Emerging Women

My church is currently doing a series where we are exploring how cultural system of patriarchy have not only hurt women and men, but they have forced us to limit God. It is a very difficult series because it exposes in us woundings that many of us have never fully faced before. But if we truly desire to love each other and worship God fully in spirit and truth, we have to force ourselves to explore difficult topics.

During our first week, we played this song by Cary Cooper, “Pretty Girls,” that really gets at the pain unhealthy cultural expectations and gender roles can cause us. I thought I’d share it here.

Pretty Girls

You…never like…your ugly duckling
You never like me…without my…lipstick on
You…never like…my recollections where your memories
Where you memories are…tread upon

You…never come…right out and tell me
The scenic route has…always…been your way
But I’ve…been riding shotgun with you long enough to know
Long enough to know what you mean when you say

Pretty girls…have pretty voices
Pretty girls…preserve their youth
Pretty girls…know all their choices
Pretty girls…don’t tell the truth

You…can teach a girl…to curtsy
Set a table…like her great grandmother did
You…can dress her up…in velvet
Neglect to tell her…all…the secrets you hid

And love…love is not…the question
Cause if you wanted…you could love someone to death
Love…them straight into…the closet…afraid to draw
Afraid to draw…afraid to draw a breath

Pretty girls…have pretty voices
Pretty girls…preserve their youth
Pretty girls…know all their choices
Pretty girls…don’t tell the truth

Pretty girls…have pretty voices
Pretty girls…preserve their youth
Pretty girls…know all their choices
Pretty girls…don’t tell the truth

By Julie Clawson

Clay Shirky’s recent blog post A Rant About Women has been getting it’s fair share of attention – mostly of the angry and upset variety. In the rant, he asserts that women don’t have the high-paying jobs and positions of power that men do basically because we don’t sell ourselves well enough. He sees male students all the time pompously asserting themselves and even lying in order to get where they want in life. Women just don’t act like arrogant bastards, and so therefore we are still underrepresented in the professional world. He suggests, we need to just be more like men in our self-promotion. He writes-

And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what? We ask people to cross gender lines all the time. We’re in the middle of a generations-long project to encourage men to be better listeners and more sensitive partners, to take more account of others’ feelings and to let out our own feelings more. Similarly, I see colleges spending time and effort teaching women strategies for self-defense, including direct physical aggression. I sometimes wonder what would happen, though, if my college spent as much effort teaching women self-advancement as self-defense.

* * *

Some of the reason these strategies succeed is because we live in a world where women are discriminated against. However, even in an ideal future, self-promotion will be a skill that produces disproportionate rewards, and if skill at self-promotion remains disproportionately male, those rewards will as well. This isn’t because of oppression, it’s because of freedom.

So on one hand, I understand his point. Research has shown that often women make less than men simply because women don’t ask for raises as often as men do. We don’t put ourselves out there in risky ways, making ourselves look good no matter who it may hurt. But as a Christian I have a hard time with his suggestion that if women just became selfish jerks like men, we would be all good. Yes, we have the freedom to play that game and yes, it may actually get us more power and money, but we’d have to sell our soul in the process. I don’t want to play a bitchier meaner game in order to compete, I want to change the game itself. I would rather live in a world where being an arrogant bastard wasn’t a virtue. Sure, that might sound naive and idealistic, but it also sounds much more in line with my faith. If I want to be like Jesus, I can’t play the game “me first, screw whoever gets in my way.”

So I wonder if the professors and consultants who are putting their time and energy into helping women be able to play just as dirty as the men in a broken system would instead put effort into building a new system what difference that would make? What would it take for that to start to happen? What changes need to be made at fundamental levels to shift the way this entire game gets played? What would a system even look like where caring for the other instead of “every man for himself” was the central tenet?

Julie Clawson is a mother, writer, and speaker. She is the author of Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our Daily Choices (IVP, 2009). In addition to moderating the Emerging Women blog, she also writes at julieclawson.com.

By Jan Edmiston

When I was in seminary in Boston in the 80s, we heard Mary Daly was on some kind of permanent sabbatical from Boston College although she continued to be on the faculty through the 90s. She died last week at the age of 81.

She was a Roman Catholic feminist who refused to admit men to her women’s studies classes.

But before we write her off as wild and crazy, remember that she introduced to many of us the radical notion that God Is Not a Man. There is no “Big Man in the Sky.”

What was “dangerously radical” was in fact Biblical. It set us free.

Mary Daly was a brave believer. She wrote Church and the Second Sex when Boston College was still all-male, threatening her job and derailing her own tenure track. Eventually she got tenure, which made it hard to get rid of her – although they tried. She was the first woman to preach at Memorial Church on the campus of Harvard.

She delighted in linguistics, criticizing “bore-ocrats” and calling angry men “misterical.” She was angry herself at times – but was also funny and so, so smart. Mainly, she was trying to be true and real. Her wishes for memorial services were merely to have women celebrate her life wherever they lived. No special services.

This is my own little tribute here.

