I read Aces Wild: A Heist by Amanda DeWitt, and here's my post about it~
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Overview
This is a novel about Jack Shannon, whose mom owns a casino in Las Vegas. His mom gets arrested for shady business things, but Jack's take on it is that all the casino owners are doing those kinds of illegal things, and the reason his mom got arrested is that a rival casino owner targeted her. So Jack invites his friends- that he met on an asexual web forum- to come to Las Vegas and help him figure out what's going on/ play illegal blackjack/ etc.
So we have 5 ace characters working together, in this casino-heist-style plot. When we talk about queer fiction, we can say there are 2 kinds: One kind is where the queerness *is* the plot- like, it's about a character figuring out they are queer, or about overcoming obstacles/discrimination related to being queer. The other kind is a plot about something else, where the characters are queer but the story isn't *about* being queer; the queerness is just a background element. "Aces Wild" is the second kind. We need both kinds, so it's good that this exists.
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My opinion
I found this to be a good story, fun to read. And I liked the asexual elements in the background- for example, having online friends that you feel totally understand you, because they are also ace. Meeting ace people "in real life" and feeling so comfortable with them because they *get* that. I've had that kind of feeling in some queer spaces and ace meetups.
Also the line "sometimes you need five aces to win," in the context of asexuals playing illegal blackjack, is just extremely clever. Love that.
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But basically I don't know if I'm interested in queer fiction
Or rather, I guess I'm not really the kind of person who likes to read a lot of fiction.
I read a lot, and my motivation for reading is I want to learn things. When I see a book about some topic and I think "oh I want to learn about that" then I add it to my wishlist.
Fiction doesn't necessarily fit into that. Fiction *can* be a way to learn things- some authors use fiction as a way of exploring a topic and getting the readers to think deeply about it, and if the author is skilled then this can be more effective than just directly telling you what their point is. But fiction can also be really formulaic, where readers want to have an enjoyable experience by reading a story that follows a known structure. Where it's fun but you don't really learn anything new from it. And that's fine- I'm not saying it's "better" to read to learn things vs reading to experience a plot structure you already know you're going to like. (I mean, I read dozens of "Nancy Drew" books when I was a kid.)
(And also I'm oversimplifying it; there's a wide spectrum between "learning things" and "formulaic", and also, one reader might read a book and not get anything out of it, while another reader reads the same book and finds it really insightful and illuminating. For one reader, it's near the "formulaic" end of the spectrum, and for another reader it's at the "learning things" end.)
Most of the books I read, I choose them because I want to learn things. But sometimes I just want something easy and fun; I don't feel like learning things. There's a place for both kinds of books! But anyway, my point is, I see people on the internet talking about how important it is to have queer fiction and representation, and sure that's great, but it seems it's not really something I'm interested in myself. Maybe sometimes? But also sometimes I'm like, what's the point of this?
Obviously, since fiction exists, there *should* be fiction books with queer characters. And we need more of that! For people who like fiction, there should be a whole range available to them. There should be books where the plot is about being queer and overcoming problems associated with that, and there should be books where the plot is about something else entirely and the characters are queer just because.
Or, maybe nobody likes to read *all* queer fiction; they only like a small subset of the books, and when we make such a big deal about how "queer fiction is so important" and "representation is so important" it means "a wide range of books should exist, because someone will like to read them, but that doesn't mean *I* am going to read them."
So anyway, that's my opinion on that. I enjoyed reading this book, but I don't really feel like it's something I "need" or something that made a big difference and improved my life or whatever. BUT there have been other fictional stories I've read, with queer characters- fanfics- which did make an impact on me and improved my life. So I'm sure for some readers, "Aces Wild" could be meaningful and helpful to them. Different readers, who are at different places in their lives, will feel differently about reading the same book.
This is in the section discussing the creation story and flood story from Genesis. They are very similar to myths from other ancient cultures. And the myths from other cultures are older. So, what do we do with that? It looks like the bible stories are just borrowed from other myths, rather than being directly from God, but that can't be right, can it? Page 41 talks about what you would do if you're a Christian in an apologetics argument:
If pressed, one could attempt to mount the argument that the Israelite stories were actually older than all the ancient Near Eastern stories but were only recorded later in Hebrew. Such a theory-- for that is what it is, a theory-- assumes that the biblical stories are the pristine originals and that all the other stories are parodies and perversions of the Israelite original, even though the available evidence would be very difficult to square with such a conclusion. But could it have happened this way? Yes, I suppose one could insist on such a thing, but it would be very difficult for someone holding to such a view to have a meaningful conversation with linguists and historians of the ancient world. To argue in such hypothetical terms can sometimes become an excuse for maintaining a way of thinking that is otherwise unsupportable. It is just such explanations that some readers might find problematic, for these explanations seem motivated by a desire to protect dogmatic commitments rather than to engage the available evidence.
!!! This is so real! This is exactly what it's like, to believe in biblical inerrancy, and to do apologetics.
It's like... you start with the idea that if you're a Christian, you have to believe all these things about the bible. You have to believe it's inerrant. You have to believe there are no mistakes or contradictions- that it's telling 1 consistent story throughout. You have to believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. And that basically every book in the bible was written very close to the time of the events that happened, by whoever seems like the author when you do a very superficial reading of it. Yeah, any talk of "the book of Isaiah was pulled together from multiple authors" or "this was written hundreds of years after these events happened" is bad- you can't even consider that. It would be going against God.
You start with an idea of what the bible is, and then when someone brings up evidence that seems to contradict that, you have to come up with an explanation for why we can totally ignore that evidence and it doesn't matter.
Someone says "other cultures also have flood stories which are similar to the Noah's ark story." You have to say, well, yes, there really *was* a global flood, so that's why there are stories about it. But the Noah's ark story is the truth about it, and all the others are inaccurate. See? Easy. So we can just ignore all those other flood stories, because they're wrong and our version is right. No need to read them or care about what they say.
