Christian women

Seedlip and Sweet Apple: Poems

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Seedlip and Sweet Apple is a poetry collection that blooms with the voice and life of Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Christian sect deemed the Shakers for their prayerful and "ecstatic" dance. Her followers eschew marriage and reproduction, living in brotherly and sisterly communities devoted to harmony and God. The author, Arra Lynn Ross, has created a cohesive story that will capture you even if you have the barest knowledge of the real life of the religious leader. (For those of you who do want to do some prep work, you can gain reference from the PBS site American Stories, or even Wikipedia.)

In such a slim volume, there is so much depth. Ross plays with form and function, mixing prose with poetry, shaping Revolution-era newspaper articles into stanzas and weaving together bits of Gospels, Shaker writings, William Blake and even Sappho into the Mother Ann's narrative. The notes at the end of the book are a must-read, as they help the reader engage and decode the poetry even further. She also provides a list of her source material, and by the end of the reading, the reader may be tempted to read more on this incredible historical figure.

The poems themselves shine alone (in fact, "Mother Ann Tells Lucy What Gave Her Joy" was featured by the American Academy of Poets as a Poem-A-Day in March, a well-deserved honor). As a collection, the poems form an intense meditation on intimacy. It examines the relationship between lovers, siblings, and a believer and her faith. There are moments of breathtaking intimacy, where the reader feels almost intrusive in the moments of revelation. In "Abraham Left Me on a Thursday," Ross captures at once the joy and loss of the dissolution of Mother Ann's arranged marriage:

"They'll say he was a bad man, but I know how hard it is to live with God. In the flesh, in the flesh, where are you Ann? You're a spirit banging at your own rib cage. [...] he danced me across the room, laughing, the heat from his grip burning my side. I shook my head, No, Abraham, no, and he stumbled. We fell sideways to the floor, tangled, my cheekbone pressed to the wing of his shoulder, the rough weave of his hemp shirt. I could smell sweat soaking the cloth, strong with fear and sadness."

Ross doesn't canonize Mother Ann. Instead, she reveals the human being she was, rife with complex paradoxes: disgust and love, fervor and patience, the dichotomy of the spiritual and corporeal entities. It's a work powerful in voice and craft.

I also want to take a few words to acknowledge the Milkweed Editions, the non-profit publisher of Seedlip and Sweet Apple. I worked briefly in the world of publishing and am compelled to spread their message: "Milkweed Editions publishes with the intention of making a humane impact on society, in the belief that literature is a transformative art uniquely able to convey the essential experiences of the human heart and spirit. In an increasingly consolidated and bottom-line driven publishing world, [the reader's] support allows [Milkweed Editions] to select and publish books on the basis of their literary quality and message." If you care about the value of our national literature, Seedlip and Sweet Apple is well worth the investment.

Written by: Jo Ristow, July 16th 2010

Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812-1960

admin — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Connie A. Shemo

Duke University Press

A great deal of important criticism has emerged recently in the area of women’s contributions to the history of evangelical Christianity, and this collection brings together some of the scholars largely responsible for this upsurge in interest. Among them is Jane Hunter (The Gospel of Gentility), as well as critics studying the records of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American women working for missionary organizations and religious groups as they imposed and also perhaps transformed American imperialism. The somewhat sunny description of this project, an examination of “the work of American women missionaries in American cultural expansion,” might strike students of post-colonial theory—or even readers of fiction like Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible—as strangely euphemistic.

It’s hard to read these accounts of women who traveled throughout the world and affected and were affected by the various cultures with which they engaged without remembering the outcome—that is, the devastating consequences of colonialism and the horrific exposure of the arrogant and naïve assumptions that underlay these “missionary” efforts. One of the mainstays of the archival holdings of my own institution is an enormous collection of missionary papers: letters, diaries, and other records kept by the legions of Christian women from the American southeast, sent on global missions to “convert the savages.” On the one hand, it’s extraordinary to follow these women, who had been bound by the conventions of domesticity, at once to view the world through their own apparently inflexible filters—and yet also be themselves changed by the experience.

