The Little Friar

For this week's "Ask Me Anything": Does the Bible really affirm the ordination of women? This is honestly a difficult argument to make, because several biblical passages seem to argue against it.  Then again, that Gentile believers may be righteous apart from observing the Law of Moses was an even more difficult argument to make, since many more biblical passages (including some in the New Testament) seem to argue against that.  However, the first generations of Christians made it.  A difficult line of reasoning may still be the right one. Of all the New Testament's writers, it is Paul (and those who may have written in his name) who is most directly responsible for both the limitations the Church has put on the participation of women in leadership and liturgy, and the insights through which those limitations have increasingly been removed. Some Christians believe Paul must be sidelined or overturned in order for women to be ordained.  In some ci...

Cinderella Ate My Daughter  is one of my favorite books of cultural and sexual criticism.  In it,  Peggy Orenstein laments how our culture naturally moves from such beauty-centered innocence as to such beauty-centered sluttiness as Take the phrase, sleeping around .  It's sounds innocent enough.  But the reality is something stark.  To quote someone from college, that time of life when sexual partners often number in the double-digits for men and women, "I cannot recall ever rejecting an advance, and I know I never felt good afterward.  On the contrary, I felt used and dirty, at once manipulative and manipulated.  I hated my reputation; I hated the sex".   It bothers me to see women objectified in this way.   Any  woman.  I've discovered over the years that most men don't get it -- this notion of objectification .  It was explained easily enough to me as a seven-year-old:  Only treat women as you would your Grandmothe...

I first read Phyllis Trible's Texts of Terror:  Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives when I was an undergraduate.  In it, Trible reads through four stories of Old Testament women.  But rather than picking your classic Sunday School "heroines" of the faith, Trible reads the stories of women who were subject to neglect, abuse and violence. What's more, from a literary perspective, these women are, as marginal characters, also tossed aside by the Biblical story.  So in reading their stories Trible attempts to give these women a voice.  The four women are: Hagar, the concubine of Abraham who, due to Sarah's jealousy, was sent into the desert with her child to die Tamar, the daughter of David who was raped by her brother The daughter of Jephthah, who was sacrificed because of an oath made by her father And an unnamed woman, a concubine who was gang-raped to death and then dismembered by her husband  These are difficult stories.  And T...