Someone points out that the 4 gospels don't exactly agree on who saw Jesus and when after the Resurrection. So you have to come up with some convoluted timeline that fits everything in, such that nothing the bible says is *technically* wrong. Even though, if your timeline is the truth, then the biblical writers wrote in a very misleading way, giving their readers an incorrect impression of what actually happened. But, no need to think about that! The important thing is that every isolated statement in the bible is true in some sense. Move along, nothing to see here!
Or any of the other little inconsistencies in the bible. Someone points them out- ugh, probably some internet atheist just looking to cause trouble. You go through and explain why each of these supposed contradictions is actually fine, nothing to see here. You make up all kinds of fan theories for how 2 seemingly-contradictory statements from the bible can both be true at the same time. That's what being a Christian is about, right? (It often goes so far, with Christians taking these fan theories so seriously because they're necessary to uphold the idea of inerrancy, that we don't even realize that they're fan theories and we actually think they are taught by the bible itself.)
And all of your explanations are like... well, it's not *impossible* that it could have happened that way. But if you just look at the evidence we have, other explanations seem far more likely. You're not really engaging with the evidence- you're viewing the evidence as a nuisance, and your task as a good Christian is to find excuses so we can ignore all that evidence.
If you're able to make a case that "it's not impossible" that your beliefs about the bible are right- well, that's good enough! That's what we're going for - "not impossible." You became a Christian for other reasons totally unrelated to biblical inerrancy and apologetics, and then you found out that one of the requirements to be a Christian is to believe certain things about the bible, so you hack a path through the jungle to show it's "not impossible" that those beliefs about the bible are true. There, all done!
But as Enns says, if that's what you're doing, you're not going to be able to have a meaningful conversation with the experts who are actually studying these things. With people who look at the actual evidence and explore the implications of it. People who really take the bible seriously, and spend their careers working to learn more about it. People who ask questions about *why* the biblical writers wrote things which are inconsistencies or mistakes- these are fascinating questions, but of course good Christians who believe in inerrancy are not allowed to ask them.
By User:Daderot - File:Tablet in Akkadian language recording court proceedings with seal impressed envelope, Yorgan Tepe, Kingdom of Mittani, 1450-1350 BC, clay - Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago - DSC07088.JPG, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115709323 / Image source.
I've been reading Peter Enns's book, "Inspiration and Incarnation," which is about how the bible was written in the context of ancient Near East culture, and truly fits into that world, and Christians should not view this as a problem, as if it means the bible is not the word of God. Instead, we should view it as God speaking to people in their own culture, in ways they could understand.
In this post, I'll talk about chapter 2, "The Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Literature."
This chapter goes through a bunch of examples of archeological discoveries from ancient Near Eastern cultures similar to ancient Israel. We see that these texts that were discovered are very similar to passages from the bible- so, what does that mean? How should we view those similarities?
This chapter brings up a lot of really fascinating ancient Near East texts that I had never heard of. I can't fit them all in this blog post, so if you're interested in this topic, you should just go buy the book.
Enns is a biblical scholar. I've read and reviewed 2 of his books before: The Bible Tells Me So (published 2014) and Genesis for Normal People (published 2019). I really enjoyed those and I want to read all of his books. This one, "Inspiration and Incarnation," was originally published in 2005, but I have the 10th-anniversary edition, published in 2015. The writing style of "Inspiration and Incarnation" is more formal and academic than "The Bible Tells Me So" and "Genesis for Normal People"- those two had a lot of [in my opinion] unnecessary pop culture references- I know some readers like that, so, that's fine, but I definitely like the style of "Inspiration and Incarnation" better.
Here's the overall idea of this book: In the past 150 or so years, there has been new evidence uncovered about the civilizations and cultures of the ancient Near East. Archaeologists have found writings from people groups who lived near the ancient Israelites- and these writings have many similarities to what we see in the bible. This is something of a problem for evangelical Christian ideology, because evangelicals believe the bible is inerrant and inspired by God, and so they don't want to believe that it's similar to other ancient writings, that it was influenced by them and it borrowed ideas from them, that it has mistakes and anachronisms, that it follows the genre conventions of ancient Near East writing rather than being absolute truth as we would view it from a modern scientific perspective.
The conservative bible scholars respond to this problem by downplaying the similarities between the bible and other ancient writing. The liberal bible scholars respond to this problem by saying the bible is the same as other ancient writing, and therefore it isn't special or inspired by God. Enns claims that both sides are making an incorrect assumption: that if the bible is similar to other ancient writing, that means it's not really from God. He says that, on the contrary, God gave us a bible which is fully human and also fully divine- just like Jesus was fully human and fully God. God speaks to humans within their own cultures.
And: The evangelical Christian hit “Testify to Love” just got a powerful pro-LGBTQ reboot (May 22) Avalon was a Christian band popular in the 90s. We're just finding out now that when one of the singers, Michael Passons, left the band in 2003, actually he was kicked out for being gay. Now here he is, 20-some years later, proud of who he is, singing Avalon's hit song "Testify to Love" as a gay man. I am so here for this.
2.Before WeChat, There Were Qiaopi Writers (May 20) "Unable to type or use a smartphone herself, the woman sat beside Jiang and dictated the letter sentence by sentence while he wrote each line down by hand."
3. The Rise and Fall of Misery Memoirs (April 11, via) 2-hour-5-minute video. It's about "misery memoirs" that turned out to be completely fabricated (about the Holocaust, drug addiction, satanic rituals, etc). It's about the McMartin preschool trial, where investigators pressured children into making up stories about satanic abuse and secret tunnels and all kinds of wild things. It's about what kinds of "trauma stories" sell, what audiences want to hear and feel. It's about how scammers make up stories that fit The Template, and how real survivors are pressured to present their stories in a certain way.
