14:00.001-05:00

"Mom, I love S---. She is the best. She is my bestest friend in the whole world!"

"I'm really happy you and S--- are such good friends, Clare."

"Yes. I love her. I'm going to marry her because I love her and she is my friend." Pause. "Mom, can girls get married, like a girl marry a girl like a girl can marry a boy?"

Pause.

"Sure, baby. Why not?"

2010-04-14T10:05:00.001-05:00

Greg Kendall-Ball, journaphotolist, writes about a rally in downtown Abilene, TX called “Walk A Mile In Her Shoes,” featuring several men dressed in ladies’ heels taking a leisurely 3-block stroll through downtown, led by a Sgt. in the Abilene Police Dept.

I'm hoping that, after three blocks in those gender-specific instruments of torture (and they really should have made them wear pantyhose too), there's a heightened awareness of the prevalence of the threat and horror of sexual assault--but also of the everyday reality of women confining their bodies in painful ways to conform to cultural expectations of femininity...after all, as Rosemary Radford Ruether observes, "one might say that the measure of women's liberation in any culture is at least partly indicated by whether or not they wear shoes that allow them to walk freely!" (Sexism and God-Talk 176).

2010-04-09T10:59:00.001-05:00

tea party jesus

survey says...!

2010-04-01T20:39:00.000-05:00

Someone I know who teaches at ACU is conducting a survey about gender roles and religious attitudes of people in Churches of Christ. Here's the link to her online survey:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22ACRXPLLE3.

It only takes about 15 minutes to complete, and your answers are completely anonymous. Please voice your opinions on these important matters, and forward this link to CofC friends or family, Facebook friends, etc., so they can express their opinions, too. Thanks!

be afraid, be very afraid.

2010-03-31T21:55:00.000-05:00

Now, look. I'm not paranoid, nor prone to conspiracy theories, nor into theological anthropologies of human depravity.

But I'm freaked out at the moment, and here's why.

Card-carrying crazy-talking pacifist feminist Obama-supporting political liberal that I am, and you know it's all true, I have received a Facebook invite to this group: Now The End Begins. Now, I chuckled at the Tea Party Express III invite, which I still haven't RSVP'd to because it makes me oddly happy to see it on my Facebook page. But "Now the End Begins" is something else--it's exactly what you might think: there, you'll learn everything you need to know about "Understanding Today's Political Events Through Bible Prophecy," and then, you can move on to the "Conspiracy Theory: 101" where you learn that the Health Care Bill was really about Obama establishing a private army so he can put us all into FEMA-run Death Camps.

And yesterday at 5:01 p.m., Now the End Begins posted this message on their Facebook fan page: "This militia group was right about one thing - the upcoming battle with the Antichrist. And ask yourself this - today this group was raided, how long before owning a Bible becomes a crime? How long before Obama makes naming the name of Jesus a crime? How long before our Muslim President makes being a Christian a crime?"

Okay, so I get it--there are crazies out there. But I thought they were far away, way more than six degrees away, way way far away in rural MI with their bitterness and guns and Bibles.

But apparently I am only one degree away from this insanity.

So I'm freaked out.

And wondering if maybe--ironically--this is some horrible portent that the end really is near because sure as hell it seems like these people are willing enough to make it happen.

we are not "leader-ettes."

2010-03-29T10:19:00.000-05:00

At the CSC 2009 hosted at Lipscomb that sparked the idea of inviting guest bloggers to share their narratives and experiences of gender within the Churches of Christ, one of the participants on the panel wryly mentioned her childhood status of "leader-ette." Because girls can't be leaders. At best, girls can be leader-ettes. A silent, secondary, expendable sidekick role, decorated with a frilly and feminine diminutive suffix.

Why would this be what we encourage our daughters to aspire to?

Here's some thoughts from a dad on L2L, and why he says 'no' for his daughters: "Taking a Principled Stand."

