Women

Lexi Schnaser 3-07-2024

From top left to bottom right: Crystal D. Cheatham, Rev. Sue Park-Hur, Rachael Clinton Chen (and baby), Bethany Rivera Molinar, Brandi Miller, Kendall Vanderslice, Chanequa Walker-Barnes, Elaine Enns, and Rev. Mae Elise Cannon. Graphic br Candace Sanders/Sojourners

Each year at Sojourners we celebrate Women’s History Month by honoring the work of Christian women who are guiding the church to become a place of deeper welcome, justice, and wholeness.

Lexi Schnaser 2-23-2024

June 19, 2018: Women faith leaders protest the Trump administration policy of separating children from their immigrant parents at the U.S. border. Photo: Jay Mallin/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News

Women were the first liberators in the Exodus story, the first to proclaim Jesus had risen from the dead, prominent leaders in anti-slavery movements, and early champions of voting rights. When we celebrate the lives of these women, we remember where we came from, honoring the women who loved us into this place and time and encourage us to carry on the work of liberation in our own lives.

Sarah James 8-02-2023
A picture of Judy Chicago's art exhibit called "The Dinner Party." There are unique plates, glasses, silverware, and tapestries depicted for esteemed women across time (mythological and historical) around a triangular banquet table.

The Dinner Party / Judy Chicago / Eric Wilcox / Flickr

IN RATTLING THOSE DRY BONES: Women Changing the Church, activist and author Susan Cole writes an essay in response to the question, Why do I remain in the church? In her answer, she shares how she healed her relationship with God through the figure of Sophia, who she defines as “the Wisdom of God, the divine imaged as female.” Cole writes, “Through [Sophia] I have discovered in a whole new way, divine presence within myself, within my sisters, within all that is.” Cole’s portrait of a female God, filled with kindness and joy, stands in stark contrast to the millennia of androcentrism that shapes Christian teaching and practice. The treasure of the Christian female godhead remains buried, but it can be uncovered.

Sophia sits (metaphorically) at artist Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” the famed feminist installation anchored by an enormous triangular banquet table, 48 feet long on each side. From 1974 to 1979, Chicago scrupulously created unique, historically precise place settings for 39 “guests of honor,” female figures both mythical and historical, ranging from Mother Earth to Georgia O’Keeffe. An additional 999 names appear written on tiles surrounding the table. According to Brooklyn Museum curators, at Chicago’s table Sophia stands as a powerful “creative force in the universe” and a cross-cultural symbol of a female God. And the elements of Sophia’s place setting — a flower plate with watery petals and a runner made from remnants of a wedding veil — symbolize Christianity’s role in “the downfall of female power, particularly religious power.” On a grand scale, “The Dinner Party” reminds us of what patriarchy has erased.

JR. Forasteros 8-02-2023
Philomena (played by Dame Judi Dench) and Sixsmith (played by Steve Coogan) sit next to each other in a waiting room. Philomena is wearing a black jacket with a flower-patterned scarf. Sixsmith is wearing a dark brown jacket and blue jeans.

From Philomena

THE BEST CHRISTIAN MOVIE you’ve never seen (even though it was Oscar-nominated for best picture!) turns 10 this year. That movie is Philomena, adapted from The Lost Child of Philomena Lee: A Mother, Her Son and A Fifty-Year Search, by British journalist Martin Sixsmith. The film stars Dame Judi Dench as the titular mother and Steve Coogan as Sixsmith. While the book primarily focuses on Philomena’s son Michael Hess, the film more closely traces the mother’s story. As a pregnant teenager, Philomena was abandoned to a convent of nuns who forced young women to work without pay and sold their children to wealthy Americans looking to adopt.

On her son’s 50th birthday, Philomena weeps, clutching the only pictures she has of him. Despite her efforts, she has never been able to learn his fate. When Sixsmith, a disgraced journalist, learns of Philomena’s plight, he agrees to help her. What began as a distraction from his own troubles soon shifts to captivation. Despite Philomena’s assurances that the sisters of the convent have done their best to care for the women and children in their charge, Sixsmith uncovers a devilish conspiracy of silence.

7-26-2023
The cover for Sojourners' September/October 2023 issue, featuring a blue illustration of a woman praying. You can see tendrils of her nervous system glowing through her skin. She's surrounded by black bramble, stained glass windows, and a church building.

Illustration by Ryan McQuade

Healing from religious harm: Why compassionate community is part of the journey.

Abby Olcese 7-10-2023
A young white teenage girl named Jem Starling (played by actress Eliza Scanlen) is sitting on the edge of a bed. Here elbows rest on the quilt blanket with her hands folded in prayer as she looks beyond the frame toward an unseen ceiling.