One thing this makes me think of is the feminist slogan "believe the victim." The thinking goes, if you come across a story of someone being raped or abused, you should believe it, because only a tiny percent of rape accusations are false, because victims who come forward are often put through a traumatizing process of interrogation and victim-blaming, because there's nothing to gain from making up a story, and a victim would only put themself through that because they really want the truth to come out.
But it has to be more nuanced than just "believe the victim." It depends on *where* you're encountering this traumatic story. If it's a friend telling you about something that happened to them, you should give them emotional support and try to help them connect with whatever resources they need (therapy, etc). Within that context, you should just believe them and help them. But if you're a journalist writing a story, you should *not* just "believe the victim." You should only publish a story if there's evidence. And if the victim has a large platform and is making this traumatic story into their whole identity, uhhhh, that is even more suspect.
4.On Grindslop (May 20) "What this reveals is that the wealthiest generation of human beings in the history of our species has become so frightened of being seen as a class so terrified of their position being legible that it has begun performing the lives of people who assemble iPhones in near-slavery conditions in Foxconn plants."
"'This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,' Donald Sherman, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in a statement."
2. Colorado Supreme Court Rules Hospitals Must Not Comply With Trump, Must Continue Offering Trans Youth Care (May 19) "In Monday’s decision, the court rejected the hospital’s central defense: that it had not discriminated against transgender youth but had simply declined to offer one category of treatment. The justices found that distinction meaningless, noting that the hospital continued to provide the very same medications, puberty blockers and hormone therapy, to cisgender youth while denying them to transgender patients."
3.Trump administration to force foreigners in the U.S. to apply for a green card abroad (May 23) This is absurd. Plenty of immigrants come to the US for education, to work, etc, legally, and then end up building a whole life, maybe even marry a US citizen, and it makes sense for there to be a process for them to get a green card and eventually citizenship. This new policy says they have to uproot their whole life and go to their own country, for who knows how many years, in order to apply for a US green card.
4.US senator says he was pepper-sprayed by federal agents during protest at ICE facility (May 26) "'Some of [the people detained] have been detained more than eight to 12 months,' Ana Paola Pazmiño from Resistencia en Accion New Jersey, a migrant rights organization, claimed, adding: 'The horrible conditions that they’re living in inside are terrible.'"
5.Tennessee judge dismisses federal human smuggling charges against Kilmar Abrego GarcÃa (May 23) "Abrego Garcia's lawyers argued that the government's criminal case was retaliation because of the embarrassment it caused the Trump administration. After he won his deportation case, he became a sort galvanizing force for critics of the president's hard-line immigration policy. His lawyers asked the court to dismiss the charges under a vindictive prosecution claim." But I think this still isn't over.
7. Trump DOJ mass-deletes info on Jan. 6 riot cases, including violent assaults on cops (May 26) "A review by NPR found that the deleted material included information about some of the most serious assaults on law enforcement that occurred that day. NPR maintains the most complete database and visual archive of the Jan. 6 prosecutions."
I want to know, *why* is it a good thing for children to develop their own theology? Like, my *feeling* when I read this is that I agree it's a good thing, but I want to think through the reasons why. If they're making up their own beliefs about God, aren't most of those beliefs going to be wrong? As an ex-evangelical I can tell you that evangelicals would be very concerned about the idea of children coming up with their own beliefs about God- no, we need to teach them the *correct* beliefs! It's very important! If people don't believe the correct things about God, they will go to hell! They will sin- and every sin hurts God infinitely, this isn't something you can just play around with like it doesn't matter. And if people have incorrect beliefs about God in some areas, even if it's just some minor little error that doesn't seem significant, WELL IT IS- those will lead to even worse incorrect beliefs about God, and worse sins. We have to make sure everyone believes all the correct things!
Yes, it's a very big deal in evangelicalism, that people have to believe the "correct" beliefs, and it would be terrible to just let everyone develop their own theology from their own thoughts and experiences. By contrast, liberation theology is based on the idea that people should make their own theology. It seems like a very key foundational aspect of liberation theology, a point where liberation theology is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from what I was taught in evangelicalism. I feel like, I agree with it, but I still want an explanation, because coming from an evangelical background, it's not obvious why it would be a good thing to let people figure out their own religious beliefs.
Here's a nice little book about Passover: P is for Passover by Tanya Lee Stone. I read this to my son recently. I think this is a good book for giving kids a basic introduction to what Passover is, and some of the modern traditions associated with it.
We're not Jewish, but I wanted to teach my son about Passover because I'm a Christian and Passover is in the bible, and also it's good for him to learn about different religions.
This book goes through the letters of the alphabet, and lists something related to Passover for each one of them. Each one is just a short description, so the book is useful as a simple overview of different aspects of it, and my son asked lots of questions, wanting to know more details.
Some of them are elements of the Exodus story from the bible. ("B is for burning bush / Flames Moses saw / God sent him a message / He listened in awe!") I know this story, so I was able to explain all those ones to him. Some of them are traditions that modern Jewish people have, for celebrating Passover, and most of these I don't know. ("A is for afikomen / The search will be fun / The broken matzah is hidden / And our story's begun!") I had to tell my son "we'll have to google it." I bet the experience of reading this book is different if you're a Jewish family and your kids are already familiar with these traditions.
I guess I should warn you that if you teach your kid about the story of Passover, it means you have to explain slavery to your kid. (Also infanticide...) But I don't think we should avoid it for that reason. It's an important story.
Anyway, in summary, I recommend this book as a good introduction for kids who don't know about Passover.
In this chapter, we will look at what theologians call eschatology. This is the study of the future, the study of how the kingdom of God breaks into our right-here and right-now and creates profound changes to our lives. In liberation theology, eschatology is the focus on how powers around us-- our churches, our government, our economic order-- need to be redeemed. They need to be redeemed because they are set up in a way that makes it harder for us to love our neighbors as ourselves. They need to be redeemed because they do not place the first last and the last first. Liberation theologians want us to think about how the kingdom of God should disrupt these powers around us. "Hope in the future seeks roots in the present."