CCfB AIDS Walk NYC 2010

2010-03-29T09:28:00.000-05:00

Clare has a collection of little frayed red ribbons on safety pins in her baby book. Someday in the future we'll be looking through it, and she'll be like, what are these things for? And I'll tell her, every year of your life until you were (???) years old, we walked in the AIDS Walk NYC together to help raise money to help people who were sick and dying from this disease.

My little activist. She may love princesses...but she's a Princess for Social Justice. Help her help people. Click here to go to our personal page to make a donation, or you can donate to the CCfB team (follow the link "my team page").

And thanks.

yay for hrothgar

2010-03-24T09:05:00.000-05:00

Raise a glass with Garrison Keillor to "for a landmark bill, achieved through the messy, maddening processes of representative democracy."

on the art of rejection

2010-03-22T11:54:00.000-05:00

I'm a pretty thick-skinned individual these days, so racking up a nice collection of rejection letters from the very few institutions even offering theology positions this past year has not been devastating. Still, I can't help but notice the amazing qualitative difference in the rejection letters so far received. Compare:

"Thank you for your kind interest in our tenure track position... We received a record number of applications for this position, and so many of them are from such wonderful and thoughtful candidates. I wish we could hire them all. Of course that is impossible. Unfortunately, after review of your credentials by our search committee, it has been determined that we will not be able to pursue this process any further with you. I'm truly sorry to bear this news, but I do thank you sincerely for your interest in our position. I know that the future will bring its own share of success and blessings for you, perhaps even in ways you did not expect."

"...is grateful for your interest in our job... We can now announce that we are offering the position to ----. Again, we thank you for your interest and for the thoughtfulness of your application. We all think highly of you and your work, and wish you every success as you move forward with your career."

Now, it seems like letter #1 is attempting to say the same thing as letter #2, but in fact, what you get is something more like "we had lots of people apply, some of whom really good but we're not saying whether or not you were one of those, we looked at your credentials and were frankly horrified, sorry to say so, but hey, thanks for applying and just as a parting shot, maybe you should start thinking about a different career path altogether."

[Note to self: JTB, if you ever find yourself writing one of these letters, remember to look up this post in the ol' blog archive before composing it.]

Mercy Street CofC in Abilene Reporter-News

2010-03-18T17:27:00.000-05:00

"Women in the Church Moving Toward Equality," February 25, 2010, by Sarah Stirman.

you gotta be kidding

2010-03-04T10:22:00.000-05:00

So, yesterday evening at about 5:30, after an hour+ of some extended and touch-and-go non-cooperative toddler negotiations, I come out of the grocery store (having saved $20 of my $78 trip, BTW, thanks to my cuz Renee's tip about coupon.com), with my cart loaded down (with my own tote bags instead of grocery store bags, I love going green, plus, you can stuff a lot more groceries in your own unbreakable bags!), Clare riding on the front like a big kid, and I round the corner to our little green car ready to unload and get home pronto to start dinner. And witness the lady parked next to us in the big new shiny Lexus SUV push her cart directly behind our car and walk off.

I mean, I know that probably half the people that grocery shop don't bother corralling their carts, but most people seem to park them in reasonably out of the way places. Not directly behind neighboring parked cars.

You gotta be kidding me, I said out loud, but she was already starting her car and gettin the hell outta Dodge.

A few years back, I would have fumed silently, thrown a dirty look that didn't land, and been even more furious than warranted because of feeling impotent and helpless. A couple of years back, I would have probably lost it completely and gone overboard in explaining to this woman exactly how awful she is.

Yesterday, I managed (I think) a good, moderate, middle-ground response. Here's how it went down:

Me: [on seeing the cart, to self and Clare] You gotta be kidding me!

[I push my cart past my car, up the aisle to her driver's side window, and tap on it. She rolls it down and gives me a what the hell look.]

Me: Did you just leave your cart directly behind my car?

Her: Which car is yours?

Me, incredulously: The green one right next to you with the shopping cart behind it!

