Tag: biblical womanhood

This book’s yellow cover evokes Curious George, except the Man with the Yellow Hat never shows up. But rather than judging a book by its cover – or by the negative reviews of some  – I read for myself Rachel Held Evans’ A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband Master (Tyndale, 2012, Kindle edition).  What I discovered was a story that is funny and thought-provoking, though neglecting one important principle of interpreting the Christian Scriptures.

Who is Rachel Held Evans, and why this book?

Rachel Held Evans grew up in a fundamentalist Christian tradition. More recently, she has moved away from the narrow tenets of her upbringing and developed a huge following on her weblog. She has pulled this off largely through championing the cause of women, especially in the context of the dominant patriarchal ethos of American evangelical Christianity. It was in conversation with her blog readers (and apparently as a follow-up volume to A.J. Jacobs’ earlier book on living a year as a biblical man) that Evans decided to attempt living out for a year the major commands of the Bible directed toward women.  Her purpose in writing becomes clear in the introduction (p. xix):

Now, we evangelicals have a nasty habit of throwing the word biblical around like it’s Martin Luther’s middle name. We especially like to stick it in front of other loaded words, like economics, sexuality, politics, and marriage to create the impression that God has definite opinions about such things, opinions that just so happen to correspond with our own. Despite insistent claims that we don’t ‘pick and choose’ what parts of the Bible we take seriously, using the word biblical almost always involves selectivity.

Her activities included letting her hair grow longer without cutting it, sitting in a tent alone in the front yard during her monthly “impurity” (period), calling her husband, Dan, her “master,” covering her head, remaining silent in church, taking care of a computer baby for three days, and “praising her husband at the city gate” by holding up a sign at the outskirts of Dayton declaring: “Dan is awesome!”

Continue reading “A Year of Biblical Womanhood: Evans stirs the pot” →