Child liberation theology raises the same issues, but with regard to children. Child liberation theology also engages eschatology by asking how we can better realize the kingdom of God in the right-here and right-now for children. The path to doing this involves taking Jesus seriously when he said in Mark 9:37, "Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me." What I am going to argue might seem too audacious or maybe even sacrilegious. Part of realizing the kingdom of God in the right-here and right-now is seeing children as God-to-us. Children are not simply representatives or servants or mouthpieces of God. They are, in a profound and real sense, God's chosen and royal substitutes. They serve as God-to-us in our right-here and right-now.
Now before you discard this book, let me tell you what I am not saying: I am not saying that children are gods. I am not saying that we should worship children. And I am not saying that children are substitutes for God in the sense that we no longer need God. What I am saying is that Jesus called us to see children as God-to-us in our right-here and right-now. They are the neighbors who we are supposed to love as ourselves. And just as the commandment to love our neighbors is rooted in the greatest commandment to love God (Matt. 22:36-40), loving children is similarly rooted in loving God. This makes loving children an act of worship.
Eschatology? As far as I know, eschatology is about heaven and hell and the end of the world- the complete opposite of the "right-here and right-now" Stollar is talking about. He says, "This is the study of the future, the study of how the kingdom of God breaks into our right-here and right-now and creates profound changes to our lives." The grammar of the sentence suggests that those are 2 different ways of saying the same thing, but, what on earth, "the future" is totally different from "how the kingdom of God breaks into our right-here and right-now." Right?
Even so, I'm like, really into this. I'm very excited about the idea that our beliefs about heaven and hell and the end of the world should have a profound effect on the way we live now- in particular, that it means the kingdom of God breaks into our world now, and we fight for liberation for everyone.
When I was evangelical, I believed that people go to heaven or hell based on whether they are "saved"- ie, whether they believed in Jesus and "prayed the prayer" to commit their lives to him, with the appropriate amount of emotional sincerity. Heaven and hell last for eternity; everything we do here on earth is meaningless in comparison. Our actions in this life only matter to the extent that they nudge people closer to "getting saved," to falling on the correct side of that binary.
In evangelical land, it's easy to have the attitude "well, I'm saved, so there's nothing else I need to be doing now. Just waiting till I go to heaven." Or, "why should we give food to hungry people? If we're not also telling them about Jesus, it's pointless."
In evangelical land, it always felt like there was this big divide between the eternity of heaven and hell, and the normal lives we're living right now. Like getting people saved to get to heaven is the most important thing, and the time we spend just living our normal lives outside of that is just busywork.
But now my beliefs are completely different. Now I believe that we are supposed to bring the kingdom of heaven to the earth, as Jesus taught us to pray. Heaven is not some faraway unreachable thing; heaven is going to come to this earth, and we should do the work to make it happen. As Martin Luther King Jr said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." That's heaven- and it ain't gonna bend itself. We have to do it.
So we look forward to heaven by doing the work to fight for justice on this earth. It's so profoundly and viscerally connected- not like the "pie in the sky when you die" and "fire insurance" of evangelicalism. I love it.
And that's what Stollar is talking about here. Eschatology is not this faraway future thing- it's about how the kingdom of God comes into our world right now. It's about the systems and powers in this world, and how they need to be redeemed and transformed, every valley raised up and mountain made low.
So... it strikes me as strange that Stollar uses the word "eschatology" for this, but also, I love it. I think this a good way to think about heaven and hell. (And maybe this *is* how "eschatology" is used in liberation theology?) Let's do the work right now on this earth. That's heaven and hell.
And it makes me think, maybe religious beliefs should be understood as projections that inform our thinking about what we should do right now. Just like a complex 3-dimensional object projects a 2D shadow- religious beliefs are that shadow, and we live our lives in the shape of a 3D object that could make that shadow. Maybe heaven and hell are not real, but whatever you believe about them makes a real difference in how you live. Maybe religion is not actually true, but it's about the power of a story. Sure, you could make a list of behaviors that people should do or not do, but people respond better to stories. A big grand story about what the world is, and how God wants us to live, and the way that filters down into our very concrete actions in the here-and-now.
(And, to clarify, I'm not saying being religious is better than being non-religious. There's a wide range of different ways that people map their religious beliefs [or lack thereof] onto questions of morality/purpose/how we should live our lives, and I would not say that religious people's mappings are better than non-religious people's.)
I wouldn't regret it, if I lived my life in an effort to bring heaven to this earth, and then it turned out heaven didn't exist. Even if heaven is not real, there's something about this that *is* real. Something about... helping people is the right thing to do, even if there's no God rewarding you for it. That's real. It's a religious belief- because how can you prove it? what would it even mean to prove it? It's a religious belief that feels even deeper than my religion, somehow.
My religion is "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people."
The kingdom of heaven is not far away. As Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Unquestionably, the central Christian assertion about the identity of Jesus Christ has been that he is both fully human and fully divine. This characterization is unique among world religions.
- Kristin Johnston Largen
I involuntarily rolled my eyes.
It's not that I think this statement is false. I wasn't even thinking about that. The reason I cringed away from this statement is that I have lots of experience listening to Christians' descriptions of other religions and why those other religions are all nonsensical and bad and shallow, not like our faith which is super meaningful and reasonable and powerful.
So any time I come across a Christian saying "here's why our religion is different from all the others, and is better", ugh. Most of the time, it's a total misrepresentation of what other religions teach. It's spreading misinformation. It's a caricature, meant to show how silly those people are who believe differently than us, haha, how silly and misguided they are, believing things that are so obviously wrong. It's just mindlessly repeating talking points that we heard from other Christians, rather than actually listening to people from other religions, to genuinely understand what they believe.
Okay, but, turns out Stollar actually shares my feelings on this. From pages 98-99:
Growing up, I was always interested in other religions. I accepted Jesus into my heart as a young child, yet I was nonetheless fascinated by faiths not my own. Some of my favorite books were the D'Aulaires' books for children on Greek and Norse mythology. I loved the fantastical stories they contained. The images of gods and goddesses fighting and playing filled my imagination with wonder and inspiration.
But the conservative evangelical world I grew up in did not encourage me to pursue my interest in other religions. As I grew older, the only context in which I studied them was to learn how to attack them-- allegedly for the sake of Jesus. When I attended summer worldview camps as a teenager, for example, I was taught flimsy, cardboard caricatures of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. And even then, I was only taught those caricatures of other faiths in order to memorize catchphrases with which I could supposedly refute them.
Now that I am an adult, I have a greater appreciation for world religions. Part of my journey toward this appreciation was getting a master's in Eastern Classics at St. John's College, where I studied religions from China, India, and Japan. For the first time in my life, I appreciated freely religions other than my own. No one was telling me what was "wrong" with them. No one was interrupting my train of thought by insisting, "But Jesus!" I simply learned what other people and cultures think about the world.
I encourage you to give the children in your family, faith community, or religious organization the opportunity to learn about other religions. As I have argued throughout this chapter, learning about other religions is essential to teasing out both the very real differences and similarities between them. This pursuit helps us understand and embody our own faith that much more deeply.
This is so real. "Learning" about other religions, in a conservative Christian context, just to memorize arguments about why those other religions are obviously wrong.
So Stollar understands that, and that's not what he's doing in this chapter. What is he doing in this chapter, then? Well, it's about child gods- ie, religions that have a god character who is a child. Comparing these stories to the Christian story of Jesus being fully god and being born into this world as a human child- and pointing out aspects of these where the Jesus story is "better" than the stories from other religions. (For example, the Jesus story is "better" than the stories where the god had the appearance of a child but still had the mind and powers of a god- Jesus was an actual child, really, going through all the developmental stages. And the Jesus story is "better" than the stories where it is prophesied that the child will *someday* be the savior- Jesus was *already* the savior, even as a child.) I don't think the book actually uses the word "better" but that's how I'm summing this up.
It seems like we *should* be able to talk about this, right? I'm just really skittish here, as an ex-evangelical, ex-apologetics-nerd. But it seems like there should be a way to talk about, hey, I'm a Christian, so logically that means I believe there are aspects of Christianity which are "better" than other religions, there are things about Christianity which are true while other religions are false... ugh... I'm just... I just cringe so hard at this line of thinking. This sounds like an apologetics argument, and I don't do apologetics arguments any more.
I enjoyed reading this chapter of "The Kingdom of Children"- it does seem to be coming from a place of thoughtfully and respectfully seeking to understand the beliefs of other religions. And the parts where it talks about why the Jesus story is "better"- I guess we should read that as "well, this author is a Christian, so of course he believes the Jesus story is better than the other religions' stories, and these are his opinions about why" rather than reading it like... like he's saying you're not allowed to believe in these other religions because it's so obvious that Christianity is better.
Maybe I could try to write something like that. Maybe there is some way I could frame it which doesn't feel like a dishonest apologetics argument. Make it about why I'm a Christian, without making it about why you should be a Christian.
I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I want to write down some of my thoughts about what I've read so far. And there will be more blog posts about this book, so stay tuned for that.
Today in "books that Perfect Number heard about 10 years ago and finally got around to reading":
I read Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible's View of Women, by Sarah Bessey, published in 2013. This book, it talks about a lot of things- but at the beginning, there's a part about the bible passages that say women should be subordinate to men. The book presents interpretations of these passages which make the case that the bible actually supports equality between men and women.
There's the verse that says women must be silent in church. In this book, Bessey explains that this doesn't mean women should be silent in all churches everywhere, but that there was a group of women in one specific church that Paul was writing to, who were disrupting the church meetings, and this is just referring to them. Indeed, it wouldn't make sense to interpret this passage as Paul saying that women should be silent in all churches everywhere, because Paul also commends women who worked with him as church leaders.
There's the verse that says wives must submit to their husbands. Bessey explains that these commands were given in a very patriarchal society, and actually were really progressive in that context.
And there are a few more bible verses discussed here, toward the beginning of the book. Bessey makes the case that these verses show that God actually intended for there to be equality between men and women.
And I'm just like... can we not do this? I'm kinda tired of doing this.
I mean, it's my own fault for reading a Christian feminist book from 2013. Obviously a Christian feminist book from 2013 is gonna go through these bible verses and give feminist interpretations of them. People in 2013 needed to hear that. *I* needed to hear that, back in 2010ish, when I first read these interpretations on Rachel Held Evans's blog. There are still people *now* who need to hear this. There are Christian women who are told that they are not allowed to do this or that role in the church, because the bible says women can't, and these Christian women believe that's something they need to treat seriously. There are Christian women in bad marriages, who believe the only thing God has to say about that is "wives submit to your husbands."
But it kinda rubs me the wrong way now, the way we have to "well actually" the bible, the way we have to walk through this bible study before we're allowed to be feminists. It's like, you're starting out with this chain of logic:
We have to believe whatever the bible says
The bible says men are the leaders and women must submit
Therefore men and the leaders and women must submit
And then a case is made for this logic instead:
We have to believe whatever the bible says
Oh, look at this! The bible actually says that men and women are equal! When you interpret it correctly.
Therefore men and women are equal
But I would like to propose this alternative:
It's just obvious to anyone with a conscience and experience living in the world, that men and women should be equal
(Optional) You can read the bible if you want I guess
Also, isn't it a little too convenient? We can explain it all perfectly, so the *actual* meaning of the bible isn't sexist in any way, shape, or form. We carefully separate the layers- the sexism of the culture where this was written, the sexism of the writer, and the intended message- and oh look, when you do that, you see that all the sexism was in the other layers, and none of it was in the "intended message" layer. Hooray!