Her: Yeah, I could have done that.

Me, even more incredulously: Why would you do that?

Her: I'm in a big hurry.

Me: Really? Yeah, so am I. And I have a three year old and a cart full of groceries to unload, how am I supposed to deal with this?

Her: I figured the guy would come take it away. And I'm in a hurry.

[I just stare--can't figure out how she could be caught red-handed and not be the least bit repentant. I stare until she rolls her eyes, sighs, and makes like she is going to get out of the car and deal with her cart.]

Me, dripping with sarcasm and really mad now: Oh don't bother. Don't worry, I'll handle it. You're in a hurry. You just go on and have a great day.

[I get no reply. No thanks, no sorry, no nothing. I am so shocked at this that I shake my head and exclaim, "Jesus!" which, I hasten to explain, is not a curse but my shorthand habit of my preferred prayer for patience in absurd and stressful situations, the "Jesus prayer"--"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."]

She ought to be thanking God I'm back on Zoloft. Things could have gone a lot worse for her. As it was, I had to push her cart away from my car in order to unload mine, and her car was so big that she had to execute an extra point in her turn in order to pull out of her space and go past us without hitting her own cart. She refused to even look over the whole time she maneuvered her way out of her spot. So she was minorly inconvenienced by her own mean sneaky laziness, but not enough for me to get any schadenfreude-ish satisfaction out it. So I find myself hoping that deep down inside she felt really bad, even if she couldn't bring herself to show it. I mean, I'd like to think that she's basically a decent person and not a totally depraved wretch.

And my sis thinks I should have just pushed the cart over behind her car instead. There's some really satisfactory poetic justice to that solution. Wish I'd thought of it.

don't miss this!

2010-02-17T10:58:00.000-05:00

Now that there's a new beautiful website for the Women in Ministry Network, if you're one of those readers who tried to click on the gadget in my sidebar to join the yahoo group and found that that didn't work (it doesn't, and I never managed to figure out how to fix it)--no worries, because you can go here and get yourself connected.

Also on that same page is a contact if you have any publications or sermon texts you would like to submit to the site. And I'd like to encourage everyone who has anything like that to do so. If you feel odd about it--as if it were some kind of weird self-promotion--think of it as both a historical archive (because what you have done and said is important!) and a public encouragement for other women to lift up their God-given voices as well. This is why I started my little sermon blog--not that I really thought a sermon blog would get any readership (it doesn't) but because I wanted a public record of these events. They are small and unimportant in themselves (except to me personally, for whom they were momentous) but taken together with all the other small, quiet actions of women in our churches, they help paint a picture of the real situation in our churches regarding gender and vocation and ministry. And by that I mean, the real situation is that women are raising their voices...the "status quo" is not complete silence (and as some have pointed out in discussion recently here, perhaps it never was to begin with). That should be recognized far more than it currently is, and we can all take the simple measure of making the public record complete on this point.

(I'm loving and overusing the parenthetical comment today for some reason...hmph...)

new Women in Ministry website

2010-02-11T19:28:00.000-05:00

This is exciting! Check it out: http://womeninministrycc.com/

by CW: The One-handed Church

2010-02-11T08:58:00.002-05:00

Our congregation’s women’s brunch last spring was bittersweet for me. As much as I loved the music and the message, the food and the friends, I couldn’t escape the painful reminder: We are missing so much by excluding women from public roles in our worship assemblies.

Who could listen to either of our main presenters and not acknowledge their spiritual gifts? These women are obviously talented speakers and writers, but God has also blessed them with supernatural powers to speak to our hearts, to encourage us, to strengthen us. Later that day, another of my spiritual heroes led us in our closing prayer, and I was so touched to hear her words as we together reached out to praise our Father. But our men, unless they happened to be helping out that day, didn’t get to hear those women’s words, and that’s a real shame.

