Upcoming Books for SEASONS 2015

Margaret Gey and Minnie in the Geys laboratory.
 "Margaret's surgical training was the only reason
the Gey lab was able to grow cells at all."

SEASONS met in January to finish our discussion of  Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
"...this book isn't just about science; it's about gender, race, and life itself."
"We must not see any person as an abstraction."    "Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help saves the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus--and at the very same time--that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies."
"...like it or not, we live in  a market-driven society, and science is part of that market."
The subject is endlessly fascinating as it was when I first read about HeLa some decades ago while I was still a medical librarian. I found this book to be a very uneven read. It is far more memoir of the author's investigation than a history. It is all too easy to identify a limited world view, errors of fact, and faulty analysis.  The tone is journalistic, lapsing at time into sensationalism. Yet with all these failings, it was a compelling read. I thought Bobbie's comment that we should perhaps "read this book empathetically rather than critically" was cogent. Here is a link that presents a very good summary. It is also by Rebecca Skloot

At our January meeting, SEASONS selected three books to read next:

1. First up is Barbara Kingsolver's 1988 debut novel The Bean Trees. 
2. Next we will dive into Nothing Daunted: the unexpected education of two society girls in the West by Dorothy Wickenden. I'm looking forward to this non-fiction account of two women teachers in Colorado in 1916.
3. The final selection for the first half of the year is Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter: a historical memoir of science, faith, and love. 17th Century, science, religion, and "a woman of exquisite mind"--oh, yes! This has been on my list for a long time and I'm glad to have the push to get it read.

Honorable mention:

 Abigail Adams by Woody Holton, winner of the Bancroft Prize.
Some years ago I read My Dearest Friend: the Letters Abigail and John Adams and found it most interesting.
“Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.”  
“We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.”  

Reading: C. S. Lewis on prayer

Reflections on the dialog...

SEASONS, my women reading theology group, selected Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer by C. S. Lewis. I had the book on my shelf, highlighted from two previous readings and put off rereading until this week.  I was in for a bit of a shock. Lewis and his imaginary friend Malcolm--an undergraduate with C.S. Lewis, exchanging “interminable letters on the Republic and classical metres, and what was then the “new” psychology!” and now continuing their correspondence on the subject of prayer--are far better read than I. Lewis drops  a lot of names and builds his sentences of countless literary references. Many of the people he mentions are intellectuals, philosophers, believers who wrestle with God or fight against “religion” as idolatry. While I recognized most of the names, I was not as familiar with their thought as I needed to be to fully comprehend Lewis's dialog.

I think Lewis intended this book not only as a treatise on prayer but also as a dialogue with his contemporary theologians on the issues of the day.
In particular Letters to Malcolm addresses Alec Vidler’s Soundings and Bishop of Woolwich John Robinson’s Honest to God.

I began making notes in the margin of my book. Then I decided to create a cheat sheet to share with SEASONS. I worked through the first six chapters. Then I found that someone else had already done so. Wasted effort? No! I have decided that I might want to read Pascal. I discovered a woman novelist, Rose Macauley, to see if I want to read; since she's 20th Century it may be a long well before she climbs to the top of the book stack. Simone Wiel looks very interesting.

This link is to a chapter-by-chapter listing of notes by Arend Smildes which I think the reader will find helpful.

http://www.lewisiana.nl/malcolmquotes/index.htm

The notes I made before I decided not to reinvent the wheel follow:

 

Chapter 1 (sets the scene. This is a “Socratic dialogue”)

 p.3        Republic            by Plato           429 – 347 B.C.           Greek

student of Socrates; founder of the Academy of Athens; the founding philosopher of Western thought.                Quotes:
“Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?”
“The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.”
“Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.”
“Nothing beautiful without struggle.”

