If I were a betting woman, I’d bet 10 bucks some of the meanest, relentlessly condemning people do in the dark the very thing they condemn in the light. I wish I had the luxury of a background that wouldn’t make me suspect smokescreens of loudmouth Bible police. But I...
Many religious people think that it’s all a merit badge system—all achievement, accomplishment, performance, and perfection. The good people win and the bad people lose. Of course, once we cast anything as a win-lose scenario, the irony is that everybody loses. Why...
The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization.
White Christianity suffers from a bad case of Disney Princess Theology. As each individual reads Scripture they see themselves as the princess in every story. They are Esther, never Xerxes or Haman. They are Peter, never Judas. They are the woman anointing Jesus,...
I can't reconcile the way that the world is jolted by events that are wonderful and terrible, the gorgeous and the tragic. Except that I am beginning to believe that these opposites do not cancel each other out. I see a middle-aged woman in the waiting room of the...
[Debbie Allen--dancer, choreographer, actor, singer, director, producer--accepting Governor's Award at 2021 Emmys:] It’s taken a lot of courage to be the only woman in the room most of the time. A lot of courage and creativity and fight and faith to believe that I...
When God confronted Adam about his sin, Adam took it like a man...he blamed a woman. -
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet Whose hands can strike with such abandon That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness That the haughty neck is happy to bow And the...
As a woman leader in the conservative Evangelical world, I learned early to show constant pronounced deference — not just proper respect which I was glad to show — to male leaders, and when placed in situations to serve alongside them, to do so apologetically. I...
Society called the blind sinful, a female child useless, a menstruating woman unclean, all of them marginal to the system, condemned to the fringes of life, excluded from the center of the synagogue, barred from the heart of the temple. But Jesus takes each of them to...