Growing up in the Church of Christ, for years I just accepted that certain roles were only for the men. I was shown the “restrictive passages” (1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2), and that was that. As I grew up and came into my own “owned” faith, I found myself drawn more and more to women’s Bible studies that gave me the chance to hear from those who were silenced on Sunday mornings. That’s not to take away from the many men who blessed me with their lessons, their prayers, their testimonies, but I cherished those occasions when I could learn from spiritually gifted women, too.

Years ago, I heard our minister’s lessons discussing which of our traditions may be gospel or cultural. That study and others turned up the volume on this question that kept resonating in my heart: Did the Lord really intend for His church to do its work with one hand tied behind its back?

Obviously, women are hard at work in His church. It is hard to find a ministry at my home congregation or anywhere that does not rely on male and female members’ time and energy. Rightly so, in our church we have no problem asking and expecting women to serve—with one notable exception. You would think that no one could argue with women serving, and yet our congregation only allows men to serve the Lord’s Supper. Even the strictest interpretation of those restrictive passages would still allow for women to participate in this way. (In fact, every Sunday hundreds of us women are serving when we pass the tray from the person on one side of us to the other, but somehow we’ve decided that a woman shalt not pass a tray whilst standing upright.)

But what about other types of service like reading scriptures or praying? What about making announcements aloud? What about teaching? We’re already doing that, too! In our small groups, in Bible studies and in our homes, women do all those things in the presence of men. Countless times I’ve been blessed to hear one of my sisters share her thoughts or her interpretation of a particular passage, and it’s been uplifting and encouraging. I’ve also heard women pray from their hearts and find ways to articulate our praise, our thankfulness, our humble requests. In those environments, are we no less worshiping God? Yes, it’s special when we’re all assembled in the Family Center on the first day of the week, but it seems strange to change the rules for that setting as opposed to other gatherings when we humble ourselves before His throne.

I have spent much time praying for God’s guidance with this issue, and I have struggled, wondering how much of my dissonance comes from my own ego: Who’s to tell me I’m not good enough to pass a communion tray? Why is what I have to say less important because I was born a female? How are my contributions to the work here not deacon-worthy? I have kept quiet, afraid that my objections were driven by my own pride and selfishness. But over and over again, I have felt the Spirit leading me to question our traditions, to speak up, to acknowledge that the cost of this silence is too great.

I don’t necessarily need to be the one in front of the microphone; I’m happy with my role tapping on keyboards and pushing buttons running MediaShout or the sound board. I’m so blessed to get to use my computer skills for the church’s work, and I can barely describe the joy it brings me to feel like a vital part of this family. But what about our women who are spiritually gifted speakers and teachers? What about our female prayer warriors? Shouldn’t they have the same opportunities to use their God-given gifts to serve Him? Not only would they be blessed to use those gifts, but we all would be blessed to hear from those women among us more regularly. At events like the women’s brunch, that fact is painfully clear.

God is at work in His church, and He is doing awesome things at our congregation! He has blessed us with so many capable leaders, but too often we have hidden some of our greatest resources behind the scenes or behind their husbands. We have squandered some of our blessings by silencing those He has gifted. For too long the generations before us ignored certain brothers and sisters because of their skin color. Looking back now, we can recognize that tragedy. How many more generations will have to pass through our doors before we recognize how much we’re missing by not utilizing the resources He’s provided? It’s time for us to reach out to Him and to those around us with both hands.

--Charis Weiss

gal328: Frequently Raised Objections

2010-02-09T11:21:00.000-05:00

Just revisited this for the first time in awhile. It's still right on target. And it makes me curious: what is the most frequently raised objection you hear? What is your response to it?

FRO (Frequently Raised Objections), by Lance Pape

1. Do you really pronounce the site name “gal three twenty-eight dot org”? Isn’t the word “gal” sexist? It’s ironic that your site’s name perpetuates a damaging stereotype.
Lighten up. It’s meant to make you smile when you say it.

