I'm reading The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr (finally), and I'm on Chapter Two and I'm so fucking mad. I'm fully on board with what she's saying. I'm mad at patriarchy. A lot of the arguments are familiar to me (I've been egalitarian for years), but the one that's standing out to me and making me rage at the way the church patriarchy has sanitised and obfuscated things, is learning how dang GENDER TRANSGRESSIVE women in the early church were. "One more piece of evidence that convinces me that the household codes should be read as resistance narratives to Roman patriarchy is how early Christians were perceived by the Roman world: as "gender deviants". . . . Not only did early Christians place women in leadership roles; they meet together on equal footing—men, women, children, and slaves—in the privacy of the home, a traditional female space. Christianity was deviant and immoral because it was perceived as undermining the ideals of Roman masculinity." Early Christianity was QUEER. It was all about breaking down gender norms of Roman society. Like Paul said "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." And I'm so mad that we haven't been taught that.

Pls read the making of biblical womanhood it’s very good

As Christians we are called to be different from the world. Yet in our treatment of women, we often look just like everyone else. Ironically, complementarian theology claims it is defending a plain and natural interpretation of the Bible while really defending an interpretation that has been corrupted by our sinful human drive to dominate others and build hierarchies of power and oppression.

Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

The Making of Biblical Womanhood

A good book is one a person is ready to read more than once. Even though I finished Barr's book last year, I am ready to read it again. She is a great writer and a consummate scholar, and I hope she writes more in this genre. #BiblicalWomanhood #BethBarr

I heard about this book from a number of people, it was all the buzz, and I admit it. I was curious. Years ago, when I had first become the teacher of a large women’s Bible study, one of the women I worked closely with had begun involvement with the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, a group I had not heard of before, but soon would become very familiar with through this coworker. As…

View On WordPress

SO GUESS WHAT

My copy of Midnight Sons isn't in AND ALSO the Agatha variant cover is ratioed - which means stores only get one for every 25 of the other (original?) covers they order SO won't be getting that one (here, at least; it'll take a little more scrounging around).

But the Wanda/Agatha funko Target set is up for pre-orders again so I CAN FINALLY IT.

So not a horrible day in terms of gathering things!

2024 Book List

Here's a list of some new books I've found interesting and enjoyable in the last year or so. If you have any recommendations, send them in! (See previous book lists here)

Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World by Dalai Lama (2020)

Love and Quasars: An Astrophysicist Reconciles Faith and Science by Paul Wallace (2019)

Stars Beneath Us: Finding God in the Evolving Cosmos by Paul Wallace (2015)

Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe by Stephen C. Meyer (2021)

The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism by Bernard McGinn (2006)

Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint by Nadia Bolz-Weber (2014)

The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr (2021)

That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, & Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart (2019)

The Gospel of Inclusion: Reaching Beyond Religious Fundamentalism to the True Love of God and Self by Carlton Pearson (2009)

Is God Real? Exploring the Ultimate Question of Life by Lee Strobel (2023)

Why? Making Sense of God's Will by Adam Hamilton (2018)

Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America by Russell Moore (2023)

The Psychology of Christian Nationalism: Why People Are Drawn In and How to Talk Across the Divide by Pamela Cooper-White (2022)

How Jesus Became God: the Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee by Bart D. Ehrman (2015)

The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible by Michael S. Heiser (2015)

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam by Reza Aslan (2011)

Current read. A biblical look at patriarchy and the harshness of gender equality among Christians. Enjoying it so far and finding some pretty good insight.

“Patriarchy wasn’t what God wanted; patriarchy was a result of human sin.”

(The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr.)

top five books that have helped u/influenced u in ur faith (besides the Bible!)

This is such a good question and I feel like I probably have not read enough to do it justice but I will go ahead and list a few (in no particular order!) and ask you guys to recommend me more in the notes! :)

Mere Christianity by CS Lewis (I have read sections but not the whole thing! It's sitting on my desk and I NEED to sit down and read it)

The New Oxford Annotated Bible - this is a Bible so it's kind of cheating but it has SO MANY footnotes and extra material that I really feel that it counts as its own book. It is so big that I recommend a PDF instead of the physical copy, but I have learned so much from it, particularly about the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

The NIV Archaeological Study Bible - also cheating, but the same situation as the last one. If you're at all interested in history/archaeology, this is a must-have. It has so many maps and notes about the places that feature in the Bible, and I've learned so much from it!

The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr - a fantastic look at 'how the subjugation of women became gospel truth' and how that is not at all biblical

The Book of Common Prayer (the actual church one, not Joan Didion lol!) - nothing I say will really do the BCP justice but it is a work of such incredible love and devotion, it's absolutely deepened my faith. Even just flipping through it or finding a morning or evening prayer to say is so profound.