The argument of Competing Kingdoms takes this observation one step further: women’s involvement in missionary work transformed the nature of American colonialism itself. Kingsolver’s missionaries are victimized by their cultural arrogance and ignorance, but they are ultimately transformed by this exercise in “cultural expansion.” And so readers here are asked to view the global efforts of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), or of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), for example, as complex in their motivations and results. Amy Kaplan’s brilliant phrase “Manifest Domesticity” captures both the connection of these movements to aggressive American expansionism and also to the “sentimentalized domesticity” inherent in much of women’s religious practice which, by virtue of exposure to international travel and cultural difference, was itself altered. Hunter notes that the mission was to convert the “savage to homebody,” and of course the conversion experience operated on those doing the converting, as well.

Ian Terrell’s essay on the WCTU and Hunter’s treatment of the YWCA both suggest the possibility of further scholarship on the complex role organizations like these played in the lives of women and in the cultures they affected. The essays generally represent careful archival scholarship, admirable in scope, covering singular figures and particular cultural instances—in the Philippines, Congo, Egypt, India, Ottoman Empire, Rhodesia, China, Japan—although none representing Central or South America.

In studying African American missionaries in Congo, Sylvia Jacobs concludes that “mission ideology always assumed a negativism about the society in which missionaries worked” and that missionaries “could respect African culture, society, and religion but still want to change them.” The most compelling part of this story is the transformations that occurred within those who sought to transform others. Whether or not these women collectively mitigated the effects of American colonialism remains an open question.

Written by: Rick Taylor, July 2nd 2010

Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement

admin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:58:00 +0000

By Kathryn Joyce

Beacon Press

When I attended a production of Jesus Christ Superstar as a wee lad of fifteen, I marveled at the song-writing, vocal skills, and daunting cross that loomed amidst a gloomy set design. Being then (and now) agnostic, I was appalled by the religious persecution depicted. I have always been puzzled by the penultimate utterance of Jesus. In the Book of Luke (King James version) 23:34, it is written, “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

I can’t forgive the Christian patriarchy movement subjects of this superbly crafted and deeply troubling new book, for their bad faith, cognitive dissonance, and behavioral misdeeds carry heavy consequences. Whether or not they know what they’re doing remains an open question. Kathryn Joyce’s gripping new account, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, is about Christians who want literally to take over and remake the world by outbreeding everyone else, warping the minds of school-children, justifying bigotry with transparent illogic, and systematically denying civil rights. That most of the violence is committed quietly and privately against women and girls, most of whom accede to it with joy and penitence, will give even the most devoutly and egalitarian Christian reader pause. “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” Christian patriarchy movement members who feel imperiled by Jews, lesbians, Muslims, atheists, gay males, feminists, foreigners, and the less fecund seem conveniently to have forgotten these words.

The book’s twenty chapters are divided into three gendered parts—“Wives,” “Mothers,” and “Daughters”—in each of which Joyce deftly explores the bizarre ideology and political-economy of feminine subservience. The resulting dystopian communities in real-time and on-line in cyber-space rival those depicted in novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale, George Orwell’s 1984, and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can't Happen Here. This ain’t fiction, however. As befitting their understanding and practice of “complementarian theology,” as opposed to the alleged unnaturalness and godlessness of egalitarian gender relations, men and women in the Christian patriarchy movement believe equally (but differently) in the inherent inferiority of Eve (the Original Sin), females (on biological and spiritual grounds), Jezebel (in terms of sex) and women (who have hearts and minds). Sisters are in the process brainwashed into becoming meek and quiet supporters of their brothers, wives are instructed to remain sexually available to their husbands 24/7 (and forego any contraception), and mothers who don’t home-school their children commit them to Satan. Insofar as submissive females require degradation—the more public, the better—virtually every page is painful to read.

Woe unto the woman who proclaims “domestic abuse” or reveals a less than godly husband. Quiverfull opens by recounting the attempted rehabilitation of the disgraced megachurch founder, Ted Haggard, whose initial denial and then avowal of his use of methamphetamine and male sex workers were ripe with possibility. “Complementarian” theology demands that it be not Haggard but Haggard’s wife, Gayle, who bears the brunt of Christian condemnation from low and high places.