Chapter 2

 p. 9       Imitation (of Christ)    by Thomas a Kempis 1418 – 1427   German Catholic

priest, monk, hand wrote 2 copies of the Bible (10 volumes)   Quotes:
“If God were our one and only desire we would not be so easily upset when our opinions do not find outside acceptance.”
“Wherever you go, there you are.”
“A book has but one voice, but it does not instruct everyone alike.”
“As long as you live, you will be subject to change, whether you will it or not - now glad, now sorrowful; now pleased, now displeased; now devout, now undevout; now vigorous, now slothful; now gloomy, now merry. But a wise man who is well taught in spiritual labor stands unshaken in all such things, and heeds little what he feels, or from what side the wind of instability blows.”
“Jesus has now many lovers of the heavenly kingdom but few bearers of His cross.”
“Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or endeavoring something for the public good.”
“The Lord bestows his blessings there, where he finds the vessels empty.”

 p. 10     Letters               Rose Macauley 1881 – 1958       English         Secularist & Anglican

her letters were published in 3 volumes in 1958. Her 26 novels (Towers of Trebizond 1956 semi-autobiographical) often have religious themes; Christianity is treated satirically in early works. An ardent secularist, she had a long (1918-1941) secret affair with Irish novelist Gerald O’Donavan. She returned to the Anglican communion in 1953.  Quotes:
“It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.”
“At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.”
“Life, for all its agonies...is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing...and whatever is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again.”
“It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.”
 

p. 11      Blaise Pascal 1628 -1662         French               Augustinian Catholic (Jansenism)

“On 23 November 1654, between 10:30 and 12:30 at night, Pascal had an intense religious vision and immediately recorded the experience in a brief note to himself which began: "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars..." and concluded by quoting Psalm 119:16: "I will not forget thy word. Amen." He carried this note sewn into his coat. A servant discovered it only by chance after his death. After this experience he began writing the Lettres Provinciales and the Pensees.  Quotes from Pensees:

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.”
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
“There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”
“In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadow for those who don't.”
“The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.”
“Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

Chapter 3

p. 14     “Manichchaeian” used figuratively as a synonym for “dualist” and suggests, somewhat disparagingly, that this world view simplistically reduces the world to a struggle between Good and Evil. Originally a major Gnostic religion founded by Iranian/Persian Mani, 216 – 276 A.D., Lewis refers not to the original but to the Histoire Critique de Manichee by Isaac de Beausobre, 1659 – 1738.        French Protestant explores the history of heresy and orthodoxy, concludes “God… eternally active and creative”

p. 15     John A.T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich      1919 – 1983              English Anglican Liberal author of Honest to God (1963), Robinson attempted to reconcile the disparate theologies of Tillich and Bonhoeffer. For more information see this article by N. T. Wright:  http://ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Doubts_About_Doubt.htm

Quotes:
"For it is in making himself nothing, in his utter self-surrender to others in love, that [Jesus] discloses and lays bare the Ground of man's being as Love".
"For assertions about God are in the last analysis assertions about Love".
“…the sacrament which forms the heart of Christian worship is… the assertion of ‘the “beyond” in the midst of our life’, the holy in the common. The Holy Communion is the point at which the common, the communal, becomes the carrier of the unconditional, as the Christ makes himself known in the breaking and sharing of bread.”

Chapter 4

p. 21     Martin Buber 1878 – 1965          Austrian Isarali Jew        Zionist author of               Ich und Du (I and Thou) “dialogical community… dialogical relationships”        Quotes:

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”
“The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.”
“Solitude is the place of purification.”
“The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.”

Chapter 5

p. 28     Juvenal 127 A.D              Roman poet “bread and circuses”

              “enormous prayers which heaven in vengeance grants”

 Chapter 6

 

p. 29     Alexander Vidler 1899 – 1991    English   Anglican priest, publisher, “new” theology              editor of Theology to which C.S. Lewis contributed, scholor of F.D. Marice

edited Soundings, collection of essays on Christian theology and the sciences. Quote:
"We are all sure that there is a way ahead, else we should not have taken up our pens. We have been less disconcerted by our differences than surprised by our concurrencies."