So Saturday, one of my favorite people asked me if I would officiate at his and J’s wedding in 2011. In our sanctuary. In a state where same sex marriage is illegal and probably will be for a while. “Don’t you want to get married in DC when you can actually get a license?” I said. “No, this is our church.” he said.

Mary Daly lives wherever we try to do the radical, Christ-like thing.

This post first appeared at Jan’s blog A Church for Starving Artists.

By Jessica Coblentz

In an excerpt from her recently published diaries, Dorothy Day recalled a friend who, exactly 9 months before Christmas day, celebrated the Annunciation by getting on his knees, leaning over, and kissing the ground. This is the day that God entered Mary’s womb, he would exclaim. He delighted in the fact that Christ Christened the earth with divine incarnation on that day. With that day, the earth became sacred in the most tangible, significant event of Christian history.

I so often think of Christmas day as the annual celebration of the Incarnation. However, this man’s celebration of the Annunciation challenges me to think of the Incarnation of God in the world as something that occurred not in a single day like Christmas, but rather, through an unfolding process–quite literally, though the season of Mary’s pregnancy.

And, really, the Incarnation did not reach its pinnacle with the birth of Christ in a manger. The Incarnation continued throughout Jesus’ childhood, adult life, crucifixion, and resurrection. And I think the Incarnation, the unfolding of the divine in temporal life, it continues today. It is my regular witness of it in ordinary life that compels me to believe this paradoxical religious claim with such devotion.

What if I lived each day like it was Christmas–the celebration of divine Incarnation in this broken, messed up world? I don’t mean to pose this question in some sort of sappy Coca-cola Christmas commercial kind of way. I mean it. What if I lived with the type of reverence for the goodness in this world that would compel me to kneel down and kiss the dirt? What if I took the time to recognize the continuous unfolding of the Incarnation like that?

Come to think of it, what if I simply lived Christmas day–one day a year–like that? Perhaps that’s a start to a new way of living out the whole year.

Jessica Coblentz is a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School. Follow her writing on the Web at www.jessicacoblentz.com.

By Ann Catherine Pittman

I read all four resurrection stories last night in an attempt to understand what it means to start over. I started off reading the first and second chapter in Matthew: the story of Joseph, Mary and the baby’s trek to Egypt. That’s starting over, I thought. A new culture a new language, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. So I headed toward the back of the book.

Matthew’s resurrection story is short and has the treasured Great Commission. Mark’s is even shorter unless you count the longer ending complete with snake-handling, but most scholars don’t, so I skipped that part. Luke has the great story of the two travelers who get the whole biblical story from Moses to the Prophets to the Messiah retold and interpreted for them by none other than Jesus himself… man I would have like to be a fly on the headdress of one of those guys. And then, I turned to John. Like the others you’ve got the women at the tomb, but also the race of Peter and “the loved one.” There’s the breathing on the disciples incident, and of course the famous “I’ll believe it when I see it” story compliments of Thomas’ doubt. But to end the book: an outing at sea.

After the crucifixion and the appearances of Jesus, the disciples return to doing what they know how to do best. Like a kid who finishes Summer Camp and then has to go back to school in August, the disciples return from their journey with Jesus and head to their fishing boats. I suppose Luke went back to his hospital clinic and Matthew went back to the IRS office, but Peter, James, John and Andrew joined back up with their partners and went back out to sea.

With New Year’s Eve, we too come off the high of Christmas. Usually it’s a time when everyone is a little bit nicer, a little more giving, and a little more repentant. From Christmas we move straight into the New Year when our culture offers us an opportunity to take our repentance and really “do” repentance by making resolutions. We even change numbers on the calendar, a constant reminder that we have really started something new.

Two Thousand and Ten
Twenty Ten
Two Oh One Oh

It’s not 2009, it’s 2010. And for our culture it’s a time to start over, start fresh.

Similarly, that’s what the disciples faced after Jesus’ ghostly appearances. What now?

“Well, I guess we go back to work.”

And that’s what happens to us too. We have an encounter with Christ and then we have to go back to work. Our lives don’t change as radically as we feel they should. We don’t get new parents or a new city to live in or a new job or a new body. What changes is within us. When the external parts of our world keep on going and we’re standing there wide-eyed and gape-mouthed having seen Jesus alive and at work, at some point we have to push our jaw back into place and go on with our lives.

And that means going back to work.

“Cast your nets on the other side,” Jesus called to them. Returning to work after an encounter with Jesus can mean doing things a little differently.

“Come have breakfast with me,” Jesus invited them. Taking a break in our busy lives for communion with Jesus can be necessary for nourishment.

“What is that to you what I do with your friend’s life?” Jesus asked of Peter. Following Jesus doesn’t mean making comparisons between you and others in your community, neither does it mean passing judgment on them.

It’s pretty easy to spiritualize this text as I’ve just done. And it’s pretty easy to just leave it alone. But the disciples had to carry on just like you and I carry on. So how did they do it? How do they live normal lives, changed by their encounter with the risen Christ?