2. If Jesus was such an egalitarian, why did he choose 12 men as his disciples/apostles?
Jesus embraced Samaritans against all odds, yet he did not choose any Samaritans as apostles. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, breaking down the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles, yet Jesus did not choose any Gentiles as apostles. In Christ there is no longer male and female, yet Jesus did not choose any women as apostles. Jesus was no “respecter of persons,” but his ministry had to be conducted within the constraints of a particular historical context.
Furthermore, the number (12) and kind (Jewish men) of the apostles function symbolically to recall the twelve tribes descended from the sons of Jacob, thus designating Jesus’ new community of followers as the New Israel descended from twelve.
In the final analysis, the “demographics” of the apostles no more suggest exclusively male leadership as Jesus’ vision for the church than they suggest exclusively Jewish leadership as Jesus’ vision for the church.

3. Aren’t you afraid you might be wrong? Why risk your eternal soul over something you can’t possibly be sure about?
Granting that well-meaning people may disagree about the Bible’s teaching on gender, there is no compelling reason to assume that the traditional, restrictive position is theologically “safe.” The status quo is self-authenticating. It creates the illusion of safety while depicting alternative visions of community life as inherently risky. But in light of God’s self-disclosure in both Testaments as the advocate of the voiceless, the liberator of the oppressed, the friend of the marginal, and the reverser of human power structures, I submit that when the status quo restricts and excludes in God’s name, it is profoundly risky and should bear the full burden of proof.

4. Gender justice is a sell-out to culture. Secular feminism raised this issue and now you are trying to make the Bible conform to a secular agenda.
There is no doubt that gender justice is enjoying a lot of attention in our culture. Violence against women, objectification of women through pornography (including the soft porn of mainstream advertising), lower pay for equal work—in so many ways our enlightened democratic society is coming to grips with the reality that gender discrimination has led to all kinds of gross injustice. As during the movements for abolition in the 19th and civil rights in the 20th century, the world outside our church doors is rumbling once again with profound change. I am convinced that, once again, God is at work in such rumblings.
I submit that these rumblings are a third chance for us. Do we really want to repeat the hardness of heart that allowed us to defend the supposed Biblical warrants for slavery right up to the moment when we were dragged kicking and screaming into God’s future? Do we really want to repeat the rigid thinking that made our Christian colleges some of the last to embrace racially equitable admission policies? What is needed now are people who take Scripture seriously and who can read it courageously with the fresh eyes that our new, God-given moment makes necessary and possible. God does new things (Isaiah 43:19) and awakens in his children new capacities to discern the new thing in their midst. Just ask the daring souls who decided the question of the inclusion of the Gentiles (Acts 15). There was plenty of Scripture to quote both ways on that question, but the more inclusive vision carried the day to the glory of God and our eternal benefit. Scripture, like the God of Scripture, is living and active. Take another look in the light of a new context; you may be surprised what you find there.

5. What about 1 Timothy 2:11-15 and 1 Corinthians 14:33b-36? Shouldn’t it tell you something that you have to work so hard to “explain away” texts like these? The plain sense of these texts seems clear enough.
The simple fact is that sometimes the truth really is complicated. When a passage insists that women “will be saved through child-bearing” (1 Timothy 2:15) rather than by grace through faith, we are on notice that something is up—something complicated.
Our context plays a huge role in determining which passages seem perfectly clear, and which need to “be explained.” To a plantation owner in the deep South circa 1860, the implications of Ephesians 6:5-6 seemed clear enough:

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.

A century and a half later, in a new context, we are not persuaded by the claim that the ownership of one human being by another is part of the God-ordained order of creation. We are utterly unconvinced by the once seemingly self-evident claim that this arrangement enjoys a universal, Christological endorsement.
What is needed is interpretive humility, and a sensitivity to the theological undercurrents in Scripture. I am convinced that Galatians 3 and Acts 15 recommend themselves as good starting points for thinking theologically about gender while 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 do not. For a detailed annotated bibliography of the relevant literature, see our “Readings” page. And we will continue to provide resources on the “Articles” page that explain and clarify our understanding of the Bible’s egalitarian vision of gender relations.

