Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Videos from Spring Open House at Writers in Progress

Last week I read from my novel-in-progress with several very talented women who were fellow alumnae of Dori Ostermiller’s Writers in Progress workshops in Florence, MA. My husband taped the performances on his new “Flip” camera, which are linked below for your viewing pleasure. Each segment is about 10-15 minutes, except for the intro, which is shorter.

Introduction by Writers in Progress workshop leader Dori Ostermiller:


Dusty Miller recounts a budding attraction between two young feminists, one of whom has a terrible secret:

Jendi Reiter reads her prizewinning story “Julian’s Yearbook”, a tale of erotic awakening at a homophobic high school:

Jendi Reiter reads her prizewinning story “Julian’s Yearbook”, a tale of erotic awakening at a homophobic high school:

Kate Kahn reads a poignant short story about a young woman in a 1950s trailer park who hopes for a better life:

Kyra Anderson relates the comic mishaps of a family trip to Mexico with her young son, who has Asperger’s Syndrome:

Kyra Anderson relates the comic mishaps of a family trip to Mexico with her young son, who has Asperger’s Syndrome:

Stephanie Faucher reads from her forthcoming young adult fantasy novel about a girl who discovers a magic book:

Don’t Take Your Breasts to Church


Clothing signifies who we think we are and where we belong in the social order, so it’s no wonder that religious communities have long been preoccupied with dress codes. While I do believe there is such a thing as dressing appropriately for an occasion, I struggle with how that issue becomes entangled with policing women’s sexuality.

To put it bluntly, women’s clothes are sexually coded in a way that men’s are not. Outside of beaches and nightclubs, men rarely wear anything provocative or revealing when they want to dress up. Men can wear a straightforward, professional suit to any special occasion, without worrying that they are sending the signal that they no longer think of themselves as young and desirable.

By contrast, women’s formal wear is all about sexual display. High heels, short skirts, makeup, low cleavage, rich fabrics, and form-fitting clothing are meant to show that a woman is toned, young, sexually confident and worth looking at.

Standards are also more lenient for men. Basically, all they have to do is shave, put on a clean shirt with no logos on it and match their socks correctly, and their wives and mothers breathe a sigh of relief as they settle into the pews.

Women’s clothing involves many more subtle, confusing gradations of formality, trendiness and sensuality. This variety certainly makes it more fun as a potential vehicle for self-expression, but it also opens us up to be judged more harshly according to ever-shifting standards. 

Mixed messages about our clothing reflect the culture’s difficulty integrating the spiritual, physical and emotional aspects of womanhood. We learn, through the fashion choices available to us and their representation in the media, that being a strong, vital, self-confident woman includes proudly expressing our sexual nature. But suddenly, when we arrive in church, people have a whole lot of opinions about whether our lipstick is too red or our neckline is too low.

This can feel like a commentary on more than our fashion sense. In a cultural context where our strength, our value and our sexuality are enmeshed, unequal scrutiny of male and female fashions makes me worry that I’m capitulating to patriarchal theology when I put on a long skirt to visit my friend’s evangelical church. I just want to hear the gospel. Leave my ankles out of it.

Some of us, thanks to God and Herrell’s Ice Cream, are built such that anything tighter than a muu-muu will look provocative. I spent too much of my adolescence wearing granny dresses because I was afraid to attract sexual attention from rude, immature boys. Around my peers, who were sexually precocious and dressed accordingly, I felt like a little girl among grown-ups. No matter how smart you are, no one takes you seriously in Laura Ashley. You’re quaint, like a parrot who can sing the Marseillaise.

Now I’m a mature woman and I want to dress like one. This includes choosing clothes that flatter my figure and express my physical confidence. High-necked shirts make me look like a sack of potatoes. Beyond that, it takes a lot of effort to find age-appropriate, non-frilly clothing that would satisfy the conservative Christian dress code. A woman in her thirties who wears mother-of-the-bride dresses is sending a strong signal that she understands herself to be too old or too shy to be thought of as a sexual being. My booty is not ready for the rocking chair.

Meanwhile, in my liberal church–of course!–anything goes. Do I wish the teenage acolytes wouldn’t wear sneakers under their robes? Sadly, I do. Church clothes should be different from casual clothes for the same reason that the priest wears vestments: to demarcate a sacred time and place, set apart from the world’s business. Am I upset that the tanned, toned young girls sport belly-baring shirts? Only because I’m jealous that I didn’t look like that at their age, and now it would be ridiculous.

