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

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.

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.

- 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

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

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

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

As we wrap up the year, I would love to hear what sort of things you all would like to see for Emerging Women (on the blog or otherwise) in the upcoming year. Suggestions for activities, blog series, book discussions? What could we do to serve you better?

And to end the year with a bit of fun, I’m including a list of interesting search results that land people on this blog. There are of course typical google searches that land people here, but these stood out to me in their unique, strange, and disturbing ways. For some I can’t quite understand how they brought people here and for others I wonder what possessed someone to google that in the first place. Anyway, I found it amusing. I’ve added my comments on a few in italics.

“negative stay at home dad”
“how to stop seeking approval be honest”
“emerging church medical marijuana”
“pastor likes to watch me breastfeed”
“woman who like being gluttons”
“christian statistics lust bra straps”
“what james dobson thinks of the book eat, pray, love by elizabeth gilbert” because he does my thinking for me…
“ads of strong women seeking sissy males”
“emerging supernatural woman”
“encouraging the feminine side for my sissy son”
“god created men stronger than women heart wise”
“the women who got burned by aliens” ummm…
“why beer is not meant for women”
“emerging women 7 ups for christ”
“god im growing a second butt”
“looking for appreciation poems for pastors wives”
“sermons on why God created women” why, could you not come up with a good reason on your own?
“what god thinks women should act like within a relationship”
“husband wife switch bodies”
“should a christian woman show cleavage for an evening function?” because Google will give you the right answer…
“what makes you think about those things” Because Google can read your mind when you are really vague
“man but not women is made in the image and likeness of god”
“red wine vinegar pimples”
“2007 50 sexist woman” I assume they intended to type “sexiest”, but I had to laugh
“a peaceful meaningful pagan christmas”
“can a hostess throw a person off a airplane” hostess???
“advice expectation from a submissive woman from a master”
“laws prohibiting women from eating chocolate in public” this is just scary
“names of women who have done something great in 2007″

and (Jemila) just so you know, the top three keyword searches that land people here are 1. Emerging Women, 2. Emergent Women, and 3. Butt Sex.

We would love it if some of you here would like to take part and share your journey. If you want to can you either reply here or leave a message on one of our blogs. Also if you could leave here, or send to us a link to your blog entry once you have posted it. I’ll post on Monday or Tuesday who has taken part, so that even if you do not feel like participating this time, you can still read other peoples stories.

Before I point you all to some of the great EW posts from this past week, I want to announce that tomorrow Emerging Women turns one. So Happy Birthday to Us!

I started the blog a year ago mostly as a way for the women who had attended the Emerging Women ReGathering to stay in touch. There had been much talk that weekend about using our collective voice, to make our presence known in the emerging conversation, and to work towards getting more books by women published in the emerging world. This blog was meant as a resource and encouragement to achieve those ends. It has since grown to be more inclusive of all who are interested in exploring what it means to be an emerging woman. I personally have been blessed beyond measure by the women here and want to thank everyone for the ongoing conversation.

What are your thoughts? Are we achieving the original goals of this blog (should those goals even exist)? As we move into our second year of existence what needs to change, what needs to grow, and what should stay the same? How can we serve women better and just in general be a better resource? How can our voice make more of an impact on the emerging conversation?

I would love to hear your thoughts. And just to highlight a few of the amazing women here who are using their voice, here are some blog posts of note from Emerging Women. Enjoy.

Kim has started a new blog and has a really interesting post up titled Naked Figureheads Have More Fun.

Jan pulls from a variety of recent experiences to reflect on proving ourselves.

Kim Wilkens had an article published recently in her alumni magazine about her experiences in Honduras.

Makeesha has some good thoughts on Christianity, hip-hop music, and living as an exile.

Lyn reviews the new book Jim and Casper Go To Church.

Have a Great Weekend.