Adam’s and Eve’s work, Orvieto cathedral façade, Orvieto, Italy

Blog Posts About Women, Gender, & Faith

June 8, 2016
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Hillary’s Not the Only Woman to Make History

By | Women, Writing | 2 Comments

UnknownWant a summer read that’s part adventure story, part biography, part introduction to biblical manuscripts, part historical drama, and part faith journey? If yes, check out Janet Soskice’s The Sisters of Sinai.

The main characters are identical twins Agnes and Margaret Smith of Scotland. Their travels lead, among other places, to St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. There Agnes discovered one of the oldest manuscripts of the Gospels ever found.

The sisters’ staunch Presbyterian father, widowed shortly after their births in 1843, raised his girls as one might raise boys in the Victorian era—educated, physically active, and engaged in the life of the mind. And he kept a promise that whenever his daughters learned a language, he would take them to where that language was spoken. Because the twins loved to travel, early on they mastered French, German, Spanish, and Italian. Their deep interest in the Bible and its languages …

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June 3, 2016
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What Are You Worth?

By | Books, Gender & Faith, Women | No Comments

demuth1Today I’m delighted to feature a guest post from my friend Mary DeMuth, who has a new book out:

I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood lately. I saw a Netflix show where drug abuse was rampant, and I had to shield my eyes. I simply couldn’t see people snorting and drinking and shooting up. It brought back memories of my early life where my life was anything but safe.

I was five, then. And the adults around me had parties. They would get stoned and unsafe. I would try to hide in my room, but the only route to the bathroom was through my bedroom, so they would parade through on unsteady legs, eyes red, hands flailing to keep balance.

I turned my head to the wall, trying to escape into the well made between my twin bed and the wall. I fit like a snake into that …

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May 2, 2016
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My Favorite Parenting Advice

By | Life In The Body, Marriage, Women | No Comments

My husband and I cut our chops in vocational ministry by serving teens and college students. So long before we brought home a baby of our own, we saw the kind of parent/child conflicts that can tear apart the strongest of families. Because we paid our way through grad school in part by “housesitting” in some homes that came with kids while parents traveled, we had a solid dose of parenting experience before we ever got started. There was the toddler who cried the entire weekend because he had separation anxiety. There was the daughter who took off to go camping with the boys’ baseball team. And I can’t forget the drug-using son who jumped out his second-story window, broke into his brother’s car, stole it, and took it four-wheeling in the river. The next morning, he swaggered up the front sidewalk as if nothing had happened.

Other people’s kids …

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April 21, 2016
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What is Intersex, and What Does the Bible Say about It?

By | Gender & Faith, Life In The Body | One Comment

We see the acronym LGBTIQA, and we might not even know what every letter stands for. To have conversations with people who self-identify in any of the represented categories, we need some basic language for communication:

 The acronym LGBTIQA stands for:

1) “L” – lesbian

2) “G” – gay

3) “B” – bisexual

4) “T” – transgender

5) “I” – intersex

6) “Q” – queer/questioning

7) “A” – asexual people and allies

(Notice “homosexual” is not on the list—many consider that word “Christianese.”)

Recently, I have had conversations with Christian leaders who’ve told me, “I don’t even know what intersex is.” I also hear people quoting Genesis’s beautiful words, “Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created” (Gen. 5:2) as a prelude to insisting that the Bible teaches there is no spectrum, that everyone

…
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February 4, 2016
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Jesus and Sexism

By | Gender & Faith, Women | No Comments

My post on Jesus and Sexism that ran this week on the Engage blog at bible.org:

Do you believe God made male and female different? Me, too (Gen. 1:27).

Does it concern you when people turn gender differences into essentialism, saying stuff like “God made women to nurture and men to do the thinking,” and call such binary thinking “biblical”? Me, too. (1 Thess 2:7; Luke 2:19).

Does it frustrate you when people say God made it a women’s role (as opposed to a man’s) to cook and serve food (Gen. 25:29; John 21:9–12; Acts 6:2–3)? Me, too.

Does it bug you when you see a speaker lineup for a Christian conference that leaves out minorities, including marriage conferences where only men teach? Me, too. (1 Cor. 11:11; 12:22; Titus 2:3).

Does it trouble you when people …

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January 25, 2016
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Author Q&A with Elizabeth Oates

By | Blog Interviews With Writers, Gender & Faith, Women | 2 Comments
Elizabeth Oates: Restoring hope...one life at a time

Elizabeth Oates: Restoring hope…one life at a time

Elizabeth Oates served as my intern more than ten years ago. Time flies! Today she’s a multi-published author with a new book out. She took some time recently to answer some questions.

SG: Elizabeth, I can’t believe we have known each other for fifteen years now. You came to seminary in 2001, and graduated in ‘05. Tell me what you have been doing since then.

