Emerging Women

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.

An interview with Kathryn Joyce, author of the new book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement. “Quiverfull” refers to the notion that women should “receive children eagerly as blessings from God, eschewing all forms of birth control, including natural family planning and sterilization.” Essentially, a Quiverfull woman breeds and keeps breeding, knocking out babies until her uterus gives out or menopause kicks in.

This interview was originally posted by Hemant Mehta at the Friendly Atheist blog.

• What kind of education do Quiverfull children receive? Do a significant percentage of them go to college? Do females get the same opportunities for education as males?

  Almost all Quiverfull children are homeschooled, and while there’s no single curriculum to point to, a number of leaders within the movement have advocated tailoring boys’ and girls’ education to the future roles they will hold. In the case of daughters, homeschooling leader R.C. Sproul, Jr., a prominent face in Quiverfull circles, argues that their education should prepare them to be mothers and stay-at-home wives.

  In a particularly disturbing anecdote, he recounts the story of a 9-year old daughter of an acquaintance who couldn’t yet read, but was a very responsible and maternal older sister to her younger siblings: a situation that confirmed his view of the daughter as an “overachiever” well on her way to being a successful helpmeet and mother herself one day.

  As for college, it varies a bit. Many sons are allowed to attend, particularly if they’re taking distance courses. This path is open for some daughters, but Quiverfull leaders strongly argue against allowing daughters to attend college away from home, as the encounter with worldly outsiders could damage or destroy their faith. Instead, they suggest that daughters stay at home after they graduate from homeschool, and practice being a helpmeet to their father as they will one day help and serve their husbands.

• How many Quiverfull children marry and start their own families before the age of 25? Is this a movement that passes on from generation to generation?

  It’s hard to give real numbers for the movement, and particularly for where the younger generation is now. As Quiverfull began in earnest in the mid-80s, it’s only in the past few years that there has been a real wave of second generation Quiverfull children marrying and having children. The movement, which has a vibrant internet presence, makes a lot of these developments, celebrating the marriages and new children of young believers. The older generation also stresses the dire importance of passing on their beliefs to the next generation, and to this end are focusing massive attention on outreach to daughters as young as five, inculcating a sense of their destiny in embracing the Quiverfull lifestyle. And they certainly also encourage women and men to marry early. While a number of children will leave the movement when they come of age, the lifestyle is structured to make that difficult, often keeping children sheltered from too much outside influence that could turn them away from the conviction.

• Do female children in these families have much freedom regarding who they marry? Regarding anything, really?

  A qualified yes. When children of the movement marry, it’s not through arranged marriages, but it is often through a courtship process that has an unusual amount of paternal involvement. Courtship is promoted through homeschooling and conservative religious circles as a chaste alternative to dating, which with or without sex is disparaged as the casual “trying on” of different partners. Courtship, alternately, is explicitly marriage-minded, and only occurs after a young man proves himself to a woman’s father. Quite literally, the male suitor is actually courting the daughter’s father, long before she is supposed to know that someone is interested in her. This is discussed as a way to protect vulnerable girls’ hearts from becoming emotionally invested before there’s the safety of commitment.

  However, as advocates explicitly acknowledge, it’s also the best way of making sure that the daughter marries a man suitably in tune with the father’s ideology. For men concerned with keeping the movement going in the next generation, it’s important to make sure they marry their daughter to a man who will be similarly faithful to patriarchy and Quiverfull convictions.

• Are any of the members of this movement actually adopting, or are they simply reproducing?
  
  Yes, there is a good deal of adoption among Quiverfull families as well as in the broader conservative Christian community. Adoption usually supplements a biological family though, rather than replace the necessity of a woman leaving her fertility in God’s hands, so they may have six biological children and then adopt four more.
• You mentioned in your Salon article that the Quiverfull movement “… likely numbers in the tens of thousands but… is growing exponentially.” Are there numbers/studies to back that up?
  
  No. I don’t know of any real research on the Quiverfull movement yet. Hopefully there will be more in the future. My estimate is based on speaking with dozens of movement leaders, looking at the membership numbers for online communities, and considering that the conviction of having as many children as God gives you is considerably broader than the people who claim the Quiverfull name or participate in its forums.
• What toll do all these births have on the mother — Emotionally and physically? You mentioned in your article one mother suffered a partial uterine rupture. Has it ever been worse?
  
  Emotionally and physically, many women — particularly those who have left the movement — say the lifestyle is one of relentless work and exhaustion. Quiverfull mothers perform a staggering amount of labor in terms of pregnancy and childbearing, childcare, homeschooling, cooking and cleaning and being a submissive wife. There does seem to be a high incidence of reproductive problems among some mothers, though of course this could be due to the fact that the mothers are having far more children, and far later into life, than many other women.