 F. D. Maurice 1805 – 1872             English   Christian socialist,

Proponet of women’s education, Unitarian family, ordained Anglican, deprived of Cambridge professorships for “unsound theology”  Quotes:
"The Bible," we are told sometimes, "gives us such a beautiful picture of what we should be." Nonsense! It gives us no picture at all. It reveals to us a fact: it tells us what we really are; it says, This is the form in which God created you, to which He has restored you; this is the work which the Eternal Son, the God of Truth and Love, is continually carrying on within you.
“The desire for unity has haunted me all my life through; I have never been able to substitute any desire for that, or to accept any of the different schemes for satisfaction of that men have desired.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906 – 1945             German             Lutheran              anti-Nazi
             Christianity in a secular world.               Quotes:
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
“A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol.”
“We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.”
“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.....We must not.....assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God.”

 p. 30    John Newman 1801 – 1890           English    Anglican convert to Catholicism, Cardinal,  leader of the Oxford Movement... Quotes:

”We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.”
“To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

 Simone Wiel 1909 – 1943 French               agnostic Jew, philosopher  Scholar of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Greek & Egyptian mystery religions. Sometimes described as a "Christian mystic, she baptized late in her life into the Roman Catholic communion by Thomas Merton.      Quotes:

 “All sins are attempts to fill voids.”
“Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.”
“True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.”
“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
“It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms. ”

 I collected most of the quotes by googling an author's name and selected the goodreads quotation link that popped up. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes

 

And another resource for reading C. S. Lewis:

http://www.cslewis.org/resources/studyguides/Study%20Guide%20-%20Letters%20to%20Malcolm.pdf

Four Women, Four Hymns.

Perhaps my favorite presentation at the ChLA 2013--which I attended in Biloxi many months ago--was that of Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, "For the Children Who Played... and for Those Who Didn't: Nineteenth-Century Hymnbooks for Home, Sunday-Schools, and Orphanages." This was the second time I have heard Alisa present, and, since I share her interest in Victorian hymnody,  I eagerly await her book Nineteenth-Century British Children’s Hymnody: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood with Chords and Verses. Studies in Childhood Series: 1700-Present series.  Claudia Nelson, series editor.  Anticipated publication 2015.

I have much enjoyed her article ,“Writing for, Yet Apart: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Contentious Status as Hymn Writers and Editors of Hymnbooks for Children.”  Victorian Literature and Culture. Vol. 40.  Issue 1.  (March 2012): Pp. 47-81. Clapp-Itnyre advocates "for the woman hymn writer for children – she who, as hymn writer or editor, surely enacted the role of religious “priest” for countless generations of children during and after her lifetime, but who is all but forgotten today."
In much the same way, I have asserted that women writers of hymns and Christian didactic literature function as theologians, shaping the doctrine and practice of the church. (See my introduction for SEASONS's reading of Evelyn Whitaker's Laddie.)

Later this week, I will teach a short class on the Hebrew word

  בֵּית

ba yith 

which means"House, Household, Home, Family, Temple, Shelter, Stronghold, Door..." and the meaning of the phrase "The House of the Lord" in the biblical Psalms. Since this is a devotional rather than a literary presentation, I selected several hymns written by women for the group to sing. These songs were chosen for their commentary upon the selected Psalms and because they were written by 19th Century Women.
Four Women Writers of Hymns:

Dorothy Ann Thrupp (1779 – 1847) was born in Paddington, England. She was deeply involved in the Sunday School movement. The first Sunday Schools were founded to provide some education to the children of the poor. These children often worked during the week to help support their families. Having Sundays free, they often ran wild and engaged in dangerous and immoral activities. Dorothy Ann Thrupp was a life-long Sunday School teacher. She wrote many materials and songs to be used in the curriculum. Many were published under the name "Iota" and some are noted as by D.A.T.  Alisa Clapp-Itnyre in her presentation discussed the Sunday School movement and  cited the "democratizing influence" of hymns and their importance in a "move from selfish pursuit to core Christian values." Attributed to Thrupp, "Savior like a Shepherd Lead Us" appears in at least 831 hymnals.

Anna Laetitia Waring (1823 – 1910) was born into a Quaker family in Wales  but like her uncle, Samuel Waring, was baptized into the Anglican church in 1842. Both her uncle and her father, Elijah Waring, were also writers. She was a life-long daily reader of the Psalter and learned Hebrew in order to read the Psalms (Yes! a kindred spirit, indeed!) and other Old Testament scripture in the original language. Her first small collection of eighteen hymns was published in 1850 and titled Hymns and Meditations by A.L.W. There was an 1855 publication of Additional Hymns. In 1863 the 10^th edition of Hymns and Meditations was published. Here is a link to the American edition which contains 32 poems.  In 1886 she published Days of Remembrance: A Memorial Calendar. For many years she was active in a prison ministry visiting Bridewell in London  and later Horfield, Bristol, and worked with the Discharged Prisoners Aid Society. When a friend asked how she could bear this ministry, Waring replied: “It is like watching by a filthy gutter to pick out a jewel here and there, as the foul stream flows by.” Many of her hymns are reflective of pain and suffering. In our hymnal she is represented by "In Heavenly Love Abiding" which appears in at least 453 hymnals.