Women, let’s be honest about our anxieties about other women’s clothing. This is an area of competition for us. Sexuality is often a proxy for status, authenticity, and confidence. Some of us might like church to be a “safe space” where we get a break from fearing that someone else looks stronger, younger, or more successful. But such judgments can make the space feel unsafe for other women who find interpretations placed on their clothing against their will.

I don’t have a simple rule to solve this problem. Some would say that a certain dress code is part of the package, and if you don’t like it, don’t go to that church. Personally, I don’t see what sola scriptura has to do with polyester print dresses. We give in too easily to the cultural captivity of the gospel. Can we find a way to preserve the reverence of “putting on our Sunday best” while being critically aware of unequal pressures on men and women?

Sponsor Soulforce’s American Family Outing


Soulforce, the nonviolent activist group that advocates for gay and lesbian equality in religious communities, is sending out 21 GLBT families to tell their stories to religious leaders at six leading mega-churches:

Rev. Joel Osteen and the Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas
Bishop T.D. Jakes and The Potter’s House in Dallas, Texas
Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr. and Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland
Bishop Eddie Long and New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia
Rev. Bill Hybels and Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois
Dr. Rick Warren and Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California

Each family has pledged to raise $2,000 to visit these churches between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Most still have only a few hundred dollars, so your contribution will make a difference. Soulforce families include a mother and her FTM transgender son, a straight couple who have joined the movement to support their GLBT friends, and several gay and lesbian couples with adopted children. Their profiles contain inspiring stories of how they reconcile faith and sexuality. Steve Parelli and Jose Ortiz, for example, were evangelical ministers who met during unsuccessful “ex-gay” therapy. They write:


We believe that evangelical gay Christians have a real message to the church at large: whatever Paul is talking about in Romans 1, it isn’t us. John Wesley of the 18th century taught that the Christian’s authority is based on the (1) scriptures, (2) tradition, (3) reason and (4) experience, and that whenever accepted reason and general experience show one’s interpretation of a passage of scripture to be very unlikely, that one’s interpretation is to be called into question rather than the collective experience of the human race. Unfortunately, evangelicalism of the 20th century has put such a premium on scripture it has perhaps failed to see the significance of reason and experience.

We purpose to lovingly and patiently ask the church to recover Wesley’s principles of reason and experience, and in doing so, to give us audience enough to hear our sacred journey and process by which we dared to question centuries-old accepted norms through reasoning and experience.

While you have your checkbooks out, consider these facts from a recent Human Rights Campaign mailing:

Florida is considering a ballot measure to enact a constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality, civil unions and domestic partnerships for same-sex couples.

Arkansas is considering a ballot measure to ban adoption and foster parenting for unmarried, cohabiting couples, both gay and straight.

Tennessee’s legislature is debating a bill similar to the Arkansas initiative, as well as a bill that would prohibit discussion of homosexuality in public schools until ninth grade.

Find out more about current and pending laws in your state here.

Open Questions About Open Communion


A couple of years ago, my church switched from “all baptized Christians” to “all those worshipping with us” being invited to receive the sacraments, a practice that I hear is not uncommon among liberal churches. This change upset some traditionalists while making others, including my multi-religious family, feel more welcome. I’m content with the current policy, though I wouldn’t be offended if they invited non-Christians to receive a blessing at the altar rail instead.

My personal opinion about communion is similar to how I feel about premarital sex: It’s important to reserve certain intimate acts for a fully committed relationship so that those vows represent a real life change and not a mere formality. However, it’s hard to point this out to someone without shaming them in a way that is worse than the original offense. A public distinction between people (like not inviting your daughter’s live-in boyfriend to Christmas dinner) is less defensible than a private word spoken in love.

Bryan at Creedal Christian has posted a thoughtful defense of closed communion that’s got me wondering about different theories of the sacraments and what they imply for salvation. Bryan writes:


My concerns about violating Church teaching, breaking ordination vows, and making discipleship optional derive from my principal concern that this new theology moves us away from an objective understanding of Baptism to a subjective understanding. On the objective theology of Baptism, here’s what the Prayer Book succinctly says:

“Holy Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body the Church. The bond which God establishes in Baptism is indissoluble” (BCP, p. 298).