  Nonetheless, many women have spoken of extremely difficult pregnancies — a number of whom are put on strict bed rest — and labors. Additionally, there is often a focus on natural and even unassisted home births among Quiverfull moms. This isn’t a requirement of the Quiverfull conviction, but like many related facets of the movement (such as home churching or other, agrarian-minded efforts towards family self-sufficiency), it’s an idea many women are exposed to through movement literature. In a very extreme case in Australia, a Quiverfull mother died following the teachings of one fringe home-birth advocate. Though that seems to have been an anomalous case, home births, and continuing conceptions despite poor health do make for some serious health risks for some mothers.

• What can we do for women who want to leave this movement? How can we ensure that the daughters and sons of these women and men get assistance out?
  
  That’s a hard question. There are not many vocal exited women, though Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff and Vyckie Garrison are notable exceptions. Exited women face substantial difficulties as single mothers to large families, often including a number of young children, often limited financial resources, and a lack of outside work experience. Additionally, they’re often without references from a community that they left and which will often shun them. Understanding and respect — particularly that they came to their convictions not through ignorance but through devout belief — would likely be a relief to these moms. For both mothers and children, there are serious and very substantial psychological, emotional, spiritual and financial barriers to leaving the movement. Still, Quiverfull is not a cult, but a conviction that many women do choose willingly — however constrained their choices later become.
• Are these people (women and children) on some sort of public assistance? If so, what’s being done about it?
  
  Generally speaking no, they’re not. Most Quiverfull believers tend to have very strong beliefs about living debt-free and not accepting government assistance. They believe that churches are the proper custodians of public charity and welfare. However, if they did need public assistance, helping families feed and clothe their children is what public assistance programs are in place to do, so I don’t believe anything would need to be done about the proper functioning of a social safety net.
• Are there allies within the religious congregations that perceive this movement as a threat? Or at least a bad idea?
  
  There is abundant and lively opposition to patriarchy and Quiverfull ideologies within more liberal and moderate churches. Much of the momentum of Quiverfull began — like fundamentalism itself — as a backlash against liberalized theology in Protestant denominations. In this case, it was a reaction against the influence of feminism in Christian churches. Though Quiverfull is at the vanguard of a much broader resurgence of complementarianism, or “biblical” gender roles, across conservative denominations, there are many other mainstream and liberal denominations that are passionate advocates for women’s and reproductive rights.
• What happens if it turns out that either one of the couple is infertile? If they are willing to accept 17 kids as “God’s plan” are they willing to accept zero, or do they go in for medical intervention? And what is their standing in the community if they can’t have kids?
  
  The philosophy of Quiverfull, of leaving fertility in God’s hands, is ideally supposed to mean that parents accept whatever God gives them: 17 children or none. And I have met a few infertile women who still called themselves Quiverfull — though they spoke of feeling stung by some in the movement who focused predominantly on the number of children one has as a measure of spirituality.

  Also, in some of the literature of the movement, Quiverfull mothers who had borne large families spoke of their sadness and loss of identity when they began menopause and began to lose their fertility. One even described herself as feeling dried out and withered when her childbearing years ended. This, significantly, is the same language that is used to describe the side-effects of using birth control, or even women who don’t have children. For me, it was a powerful illustration of what a no-win situation this ideology can be, even for women who followed the conviction diligently their entire reproductive lives.

I recently had the opportunity to read through Find Your Way Home: Words from the Street, Wisdom from the Heart. This short book is a collection of reflections by the women of Magdalene. Magdalene is a two-year residential community for women who have survived lives of prostitution, violence, and abuse. The community exists not just to help these women, but to change our culture that not only buys and sells women, but often rejects them as too broken to be redeemed. To this end the women of Magdalene live by a disciplined order – a rule for living in community. The twenty-four principles of this rule are what the women of Magdalene reflected on as they contributed their stories and meditations.