6. You chose Galatians 3:28 as the theme verse for your site. Aren’t you aware that Galatians 3:28 is simply saying that both men and women enjoy equally the promise of salvation?
Obviously the argument of Galatians is concerned primarily with the question of Jews and Gentiles, not men and women. And, strictly speaking, the conflict doesn’t appear to be a boundary or “salvation” dispute (“Are the Gentiles in or not?”) so much as a status dispute (“Can an uncircumcised Gentile ever really be ‘in’?”).
This is a growing scholarly consensus that is well illustrated in the story Paul relates in Galatians 2:11-14. Paul recalls an incident in which he chastised Peter as a hypocrite when he was persuaded by Jewish peers to refuse table fellowship to Gentiles in Antioch. Paul counted Peter’s treatment of Gentiles as an affront to “the truth of the Gospel.”
Apparently, the “no longer Jew and Gentile” of Galatians 3:28 is not only a claim about Jews and Gentiles sharing equally in the promise of salvation, if by “salvation” we mean an other-worldly designation with no concrete social implications. We can scarcely imagine Paul consoling Gentiles forced to sit at a separate table with the assurance that they are equal in God’s sight, but must resign themselves to a different “role” in the community. In Galatians, Paul argues and imagines a community with no second-class citizens. For Paul, the new status enjoyed by both Jews and Gentiles “in Christ” is the reality that trumps all others—a “new creation” that will be reflected in every facet of community life.
Since the claims about race, class, and gender appear in parallel in Galatians 3:28, I submit that the burden of proof is on those who want to say that the implications for gender are not analogous to those for race. I further submit that Galatians 3:28 may be the best window into Paul’s theology of gender—one that is not complicated and obscured by the (largely unknown) circumstantial crises of gender that precipitated 1 Corinthians 14, and 1 Timothy 2.

7. Churches of Christ have a long history of quarreling over opinions and majoring in minors. This gender justice thing is just another example. Shouldn’t you be paying more attention to core issues like evangelism?
I resonate with this concern. Given our history, we should take great care in choosing the issues that receive our attention. I can only say in good faith that I am convinced that time will show that gender justice is different. I think history will someday show that it is as important to the truth of the gospel as the full inclusion of the Gentiles in the first century, and the important milestones of class inclusion championed by American Christians in the 19th (abolition) and 20th (civil rights) centuries.
Paul could say that “the truth of the gospel” was at stake in the way Gentile converts were treated by Jewish Christians at Antioch (Gal. 2:11-14). And, of course, the status of Gentiles in the community did have profound implications for the spread of the Gospel of grace in Paul’s mission field. Paul understood that the Good News was not really good news to the Gentiles of Asia Minor or Greece if it involved inviting them into the community of faith as second-class citizens. How could they have been expected to receive it as Good News on those terms?
I think that in the 21st century we will face similar problems on gender unless we work hard to come to terms with the last of the three claims in Galatians 3:28 (“no longer male and female”).
For a narrative approach to this same idea, I recommend “Elijah’s Twelfth,” a little piece of historical fiction by Dale Pauls that teases out the troubling evangelistic implications of dismissing justice issues as peripheral to the gospel.

belated tribute to genius

2010-02-05T10:54:00.000-05:00

Finally, I am uploading some (sort of fuzzy, sorry, the camera is not behaving well lately) pics of my uber-awesome biz cards from Virgil O. Stamps Letterpress. In case you were wondering, YES, a handful of my cards are backed with a vintage SPAM ad. I'm not giving those away. They are too cool. Others are backed with B&W images of 50's housewives holding big baskets of laundry, or washing dishes, and looking, frankly, a little pissed off. And others with pics of 50's paradise-suburbia. Because Virgil knows, I like irony.