Anne Ross Cundell Cousins (1824 – 1906) was born in Yorkshire, England. She married William Cousins, pastor of the Free Church of Scotland. They ministered for twenty years in various locations with the Free Church of Scotland and with Presbyterian congregations. She was the mother of six children. She began writing hymns to be used in her husband’s worship services and some of these became very popular in Britain. Her hymns and poems for various publications were most often published as by A.R. C.  She was an accomplished pianist having studied with John Muir Wood. Here is a link to the 1876 edition of her collected works. She said her hymn, 'The Sands of Time," was inspired by the last words of the great 18^th Century Calvinist and leader of “the second Reformation,” Samuel Rutherford, whose tombstone is engraved “Acquainted with Immanuel’s Song.”  

 Caroline Louisa Sprague Smith (1827 –1886) was the wife of Rev. Charles Smith of the South Congregational Church, Andover, MA.  She is listed in Hatfield’s Poets of the Church, New York, 1884, p. 564. Her hymn “Tarry with Me. An Old Man’s Prayer” appeared in The Sabbath Hymn Book 1858. She described writing this hymn:  “About 1853 [in the summer of 1852] I heard the Rev. Dr. H. M. Dexter preach a sermon on ‘The Adaptedness of Religion to the Wants of the Aged.’ I went home and embodied the thought in the hymn “Tarry with me, O My Savior.’ I sent it to Mr. Hallock, for The Messenger. He returned it as ‘not adapted to the readers of the paper.’ Years after, I sent it, without any signature, to the little Andover paper…. I send it to you in its original form, in a little paper of which my sister, Mrs. Terry [Rochester, NY] is editoress.” Here is a link to a 1909 edition of her collected writings.

There are at least three other tunes more commonly used with Smith’s words.  The tune in our hymnal #783 is not listed in the references. It is by Knowles Shaw (1834 –1878) who was the “singing evangelist” of the Stone-Campbell Movement. The story of his conversion--he was in the middle of playing the fiddle at a dance--is rather amusing. He was both an accomplished violinist and pianist. Having no objection to instrumental music in the Disciples of Christ fellowship, he frequently played in churches and revival meetings. Smith’s “Tarry with Me” with Shaw’s music was published in Zion’s Harp #165.

 

Distant Voices

SEASONS, my women-reading-theology group will discuss the now twenty-year old book, Distant Voices. Discovering a Forgotten Past for a Changing Church by C. Leonard Allen. Abilene, TX: ACU Press, 1993,  which focuses on the "minority voices among the churches of Christ." p. 4 
I read this book when it was newly published but have certainly benefited by a second reading. As a church librarian I have had the opportunity to browse some of the 19th and early 20th century publications that make up the written history of the Stone/Campbell movement and have long known that I am more often in sympathy with the voices that were silenced than those who defined the traditional doctrine and practice of the Restoration Movement, particularly as expressed in the churches of the South. One might call me a "Stoneite" but never a "Campbellite."
Quoting Allen: "...in Stone's view, heresy involved not so much believing wrong doctrines but a lack of love and a rending of the body of Christ. He did not believe that a set of correct doctrines would ever unite believers." p 18 Nor do I.
He would not deny fellowship or Eucharist based on whether a person claiming the name of Christ had been baptized by immersion. Nor would I.
"He opposed the "mania for uniformity" that allowed people to exclude from fellowship those who differed in interpretation or opinion." p. 44 As do I. In my 40+ years in the churches of Christ, I have been more than once named a heretic (always by a male) which I usually take as a compliment. After all, they called Jesus a blasphemer.

