Emerging Women

Our quarterly(ish) newsletter just went out highlighting the upcoming series here at Emerging Women. If you are not on our emailing list, but would like to be added, send a request to emergingwomen@gmail.com

Greetings Emerging Women!

I trust this newsletter finds everyone well.  As always this is a busy time of year,  and it has most definitely been an exciting fall for me so far.  I have been a part of the process of re-imagining the future of Emergent Village and am encouraged to see the communal directions we are heading.  I’ve also been busy with release of my book, Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our Daily Choices (and yes, that was a total shameless plug).  This week I am heading to the Twin Cities for Christianity 21 where I’m looking forward to spending time with many of you.  Stay tuned to the Emerging Women blog to hear more about what is happening at this historic event.  And if you are planning on attending and blogging about the event, send us your links so we can share them on the blog.

And speaking of blog posts, I wanted to let everyone know about the upcoming blog series at Emerging Women.

Hope – It can be easy these days to feel overwhelmed by the pressures of the world, the injustices that surround us, or the polarized dialogue that plagues the church.  But as followers of Christ we can find hope in the one who suffered just as we suffered.  So we are looking for the stories of where you find hope around you.  What are the things or people in your life that challenge the darkness and remind you that a better world is possible?  You are invited to share your stories of hope at Emerging Women.  Tell us about that book you read, a mentor in your life, or that conversation with your kids.  Share with us the stories of the people you know seeking justice or who simply bring a smile to your day.  Let’s encourage each other by pointing out the places of hope in this world.

Incarnation – During Advent, we want to post about what the practical implications of incarnation are for our lives.  What does God becoming flesh mean for your faith?  How can we celebrate and be present in incarnation each and every day?  How does Incarnation turn our world upside down?  So you are invited to send in your reflections for Advent to help us all celebrate the Incarnation this season.

As with all of our series you are invited to send in your posts – be they articles, stories, poetry, or art – to emergingwomen@gmail.com or to post your submission on your own blog and send us the link.  We are such a diverse group that we can truly gather a rich variety of perspectives on these topics for these series.  We do request that posts try to stay under 800 words (but they can be much shorter than that as well) and that you please include a short (1-2 sentence) bio that we can include with your post.  The Hope series will run through the new year, but the Incarnation series will be just for the season of Advent.  Feel free to send in your submissions at any point, or sign-up for posting on a date in the future and I can send you a reminder.  And, of course, feel free to send in posts on non-series topics at any time.  This is a great community of thoughtful and artistic women and I enjoy learning from and being encouraged by the posts you send in.

May you all find encouragement today, and I look forward to reading and posting your thoughts on Hope and Incarnation

- Julie Clawson

Thanks everyone for participating in the recent giveaway of Mama’s Got a Fake I.D. Congrats to Tracy the winner – enjoy the book!

And I wanted to put out a call for submissions for an upcoming series here on Awakenings. We are looking for stories, reflections, and essays on your experience awakening to yourself. This could be when you first realized that as a woman you too held worth, or when you started claiming your faith as your own, or when you chose to break from from cultural constraints and expectations, or when you discovered a new way of approaching theology, or when you claimed a part of you that had been hidden (or whatever else you want). The idea is to reflect on a time when you woke up and saw the world or yourself in a new way. Submissions should be under 800 words and sent to emergingwomen (at) gmail (dot) com. I look forward to reading your stories and sharing them here.

Also if you haven’t updated your links to this new site yet or want to share the Emerging Women love, please add www.emergingwomen.us to your blogroll.

Update – The contest has ended and congrats to Tracy our winner!

So Caryn Dahlstrand Rivadeneira, the author of the fantastic new book Mama’s Got a Fake ID: How to Reveal the Real You Behind All That Mom, has offered to let me do a giveaway of her book here. That means all you cool people have a chance to win a FREE copy of what I think is one of the best books on parenting I have ever read.

I reviewed the book here recently – but what I love about it (besides its honesty and humor) is how it admits lies fed to moms and encourages us to live into the person God created us to be – even as a mom. It’s a great resource for women to help us not be defined by others and their expectations of us. And this book isn’t just for moms – but is a good perspective on parenting for dads, grandparents, pastors, teachers, and whoever might encounter parents regularly.

So if you would like to win a copy just leave a comment here by the end of Sunday April 12. One of the comments will then be selected (in a super secret scientific system created by my four year old) as the lucky winner. And if you would rather not just leave a “hi, I want a book” comment, I invite you share what you think are some of the identity struggles parents face these days.

Happy commenting, and good luck.

And if you are really observant, or just really want to increase your chances of winning the book, you’ll notice that we have the same offer up at both the Emerging Parents and my blog onehandclapping.

I am happy to announce that the long awaited changes here at Emerging Women have finally arrived. I’m excited to be moving ahead with this community and look forward to our future conversations. Most of the Emerging Women members already know about these changes, but for the broader community of readers, here’s a summary of what’s happening and why.

- From now on, Emerging Women will exist exclusively at this domain – www.emergingwomen.us. Some of you may already be using this address, but until now it simply forwarded to the blogspot site. We will no longer be hosted at Blogger, so please update your links!

