My apologies for deleting a comment

Ack!! I just went into comment moderation to delete a spam comment that had been held for my approval.  Just as I was about to click Spam, my husband came in with a cup of coffee for me. I jerked and clicked on the post before it – one that was OK. Because I hadn’t looked at it, I don’t know whose it was, but if it was yours, please rest assured that I have nothing against you and you are very, very welcome to repost it.

 

Women Bibliobloggers (or lack thereof)

This issue of why there are so few women bibliobloggers has raised its head again in the biblioblogosphere at a time when I am rapidly sinking under a load of the work that I get paid to do so that I can afford to study. Please therefore excuse me for failing to link to all the people who are discussing this and for not acknowledging who said what. Kudos, though, to Pat McCullough for highlighting the issue. I don’t all that often hear men asking this kind of question an we women get sick of asking it for ourselves.

Before I say what I have to say, let me give you some background.  I was ordained by the Uniting Church in Australia in December 1987. My church, which formed in 1977, has always ordained women. Two of its parent churches, the Methodist and Presbyterian churches had been ordaining women since the mid sixties. The Congregational Union in Australia ordained its first woman in the 1930s – internationally, it was the late 1800s. On the surface, my denomination has a pretty good track record with respect to women in leadership.

While I was training, some of the male candidates felt it was OK/their duty to explain to the female candidates why it was against God’s will for women to be ordained. The congregation where I currently worship has had two previous women ministers, one for 9 years. It currently has a woman minister. I have been attending worship there for some eight and a half years while I have been working as the denomination’s chaplain at the university. Significant numbers of members of the congregation still refer to any generic minister as “he”. I recently had a conversation with the chair of a “search committee” (we call them joint nominating committees) from another congregation who told me that a number of members of their committee did not want a woman because the person who has just left to join another denomination was a woman. I have never heard anyone suggest that they should not get another male minister because the previous man had done something they didn’t like – even serious misconduct.  They just say that the last guy was a dud!

The general consensus amongst Christian churches in Australia is that my denomination is so liberal as to be hardly Christian and yet there is still significant misogyny observable and even more if you scratch below the surface. Although we have a significant proportion of female clergy and quite a few of our lay leaders are also female, most of our gatherings are very “blokey”. Men have very loud voices and they pray and sing loudly. Which is why you can have a nicely balanced choir with 7 sopranos, 5 altos, 1 tenor and 2 bases. (Many men also take more than their fair share of seats in aeroplanes, but that’s probably got nothing to do with biblioblogging). My church often feels like a men’s club.

Some time back, someone did a list of bibliblogs that described them according to their theological positions as well as their frequency of posting. I appear not to have bookmarked it, but  it confirmed my impression that by far the majority of well-known bibliobloggers are theologically more conservative, which means that they are also less likely to be female. One of the other chaplaincies on my campus is Evangelical and although they ordain some women, these women are not allowed to teach men, so they are girls’ school chaplains or women’s and children’s ministers. One of the women leaders used to run a bible study group in the meeting room next to my office.  I didn’t always agree with her theology, but she was a great group leader and an excellent teacher. The men’s group thought it was just perfectly OK to disrupt her group by playing pranks, like locking her out. At team meetings (which I overhear), there is almost always a “pick on the female leader” segment aimed at making whoever is currently in the position feel small and stupid.  I actually don’t think this is deliberate. The guys are for the most part genuinely nice people, but their culture simply values women’s input on serious faith issues less than it values men’s. If, every time you open your mouth you’re ridiculed, it would take an incredible amount of self esteem and courage to put your thoughts about Bible out there on the web.

As I suggested on April DeConick’s blog, I think that another problem is that in many families where both partners work full time, there is an uneven allocation of housework and childcare at home.  This is well documented in the literature, and it means that women tend to have less time and less headspace than men to blog. If you are going to blog serious theology, you need headspace (this was pointed out by another woman blogger who rarely blogs theology despite having academic qualifications therein).

I am different. I grew up in an egalitarian family. My mother taught me to cook and my father taught me to fix cars. I went to an all girls’ school where we were told that we could do anything we wanted if we worked hard enough. I was in my early twenties before anyone whose opinion I respected told me that there were things I couldn’t do because I am female. My husband has been the primary care giver for our children ever since they were born. He recognised my call to ministry and was prepared to support it.  This has limited his choices in life.  April is also different. I don’t know about her family and educational background, but she didn’t have a child until she had already established her academic career and from what I have observed, she does have a husband who is willing to share the household chores and child care fairly evenly. This is not the case for many of my female colleagues.