It’s difficult to imagine a clearer affirmation that Baptism objectively makes persons full members of the Church than this. And the implications of the “indissoluble bond” created by God in Baptism are far-reaching. No matter what I do or fail to do – no matter how far away from the fold I may drift – the “yes” that God says to me in Baptism never changes to a “no.” I can always return home, where the father will come running out to meet, embrace, kiss, and welcome me back.

That’s powerful stuff. But since its core meaning derives from Baptism and not from the Eucharist, the baptismal theology of membership and of the “indissoluble bond” are put in peril by the new theology of “inclusiveness” that shifts the locus away from Baptism to the Eucharistic table.

Among other implications, the theology of communion for the unbaptized means that Baptism as the sacramental foundation of the Church gets replaced by the individual’s desire to receive Communion as the ‘sacramental’ foundation of the Church. This signifies a virtually wholesale adoption of a ‘consumerist’ ecclesiology that turns the 1979 Prayer Book on its head. Instead of being primarily about what God does, the new theology is about what the individual human being does. It’s about what I choose and what I desire. Shifting the locus away from the “indissoluble bond” of Baptism to the individual subject’s desires, we can no longer speak (as we do when introducing the Apostles’ Creed in the burial office) of “the assurance of eternal life given at Baptism” (BCP, p. 496). The only assurance we have is what I happen to want right now.


Without pretending to understand how it “works”, I lean toward a strong theory of the sacraments as conveying God’s real presence, as opposed to a mere symbol. In our materialistic age, to say that something only happens in the mind is the first step toward letting it become unreal and irrelevant. I need a startling reminder that God can be as present to our bodies as He is to our minds. The plausibility of the Incarnation is continually refreshed when we are shown that God works this way all the time, infusing the finite with the infinite, bridging the gap between matter and spirit.


However, when we consider baptism as a similarly objective operation, making us “sealed as Christ’s own forever” no matter what we do, are we endorsing a magic-ritual theory of salvation? Is it impossible to “lose” your salvation because the water sprinkled on your forehead had objective power apart from the vagaries of your current desires? I’m more convinced by C.S. Lewis’ argument that heaven and hell are states of being (closeness or estrangement from God) arising from the daily choices that shape our character. I suspect most Episcopalians would agree, to the extent that they believe in hell at all.

Somewhat inconsistently, evangelical Protestants who believe baptism is the dividing line between heaven-bound and hell-bound also have a low-church view of the sacraments as mere symbols of fellowship. Now I am really confused.

I’m being a little unfair to Bryan, since his post wasn’t focused on soteriology, but I’d like to know what baptism “does”, in an Episcopal theology of the sacraments, beyond making the individual believer feel subjectively committed to Christ. As a practical matter, any church that’s going to re-close its communion table will have to explain this to the congregation.

“Julian’s Yearbook” Wins Chapter One Promotions Short Story Competition


Marianne Moore may have wanted imaginary gardens with real toads in them, but what’s even better is imaginary friends who earn you real money. “Julian’s Yearbook”, a chapter from one of my two novels-in-progress, has won first prize of 2,500 pounds in the Chapter One Promotions International Short Story Competition. In this episode, Julian grapples with first love and homophobia at his Southern high school, while taking steps to launch his career as a fashion photographer. Here’s the beginning:


Desire smells like acid in the dark. Its face is a hundred faces, rising out of the stop bath, materializing on grey paper like ghosts. Your ghosts and mine; you knew them too. The football heroes joshing in a group shot, a chorus line of manly awkwardness. There’s the clown, the golden boy, the dull and violent sidekick. You’ve got to remember that snub-nosed blonde with too much school spirit, whose mascara you almost forgot to clean off the backseat of your daddy’s car. Memory kisses her lips back to pink, repaints these black-and-white yearbook photos in the streaked denim and poison green we wore when Reagan had his finger on the big red button.

Everything’s digital now. Hollywood no longer needs a thousand sweating extras to watch a gladiator die. It’s amazing that clients still fly me to Milan or Los Angeles to photograph an actual shoe on someone’s foot. I’m a Southern boy so perhaps I romanticize inefficiency. But I miss the days when you put something more than your eyesight at risk for a picture. I wonder how many of us went mad as hatters from the darkness, the fumes, acid seeping under our rubber gloves, the tension of this hurried intimacy with a masterpiece we had only one chance to perfect or spoil.
…

The story will be published in Chapter One Promotions’ 2008 anthology, which you can order here.