From The Starling Girl

THE WORD “SELFISH” is used many times throughout writer-director Laurel Parmet’s coming-of-age film The Starling Girl. Seventeen-year-old Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen) hears it most often from her parents. Her father (Jimmi Simpson) uses the word to describe the period of his life before he got saved and gave up drinking. Her mother (Wrenn Schmidt) chides Jem for selfishness when she isn’t performing her duties at home. And at church, congregants direct the insult at Jem whenever her performance in the worship dance troupe pulls attention toward herself and away from God.

This understanding of “selfishness” dismisses the community members’ unmet needs. Jem, like most teenagers, is starting to consider what kind of person she’ll become. However, the only guidance she’s getting is from her fundamentalist church, which advises her to give up her dreams, fear her changing body, and let her church decide who she’ll marry. It’s no wonder that Jem’s thoughts turn increasingly to the only person who gives her positive, albeit problematic, attention: the youth leader, Owen Taylor (Lewis Pullman), the married son of her church’s pastor.

The Starling Girl is an empathetic portrait of the vulnerability and power of young women. It shows what can happen when the structures around them — family, church, patriarchy — limit that power and stifle their desires and dreams. This leads Jem to a sexual relationship with the similarly frustrated Owen, who’s drawn to Jem’s seemingly boundless potential.

7-10-2023
The cover for Sojourners' August 2023 issue, called "The Paradox of Poverty." Small figurines of a white couple in fancy garbs stand on top of a tall stack of silver and gold coins. There are other figurines below working by carrying around dollar bills.

CSA-Printstock / iStock

How the “welfare state” is designed to subsidize affluence rather than fight poverty.

An illustration of pink bubbles on a purple backdrop with various things in them, such as a baby in utero, pro-life and pro-choice signs, a Bible, a law book, and a hand holding a sprout.

Illustration by Alex William

THE REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH landscape in the United States has changed drastically in the last year, and it continues to change. But some things remain the same. One consistent aspect of our ongoing national conversation is that many of those who support the greatest restrictions, including on access to abortion and other elements of reproductive health, claim Christian faith as a primary motivator.

I spent much of my young adulthood in evangelical contexts where people had strong opinions about faith and reproductive rights. Most evangelicals I knew believed that life begins at conception and thus abortion should be broadly prohibited by the law as akin to murder. In these spaces, the Bible was considered the main — sometimes the only — source of authority when it came to navigating ethical questions. I’ve come to realize, though, that the Bible hardly speaks anything straightforward into the intensely personal realm of when human life begins and what decisions should be made in complicated, real-world situations.

I wonder, then: What does it look like to wade through this murky territory as people of faith? Who are Christians called to be in a post-Roe world?

The book 'Sensual Faith' is cast over a light purple background, hovering in the air. The cover features a painted illustration of the lower half of a woman's face.

Sensual Faith: The Art of Coming Home to Your Body, by Lyvonne Briggs

HAS RELIGION ALIENATED you from your body, demonized your sexuality, or caused you to see your body as a source of shame? If so, it’s time to come home. In Sensual Faith: The Art of Coming Home to Your Body, body- and sex-positive pastor Lyvonne Briggs invites Black Christian women and femmes to reconnect with and feel at home in their bodies, sexuality, and sensuality: “You see, Sis, home is not an address; home is where you feel safe.” Finding home in our bodies is important because, all too often, Christian spaces have deemed our bodies “temptations” and our bodily processes “nasty.” And historically, American society has tried to control Black women’s bodies and sexualities, denying our humanity and womanhood through slavery, sterilization policies, and degrading stereotypes such as the asexual Mammy and the hypersexual Jezebel. So, the type of bodily reclamation Briggs writes of is an act of personal and societal justice.

Similar to theologian Candice Marie Benbow’s Red Lip Theology (2022), Sensual Faith is a womanist work that centers the experiences of Black women of faith. “Womanism” is the term coined by writer Alice Walker in the early 1980s to honor the experiences of Black women, who were often overlooked and excluded by the feminist movement. By utilizing a womanist interpretation of the Bible, Briggs challenges harmful religious messages around women’s bodies: “Womanism says: Your sexuality is a sacred gift. Your body is holy. Just as it is. Pleasure is your birthright.”

Felicity White 11-22-2022
An illustration of a mother sitting down in a bathroom breastfeeding her infant. She leans against a wall with green tiles on the bottom section and swirls of orange paint on the top third of the wall.

Illustration by Hannah Lock

What moved me the most was a tiny hand,
like the claw of a cub, pawing at my
rib cage in time to the suckle of his lips.
This beautiful, wild person sustained
by milk drawn from unknown wells within me.
I remember nursing once in the basement
restroom of the zoo’s primate house.
The floor tile was cold — no other place to sit.

Rebecca Riley 11-04-2022

Grace Dove and Hilary Swank in 'Alaska Daily,' a new drama that centers the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Image: Darko Sikman/ABC

I don’t often turn on a non-news network television show and expect to learn. Instead, I expect to laugh, maybe cry (I’m looking at you, This Is Us), see loads of inaccurate depictions of medical interventions, or simply be entertained. But ABC’s new primetime drama Alaska Daily has me expanding my perspective on the possibilities of network TV. And that’s thanks to the light it’s bringing to a dark truth: the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

Sarah James 10-31-2022
An ancient illustration of Mary giving birth to Jesus with the help of midwives as they are surrounded by animals.

“The Nativity,” from Ethiopian manuscript Nagara Māryām (1730-1755)

IN THE EIGHTH season of Call the Midwife, set in post-war east London, nuns and nurse midwives of Nonnatus House assist a woman with severe complications from a “backstreet” abortion. Sister Julienne says to a young nurse, “The word ‘midwife’ means ‘with-woman.’ A woman in that situation needs somebody by her side.”

I’m pro-choice, which was an unpopular stance in the Catholic community I grew up in. For my views on reproductive rights, people in youth group called me a “baby killer” and “Pontius Pilate.” During Advent, specifically, I loathed the hollow teachings on Mary and childbirth. We sanitized the Nativity into a cute story — the equivalent of a Disney movie featuring a white family and a manger crowded with men. Only recently did I learn that some scholars believe that midwives attended Jesus’ birth. As reproductive freedom and care are further undermined in the United States, this is an apt time to reclaim a more feminist view of the Nativity and rethink Advent as the season of the midwife.

Lauren W. Reliford 9-01-2022
Women wearing hijabs walk with young girls wearing gray school uniforms past a mural depicting a smiling globe and hearts.

Palestinian women and their children walk to school on the first day of the new school year in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo by Yousef Masoud / SOPA Images/Sipa USA

I was amazed at the grassroots leaders, mainly women, working to deliver that desperately needed good news to their communities. Their witness was particularly poignant given the patriarchal context in which they worked. Many of the government officials we met with were men who seemed focused on who would get what in the region’s future; the women we met were empowering people in their communities to create change.

Mitchell Atencio 8-30-2022

Catholic women with parasols expressing the call for women’s ordination in the church at the Vatican, Aug. 29, 2022. Courtesy Women’s Ordination Conference.

Kate McElwee, the executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference and one of the women at the protest, spoke with Sojourners’ Mitchell Atencio about her hope for women’s ordination, Francis’ attitude toward reforms, and the symbolic nature of their activism.

Pope Francis speaks during an exclusive interview with Reuters, at the Vatican, July 2, 2022. REUTERS/Remo Casilli

Pope Francis said he wants to give women more top-level positions in the Holy See and disclosed that for the first time he would name women to a previously all-male Vatican committee that helps him select the world’s bishops.

Olivia Bardo 3-08-2022

Courtesy photos. Graphic design by Tiarra Lucas / Sojourners.

For the past six years, Sojourners has celebrated Women’s History Month by sharing a list of Christian women who are bringing us hope and inspiring us to action. This year’s group includes pastors and poets, abolitionists and mothers, liturgists and storytellers; women who question authority, disrupt unjust systems, set boundaries, reimagine what’s possible, and pray.

Brittini L. Palmer 11-23-2021

Black women have been historically marginalized both in the church and society — and this trend continues today in theological education as well as the church. Neither the church nor the world of theology will survive if things continue in this direction.

Madison Muller 11-10-2021

In an increasingly polarized Congress, protections for pregnant workers via the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act may be an avenue for bipartisanship between conservative and progressive lawmakers and activists — especially for Christians.

“That’s the sort of thing that catches the attention of both those who are operating in worker justice, for women in particular … but also those who are concerned with the unborn,” said Clayton Sinyai, executive director of the Catholic Labor Network. “This [bill] is pro-worker, pro-family, and pro-life, and all of those are concerns for Catholics.”

 

Caroline McTeer 10-20-2021

‘The Vale of Rest’ by Sir John Everett Millais, Bt. Oil paint on canvas, 1858-1859. Photo via Tate / CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported)

In Lauren Groff’s newest novel, Matrix, monastic life in the High Middle Ages serves as a stunning backdrop for the story of Marie, a nun who feels “her greatness hot in her blood.” Marie arrives at an English abbey as a reluctant teenager, at the appointment of her queen, Eleanor, who expects Marie to become abbess and save the Crown from the public shame of a royal abbey where nuns die of starvation and disease.