The pervasive theme in the book is the power of love to bring about healing. Over and over the women confess that they had never felt loved or accepted by anyone until they came to the Magdalene community. This love is demonstrated in the principles of their order. One rule is that of proclaiming original grace – to look at each person’s journey beginning not with original sin but with original grace. The community uses the thistle as a symbol of this love. Generally seen as an unwanted weed, it is the one flower that grows on the streets where these women walk. As one woman wrote – “there were no weeds in Eden. Even the thistle was loved by God. I can see life in a thistle and how God created life in me.” (p.68)

Too often in the church we despise women who have lived lives like the women at Magdalene. Our fascination with sexual sin forces us to otherize even those who have been abused sexually. Our rejection and inability to offer unconditionally healing love though objectifies these women just as much as those who buy and sell her. I was touched to read how the simple acts of the Magdalene community connected with the hurt and broken women. For some it was the offer of a meal or a bag of toiletries, for others a living room with soft chairs or a kitchen with pots and pans, for others it was someone being willing to brush the knots out of their hair. It took some of these women years and multiple attempts to accept the healing offered to them, but they were never given up on or forced to heal on a timeline. They were loved and offered the benefits of community as they were – and it was that acceptance that made the difference in the long run.

The book is a quick read, but it has lasting impact as the stories of these women challenge the standard reaction of the church to “wayward women.” Just hearing their stories forces us to change our perspective. To move past our preoccupation with sin and respond instead with abundant grace.

Many of these women have been able to re-enter the world and develop job skills through the non-profit business Thistle Farms which makes natural bath and body products. You can follow their stories at their blog The Voices of Thistle Farms.

By Beth Booram

“You never know what’s comin’ for you.”

During Christmas vacation, one of our favorite family traditions is to head out to a movie theater and watch one of the new releases. For those who did the same, you likely know by the above heading which one the Booram family enjoyed—The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Rather than explain the premise of the movie and spoil it for you, I’ll simply mention that this line was spoken first by Queenie, Benjamin’s “adoptive” mother, and subsequently repeated several times throughout the movie. Queenie urged Benjamin to be prepared for what life brings; not to fight it, or resent it, but respond with acceptance and openness—a philosophy that she exemplified.

The movie has a fanciful and curious story line, great character development, and brilliant acting. I highly recommend it, though be prepared for a nearly three hour stay in your seat! What I’m musing about today is this idea that you never know what’s coming for you.

Queenie warned that there is some force beyond us that can and will sweep us up in its foment, whether we want it to or not. We are in a position to respond and cooperate, whatever that means, with the momentum this force generates. Not that we are helpless or passive, non-agents in our destiny. But we swim in a current of life that sometimes swirls us around and delivers us somewhere we weren’t expecting.

Now, allow me to make a leap….into a book I finished last night. (If this begins to read like a book review, it unapologetically is!) It is called The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle. The sub-title reads, “How Christianity is Changing and Why.” If you get the sense, as I do, that a momentum of change is building within Western Christianity, “that something is coming for us,” you are right.

According to Tickle,

“As a phenomenon, the Great Emergence has been slipping up on us for decades in very much the same way spring slips up on us week by week every year. Though it may have sent us a thousand harbingers of its approach, we are still surprised to wake up one balmy morning to a busy, chirping world that, a mere twenty-four hours before, had been a gray and silent one.”

Tickle goes on to explain, with helpful clarity and profound insight, that every five hundred years the Church feels compelled to hold “a giant rummage sale.” And we are in the midst of one of those times, a time of monumental change when something comes for us and we don’t know exactly what that something is.

As I interface with a broad spectrum of Christians, I observe a variety of reactions to this “emerging” Christianity. Some seem oblivious, content with their faith context, and unconcerned with the gathering storm. Others are battening down the hatches, vehemently committed to protecting themselves from the onslaught of the storm, convinced it is a tsunami of destruction. Others are indifferent, so far gone in their cynicism and disillusionment that if the storm hits and wipes us clean of any vestige of the institutional church, that would be just fine.

Others, like me, are mostly hopeful. Reading The Great Emergence has helped me frame our current history within a backdrop of five hundred year cycles of reformation. Tickle explains that each period of upheaval has resulted in three things: a new and more robust form of Christianity; a reconstituted previous form of Christianity that becomes more vital; and the spread of Christian faith and practice. That is good reason for hope.

For the last decade of my life, I have had the sense that “something was coming” for those of us who follow Christ and find community within the church. Whatever it is, I don’t think it can be stopped or avoided. Some interject this phenomenon is a consequence of our neglect of God, national moral decline or disregard for the Bible. I, on the other hand, think that God is up to something—that He is in this thing that is coming.

Whatever you think about the great emergence, please become educated about the history of the church and what’s coming for us today. This book will help explain how Christianity is changing and why.

Beth Booram has a passion to explain and model a way of living responsively to God in the midst of life’s varied landscapes. As a writer and speaker, she is highly creative, often utilizing artistic elements , contemplative exercises, and engaging interaction. Beth has authored a number of excellent works. Her most recent are The Wide Open Spaces of God (Abingdon Press/ September, 2007) and Picturing the Face of Jesus (Abingdon Press/April, 2009).