Few books have so affected me. This is not the sledge-hammer account I might have written. With equal parts curiosity and compassion, Joyce explains how and why tens of thousands of American women have “chosen” forms of subservience that bankrupt and humiliate them, that crimp their mental development and that hurt them physically and lead sometimes to social leprosy. Each female interviewed firmly and confidently speaks her motivations and explains her anti-feminism while gleefully ignoring the Malthusian outcome of unfettered fertility.

My sole criticism is that Joyce praises the “openness, generosity, courage, and patience” of her key informants with whom she (sometimes, usually, inherently?) “sharply disagreed,” but without revealing any of those disagreements. Joyce’s secular feminist aesthetics and politics are “clear” enough in mind but not in body: how did she manage the flesh-crawling creepiness and awkward silences without every day saying “that’s obviously horseshit” or “I wouldn’t wish this lifestyle on the daughter of my worst enemy?”

That Quiverfull opens with Gayle Haggard’s exemplary case should rouse outside observers of this noxious fundamentalism not to sit on their hands. As she points out, “to follow these ideas to their conclusions can mean, in very real ways [as women], to disappear.”

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., June 15th 2009

Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl

admin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:02:00 +0000

By Susan Campbell

Beacon Press

As a feminist who was raised within the Christian fundamentalist paradigm, I was immediately drawn to this memoir. Though Susan Campbell and I come from different flavors of fundamentalism, all of the experiences she writes about ring true. I suspect they would ring true for all women who were raised within a patriarchal religion (fundamentalist or not), as well as women who may not have been raised with any religion at all, but recognized prejudice in American society just the same.

Campbell grew up in the South during the 1960s and '70s, where she struggled with what was expected of her as a female. In Dating Jesus, she describes countless scenarios of rebellion, which make the reader simultaneously laugh and pump her fist in the air in solidarity and support. One such incident took place when Campbell asked her Sunday school teacher why women could not be preachers. Her teacher gave her a pat answer, yet even at a young age, Campbell was skilled in rhetoric and debate. She continued to dialogue respectfully with her teacher until he stepped out and returned with her mother, who took her out of the Sunday school class to spend the rest of the time in the nursery. “The meaning is not lost on me,” Campbell writes. "For asking questions, I will be placed among babies who slobber and fill their pants. It is a public shaming."

Dating Jesus is not limited to describing faith-based injustices against women. It also paints a picture of America at a time before Title IX, through the eyes of a tomboy who desperately wants to be treated as her brothers are, but is constantly expected to behave like "a good Christian girl." This reprimand comes from all sides, including her school principal when Campbell flips off a fellow student athlete as he shows off his new school-bought sneakers. The female sports teams at the school had been forced to wear the same ratty uniforms while the boys were given new uniforms for each sport.

Yet the fact remains that Campbell's memoir is about her tumultuous relationship with Jesus, whom she views as her boyfriend from age eight on. And who can blame her? She is brought up in a culture of loving and adoring Jesus and living her life in order to make him happy. One of the best things about this memoir, however, is that it does not end with Campbell dismissing Christianity altogether. She is honest enough to say that while she is disappointed by the route the church has taken, where misogyny and strict legalism reign in place of Jesus' message of love and acceptance, she is still a Christian on some level. She refers to people like herself as "Christ-haunted," never being able to depart fully from the faith. When, as adults, her brother says to her, "Fundamentalism broke off in us, didn’t it?" the reader who has lived this type of life knows exactly what he means.

Campbell ends on a hopeful note. She talks about the way Jesus treated women in the Bible, which was very different from how the rest of the world treated them. They were seen as outcasts, unworthy of attention or respect, but Jesus spent time talking with them. He valued them in a way that was revolutionary at the time. Campbell's final realization is that the Jesus she "dated" throughout childhood was "someone’s idea of Jesus, but not the real one." She notes, "The real Jesus wouldn’t have loved me less because of my gender. The real Jesus wouldn’t have weighed me down with rules—a list of do's and don'ts that serve no real purpose. The real Jesus would have had a sense of humor about the whole thing, goddammit."

Written by: April D. Boland, April 10th 2009