Bonus Round that anon did not ask for but I'll give anyway: Books that I have not yet read but want to (that are somehow related to religion)!

Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer

The Confessions of St Augustine

Eusebius's Historia Ecclesiastica

Who Cooked the Last Supper? A Women's History of the World by Rosalind Miles

The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis

Descent Into Hell by Charles Williams

lent 2023: what i read, watched, and listened to

i gave up reading fiction for lent, which freed up... um... a lot of time.

read:

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes DuMez [audiobook]

The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances Fitzgerald [audiobook]

Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again by Rachel Held Evans

The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr [audiobook]

The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler*

Wholehearted Faith by Rachel Held Evans with John Chu [audiobook; this was posthumously finished and narrated by her friends, so it can be a lot.]

Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church by Rachel Held Evans [audiobook; this is almost the only book on the list that i rated under 4 stars, only because i found it less cohesive and compelling than the previous two books of hers i had just read. my extremely general opinion on rhe is that i dislike her writing voice in a lot of inconsequential ways, but appreciate her thoughts on a much deeper and more important level.]

watched:

Same God (2018, documentary) [i was a student at wheaton college when this happened. watching it happen again felt about 10 years long.]

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)

I Survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye (2018) [this film is in no way a wholesale rejection of purity culture, but it was interesting to me, especially followed by the podcast episodes I Kissed Christianity Goodbye and Reflections on Christian Celebrity. if you're interested in what happened in josh harris' church before all of this, this is a great article. tw for sexual and spiritual abuse, including but not limited to csa.]

other nonfiction read, though not for my lenten study:

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

The Fire Never Goes Out: A Memoir in Pictures by ND Stevenson

Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library by Amanda Oliver [this is the other book that i rated under 4 stars; it resulted in such mixed feelings that i wrote a goodreads review, which i hate doing.]

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn*

*still reading

With the Industrial Revolution, time became money. Instead of being paid per task, or bushel, workers were put on the clock. As Headlee writes, “Even our vocabulary reflected this change. In the 1600s, the word punctuality meant ‘exactness’. Somewhere around 1777 or so, people began to use the word to mean ‘on time’. For centuries, the word efficiency meant ‘the power to get something done’, from the Latin verb efficere, which means ‘to accomplish’. But in the 1780s, we see it used as a synonym for productive work, and in 1858, an article first used efficiency to mean ‘the ratio of useful work done to energy expended’, Time well spent began to mean ‘time during which money was earned’. ” Another side effect of the Reformation for women, per religious historian and professor Beth Allison Barr, is a doubling down on the belief that the hard work of good Christian women must be spent in the home. Over the years, most cultural leaders have contributed to the idea that your sense of self should match the value of your output.

On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good (Elise Loehnen)

Books I read in March 2023

When I Spoke in Tongues by Jessica Wilbanks. This is a memoir about the author's deconstruction from her Pentecostal childhood faith. It also includes details of her recovery process from an eating disorder and her journey to become a writer. I was really interested in her travel to Nigeria in order to explore Yoruba influence on Pentecostal worship. This was interesting to me because one of my grad school classes involved studying Yoruba religion in Cuba, which also has a large emerging neo-Pentecostal demographic. Although some of my views and experiences with Pentecostalism were very different from Wilbanks's, I appreciated the chance to think carefully about how to approach my experiences through writing and academia intentionally and fruitfully.

Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr is nonfiction arguing that biblical womanhood as understood by American evangelicals today is not a straightforward reading of the Bible but developed over a long and complicated history, driven by men's desire for power over women. Some of the history was new for me but as a New Testament student I liked her exegesis.

Leftover in China by Roseann Lake is nonfiction about women in China who remain unmarried over age 30-35. There's a lot of detail here about Chinese marriage norms historically and in the present, the impact of the one-child policy meaning that there were fewer girls in China and the girls who were born suddenly had unprecedented attention and access to educational and financial opportunity. I was really interested in the interviews with various women--it offered a personal glimpse into the challenges, privileges, and priorities of these unmarried women.

The Last Queen by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is historical fiction about the life of Maharani Jindan. This book has romance, politics, trauma of war, and ends with a very moving parent-child tragedy of assimilation and colonization. (Spoilers: you can blame a whole lot of problems on the British.)

The Gilded Page by Mary Wellesley. Nonfiction about handwritten manuscripts, mostly centered on medieval England. Wellesley is interested in what the manuscripts reveal about the people who wrote them by hand: marginalia, errata, other traces of everyday life. This book wove in neatly with Biblical Womanhood's discussion of Margery of Kempe. I was also really interested in all the detail it gave about the ascetic lives of anchoresses.

