Irene Zimmerman – Liturgy

Pieta by William Adolphe Bouguereau

All the way to Elizabeth
and in the months afterward
she wove him, pondering,
“this is my body, my blood!

“Beneath the watching eyes
of donkey, ox, and sheep
she rocked him crooning
“this is my body, my blood!”

In the search for her young lost boy
and the foreboding day of his leaving
she let him go , knowing
“This is my body, my blood!”

Under the blood smeared cross
she rocked his mangled bones,
re-membering him, moaning,
“This is my body, my blood!”

When darkness, stones , and tomb
bloomed to Easter morning,
She ran to him shouting,
“this is my body, my blood!”

And no one thought to tell her:
“Woman, it is not fitting
for you to say those words.
You don’t resemble him.”

NOTE: A Eucharistic poem by Roman Catholic Sister Irene Zimmerman.

Frances Croake Frank – Did The Woman Say

Pieta

Did the woman say
When she held him for the first time
in the dark dank of a stable,
After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,
“This is my body, this is my blood?”

Did the woman say,
When she held him for the last time in the
dark rain on a hilltop,
After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,
“This is my body, this is my blood?

Well that she said it to him then,
For dry old men,
Brocaded robes belying barrenness,
Ordain that she not say it for him now.

Note: A beautiful Eucharistic poem, on a delicate subject, written by Roman Catholic Sister, Frances Croake Frank.

Graham Hill – 15 Habits and Practices to Amplify the Voices of Women and Honor Their Gifts

1. Get real about empowering female leaders
2. Enable women to sit at the table
3. Help women see women at the table
4. Transform male-dominated cultures
5. Model and esteem real professional and personal partnerships
6. Build cultures where women and men can equally succeed
7. Stop talking and start listening
8. Honor all women
9. Examine your beliefs and practices
10. Embrace reciprocal mentoring
11. Get proactive about women speakers
12. Ask what you’re willing to give up (and gain)
13. Profile female Christian leaders
14. Pray with women
15. Make honoring women and girls a lifestyle and an institutional value.

Graham Joseph Hill – Holding Half the Sky. A Biblical Case for Women Leading and Teaching in the Church (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020)

(From Scot McKnight – ‘Practicing Biblical Equality in the Church. Graham Hill gives fifteen practices for greater equality in the church‘)

Rachel Elizabeth Asproth – Things Christian Women Hear about Women

Rachel Elizabeth Asproth

April 19, 2017

Last night, Sarah Bessey (we’re fans!) began a conversation about the strange, sexist, abusive, and toxic things Christian women are told on a regular basis. We’ve been leaning into the conversation and doing our best to keep a record of the profound and heartbreaking stories women and male allies are sharing. We’ve collected some of the most powerful tweets so far in a list, and we’re inviting our audience to follow the ongoing conversation happening on Twitter under #ThingsOnlyChristianWomenHear.

If you have a relevant story or experience, please join the conversation yourself or share in the comments below.

1. “You can teach the women and children, you just can’t teach the men.” –Charlie Grantham

2. “You are an amazing leader! You’d make an excellent pastor’s wife someday!” –Sarah Bessey

3. “Women are too emotional to be leaders and pastors. It would never work.” –Jesse Harp

Church of England General Synod Votes for Women Bishops, Finally

Rev Rose Hudson-Wilkin is tipped to be the CofE’s first woman bishop

‘Women will be bishops in the Church of England after a historic vote in the General Synod, ending 40 years of wrangling.

An overwhelming 81 per cent of Synod members backed the change, during the sitting in York, and 75 per cent of the laity supported the move.’

(Read the whole article in The Telegraph.)

* * *

See also on BBC News the article ‘What are the issues behind women bishops vote?‘

Sherry Hamby – Rethinking Domestic Violence – 5 Myths

Myth #1 – Battered women keep domestic violence a secret.

Reality: Countless research studies show that most battered women disclose their partner’s violence to at least one person—about 80% to 90% of victims in many studies. Victims not only tell, they often tell multiple people and agencies. The problem is not that women don’t tell, it is that they do not receive useful help when they do disclose.

Myth #2 – Victims just need to call the police.

Reality: Police officers cannot offer a cure-all for domestic violence. Police arrest perpetrators less than half the time when they are called to the scene of domestic violence incidents, according to the most recently available national data. Worse, arrested perpetrators seldom go to jail—approximately five out of six perpetrators arrested for domestic violence never serve any jail time.

