Women
"Hagar has 'spoken' to generation after generation of black women because her story has been validated as true by suffering black people. She and Ishmael together, as family, model many black American families in which a lone woman/mother struggles to hold the family together in spite of the poverty to which ruling class economics consign it. Hagar, like many black women, goes into the wide world to make a living for herself and her child, with only God by her side."
Seeing God in the Midst of Divorce and Single Parenting
Sue Birdseye
"In an instant my life became completely foreign to me."
"The problem of abandonment is far more widespread than many people realise, and up until now it has been in the shadows. What does a spouse do when the usual Christian resources about how to fight for your marriage no longer apply? How does one face a spouse's unfaithfulness and desertion with a Christlike perspective, both for one's own sake and, often, for the sake of one's children?"
Uncovering the face of the feminine in Revelations of Divine Love
Mirabai Starr
A priest administering the last rites holds up a crucifix to a young woman on her deathbed. She experiences 16 visions of Jesus . A horror show of pain and agony, blood and gore dominates her visions at first. Out of the suffering comes a revelation of the feminine aspects of the Trinity. At the end of the revelations she awakes in pain but alive. She became the first woman to write a book in English, yet we still do not know her name.
Fresh out of seminary and straight into her church planting at House for all Sinners and Saints, Nadia Bolz-Weber put on one hell of a party: a non-stop 24 hour binge watching Christian Television. In between the bemusement, hilarity and sleep deprivation are some moments of deep reflection and cross-denominational inspiration.
Phyllis Trible performs a close reading of four of the most horrific passages in the Hebrew bible. Free translation draws out the poetic structure and literary emphases of the Hebrew text to draw out the voices (and erasure of voices) and lived experiences of women in pivotal events of the bible. While she draws out new meanings of the annunciation, the suffering servant, and Abraham's sacrifice, there is no redeeming story to be found here.
How a liberated woman found herself sitting on her roof, covering her head, and calling her husband "master"
Rachel Held Evans
Following in the footsteps of AJ Jacobs, the late Rachel Held Evans continues her re-examination of the pillars of her evangelical upbringing in the heart of the Bible Belt: gentleness, domesticity, obedience, valor, beauty, modesty, purity, fertility, submission, justice, silence, and grace.
The former stand up comedian turned pastor continues her trademark combination of Alcoholics Anonymous confessional with Evangelical Lutheranism's focus on the grace of God.
"... what makes us the saints of God is not our ability to be saintly but rather God's ability to work through sinners."
Appalling, heart-rending, and astonishing stories of God's grace breaking into people's lives despite them rather than because of them.Â
As an adolescent growing up in the heart of the Bible Belt, calling herself "evangelical" signified that she found the Southern Baptists too staid and left-wing. A crisis of faith in young adulthood led the late Rachel Held Evans on a journey that ultimately lead her to ... Anglicanism.
Nadia Bolz-weber
A heavily tattooed standup comic struggling with sobriety goes to seminary school....
When one of the members of her Alcoholics Anonymous group committed suicide, Nadia was asked to take the memorial service as being the only "religious" person any of them knew. She found her calling. After ordination, she founded a church.
Kathy Coffey
"When John said that if all the things Jesus did were recorded, the world itself could not contain all the books, he might have meant the stories of these women".
"You have a responsibility to womanhood on the planet to be all that you were created to be .... The princess chick, the warrior chick, the champion chick, the friend chick, the party chick, the lover chick, and the whatever-it-takes chick all reside in you. You are woman, and you were put on the planet for 'such a time as this'. Now is your time".