Northampton Pride 2008


Yesterday Northampton held its 27th annual Gay Pride March, attended by 7,500 people. My husband and I and one of my moms marched with the good folks from MassEquality, the group that successfully lobbied to preserve equal marriage rights in Massachusetts, and their Connecticut counterpart, Love Makes a Family.

MassEquality is currently advocating for the Equality Agenda, a variety of state legislative and funding initiatives including transgender civil rights, “safe schools” programs, and HIV/AIDS prevention.



Behind that sign, I’m wearing my rainbow “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You” tank top, available here from Cafe Press. The leopard-print sequined lid is from Mrs. Dewson’s Hats in San Francisco. (I received objective proof of my fabulosity when a young gay man asked to buy it from me. I let him try it on.)


That’s MassEquality organizer Ryan Brown on the left, with other supporters whose names I didn’t catch, as we march down Main Street past the courthouse.



An appreciative crowd on Main Street.



 


Some of our more colorful characters.

What to Do When Your Glasses Break


My beloved, unstylishly large eyeglasses went kaput this week, after 10 years of faithful service. Since without them I am as blind as Mr. Magoo, I put on my driving glasses and headed to the eye doctor for a long-overdue checkup and a new prescription. I’m not sure what she said after “As you get closer to age 40…” (the very thought induced brain freeze) but the upshot was, I bought a lovely pair of Armani frames, then spent the afternoon on the couch in a darkened room waiting for my eyes to un-dilate.

Cut off from my usual sources of entertainment, I searched the Internet for someone to “tell me the story of Jesus”. If you’re ever in a similar predicament, start with the Coffee Cup Apologetics podcasts at the Internet Monk’s blog. His conversational musings take a little while to get to the theological heart of the matter, but there’s always a memorable original insight to take away. Recent topics include the New Atheists (Dawkins et al.) and what it means to be post-evangelical.

Then I headed over to God’s iPod for a sermon by Rob Bell of Mars Hill Church. Just as in his book Velvet Elvis, his preaching includes a great deal of economic, social and religious background information to show how Jesus’ parables would have resonated with his audience, yet his style is down-to-earth and approachable, not academic.

Still on my to-do list: check out the Charles Spurgeon sermons dramatized by Charles Koelsch on the Spurgeon Audio Page.

The Good Thief’s Penance


Bryan at Creedal Christian has posted this meditation from the late Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (Bloom) that I hope to remember whenever I feel ensnared in persistent sins:


So often we ask ourselves and one another a very tormenting question: How can I deal with my sinful condition? What can I do? I cannot avoid committing sins, Christ alone is sinless. I cannot, for lack of determination, or courage, or ability truly repent when I do commit a sin, or in general, of my sinful condition. What is left to me? I am tormented, I fight like one drowning, and I see no solution.

And there is a word which was spoken once by a Russian staretz, one of the last elders of Optina. He said to a visitor of his: No one can live without sin, few know how to repent in such a way that their sins are washed as white as fleece. But there is one thing which we all can do: when we can neither avoid sin, nor repent truly, we can then bear the burden of sin, bear it patiently, bear it with pain, bear it without doing anything to avoid the pain and the agony of it, bear it as one would bear a cross, — not Christ’s cross, not the cross of true discipleship, but the cross of the thief who was crucified next to Him. Didn’t the thief say to his companion who was blaspheming the Lord: We are enduring because we have committed crimes; He endures sinlessly… And it is to him, because he had accepted the punishment, the pain, the agony, the consequences indeed of evil he had committed, of being the man he was, that Christ said, ‘Thou shalt be with Me today in Paradise…’

Read the whole post here.

C.H. Connors and Other Smith College Poets


Earlier this week, the Poetry Center at Smith College celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2008 with readings by alumnae from the past 60 years. Poems by the participants and other Smith graduates are featured on this web page. Carolyn Connors ’60, who publishes her poetry online at www.chconnors.com, has kindly permitted me to reprint her poem “A Glory from the Earth”, which she read at the gala. I especially love the last line.

A Glory from the Earth
by C.H. Connors

Our science has achieved its opposite
    and taken us down a peg or two.
    Our animal nature has come unglued
from ghost; we’re Things with skills and wit.

Once we had a soul because we thought
    the world was also made in part
    of spirit. Taught by story, art
and church, we went about the earth in awe.