- The continued growth of Emerging Women means that we can no longer function as a membership based blog – there’s just too many of us! But we will continue to be as open source as possible. We still want the blog to represent the voices and thoughts of a wide variety of women, so we are looking for your submissions. We are still looking for articles, book/movie reviews, stories, interviews, creative writings, questions, resources, links, and news items to share on the blog. So feel free to send those submissions at any time to emergingwomen(at)gmail(dot)com to be posted.

- But even without membership, Emerging Women desires to be a resource helping connect those in the emerging church to the women’s voices in its midst. We will continue to have two blogrolls for this purpose. One will feature any (appropriate) emerging woman blogger who wants to be on the list. The other will include any websites, organizations, or men’s blogs who want to be “friends of emerging women.” The point is to connect us all together.

- All of the old posts are here at the new blog. It just might take some time to update the author info on each one.

I’m excited to see how the conversation develops and look forward to reconnecting with all of you here.  As we get the conversation rolling here, I’d love to hear your thoughts.  How can this blog be improved? What topics do you wish we would cover?  What activities should we resurrect (book club, weekly round-ups…) or create for the blog?  What resources should we provide?  How can we best serve women in the emerging church conversation?

- Julie Clawson

I wanted to pass on an blogging opportunity from Rachelle Mee-Chapman to the community here –

Hello! We might have already met at an Emergent Convention, or at your blog or mine (Urban Abbess or Magpie Girl). Now I’m the contributing editor for Religion and Spirituality at BlogHer.com I’m trying to rustle up great posts to feature in my Monday column on Religion and Spirituality.

I’ve been following your blog for awhile now, and was wondering if you’d like to be on my mailing list of Spirituality Writers. It’s a select group of bloggers, and I’d love to have you along. You wouldn’t get a ton of email from me. I would just send out periodic requests for gridblog participation on a given topic. Then I would feature some of the most relevant posts on BlogHer, and maybe at my personal blog as well.

If that sounds interesting to you, reply to this email and ask me to include you on the Spirituality Writers mailing list. I’d love to have you along for the journey.

Shalom,

Rachelle Mee-Chapman

Contributing Editor, BlogHer.com

http://www.blogher.com/blog/rachelle-mee-chapman

P.s. Please feel free to pass this email along to women bloggers you love, even if they only write occasionally about religion and/or spirituality.

Rachelle Mee-Chapman

moi (at) magpie-girl (dot) com

http://www.magpie-girl.com

Our book discussion of Forever and Ever, Amen will resume next Tues — I have been simply trying to keep my head above water this week.

I would love ideas and suggestions from all you about how to go at this discussion and future ones so as many as possible feel engaged and interested. What kinds of questions are on your heart that you’d like to see explored through our book discussions? What, if anything, is preventing from engaging with the books and ideas? Would you like a break from book discussions for a while to focus on the interviews of emerging women instead? This is a safe place, so any feedback is very welcome.

Thank you all for being you, for your beautiful questioning hearts, for being about God’s being in the world!

–Jemila

So we have passed the holidays and from what I have heard many of us are still in recovery mode. I know things have been slow around here recently as life has taken priority over cyberdiscussions, but I hope that we can gain momentum and jump back into more conversations soon. As the last year drew to an end some of you gave your opinions on things you would like to see here at Emerging Women which I want to mention today.

Gatherings
I hope that the small gatherings can continue around the country to help women connect with each other. This is up to you guys to instigate and so far they have been great successes.

The Northwest Emerging Women have their Convergence gathering in February which I highly recommend anyone to attend (I had an amazing time last year). Other gathering are still in the works but no concrete plans are set as of yet.

Interviews
But one suggestion that I want to institute as soon as possible is that of hearing the stories of Emerging Women from around the world. The idea would be to collect interviews from women we admire who are out there making a difference. I’m not talking just about “famous” women, but any women we can learn from and by inspired by. I am envisioning simple email interviews that will be posted here in multiple installments. And while I think it would be great to hear stories from all sorts of women, I would like to limit it (at first at least) to women who are connected in some way (however small) to the emerging church. We so rarely get to hear the stories of these women and I would love to bring the presence of women in this conversation into greater focus.

So what I am asking from you all here are three things –
1. Who would you like to hear from? Name whoever you want.
2. What sort of basic questions would you like asked of these women?
3. And are you willing to contact the people you know and conduct the interview? (we can work out details later)

I am excited about this and can’t wait to start hearing the stories of these women.

Book Discussions

And I know we are a bit behind in announcing the upcoming selections for our Tuesday Book Club discussion, but here is the list for the next few months. We have chosen somewhat lighter fare from a diversity of perspectives and all selections are available at the Emerging Women Resource Store. Once again we are looking for volunteers to lead select weeks of the discussions. If you are interested, leave a comment or email emergingwomen@gmail.com. I look forward to exploring these books with you all here.

February – Forever and Ever, Amen: Becoming a Nun in the Sixties by Sister Karol Jackowski

March – A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

April – The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs