My #NeverthelessShePreached sermon: wilgafney.com/2018/09/24/whe…
The texts of Hosea and Jeremiah present prophets who heard and spoke for God in and through the vernacular of their culture. As Dr. Weems taught us, that vernacular was androcentric with a mean misogynistic streak...
Sep 16, 2018 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Jesus didn’t just stand with good men like Botham Shem Jean, but he stood with and died with the criminally corrupt bearing his cross along with them, receiving a final beating at the hands of the police before his execution. wilgafney.com/2018/09/16/the…
Jesus’s cross was the empire’s death sentence for revolutionaries. Is your faith revolutionary? Is your faith visible outside of the walls of this sanctuary? Jesus call us to take up our cross and follow him into the world’s broken places and make a difference.
Sep 13, 2018 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Y'all. I got a sho' nuff word in the middle of my lecture on Judges in intro:
Qayin (Kain/Cain) was a murderer. A fratricide. A brother killer. He was guilty. He did it. Even in an unjust system some folk locked up are guilty. Somebody’s son, father, uncle, cousin, brother...
sister, mother, daughter, auntie is locked up and locked down because they did it. And some folk want to throw them away for ever, use them for cheap labor, throw their bodies at forest fires, leave them behind to die in hurricanes...
Sep 13, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
22.
22 years.
Sep 5, 2018 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Time for the first grading thread of the semester. Starting with a reality check:
"I am middle-class but am currently trending towards lower class due to student loan debt as well as working a lower-income position as a pastor."
Representation matters. It matters that faculty and their syllabi are well read beyond their own identities. In short, glad to be able to recommend some Pacific Basin biblical scholarship by Jione Havea.+
Sep 4, 2018 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Today in #BriteBible: Ancient Israel's androcentric hierarchy is not true patriarchy with all males, or even all male heads of households holding power and authority over all women and children.
Rather, certain males (Moshe over Aaron, kings and priests over virtually all others) and occasionally certain females (reigning queens, e. g. Athaliah and some female prophets, e. g. Deborah and Huldah) held sway over all others. #BriteBible
Sep 3, 2018 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Participating in the Jude 3 Courageous Conversations on sexuality, scripture, Justice, preaching, and the authority of scripture. #j3pncc
Facilitator asks if panelists use the language of the authority normatively, yes or no. The two brothers, “Yes,” the two womanists: @somethingwithin, “uh-huh,” and Dr. Fentress-Williams, “sure.” You can’t box a womanist in with a nuance-lacking question. #j3pncc
Sep 1, 2018 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Perhaps like many I am still thinking about the spectacle — in every sense of the word — that was Aretha Franklin‘s home going service. The best and the worst of black church on display for the world.
I think that’s what made it touch so many people so deeply, both those who had positive and negative reactions to elements. It was all tangled up together the way it often is in real life.
Aug 14, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The Philly cover-up was one of the most despicable because it was one of the most thorough and intentional at all levels.
Calling a woman a dog is calling her a bitch. It is never alright. No matter who the woman is. No matter who the man is. (Jesus, I'm looking at you.) Jesus' encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman was ugly then ultimately redemptive and transformative for him.
Were it not for that woman there might not be any gentile Christians. Jesus spoke out of his privilege and cultural bias but listened when the multiply marginalized woman checked him on it. He listened, he heard her and he shifted his language and practice.
Jul 8, 2018 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Since so many are allowing the media’s bad takes to frame the discussion: The theology and language subcommittee did not recommend a cut-and-paste revision of the prayerbook swapping out every masculine pronoun and noun for a neuter one.
The recommendations and resolutions that my committee advanced were for expensive and inclusive language. Much of the media reports have highlighted the use of neuter language as one way to do that. But that simply is not the proposal.
Jul 7, 2018 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
The biblical writers have more imagination than their readers.
The Bible we use as a Episcopalians and as Christians does not begin with the New Testament.
Jul 1, 2018 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
A couple of Rabbi Waskow stories: he came to the Lutheran seminary where I was teaching to do some interfaith work and put on a master class in God talk, why an older white male bearded guy who looked like him was a destructive image.
The assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. forever changed how he understood himself as a Jew and what his work was in the world. It was out of that moment that he wrote the freedom seder. sojo.net/articles/freed…
Jun 30, 2018 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Friends and colleagues keeping me abreast of #GC79. Suspicious of resolutions supposedly for the pastoral needs of LBGTQ folk put forward by all-cismale/het white bishops.
I know there is no agreement about revising the BCP. But creating ancillary liturgies for queer folk while preserving the enshrined liturgy in the prayerbook for straight folk is a marginalizing move. #GC79.
Jun 29, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The conversation about abortion is not just about with the intent of ideologues to force their religious standards on the bodies of women some of whom have their own religious standards that affirm their right to choose what they do with their bodies.
It is also about subjugating medicine and science to one particular strain of religion.
Apr 6, 2018 • 17 tweets • 6 min read
My talk, White Supremacy in Biblical Studies Unhooded, at UVA in Charlottesville went well. No tiki torches.
A few excerpts: White supremacy in biblical studies, like its get, racism, has never been hooded...Racism has been thinly obscured by the tawdry yet seductive negligee of privilege-purchased naïveté. #unhooded