Those who went before believed with ease,
    an opening between two roots
    gave passage to the underworld.
Enchanted bridges spanned the burning seas

between defeat and safety, peril and hope.
    Of host of angels, fairy host,
    song sifted from the sky or rose
in mists of heavenly vapor from the moat.

By silver water, fruit of gold bowed low
    to free the spellbound prince from form
    of tree or beast, or keep from harm
the peasant girl before whom all will bow.

What shall we do with all our magic now?
    Our wands are turned to sticks to beat
    each other off and school belief.
Once, our gift of meaning to our world

gave back the gift of meaning to our days.
    But even still, imagination
    lets all understanding happen;
even then, curiosity was praise.

****

Other favorites from the Smith College reading were Tanya Contos, Celia Gilbert, Anne Harding Woodworth (her chapbook Up from the Root Cellar, just out from Cervena Barva Press, tops my soon-to-read list), and Jane Yolen, whose original fairy tales enriched many hours of my childhood. If you can lay your hands on a copy of her out-of-print books The Hundredth Dove and The Girl Who Cried Flowers, pay any price. I’m grateful that I saved most of my picture books, including The Bed Book, a dreamy little oddity by late lamented Smith alumna Sylvia Plath.

Book Notes: Liberating Tradition


Kristina LaCelle-Peterson’s Liberating Tradition: Women’s Identity and Vocation in Christian Perspective offers a solid introduction to Christian feminism, and a wake-up call to the churches not to mistake culturally conditioned gender roles for gospel truth. Topics surveyed include the strong women of the Bible and their often-overlooked successors, from the female monastics to the 19th-century social reformers; feminine metaphors for God in Scripture; sex discrimination and body image; the diverse forms that marriage has taken in the Judeo-Christian tradition; and the egalitarian message of Jesus.

While at times I feel that Liberating Tradition goes in too many directions at once, this smorgasbord may be useful to conservative Christians who have not previously been exposed to basic feminist critiques of consumerism, for example. The book’s main strength is that LaCelle-Peterson backs up mainstream feminist-egalitarian arguments with detailed Biblical citations and historical evidence of women’s leadership roles in the church.

I was encouraged to see this book being sold at the recent Wheaton College theology conference, on the table of Baker Books, a leading evangelical publisher. As egalitarian perspectives become more reputable in evangelical circles, space also opens up for a more dynamic, historically aware method of reading Scripture, which hopefully can benefit other marginalized groups. It’s no longer plausible to say that we must replicate the family structures of first-century Palestine or else we’re undermining the authority of the Bible. Educated, active, Spirit-filled women, in numbers too great to ignore, are forcing the church to recognize that history and personal experience must inform our interpretive process, which means that our understanding of what the Bible says about women will change over time.

LaCelle-Peterson distinguishes herself from secular feminists and Christian complementarians, both of whom see the Bible and feminism as inherently incompatible. Instead, she argues that the Bible as a whole affirms women’s full humanity and equal participation in God’s kingdom. She does not take the liberal approach of throwing out texts that offend her politics, but rather contextualizes them and asks whether the “obvious” interpretation merely seems so because of the sexist cultural lenses through which we read.

God’s maleness, for instance, is not evident from Scripture. Compared to the other gods of the ancient Near East, who all had consorts and fertility rituals, the God of the Old Testament is strikingly non-gendered. Why do we assume that God is a literal “father” when this metaphor appears, but have no trouble perceiving the figurative language when God is compared to a stream of water, a rock, a nursing mother or a brooding hen? Since the God of the creation story transcends gender, “made in God’s image” applies equally to men and women.

After the Fall, hierarchy is introduced into the male-female relationship, with elements of oppression and unhealthy craving. Again, Christians have easily recognized that the other aspects of Adam and Eve’s new situation are a curse to be alleviated: “Are the items in Genesis 3 describing the state in which God wants us to live? For example, since God said farming would be difficult, does that mean using tractors is contradicting God?…Is it wrong for a woman to have epidural anesthesia in childbirth, since God said that women will have increased pain as they bear children?” (p.40) By contrast, we take Adam’s rule over Eve to be a moral norm, not a warning that their sin now taints all intimate relationships with the possibility of abuse of power.

In Jesus’ earthly ministry, we see God’s original plan for an egalitarian kingdom. Jesus validated Mary the sister of Martha when she assumed the posture of a male disciple, and provocatively ignored the purity taboos that would have kept him from healing, touching and speaking with women.