In his book, Allen makes use of a couple of my favorite Barton Stone quotations:

"I hear much said about obedience, and too many confine or almost restrict the term to baptism and the weekly supper: prayer is sadly neglected, [along with] love to God and man."

"If our faith be ever so imperfect, and blended with error, yet if it leads us to do the will of God, and bear fruits of the Spirit; if it works by love; if it purifies the heart; if it overcomes the world--it is the faith of a Christian." p. 44

SEASONS decided to focus our discussion on the chapters dealing with women:

• Chapter 4 Your Daughters Will Prophesy,
• Chapter 17 The New Woman,  and
• Chapter 18 Phoebe's Place.

Thomas Rolandson (1815)
from the digital collection of the New York Public Library.
 

Chapter 4:
I am struck with how very much the "Restoration Movement"
reflects the general societal views of women in the late 18th, through the 19th, and in the early 20th Centuries in America and in Victorian England with which I am more familiar.  I notice some interesting parallels between the criticisms of "female preachers" lacking "that delicacy of mind, which is the ornament of her sex" p. 25 to similar invectives directed at the Bluestockings.  I've recently been sampling some of the writings of Hannah More (1745 - 1833) and other proponents of education for women.
Allen notes that in the churches of Christ in America "the predominant cultural model of "true womanhood," which limited woman's role strictly to the domestic sphere, became the predominant model of the restoration movement. It remained so throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth." And I fear follows us still into the twenty-first.

Chapter 17:
Likewise the exchanges between David Lipscomb and Silena Moore Holman (1850 - 1915) give a theological setting to the "New Woman" questions that were being debated in the society at large. Allen quotes Holman:
"The days of the 'clinging vine woman' are gone forever... a husband will find walking by his side the, bright, wide-awake companion, ...a helpmeet in the best possible sense of the term." She is well educated, and her education has not "impaired her feminine grace or lovable qualities in the slightest degree."  p. 132
"Men may change with the changing conditions of modern life, but when women find themselves trying to keep step with their fathers, brothers, and husbands in the new order of things, the brethren stand in front of them with a drawn sword and demand a halt, because, they say, the Bible forbids, when it does nothing of the kind." p. 133

I find it telling that Lipscomb in his opposition to suffrage warned against women who "break the bond of subjection" divinely laid upon them. p. 131 The fact the he used the word "subjection" rather than the biblical word "submission" seems to me a clear demonstration that his opposition arose out of a entitled position of power and domination rather than the spirit of Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

Mitigating my heretofore negative view of Lipscomb is Allen's Chapter 13 God's Chosen Vessels about the 1873 cholera epidemic in Nashville and Lispcomb service to "the poor and destitute, especially among the black population." p.92 I may disagree with Lipscomb's doctrine or dogma but, in the face of a life sacrificially and courageously lived, I am awed and humbled by the man.


 Chapter 18
The Phoebe's of the Stone/Campbell movement are part and parcel with the deaconess movements that were rampant in all religious circles. They are very much the same as the "gray ladies" of the Anglican sisterhood.  {A really delightful novel touching on this topic is The Perpetual Curate by Margaret Oliphant, part of her Chronicles of Carlingford, a free Kindle book which I greatly enjoyed. It's a sweet romance that will delight the gentle reader.} This sisterhood and Margaret Oliphant are of particular interest to me because of their association with the Christ Church Albany Street St. Pancras which was the church attended by Evelyn Whitaker and her sisters. SEASONS read Evelyn Whitaker's novel Laddie as a study in the woman novelist as theologian.
The increasingly public role of women in the 19th and early 20th Centuries found religious expression in
many social movements: abolition, temperance, education, work place conditions, child labor, public health, orphans and children, health care, missions...
We in SEASONS are blessed to attend a church that has been at the forefront of the women's issue in churches of Christ for a couple of decades. In fact, our own Steve Sandifer wrote one of the best references on this subject.

In Allen's book I noted that women's service gave them credibility. Nancy Cram (1776 - 1815) had begun a teaching ministry among the Oneida Indians. Her prayer at a funeral touched the audience before she became a "female preacher." Abigail Roberts (1791 -1841) preached in "out of the way places." Nancy Towle was a school teacher who spent 4 years in Bible study and prayer before in 1821 beginning her fourteen years as a full time itinerate preacher "wherever a platform was open to her." p. 28 "I was astonished that professed Christians can be so much more willing souls shall perish, than that 'the rules of their society' shall be broken." I share Towle's astonishment. 