EO: My husband and I moved from Dallas to Waco, where we’ve had three biological kids, ages 10, 8, and 6. We also have a sweet foster daughter who is 16 months old, and we are on track to adopt her sometime this spring. In between raising babies and running carpool, I’ve been writing, blogging, and speaking. I wrote my first book, Dealing with Divorce: Finding Direction When Your Parents Split Up, in 2009. And I …

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January 4, 2016
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Why Peter Would NOT Want a Wife Today to Call Her Husband “Lord”

By | Gender & Faith, Marriage, Uncategorized, Women | No Comments

In Peter’s instruction to wives with disobedient husbands, Sarah, one of the godly woman of old who hoped in God, is singled out as modeling virtue. Her “adornment,” as was true of that of the other holy women, manifested itself in submission to her husband. And according to Peter, in her submission Sarah goes so far as to call Abraham “lord.”

But strangely, the only time the Old Testament describes Sarah calling Abraham “lord” is in the context of an off-hand comment she makes in response to the revelation that she will become pregnant by him when they are quite old (Gen. 18:12). She scoffs and asks if she will have pleasure, and then seems further amused at the double impossibility, saying, “my lord being old also.”

To contemporary male and female Western ears, the thought of a woman calling her husband “lord” seems absurd. But another text in Genesis …

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December 5, 2015
1

A Question Mark Over My Head?

By | Gender & Faith, Life In The Body, Women | One Comment

Last year in San Diego at the national meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS), I agreed to be interviewed about my experience as a female who belongs to a society that has only 6% women in its membership. That number even includes student members. And who knows what percentage of the female members actually attend the annual meeting. All I can say is that when I go, I felt quite conscious of my femaleness, let me tell you. (Kudos to our friends at IFL who invest in their female employees by sending them.)

I asked that my remarks be connected with a pseudonym—and as a journalist I almost never make someone keep my comments off the record. Does that tell you anything?

A year later, the results are in, and the report evoked a lot of conversation in Atlanta. The opinions have been quite mixed, with some insisting that …

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October 19, 2015
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Lean In ≠ Keep Others Down

By | Gender & Faith, Women | No Comments

Recently the NY Times ran an article titled “A Feminism Where Leaning In Means Leaning on Others.” The author, Gary Gutting, interviewed a feminist who was critical of Sheryl Sandberg and her approach to business in her book Lean In (reviewed on this site). The interviewee was Nancy Fraser, professor of philosophy and politics at The New School. She is the author of Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. Fraser said, “For me, feminism is not simply a matter of getting a smattering of individual women into positions of power and privilege within existing social hierarchies. It is rather about overcoming those hierarchies. This requires challenging the structural sources of gender domination in capitalist society—above all, the institutionalized separation of two supposedly distinct kinds of activity.”

First of all, this interchange provides a good example of how liberal feminists and radical feminists differ …

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October 1, 2015
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Do Males “Image” God More Than Females Do?

By | Gender & Faith, Women | No Comments

Do male humans “image” God more than female humans image God?

Both male and female were created in the image of God. Recall Genesis 1: “Then God said, ‘Let Us make adam in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule . . . God created adam in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (vv. 26–27).

The image of God is male and female. One sex does not “image” God more than the other. And, in fact, male and female are interdependent. I once had a student who wept with joy when she learned this. She was single and thought she could image God only through association with a husband.

We need each other. God made male and female to rule together, to multiply together, to use our gifts together, to build up the body of …

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September 17, 2015
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Is God More Male Than Female? Why Was Messiah a Male?

By | Gender & Faith, Life In The Body, Women | No Comments
The gold ceiling in St. Mark's Basilica (Venice) represents God the Father.

The gold ceiling in St. Mark’s Basilica (Venice) represents God the Father.

Is God more male than female?

Of course not. Nor is he more female than male. God is spirit (John 4:24), so God has no sex. Father and Son are metaphors, not sexual identities.

The early church never depicted the Father as a male human. But later…well…consider the Sistine Chapel’s “The Creation of Adam.” Michelangelo painted the Father as an old man with white hair and a long beard. But in earlier centuries, it was considered heretical to portray the Father in human form at all. Only Jesus could be depicted in art, because he did indeed come in human flesh. Matt Milliner, assistant professor of art history at Wheaton College spoke about this at Gordon College in 2013 in his presentation, ”Visual Heresy: Imaging God the Father in the History of Art.”

In earlier Christian …

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August 17, 2015
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I Wish My Church Knew…

By | Gender & Faith, Infertility, Marriage, Women | No Comments

Recently Her.meneutics asked people to enter a summer writing contest addressing what they wished their church knew. More than 150 women with ages ranging from 16 to 70+ responded from across the world. Here is the list of topics they submitted. 

“I wish my church knew . . .”

the pain of miscarriage
the importance of female pastors as role models
that we don’t have all the answers
that singles need ministry too
that we can learn something from the LGBT community
the demands of women who work
the pervasiveness of mental illness
to teach us how to argue
the forgotten power of reciting the psalms
to stop looking for the next big thing
the needs of rural women
what it’s like to be an evangelical introvert
how to talk about addiction
the ministry opportunities for adults with disabilities
how to make disciples out of senior citizens
what it’s really …

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