In a section titled “Discipleship Trumps Gender Roles”, LaCelle-Peterson adds, “It is interesting that Jesus also refuses to affirm positive traditional roles for women, even when asked to. Most significantly, unlike the tradition of some sectors of the Christian church, he does not put his own mother on a pedestal and value her simply for having borne him.” (pp.58-59) In Mark 3:33-35 (“Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother”) he takes an exclusionary status marker, one’s membership in a family, and makes it open to all who follow God. Women who fulfill traditional expectations as wives and mothers are no more privileged than their widowed, poor, or unpartnered sisters, including those with a checkered sexual history. Similarly, in Luke 11:27, Jesus proclaims that anyone, through discipleship, can be on a par with the woman who gave birth to him. “He isn’t putting Mary down, but raising the status of all the women in the crowd.” (p.59)

LaCelle-Peterson takes on the verses in the Epistles that seem to limit women’s participation, such as 1 Cor 14:33-35 (“women should be silent in the churches”). She notes that these lines occur within a discussion of how both men and women should behave decorously when they pray and prophesy, so that non-Christians will not be scandalized. It is assumed that women will be preachers and teachers (e.g. Phoebe and others in Romans 16). As many scholars now believe, 1 Cor 14 probably refers to women in the congregation who talked during the service, perhaps asking their husbands to explain the Scriptures, since women were not generally literate.

LaCelle-Peterson suggests that 1 Tim 2:11-15 (“…I permit no woman to teach or hold authority over a man…yet she will be saved through childbearing”) addresses a specific problem: female followers of Diana or other mother-goddesses who were proclaiming their superiority to men within the church. Saved “through” childbearing does not mean “by” (as in, salvation comes through being a mother) but “during”; God will bring them safely through childbearing, so they no longer need to hedge their bets by praying to Diana.

Anyone who’s cringed at the selection of pastel-tinted “Christian womanhood” books in a Lifeway bookstore, or sat through one too many John Eldredge lectures on how men naturally long to be rescuers and women to be rescued, will appreciate LaCelle-Peterson’s deconstruction of gender stereotypes that have been picked up by the evangelical marketing machine and reinforced with so-called divine authority. Consumer culture teaches young girls that their self-worth depends on being pretty, delicate, and unthreatening. Gimmicks like Revolve, the Bible packaged as a teen fashion magazine, misdirect Christian girls’ energy toward externals rather than internal spiritual maturity. It would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.

One of the most helpful sections of this book is its tour through the many manifestations of marriage in Biblical times and beyond. What Christian conservatives call the “traditional” family, with the man working outside the home and his wife staying home to raise the children, is an artifact of 19th-century capitalism. Before industrialization, husbands, wives and children often worked side by side on the farm or in the artisan’s workshop. Both parents were involved in teaching the children the skills they would need to carry on the business.

However, when capitalism turned men into salaried employees of a large corporation, women’s non-cash-based labor became devalued and invisible. It was a sign of upward mobility if your wife could afford to stay home. This meant that the woman became an ornament to the male ego rather than a contributor to society. That pride-based arrangement doesn’t sound like the model of mutual submission we read about in the Epistles, still less the actual patterns of discipleship in the early church. Yet today’s conservative churches have uncritically
adopted a commercialized vision of gender roles as if it were based on natural law.


To me this suggests the dangers of an ahistorical reading of the Bible. Human beings are inescapably embedded in history, both enriched and constrained by the specifics of our time, place, and material interests. When we are afraid to contextualize and move on from the social arrangements that happened to prevail in New Testament times, because we are seduced by an impossible dream of an “objective” social order that stands outside historical contingency and fallibility, we also lose perspective on our present-day social arrangements and how they unconsciously shape our hermeneutics. 

Liberating Tradition contains many more useful arguments from history and Biblical criticism than can be summarized in this review. By necessity, LaCelle-Peterson limits her focus to women’s heterosexual relationships and church leadership roles, but the logical extension of her critique of gender is unavoidable. Having admitted, in any context, that the meanings of maleness and femaleness are historically variable — and having recognized that our fallen nature easily converts difference into inequality, contrary to the radically inclusive vision of Jesus — we cannot honestly say “marriage is between one man and one woman” without admitting that most of the important words in that sentence are ambiguous, including (pace Bill Clinton) “is”. Will the female pastors and theologians in today’s conservative churches, who owe their leadership roles to feminist readings of the Bible, speak out against heterosexist idolatry, or will they pull the ladder up after them?