We Christians would do well to remember and not to repeat or continue the errors of the past. Allen quotes Henry May's 1949 book: "In 1876, Protestantism presented a massive, almost unbroken front in its defense of social status quo." p. 111 The path of truth, wisdom, unity not uniformity, and peace demands that we 21st Century members and leaders of the churches of Christ hear those Distant Voices.

The Jesus I know is a revolutionary who rejects the status quo and repeatedly engages the marginalized people he encounters. The Christ embodies the teaching of Torah, Psalms, and Prophets: a Holy God is less concerned with liturgical practices than with the compassionate care of those in need. When we do not do likewise we are failing in our witness to the world.

SEASONS: 2 books on biblical womanhood in Hebrew scripture

I belong to a book club of sorts. SEASONS is a group of women meeting most months to discuss a book over a continental breakfast. We usually gather at Southwest Central Church of Christ which is the church that many of us attend. We read theology and fiction. Our summer selections have been two books that we grouped together as dealing with Hebrew scripture and rituals in every day:

Rachel Held Evans: A Year of Biblical Womanhood
Thomas Nelson, 2012. Available as a Kindle book.
 SEASONS also read Evans's Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions. Evans is a clever, well-read, witty author. She has a particular interest in confronting injustice and, particularly, the injustices of sexism. She is both firm and funny but she's sometimes a bit "snarky." One minute I want to throw her book across the room but the next I'm highlighting a perfectly turned phrase:  "...be careful of challenging another woman's choices, for you never know when she may be sitting at the feet of God." p. 37 "...for all its glory and grandeur, the Bible contains a darkness... sometimes taking the Bible seriously means confronting the parts we don't like or understand..." p. 62 , 66 "The divine resides in all of us, but it is our choice to magnify it or diminish it, to ignore it, or to surrender to its lead." p. 73 "...most of the Bible's instructions regarding modesty find their context in warnings about materialism, not sexuality..." p. 128 "Women should not have to pry equality from the grip of Christian men. It should be surrendered willingly, with the humility and love of Jesus, or else we miss the once radical teaching that slaves and masters, parents and children, husbands and wives, rich and poor, healthy and sick, should 'submit to one another' Ephesians 5:21" p. 219 "We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: Are we reading with the prejudice of love or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed?" p. 296

Rachel Held Evans is not afraid to ask the most controversial questions and I often read her blog. The most current one is on Responding to Homophobia in the Christian Community.

I missed the SEASONS in both June and July so I'm eager for a time to visit with my friends and to share our gleanings from
Lauren F. Winner's Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline. I very much enjoyed reading this book. Winner beautifully expresses many things that I think. She has an interesting history as a Jewish woman who converted to Christianity in her late twenties. Two of her books Girl Meets God and Faith Interrupted tell part of her story. Her perspective melds well with my own since I am a lover of Hebrew scripture. I am a seeker of "rhythms and routines" that draw "the sacred down into the everyday."."Practice is to Judaism what belief is to Christianity....Your faith might come and go, but your practice ought no to waver.... the repeating of the practice is the best way to ensure that a doubter's faith returns." Introduction. Chapter 5 p. 53 of her book is titled "tefillah prayer" and is the best short lesson on prayer that I have ever read which is saying a lot since my personal collection devotes three linear feet of shelf space to the subject. "Jewish prayer is essentially book prayer, liturgical prayer. Jews say the same set prayers, at the same fixed hours, over and over, every day. There is, to be sure, room for spontaneous prayer... but those spontaneous prayers are to liturgy what grace notes are to the musical score: They decorate, but never drown out, the central theme."   "words that praise God even on the mornings when I wonder if God exists at all."  Winner's sections on Sabbath, on grief, and on hospitality are instructive and life-giving. "Judaism connects physical acts to spiritual practice without somehow suggesting that the spirit is superior to the body."  p. 69 I plan to get to know this author much better. http://laurenwinner.net/

We're probably going to select our next books and I'll be seconding the nomination for a novel:
John Green's The Fault in Our Stars.