If real life doesn’t overtake me again, tomorrow I will make some comments on the place of the Bible, which I think is really important.

I will close by saying that I really wish I had known about the Emerging Women blog when I was doing my Biblical Studies Carnival.  I really struggled to find women to link to, but here some of them were!!

 

It must be summer again . . .

. . . because memes are abounding in the blogosphere again. I’m always ambivalent about them.  On the one hand, it’s nice to be recognised by other bloggers as having something worth linking to.  On the other, one of my friends once suggested that they’re not far removed from chain letters…

However, I’ve been tagged with two in the last week or so and  I want at least to acknowledge the taggers.

noblesse oblige logo

The first was Tim Bulkeley from SansBlogue, who tagged me with the noblesse oblige meme. The rules of this meme are very simple – you display the logo on your blog and tag up to 9 other bloggers whose work you think deserves it. The concept, for those who are not familiar with it, is that with nobility comes obligation (in the case of the French aristocracy, the obligation to look after their serfs, in the case of the tagee, to tag others). Tim is a scholar of Hebrew Bible whose blog has recently concerned itself with the ethical dilemma for people from the developed world of spending money on life’s little luxuries when people in developing countries don’t have adequate food, clothing, shelter or education. Malheureusement, so many people have now been tagged, which makes selecting targets challenging.  Those whose interest in biblical studies extends to putting the study into practice in worship might find both Cheryl Lawrie’s hold :: this space and Roddy Hamilton’s abbotsford.org.uk sites interesting and thought-provoking, maybe even refreshing and encouraging.

Today, the person who goes by the nom de plume Theophrastus Aristotle and writes over at What I Learned from Aristotle tagged me with the far more work-intensive meme. This one, Books that Influenced My Reading of the Bible, as the name suggests, requires five books that have influenced how you read the Bible. I find this very, very difficult to do, because I actually can’t remember any books that have had a lasting influence, but there have been people:

• Prof Brendan Byrne, sj,  who helped me to understand what exegesis is all about and how important it is to read meaning out of rather than into the text
• Prof Nigel Watson, who introduced me to Koine Greek and to the concept that it’s OK to change how you interpret biblical text based on new insights from other scholars
• Prof David Scholer, about whom I’ve written elsewhere, who introduced me to the concept of lenses or grids through which we view the bible
• Dr Morna Hooker, who showed me that a female biblical scholar could have credibility without being ordained or trying to write like a male one and whose “On Using the Wrong Tool” I have also written on elsewhere
• Prof Majella Franzmann, my doctoral supervisor/adviser (does this make her my Doktormutter?) who gently reminds me when I am reading biblical texts wearing my “person of faith” lenses and making  assumptions based on church dogma.
• Prof April DeConick, my mentor and friend, of The Forbidden Gospels Blog, who also reminds me about my faith lenses and who helped me to see why having a clear methodology for approaching text is so important.

While it is very tempting to tag Jim West, just because everyone knows how much he hates memes, I am going to resist.  Tim Bulkeley has just moved house, but might wish to participate, seeing he tagged me with the other one. Hey, if you read this blog and would like to join in because you have books or people you’d like to mention, consider yourself tagged. Oh, and my daughter has just wandered past and after getting over the shock of discovering that bibliobloggers do memes, suggested that I should mention her personal favourite blog, I can haz Cheezburger, although I can’t really see them getting excited about writing about books that changed how they read the Bible or feeling noblesse-ily obliged to link to other blogs. Anyone got a picture of a cat looking at a Bible that we can caption “O, u mean ai should look at it from dis saide”?

Oh, and just so you know, here in lovely Armidale, NSW, Australia, I am wearing thermal underwear in an attempt to deal with the winter cold in a way that has less negative impact on the environment. Our students started end of semester exams on Tuesday and classes begin again on 28 July.

 

Thomas and Origen email discussion

Mike Grondin, the owner of the Gospel of Thomas email list, has organised for Stephen Carlson to lead a discussion on the paper he is presenting at the New Orleans SBL annual meeting on Origen’s use of the Gospel of Thomas.  His abstract ends:

In short, this survey shows that, despite Origen’s recognition that the Gospel of Thomas did not rank with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and despite the presence of some content he must have found objectionable, Origen nonetheless thought that the Gospel of Thomas contained historically useful and homiletically edifying material.