And that’s what New Years reminds me of: my conversion, or rather, my continual process of conversion. This time of the year reminds me what it means to start over in our hearts and minds, but carry on living in the same world as before.

And so I leave you with a question (just in case resolving to go to the gym every day weren’t enough of a burden).

How will we start over… now that we’ve had breakfast with God?

Rev. Ann Pittman is the Minister to Young Adults and of Creative Discipleship at First Baptist Church in Austin, Texas. She is a writer, singer and mother of two cats and a dog. She blogs at www.anncpittman.blogspot.com.

By Jenny Rae Armstrong

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it really means to be a Christian, and about the challenges of being or calling oneself a Christian in American society. As a missionary kid in Liberia, I had friends from many different nations, cultures, and faiths, and was faced early with the fact that many good, devout people believed very differently than I did. The sincerity and devotion of my Muslim, Buddhist, and Jain friends challenged me. They held tight to the doctrines they were taught from infancy, lived out their faith in the ways prescribed by their sacred books and cultures.

I couldn’t help but wonder, was I any different? I had been born to Christian parents in the backwoods of Wisconsin, and I believed in Jesus with all my heart. But if I had been born in Taiwan, like my friend Yu-San, would I be a Buddhist? If I had been born in the Cameroon, like my friend Mohammed, would I be a Muslim?

The answer made me uncomfortable. I figured that if I was going to ask Yu-San or Mohammed to reconsider their beliefs, to be willing to chuck everything they had been taught by the people they loved the most out the window, I had better be willing to do the same. To ask questions. To regard my culture with a critical eye. To be willing to temper my “worldview” with as much logical and emotional distance as I could muster.

That was a very good thing, a refining and refocusing of my faith. And honestly, I think this is an are where “third culture kids,” children who are raised in a culture that is not their own, have an advantage. They are the perpetual outsiders, savvy anthropologists who don’t fit into their home or host cultures (whichever is which). Everyone sees the world through their own pair of glasses, the lenses focused by education, experience, and cultural expectations–it’s just that third culture kids tend to have several pairs lying around, and find it easier to change them at will.

Anyhow. Fast forward twenty years, to a sleepy little county in Northern Wisconsin. Churches abound, their libraries stocked with books on developing a “Christian worldview” (invariably written by evangelical Protestant males of European descent). Christian novels, Christian newspapers, Christian music, Christian tee-shirts, Christian dietary supplements (?!) are everywhere. Politicians on both sides of the aisle season their speeches with oblique allusions to their Christian faith, in the hopes that if they can just brush the hem of Jesus’ garment, some of his glory will rub off on their agendas. And while not everyone in Douglas County, Wisconsin would claim to be a Christian, there are precious few of them who would claim to be anything else, a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist.

My question is, how is it possible to be a Christian in a place like this? How is it possible to tell the difference between your faith and your culture when they are, for all intensive purposes, one and the same? I’m overstating the point, obviously, but our preconceptions of what it means to be a Christian are HUGE. Do we assume Christians talk a certain way? Vote a certain way? Dress a certain way? Drink (or not drink!) a certain way? If we’re honest, most of us would question the salvation of a man seen swigging alcohol at a party with prostitutes. Good thing Jesus didn’t need to be saved.

If we strip away the preconceptions, take off our glasses and try our hardest to step outside our carefully crafted worldview, what are we left with? Is it enough? Is your faith built on the shifting sand of cultural Christianity, on what you’ve heard at church, from loved ones, on Christian media or from the latest Beth Moore Bible study? If those same sources told you something different, would you believe differently?

Or is your faith built on something that doesn’t change, on the salvation of God through the person of Jesus, as revealed through scripture?

It’s not an easy question to answer, and it can be hard to see Jesus through the religion that sprung up around him. I struggle with this constantly–I even struggle to remember to struggle, to keep searching for more and more of God instead of settling into the warm, familiar comfort of American “churchianity.” But I am afraid that the American church has been lulled to sleep by a false sense of security, that instead of running the race with perseverance, we’re playing the hare and hunkering down for a theological snooze, certain of our innate superiority and inevitable victory.

I guess what I’m really asking is have we put our faith in Jesus, or have we put our faith in Christianity? And which would we choose if (and when) the two are at odds?

If you’re not sure you can tell the difference between the two, a good place to start would be by reading the Gospels–Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John–in long, uninterrupted hunks, so you can get a sense of the big picture unfolding in each book, instead of little snatches of verses read out of order and out of context. Study Jesus–viewing the church through the lens of the Gospels, instead of vice-versa, can be very enlightening. I’m going to be kicking off my 2010 Bible reading with another pass through the Gospels, to refresh my focus on the person of Jesus. It’s just so, so easy to lose sight of him…

Jenny Rae Armstrong is a freelance writer and musician. She and her husband Aaron own DeepWater Music (www.deepwatermusic.net) and live in Northern Wisconsin with their four little boys. This post originally appeared at her blog jennyraearmstrong.blogspot.com.