Veil of Tears – Official Movie Trailer

Veil of Tears is the gripping new documentary film narrated by Natalie Grant that tells the untold story of millions of women in India who are culturally persecuted for no other reason than the fact that they are women. However, despite the centuries of oppression, there are those who are reaching out and trying to change the culture towards women, from the inside out.

In which there’s a new way forward – Sarah Bessey

In which there’s a new way forward – Sarah Bessey.

Sarah Bessey is another blogger that I read with great pleasure.

She asks in this post a number of important questions for women, and members of other dis empowered groups, that tend to be marginalised in our (christian) culture. Here are some of them:

‘So when confronted with the exclusion of women or minorities by people who really don’t care to change or listen from those within the religious establishment, what are my options?

Do I argue and force and campaign my way to a seat at their table?

Do I ignore it and simply move on?

Or is there a third way? is there a new way forward for us?’

Man vs Woman

This may be a bit simplistic and reductionistic, but probably not too much off the mark. What do you think?

1. MULTITASKING
Women – Multiple process. Women’s brains designed to concentrate multiple task at a time. Women can Watch a TV and Talk over phone and cook.

Men – Single Process. Men’s brains designed to concentrate only one work at a time. Men can not watch TV and talk over the phone at the same time. they stop the TV while Talking. They can either watch TV or talk over the phone or cook.

2. LANGUAGE
Women can easily learn many languages. But can not find solutions to problems.

Men can not easily learn languages, they can easily solve problems. That’s why in average a 3 years old girl has three times higher vocabulary than a 3 year old boy.

Women in Ministry: One Week Intensive

Women in Ministry: One Week Intensive.

Some help from Scot McKnight for those who are struggling with the biblical legitimacy of idea of ‘women in ministry’.

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Men Rules

How men and women see colours

MAN RULES

AT LAST A GUY HAS TAKEN THE TIME TO WRITE THIS ALL DOWN
FINALLY, the guys’ side of the story. ( I MUST ADMIT, IT’S PRETTY GOOD.)

WE ALWAYS HEAR ‘THE RULES’ FROM THE FEMALE SIDE
NOW HERE ARE THE RULES FROM THE MALE SIDE

THESE ARE OUR RULES!

PLEASE NOTE. THESE ARE ALL NUMBERED #1 ON PURPOSE!

1. MEN ARE NOT MIND READERS.

Women’s Press » Blog Archive » Losing my religion for equality…by Jimmy Carter

Women’s Press » Blog Archive » Losing my religion for equality…by Jimmy Carter.

I fully agree with Jimmy Carter on this matter

By the way, when carter talks about ‘losing his religion’, he does not talk about his Christian faith, but about his ‘Southern Baptist faith’. Sincerely, I don’t think he has lost much, at least not the way this faith looks at present.

Pope Francis on the Fundamental Role of Women in the Church

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Today we turn to the Catechism of the Year of Faith. In the Creed we repeat this phrase: “He rose again on the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures”. This is the very event that we are celebrating: the Resurrection of Jesus, the center of the Christian message that has resounded since the beginning and has been handed down so that it may reach us today. Saint Paul writes to the Christians of Corinth: “For I handed on to you …what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures;that he was buried; that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures;that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve”(1 Cor 15:3-5). This brief confession of faith announces the Paschal Mystery, with the first appearances of the Risen Christ to Peter and the Twelve: the Death and Resurrection of Jesus is the heart of our hope. Without this faith in the Death and Resurrection of Jesus our hope would be weak, but it wouldn’0t even be hope, the Death and Resurrection of Jesus is the heart of our hope. The Apostle says: “If Christ has not been raised,your faith is vain; you are still in your sins” (v. 17).

Unfortunately, there have often been attempts to obscure faith in the Resurrection of Jesus, and doubts have crept in even among believers themselves. A watered down faith, as we would say, not a strong faith. This is because of superficiality, sometimes because of indifference, occupied by a thousand things considered more important than the faith, or because of a purely horizontal vision of life. But it is the Resurrection that gives us the greatest hope, because it opens our lives and the life of the world to the eternal future of God, to full happiness, to the certainty that evil, sin, death can be defeated. And this leads us to live everyday realities with more confidence, to face them with courage and commitment. The Resurrection of Christ shines a new light on these daily realities. The Resurrection of Christ is our strength!

Complementarian vs Egalitarian

The last book of Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, continues to make waves among evangelicals.

One expression of this is an indirect dialogue between Rachel and Jen Pollock Michel, a ‘complementarian’ lady writing for the Her.meneutics blog of Christianity Today.