Stephen has volunteered to post excerpts from his paper during the month of May and I’m certainly looking forward to the discussion. It’s a Yahoogroups list and you’ll find it here.  It seems that you can read the posts without joining, but in order to be part of the discussion you’ll need to join.  You’ll be asked to provide information about why you want to be a member, so mention the discussion (and say you read about it on this blog, if you like).  If your email address doesn’t make it obvious who you are, giving your name would also be good. The default setting is that posts are moderated to make sure that spammers (of either the commercial or religious kind) don’t post, so don’t be surprised if your first post or two is held for moderator approval.

 

Looking forward to a good read

I am very pleased that today’s mail contained my copy of Mike Bird and James Crossley’s new book How Did Christianity Begin? The timing is good because I had run out of things to read in my regular exercise bike rides in the gym and was finding that The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants was failing to hold my interest for a second reading and my paperpback edition of the complete Chronicles of Narnia is just a bit big to balance on the bike. It is my current aim to write at least a short review once I’ve finished it, although sometimes time gets away on me.

Update: It occurred to me after I posted this that it might be possible to understand it as the suggestion that James and Mike’s new book is of about the same standard as Sisterhood.  In fact, I was just trying to demonstrate the depths to which I had sunk.  Ideal exercise bike reading for me is not so technical that I need to access reference books or concentrate intensely, but nevertheless stimulating and challenging.  I read 15 pages this afternoon and How Did Christianity Begin? is proving to be excellent bike reading!  I would also recommend Scot McKnight’s The Blue Parakeet and the introductory sections of Bill Loader’s The New Testament with Imagination, although the actual commentary on the passages requires juggling book and biblical text and is beyond my on-bike capability.

 

Bushfires in Australia

I don’t know what gets into the international news, but a very large area of Australia is currently on fire or burned out as a result of the worst bushfires in several decades.  Because Australia is dry and we like our trees and our native eucalypts (gum trees) burn well, we get bushfires every summer.  However, this means we’re good at dealing with them, so most years property is lost, but not lives.  When people die, it’s usually only a very few.

This year is different.  Just a few minutes ago, the confirmed death toll in Victoria was 128, with a warning that it could go as high as 230.  The latest report in the Australian newspaper says

The weekend’s blazes are likely to have destroyed almost 1000 houses. They wiped two whole towns - Marysville and Narbethong - off the map and left the town of Kinglake decimated.

There are more fires burning on the Central Coast of New South Wales, although I don’t think people are dying there, and then in Queensland there are floods!!  Bear in mind when looking at these figures that the population of Australia is only 21 million.

There are stories of firefighters who have lost their own homes while out trying to save the homes of others.  Recovery workers are going through the wreckage of burned out houses and dragging out the bodies of whole families who died.  Most of the fire fighters are volunteers. They are all well trained but quite a few will be dealing with the reality of death from bushfire for the first time.

There is a higher death toll than in either of the other big fires in our history, but our population is also significantly higher, so I’m not sure if this really is the worst since European settlement.  It’s one of the three worst, though.

Armidale, where I live, is a long way from these fires and the surrounding area is not drought affected, so any fire that might start would be far easier to control. However, one of the areas affected is Churchill, where I lived in my last chaplaincy placement at Monash Gippsland campus.  From what we are hearing, the house we lived in then has almost certainly been burned and quite likely the homes of friends who still live there. The Fire Service is almost positive that this fire was deliberately lit.

If you are the kind of person who prays, please keep the people who have lost homes and loved ones and the emergency service personnel working in the area in your prayers.

Update 23 February

Yesterday was declared a national day of mourning and there was a memorial service in Melbourne, with live feeds all over the country.  The official death toll is over 200, with the homes of over 7,000 people destroyed.  There are still fires threatening other places near Melbourne and people were told that if they hadn’t got out by early this morning, it was too late to try to leave and they had to stay and try to defend their homes.  Just horrible.

 

Advance requests Biblical Studies Carnival XXXVIII

For some reason that I no longer remember, I agreed to host the Biblical Studies Carnival that highlights blog posts for the month of  January.  If you have a nomination, please let me know.  I will especially need help with Hebrew Bible and biblical archaelogy related posts.

Send the following information to the following email address: jredman2 AT une.edu.au. If you’re not sure whether a post qualifies, send it anyway and I will decide whether to include it.

• The title and permalink URL of the blog post you wish to nominate and the author’s name or pseudonym.
• A short (two or three sentence) summary of the blog post.
• The title and URL of the blog on which it appears (please note if it is a group blog).
• Include “Biblical Studies Carnival” in the subject line of your email
• Your own name and email address.