Yeah, kind of a little too convenient. Although, if you believe in inerrancy, that means you believe the bible is perfectly telling one good and consistent message all throughout, so it won't seem suspicious to you if things are "too convenient." (I do not believe in inerrancy.)
I'm a bible nerd. I love the bible! But can we let it just be what it is, rather than needing it to be a shining beacon of feminism, or else we can't believe in equal rights?
Like, do we really have to do all this? Can't we just say "oh, people were sexist back then" and then get back to the task of doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly before God? Can't we just "love our neighbors as ourselves"? We're not allowed to "love our neighbors as ourselves" as it pertains to the issue of gender discrimination until we get to the bottom of whether or not the apostle Paul was sexist.
I no longer care if the apostle Paul was sexist. In the past, I believed that "these passages that Paul wrote actually support gender equality if you interpret them correctly" is the hill you gotta die on, if you're a Christian feminist, but now I'm like, can we not? So what if Paul was trying to say something sexist? Paul is not in charge of me. The bible is not in charge of me.
I get the sense, from reading "Jesus Feminist," that Bessey is also tired of talking about it. She says, she doesn't want to keep arguing with the powers-that-be, about why women should have a seat at the table. Let's forget the table entirely, and go start a bonfire.
I like this quote from page 171:
I'm through wasting my time with debates about women-should-do-this and women-should-not-do-that boundaries. I'm out. What an adventure in missing the point. These are the small, small arguments about a small, small god.
And this Christian feminist apologetics lesson is just a section at the beginning of the book. I don't want to give the wrong impression- that's not what this book is about overall, but it was the part that stood out to me because I was annoyed by it. Maybe I shouldn't be annoyed, because people really do still need to hear those arguments. But like... isn't it kind of messed-up that Christians believe we can't support equal rights until we can come up with a biblical interpretation that says we're allowed to do so?
Let me tell you what was good about the rest of the book. There's a chapter about experiencing God in the context of pregnancy/ childbirth/ being a mother. If it's only men who are allowed to preach in the church, you miss out on this whole angle on the nature of God. Also, there were parts in this book about the missions work that Bessey did in Haiti. Christian feminism means going and *doing* things to help people. It's not about debating conservative men about what women are allowed to do. It's so much more than that.
So, is the part where we debate conservative men about the bible a prerequisite for the "going and doing" part? Ugh, can we not? What if we just, like, skipped that part?
You don't have to do that, to be a Christian. You don't! You don't have to believe the bible, or obey the bible. I love the bible, but it is not in charge of me. (I do think it's a positive thing for Christians to read the bible- but not like this.) My Christianity is not about that. My Christianity is about Jesus. It's about incarnation, Immanuel, God with us. It's about the image of God in every human, the thriving diversity of the image of God, alive, every flag in the LGBTQIA community, speaking every language, feeling the whole range of human emotions. It's about "love your neighbor as yourself." It's about "whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me." It's about "the first will be last, and the last will be first." It's about #BlackLivesMatter and free health care. It's about bringing the kingdom of heaven to the earth.
But wait! Hold up! We can't do any of that until we figure out how serious the apostle Paul was about "women should remain silent in church." Umm, really? Really? No, let's not get stuck on this. You can read the bible if you want, but don't let it stand in the way of doing good and following Jesus.
This is great. Definitely recommend this book if you want to learn more about shame and vulnerability. For myself, though, I felt like I already understood a lot of this. And there was something that was bothering me as I was reading: Does "vulnerability" mean just letting people see your real, raw emotions? Like just letting anyone see that? Is that a good thing? No, I don't think that's a good thing- I believe in boundaries instead.
[content note: spoilers for "Pride and Prejudice"]
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, was first published in 1813. It's a romance story, about how the fancy gentlemen and ladies of 1700's England go about partnering up and getting married.
Those of us who grew up in purity culture in the American church in the 1990's were taught an ideology about "sexual purity" and rules about dating and gender roles. This ideology was presented as timeless, traditional, how God always intended relationships to work. Like everyone has always known that these were the rules, until the sexual revolution of the 1960's- that's when all the problems started. We need to just get back to these traditions, which are straight from the bible. That's how dating is supposed to be.
So, naively, one might imagine that when you encounter writing about romance/relationships/marriage from hundreds of years ago, in a society that was greatly influenced by Christianity, it would basically match what purity culture teaches. That the rules that proper men and women followed back then should be more or less the same as the rules that purity culture is putting on us now. That the way that people in that time period viewed romantic relationships would match what purity culture tells us.
But oh goodness, let me tell you, this is very much not true about "Pride and Prejudice."
Wow, it is very much NOT TRUE that purity culture ideology is just getting back to the way that every proper and respectable person used to approach romantic relationships. Purity culture is a movement that was invented in the US in the 1990's, and its aesthetics give the appearance of being old and traditional, but it's not.
So let me tell you about 4 things in "Pride and Prejudice" that are at odds with the purity-culture perspective on relationships.
Today in "books that Perfect Number heard about 10 years ago and finally got around to reading"...
I recently read Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality, by Wesley Hill, published in 2010. Hill is a gay Christian and believes in the traditional Christian teaching that says same-sex romantic/sexual relationships are sinful. The book is about how he struggles with the pain of loneliness and desire that can't be fulfilled, but he holds on to his faith that God sees what he is doing, that it's the right thing to do, and God will reward him some day. The purpose is to encourage other gay Christians who hold these beliefs and struggle with them.
I wasn't going to blog about this because I'm not really the right person for this... I feel like, a very obvious solution suggests itself... like why don't you just date a man? See, but I shouldn't actually say that to someone who is in this situation because it would come across as really insensitive. People in this situation are working so hard to keep the rules that they believe God is requiring them to keep, and they feel like it's so difficult and painful and lonely and they need encouragement, and if I come along and say "hey good news, your beliefs are wrong and you don't have to do any of this at all" well that is not helpful.