The Chocolate Cake Sutra, by Geri Larkin, is a fun and nuanced look into the lifestyle and actions that lead to a “Sweet Life.” Larkin writes as a Jesus-friendly Buddhist and her prescriptions sound familiarly scented not only with “Sweet Life,” but with the Abundant Life offered when we live in harmony with the Spirit and act in ways that incarnate the kingdom of God.

You can find a review here .

The prologue and introduction are full of fodder for growth and an interchange of ideas. Let’s start with the story Larkin tells of a “young man named Eugene who was desperate to find a truly holy person with whom he could study.” After much searching, Eugene eventually happens upon a guy in woods who works for a hot-shot holy woman called Jaya, who has an incredible reputation for what she can do for her students’ spirituality. It takes Eugene taking three years and many near-death experiences to even gain admittance into Jaya’s complex, where he is instructed to wait in the shrine room. Eugene is told it won’t be long before Jaya is able to meet with him.

So Eugene waits. But he really has to pee.

“‘I have to go to the bathroom,’” Eugene says to Jaya’s assistant.
“‘You have to stay in the shrine room.’”

Eugene sure waits his best, and at last, hours later, he aims at a corner of the shrine room and pees like nobody’s business, whereupon he is dragged away by two acolytes, with the largest bellowing,

“‘How dare you!’”

“‘You show me a place that isn’t holy, and I’ll pee there!’”

“‘He stays’.”

“It was Jaya.”

1. What is your reaction to this approach to the holy?
2. What can communities of Christian disciples learn from this story that can be applied to worship?

In her introduction, Larkin isn’t afraid to deal a significant blow (or is it constructive criticism?) to her celebrity crush, on a serious count of spiritual arrogance.

Larkin writes, “The Interview was about a movie he had just directed. It was about Jesus Christ. As a card-carrying Buddhist, I have have always been moved to tears by the last hours of Jesus. Even as I write, I can barely fathom the depth of love and compassion for the people harming him. It is the best love story ever.” Larkin goes on to describe the situation that sparked her accusation:

My crush was responding to criticisms of his interpretation of the story…As I remember it, the interviewer asked how he would respond to someone criticizing his film.
A pause. ‘I’d forgive them.’
Oh, no. The arrogance in his voice told me he had it wrong. It was that ‘I’m-better-than-you tone that gives me the goose bumps because it’s the same tone that says ‘You don’t get God because he’s ours.’

3. What is it like for you to read about a non-Christian pouring her heart out over her love of Jesus? What feelings and ideas come up for you?

4. What is your sensibility about what differentiates self-perceived spiritual accuracy from self-deceived spiritual pride?

5. What’s your favorite story or quote in the book so far?

In The New Christians, Tony Jones explores attributes of the emergent movement. One of the largest components of the movement is its focus on community. People and the cultures we abide in are part of our lives and affect our faith journey. These are not things to be shunned by emergents, but embraced as part of who we are. Two of the aspects of this focus on community include –

- Emergents see God’s activity in all aspects of culture and reject the sacred-secular divide.
- Emergents believe that an envelope of friendship and reconciliation must surround all debates about doctrine and dogma.

How do these cultural approaches to faith differ or affirm what you have experienced in the past?

What are the benefits or dangers of placing relationships before dogma?

Do you see these descriptions as helping or hindering “evangelism”?

Sorry for the delayed book discussion this month, I’ve been kinda out of touch online since my son was born a month ago. But it’s the summer, so laid back is all good right?

Anyway our book club selection for this month is Tony Jones’ The New Christians. If you don’t know Tony is the national coordinator of Emergent Village and so is in a great position to tell the story of this new movement called the emerging church. And telling that story is just what he does in this book. From its beginnings as a young leaders attempt to do generational ministry, The New Christians describes the formation of emergent, its main influences, and the ways it has manifest over the years.

So as we start this discussion I want to ask a few basic questions –

- how aware are you of the emergent movement and its history?

- what manifestations of the movement have you encountered?

Much has been said regarding differences of opinions as to what the “real” version of emergent is. Some say that Tony’s perspective is just one of many. Given that emergent isn’t a denomination, but an organization and conversation, such differences are perhaps to be expected. In light of that, did the story of emergent told in The New Christians resonate with you or did it seem outside your particular experience? Do you think emergent will ever be a cohesive group or is the diversity present in the movement something to be valued and upheld?

Next week we will explore some of the characteristics of the new Christians that are described in the book, but I hope that we can explore the larger issue of the movement as a whole this week.