You can also do this and find out more information through the Biblical Studies Carnival website.  I am just attempting to be organised now in order to save my sanity at the end of the month.

 

Jim’s desktop challenge

Unlike, Jim West, the originator of this “challenge” I don’t change my desktop image all that often. My desktop image is a photo of the statue of William Marsh Rice (aka “Willy’s statue”), the donor who made Rice University, Houston, Texas possible.  Behind it, you can see the Fondren Library, where I spent a significant proportion of the five weeks I spent at Rice in April/May 2007.  Fondren is a great library for someone doing research into Early Christianity and April DeConick was a wonderful host for my visit.  The picture therefore brings back happy memories and encourages me to get back to work on my doctorate.

 

Six unspectacular things about me

Iyov has nominated me for the six unspectacular things about me meme.

I am always very diffident about naming other people for memes, so I will do what I generally do – list the things and say that if anyone reading this wants to participate, consider yourself tagged.   I will even edit this post to link to you if you wish – just let me know.

So, six things:

1. I am the mother of two children who are both old enough to vote (ie they have both turned 18)! I find this difficult to believe.
2. I am very bad at relaxation techniques that require me to visualise unreality (eg  “Picture yourself on a beach…” gets my mind insisting that, no, I am lying on the floor in the gym…)
3. I luuuuurve dark chocolate
4. I have been married to Bruce for 25 years and four days – but perhaps having been married 25 years is fairly spectacular??
5. I like Facebook applications that allow me to contribute to people in developing countries/the environment and ones that grow things – one of my favourites is therefore H2Opia – I also like sending Karma, Lil Greenpatch and the Hatchery.  And yes, I will be your Facebook friend for Karma, H2Opia and Greenpatch.
6. Ich kann ein wenig Deutsch und ich spreche es mit meine Tochter, manchmal beim Frühstück.  Bruce hat das nicht so gern.

Meme Terms and Conditions

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Mention the rules on your blog.
3. List six unspectacular things about you.
4. Tag six other bloggers by linking to them.

 

Remembering David M Scholer

I probably did women in ministry backwards to most women.  The Presbyterian church where I grew up had one of the first two women ordained in the denomination in Australia as its assistant to the minister (while she was training) and assistant minister (when she was first ordained and her husband was finishing his training), and many women guest preachers, so it never really occurred to me that there was any problem with ordaining women.  When I felt a call to ordained ministry, the fact that I was female wasn’t something that came into my calculations.

By the time I started my training, all the denominations which joined to form the Uniting Church had been ordaining women for well over a decade, so the theological college I trained at didn’t bother much with justifications.  Apparently some of the male candidates were less convinced than the hierarchy, but for some reason they didn’t subject me to the same tirades as they did other women.  I don’t know if they were cowed by my perceived theological acumen or scared that I’d complain to the Principal.  For whatever reason, though, I really had not much idea about any biblical justification for ordaining women.

In 1989, though, I was in my second year as a minister in the Wimmera district of Victoria (Australia) when I got a notice saying that some American Baptist called David Scholer was offering a two week intensive on Women and Leadership in the New Testament and it sounded like a good excuse to get back to Melbourne and do some more biblical study.  We were offered the opportunity to stay in the house of the parents of one of my parishioners while they were overseas and if I audited the course rather than doing it for credit, I could just afford to go.

I thoroughly enjoyed my two weeks and found David’s insights into early Christianity fascinating, as was studying the biblical material that underpinned the validity of my call in a systematic way.  It was also really eye-opening to hear the stories of the discrimination that other women had experienced in answering their call to ministry. For all of us, it was wonderful that a male minister felt that the issue was important enough to spend time on at what was probably considerable risk to his academic reputation.

Several years later, when I was a university chaplain in Gippsland, Victoria, the feminist theology discussion group that I belonged to watched and discussed the video series that David made with his wife Jeanette on the same issue.  Again, it was validating to all of us, since we all had leadership roles in the church, although I was the only one ordained.  Another member went on to be one of the first women ordained in the Anglican church in that diocese, having worked as a lay chaplain in schools for a number of years.

It was thus with much sadness that I read of David’s death, and especially of his six year battle with cancer.  I think of Jeanette, whom I never met but felt I got to know somewhat through the videos and also his daughters and their families as they mourn the loss of a very special man.  God be with them all.