Tag: women
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#6–The Making of Biblical Womanhood–2021 Best Reads
The 6th book on our Top Ten list is Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood. Barr got a lot of buzz for this book, making her perhaps the country’s most popular medieval historian. Barr also happens to be an evangelical Christian trying to help her branch of the Christian church move out of…
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Unmaking Biblical Womanhood
Sometimes you have to go back to a 15th century woman to find your way to a 21st century church. At least that’s where Beth Allison Barr goes in trying to understand the sad history of patriarchy in the Christian Church. Which makes sense because Barr is both a medieval scholar and an evangelical Christian…
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Overhearing Women’s Prayer
The pioneering Christian feminist theologian Letty Russell once described a litmus test for theological statements. With my books packed away for an upcoming move, I won’t be able to track it down, but it went something like this: Any interpretation or statement about God that does not affirm the full humanity of women cannot be…
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The Women Beyond Wesley
This review by Alex Joyner was published on the great Englewood Review of Books site and is republished here with permission. Even today, if you visit the website for Cokesbury, United Methodism’s venerable bookseller, you’ll see an image that has shaped Methodist perceptions of their heritage. It’s a circuit riding preacher on horseback reading a…
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Good God, What Happened to the Heartland?: Laughing and Lamenting with Lyz Lenz
Lyz Lenz is so funny sometimes that you can forget that she has written a hard book. As, for instance, when she’s surveying the physical layout of cookie-cutter megachurches and says that “the decor looks like a Hobby Lobby vomited all over the place.” (115) That’s the vibrant Lyz that you want giving you the…
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Jarena Lee and the Day the Preacher Stumbled: Exhortation and the Methodist Future
The preacher was in trouble. It’s hard to take the life out of the story of Jonah, but somehow he had. Struggling preachers are not unusual. We’ve all had a Sunday. Or several. But in early 19th-century Methodism, including the AME branch of Methodism, (of which this preacher was a part), the official preachers had…
Heartlands 