Actually, though, I think a lot of what Hill writes about in this book can be applied to singleness in general. People may be single for all sorts of reasons- all sorts of reasons which don't have an "obvious solution"- and they often do feel like it's overwhelmingly lonely. The book emphasizes that we all need human connection, and that the desire for friendship/connection should be embraced, and the church is supposed to meet that need. The church doesn't do a good job of this- churches often don't seem to know what to do with single people- but, in an ideal world, it would be a place where people can form deep, meaningful friendships. It's good that this book exists.
Anyway, the main thing about this book that inspired me to write this blog post is this: This is a very different version of Christianity than what I believe. Superficially, one might thing that it's just a matter of "some Christians think same-sex relationships are sinful, some Christians think same-sex relationships are okay", perhaps just a few Greek words in a bible verse being interpreted differently by the 2 different sides. But it turns out it goes way deeper than that.
The book is called "Washed and Waiting"- because celibate gay Christians are "washed" clean from their sins and are "waiting" to get to heaven and finally be rewarded by God and healed of their homosexuality. (Yes, the book says that homosexuality is an abnormality that will eventually be removed when we are all made perfect in heaven.) The "waiting" part is really difficult- living one's whole lifetime with this pain and longing and loneliness, struggling, failing, trying to be faithful to God's law, clinging to the hope that someday God will reward you.
Is the Christian life about waiting, and trying not to sin? Wow, no, I very much do not see it that way. The Christian life should be about doing, not waiting. We are supposed to take action to help people and do good and make the world better. That is what actually matters. Not the extent to which you can control and discipline and repress yourself as it relates to your own personal habits and thoughts.
I was also struck by how much this ideology relies on heaven to finally make everything better. This life is full of pain and struggle and that's just how it is; we won't be healed until after we die and meet God. I don't agree with this. I don't think we should wait for heaven; I think we should bring the kingdom of heaven to the earth.As Jesus taught us to pray, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." We can't wait for God to save us; we need to take action and do it ourselves. And what if there is no heaven? I don't want to bank on that. We need to do what we can now to make this world better.
If our religion doesn't help people right here and now, I think it's worthless.
I will say, I can think of some circumstances where you can't really do anything to solve your problem except look forward to heaven. For example, what if someone you love died? Nothing you can do about it, except hope that you will see them again in heaven. Or what if you have a chronic illness or disability that you wish you could be healed from- nothing you can do except look forward to being healed in heaven. So yes, this idea of "waiting" and relying on heaven's existence can apply to some situations, but I very much do not think this "waiting" is the main point of Christianity. The book talks about it like it's the main point of Christianity. Waiting and *not* doing things. Maybe Hill would disagree with me saying that; maybe he doesn't think it's the main point of the Christian life. But if you read *only* this book, that's the impression you would get.
Still, though, it shouldn't just be "waiting"- we should take action to change the world and help people and advocate for disabled people's rights, etc, do what we can to make things better here on earth, even though we can't *completely* solve these problems. It feels so bizarre and jarring to me, to encounter this ideology that says gay Christians can't date a same-sex partner, because reasons, and that causes them to suffer loneliness and it sure seems like we could easily solve this by allowing them to date, but no no, let's not do that, let's wait for heaven.
(Okay, yes, I'm kind of oversimplifying it- Hill *does* give reasons in the book for why he believes he can't just date a man. It's not like this "obvious solution" has never occurred to him. All his reasons rely on a view of Christianity that's very different from mine though, so they don't really do anything for me.)
I don't think we should wait for heaven, and accept that we suffer in this world because that's just how it is. Christianity should be about bringing the kingdom of heaven to this world. Christianity shouldn't be about waiting, it should be about doing.
I got this book for my kids, Mother God, by Teresa Kim Pecinovsky. Here's my review of it.
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Summary
This book tells us that God is our mother, and every page gives examples of the actions She performs as a mother. For example:
Throughout day and night, God wakes To nurse the infant at Her side. She snuggles Her baby gently Until he closes his sleepy eyes.
The inside cover of the book says it contains "a dozen images of God inspired by feminine descriptions from Scripture."
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I have ex-evangelical thoughts about this interpretation of the bible
Some of this imagery I recognized- I know the bible passages that they came from. For example, the page about God the mother hen, gathering Her chicks under Her wings, comes from the words of Jesus in Matthew 23:37, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing."
I wish the book included a list of bible references, because I feel some of these might be a bit of a stretch, and I want to check them. There is one page in this book that says God is a leopard taking care of Her cubs, and I'm trying to figure out where in the bible that is supposedly coming from. I did a search, and the word "leopard" only appears in the bible 8 times. The one that I think "Mother God" must be alluding to is Hosea 13:7-8, which says:
So I will be like a lion to them, like a leopard I will lurk by the path. Like a bear robbed of her cubs, I will attack them and rip them open; like a lion I will devour them— a wild animal will tear them apart.
Not really the cheeriest of bible verses.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the imagery of God as a mother leopard. I love that this book has that. I think it's fine to describe God that way, even though the bible doesn't quite do that, not exactly.
It's just that... if you're having an argument with a conservative Christian who believes we're only allowed to talk about God with he/him pronouns, and you want to pull out this book and say "see? The bible itself talks about God with feminine language, so we are so allowed to call God 'her'," well, you're kind of over-selling it. Yes, there are places in the bible where God is described with feminine language. It never goes so far as to use a 'her' pronoun, though. The bible's feminine descriptions of God are comparisons and metaphors, while the masculine ones are literally calling God "he", "Father", "Son", etc. Conservative Christians in arguments about God's pronouns are quick to point this out. They're not really wrong... it's just that... I want to believe in a better God than that, a God who is every gender.
Probably the closest the bible gets to non-metaphorically calling God a woman is 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:16, which refers to Jesus Christ as "the wisdom of God" - and this was originally written in Greek, and the Greek word for "wisdom" is "Sophia," which is a feminine name. Christ is the woman, Sophia Wisdom. (Okay, yeah, this is still pretty metaphorical.)