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot. This memoir follows the author through her struggle as an Indigenous woman to leave an abusive relationship, learn how to live with bipolar disorder, and parent her two sons. Mailhot makes a conscious effort not to write an auto-hagiography, showing her worst moments in full detail that earns the audience's sympathies even more effectively. I love reading authors' memoirs because at some point they turn into books about writing books. It was really cool to see Mailhot's success after how hard she worked to earn it.

The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera. Dystopian middle grade scifi. When Earth becomes unliveable, Petra Peña, along with her parents and younger brother, are supposed to be part of a privileged few cryogenically frozen to be woken up 300 years in the future on a new colony planet. When things go wrong Petra stays conscious through her stasis and wakes in a world where no one else remembers stories of Earth. This book was really intense for middle grade fiction! It's a very thoughtful look at grief, love, stories as a means of continuing culture, environmentalism, critique of censorship, and at its heart an argument that conflict comes not from differences between people but from unwillingness to embrace those differences. I appreciated how this book approached its protagonist's disability in a eugenicist dystopia. I'd recommend this book for fans of Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series (particularly if you liked the John chapters in NtN).

The Preacher's Wife by Kate Bowler. This book was already on my list but then Beth Allison Barr talked about Kate Bowler in Biblical Womanhood, which made me even more interested. Bowler looks at celibrity women within evangelicalism, arguing that even the most conservative church spaces offer these spotlit women subtle but significant power, and even the most egalitarian-seeming liberal church spaces still embrace social norms that uphold patriarchal power over women. Fun fact: this book also cites one of my religion professors from undergrad!

How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Impler. This book is a collection of memoir essays in which various marine animals are used to illustrate the author's life. The Chinese sturgeon illuminates immigrant familiy history, an octopus watching her eggs pairs with the author's relationship with their mother in regards to disordered eating, and life in high temp, and high pressure volcanic vents are paired with the persistence of a queer community in Seattle. From a craft perspective I'm so impressed by the structure of this work, and it was a real pleasure to read.

Bitter Orange Tree by Jokha Alharthi. Realistic fiction in which an immigrant university student remembers and traces the life of her Omani pseudo-grandmother, who dies just as the narrator is leaving for Britain. There's a lot of love and grief and memory and love again in this book, and the writing is just beautiful.

Bible and Sword by Barbara W. Tuchman explores the historical relationship between Britain and Palestine, particularly the history of Zionism in Britain. (Spoilers: you can blame a whole lot of problems on the British.)

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin. Realistic fiction about the family of a woman who goes missing after she gets separated from her husband at a subway station in Seul. The book switches between the woman's children and husband as narrators, as they search for her and remember her. This book made me think a lot about my own aging parents as I read how easily the children overlook their mother's health issues and failing memory.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. Historical fantasy about a notorious pirate coming out of retirement to rescue the daughter of her old crewmate, in part motivated by love for her own daughter. This book is a bit sweary and has PG-13 level sexual content. We've got ruffians and scallywags, sea monsters, rigorous hospitality, legendary treasures, magic and scholars of magic, and some really thoughtful depictions of religious characters whose faiths inform their difficult decisions. Amina wrestles with her nostalgia for her pirate days in light of her post-retirement efforts to be a devout Muslim. I love how Chakraborty writes interactions between characters of different religions.

Nonfiction:8

Fiction:5

Total nonfiction for 2023 so far:18

Total fiction for 2023 so far:10

Total books read for 2023 so far:28

I'd love to chat about any of these books and I'm always happy to provide content warnings on request! What are y'all reading lately? Anything you really love or really hate? Any recommendations?

For evangelicals these attitudes are connected: limiting women's spiritual authority goes hand in hand with limiting women's economic power. [...] Evangelical teachings that subordinate women within the home and inside the walls of the church influence attitudes about women in the workplace. Or, considered within Bennett's framework, male ecclesiastical authority and male household authority exist within broader cultural practices that subordinate women to men. Patriarchy doesn't stay confined to one sphere.

Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

Hey there people who have been hurt by the Christian, fundementalist evangelical church

If you could give a recommended reading/watching/listening list of 2-4 things that you would want to Show someone so they understood your experiences?

For example, my list would be

#churchtoo, emily Joy Allison

Quiverfull, Kathryn Joyce

The making of biblical womanhood, beth Allison Barr

Women's History Month 2023 - March 8

The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth - Beth Allison Barr

'The Making Of Biblical Womanhood' Tackles Contradictions In Religious Practice from NPR