Those who read my blog know already a number of things about me:

1. I consider myself a feminist theologian. I believe the church looses a lot when she reads the Bible and interprets church history and Christian thought exclusively through the eyes of men, as was the case for most of its existance.

2. I refuse to be catalogued as an egalitarian, and even less so a complementarian (as much as I refuse to choose between the Calvinist and the Arminian ideologiei); I am convinced that these labels are misguided and deceptive. In fact, most so-called ‘complementarians’ are in fact hierarchialists, while egalitarians, when they don;t buy into the Marxist rubbish that informs some extreme versions of feminism, refuse to obliterate all differences between men and women (some of them, thank goodness, are in fact impossible to obliterate, to our delight 🙂 ).

Valerie Hudson – What Sex Means for World Peace

The article with the title above, published by Foreign Policy, raises a very important issue which, in our man-made world is most often neglected. Here is the main argument:

Using the largest extant database on the status of women in the world today, which I created with three colleagues, we found that there is a strong and highly significant link between state security and women’s security. In fact, the very best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is not its level of wealth, its level of democracy, or its ethno-religious identity; the best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is how well its women are treated. What’s more, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are as insecure and unstable as nondemocracies.

Richard Rohr – Women As Transformers

Historically speaking, in our culture the role of men has been to create, to make new things, to fix broken things, and to defend us from things which could hurt us. All of these are wonderful and necessary roles for the preservation of the human race. However, most children saw their mother in a different way. She was not a creator, a fixer, or a defender, but rather a transformer. Once a woman has carried her baby inside of her body for nine months and brought it forth, through the pain of childbirth, into the world, she knows the mystery of transformation at a cellular level.

Ben Witherington III – Women, Ministry Roles, and Scripture

No comment. Just for the open minded.

Thanks to Scot McKnight for the link.

Should women be permitted to read Scripture aloud in a church service?

Jesus Creed » Women and the Public Reading of Scripture.

Scot McKnight comments, again on some common sense matters (for non-fundamentalists). Here it goes:

Anyone who says reading Scripture is a teaching ministry is just making stuff up. Reading is reading and teaching is teaching, and preaching is preaching, and prophesying is prophesying, but reading is not teaching, preaching or prophesying. Women were prophets, women were apostles, women were teachers – this is all in the New Testament. That more than qualifies them for the public reading of Scripture.

There is a serious set of scholars who think the first public reading of Romans was by none other than Phoebe, the letter courier. Beside the already-unbiblical notion of prohibiting women from proclamation and teaching and preaching, the biggest error here is the reservation of only male-given gifts for a Sunday morning service. Where do we get Sunday-morning-only gifts? If women can read the Bible at home to themselves (teaching themselves) and to their children (teaching them) and to their Sunday school classes (teaching children), they can read it in the church service.

Carol Howard Merritt – Seven Things Guys Need To Know About Post-Evangelical Women

Carol Howard Merritt is a pastor of Western Presbyterian Church, an intergenerational congregation in Washington, D.C.

In a recent post on her blog, TribalChurch, she identifies what she describes as ‘seven things guys need to know about post-evangelical women (PEWs)’.

Here is the list:

1) We were told to keep silent in church.

2) We’re not welcome at every table

3) We don’t want to hear whining about forced quotas.

Women: Know Your Limits

R well deserved ridicule of the misogynism of the world built by men,’ according to their own image and likeness’: ugly, impersonal and absurd.

Note: Thanks to Lucian Balanescu for this link

WCC – Multimedia study series on gender violence launched for Lent

Cries of Anguish; Stories of Hope –  a series of online Lenten study resources on the struggle to end violence against women will be launched 15 February during a prayer service at the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva, Switzerland, which is home to a number of international church organizations including the World Council of Churches (WCC). The general secretary of the WCC, the Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit,  will participate and WCC programme executive for Women in Church and Society, Dr Fulata Mbano Moyo, will discuss biblical texts addressing violence against women.

Freedom

The basic freedom of the world is woman’s freedom. A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters.

(Margaret Sanger – Woman and the New Race)

A Software Problem

Dear Sir:

Las year I upgraded Girlfriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and noticed that the new program began unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and valuable resources. No mention of this phenomenon was included in the product brochure. In addition, wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during system initialization where it monitors all other system activity. Applications such as Pokernight 10.3 and Beerbash 2.5 no longer run, crashing the system whenever selected. I cannot seem to purge Wife 1.0 from the system. I am thinking of going back to Girlfriend 1.0 but un-install does not work on this system.

Can you help me?