So yes, I love this book, I love every single thing about it, I love when people call God "Her," I love the bible passages which use feminine language or metaphors to describe God. But not every page in "Mother God" is rooted in such a straightforward reading of Scripture that you can use it to win arguments with Christians of the "God is a he/him" persuasion. I mean, personally I'm no longer interested in participating in such arguments, so this is fine for me. But I'm just a bit concerned that this book is misrepresenting itself... if you're coming at it from an evangelical biblical-inerrancy perspective, you expect this book to be "here are bible verses where God is described as/ compared to a woman." But actually, it's more like, "here are bible verses which allow for an interpretation where God is a woman." And I 100% support doing such interpretations. I am so on board with this. But you'll definitely get people responding with "no, that's not what that verse means." (I mean, I agree that in some cases it's not what the verse is supposed to mean. I'm just not so hung up on only being allowed to think about the bible as what it was originally "supposed to mean." It's living and active.)
Another example from "Mother God":
Granny, Baba, Halmeoni, God is a woman with gray hair. She passes down stories of old, Rocking softly in a chair.
This is great, love this, but also, I have no idea what bible passage this is supposedly coming from. I don't even know what search terms to use- "bible verse where God is a grandma telling stories"?????
So yeah, some of these are a bit of a stretch. I'm sure there is some bible verse, perhaps where God is metaphorically compared to someone who tells stories from one's ancestors, and the author of "Mother God" envisions this person as an old, wise grandmother. Yeah, probably it's something along those lines.
Like I said, I think this is great. *My* take on biblical interpretation is that you can use the bible as inspiration for whatever story about God is meaningful for you. Make sure when you do that, though, you don't claim "this is true" or "this is what the bible says." Your interpretation makes sense only to the extent that you can present coherent reasons why it makes sense- you can't claim it's just automatically right because it comes from the bible. This approach is very different from "biblical inerrancy" ideology, where we believed we were very seriously adhering to what God and/or the original writer really meant to say, and so our conclusions just simply were true. (We *believed* that, but in reality, "biblical inerrancy" ideology isn't as unbiased and faithful to the bible as it claims to be...)
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When we call God a woman, does it always have to be in the context of pushing back against patriarchal religion?
Obviously, the reason I love this book has a lot to do with my being a queer Christian with a lifetime of experience hearing people call God "he" but never "she." It just feels so refreshing, to hear people saying that God is a woman.
Also, in the previous section of this blog post, I talked about arguing with conservative Christians who say you're not allowed to call God "she", and the extent to which this book can be used to bolster our side in such arguments.
Ugh, but does it always have to be that way? When we call God "she", does it always have to be about "wow this is great, because everyone always calls God 'he'" and "yes, we *are* allowed to talk about God in this way"? I wish it could just be... that it could just be what it is, rather than needing to be about Taking A Stand Against Patriarchy.
"Mother God" actually starts out by saying,
You know God the Father, But God is your Mother too. You are made in Her image-- She is making all things new.
So even this book isn't able to just be about "we are calling God a woman"; it has to be about "we are calling God a woman becauseeveryone always calls God a man." It's unavoidable.
My beliefs about God are in many ways a reaction to the evangelical ideology I was raised in. I always wonder, what does that mean for how I teach my kids? I call God "They" when I talk to my son about what I believe, and the feel of it is like... I'm queer and I chose this. But for him it's never going to feel like that, if he hears someone calling God "They." Soon he'll be at that age where he thinks everything I do is extremely uncool, and that will be the lens he uses to think about the concept of calling God "They."
This isn't just about religion- so many societal trends are like, one generation is reacting to something they didn't like about the way they were raised, but the younger generation didn't have whatever negative experience they are reacting to. The older generation creates a new approach intended to be a healthy correction of the errors of the past, but the younger generation doesn't necessary experience this new approach in that way. Without that context, it will be understood by the younger generation as something else entirely.
So yeah, I bought this book for my kids, but I have no idea what it would be like to grow up with the idea that calling God "she" is just a normal, unremarkable thing. This book means something very different to me than it does to my kids. I don't really know how to understand that. I think it must be a *good* thing to expose them to this idea, and also *not* expose them to the idea that 'we're only allowed to call God he/him or else it's HERESY.' But I can never really *get* how my kids are thinking about this, because for me it always carries that context of rebelling against conservative, patriarchal religion.
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The actions God takes in this book
A lot of the imagery in "Mother God" is about real actions that real people do, and the book says that God is doing these actions. I'm not sure what to make of that. For example:
God is a skillful seamstress Who stitches and sews thread together. She makes clothes for rain, snow, and sun, Caring for you in all kinds of weather.
What does this mean?
Does it mean that when we see actual real women making clothes, God is there?
Does it mean that the clothes we wear come from God, in the indirect sense that God created the world and helped people learn the skills to make clothes?
Does it mean that some of the spiritual things that God does are metaphorically similar to sewing clothes- for example, creating the earth, or perhaps this is a reference to Psalm 139:13, "you knit me together in my mother's womb," where fetal development is metaphorically compared to God knitting?
Does it mean that when we imagine God performing these feminine-coded actions, like making clothes, that opens up our understanding of God, to help us view God in powerful new ways? Maybe you always imagined God as looking like and acting like your male pastor- but what if you imagine God as a woman making clothes? Don't we believe that a male pastor bears the image of God to the exact same extent that a female seamstress does? Don't we? It brings our biases to the surface and challenges them.
I like interpretations 1 and 4. But I do feel like it's strange, to talk about God doing such concrete actions, and I'm really unclear on what this is intended to mean.
I am so into this book. I love it. I love it because I'm a queer Christian- and so I wonder about how my kids will take it, and what it would be like to grow up with the idea that it's just fine and normal to call God "she."
