Trigger warnings for mentions of rape, sexual violence etc., attempted child death. I wrote this a few days ago.

So I’m sitting at the reference desk and this scholar dude who’s been using our reference books to write an article is on the phone/a video call with someone. He’s talking about all sort of Biblical topics with the person on the other end of the line, and he brings up how in a sermon he talked about this “really disturbing story” from Judges 19 where this concubine who (according to this dude) is abused by her master, is given over to a male gang who wanted to rape him, is raped all night and then dies at the door of the house the man is staying in. The man then proceeds to cut her body up into 12 pieces and sends each piece to each house of Israel, inciting a civil war. He used this story in a sermon about uplifting women!!!!! What kind of idiocy, of tone-deaf obliviousness, of lacking sense of what’s appropriate? What kind of idiot wouldn’t say to himself, a college-educated ministerial sort of man, “you know, maybe the story of a sex slave being gang-raped to death isn’t the best story to include  in my women-uplifting sermon.” He does not see anything wrong with this whatsoever! And what’s worse is that he’s LAUGHINGLY telling his friend how in the audience some teenage girl was making weird awkward faces, while some teenage boys were laughing--not that they were laughing at the rape and death, he assured his friend, but that they were laughing at the jokes he’d made about it. Or they were not jokes directly about the concubine’s rape and murder, but were still made adjacent to it. I repeat, he did not see anything wrong with this, and expressed no discomfort or regret about it.

Later on in his conversation, he tells his friend how in some church service he’d been part of, the girl in charge of telling the children’s story decided it would be a good idea to tell the story of when God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac his first-born son on the altar instead of the ram. And he expressed to his friend how the girl cheerfully and systematically described the story and how exactly Isaac [a child] would be killed on the altar to a bunch of five-year-olds, ending it with, “and that’s why we should always obey God.” I think this dude was quite right in feeling uncomfortable with the telling of this violent, child-death-adjacent story to a bunch of impressionable children, but I find it staggering that he could care about children being traumatized from a children’s story but not how women and girls could be traumatized by a story of rape and misogynistic murder in a sermon explicitly for them. I can guarantee you that there were women and girls in his audience that had already experienced sexual violence and assault, and they may have very well found this part of the sermon triggering. This lack of common sense and empathy  is just staggering to me and it could be the caffeine but I’m honestly shaking in rage. Shit like this is why I don’t trust men, even 'good' religious men.

Science Fiction & Fantasy class essays: Grimm's Fairy Tales

I took an online class on Coursera, Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World. Each week we read a different book or some short stories and had to write a short essay. This is the one I wrote after reading Children's and Household Tales, a translation of Grimm's Fairy Tales into English by Lucy Crane with illustrations by Walter Crane. The above link isn't the online version I read but I can't find it because the class is over and I can't access any resources :(
I did okay with this one; I don't remember my classmates giving me too much criticism.

“The Three Spinsters” and “Rumpelstiltskin”

“The Three Spinsters” is a tale much like the better-known “Rumpelstiltskin”. Three women with unusually large body parts (those used most often in spinning) take the place of the eponymous gnome, and they simply spin flax quickly, rather than spinning it into gold. They save the girl twice: from having to spin three rooms’ worth of flax, and from ever having to spin again. The spinsters meet a happier end than Rumpelstiltskin; they are fêted at the new princess’ table as her cherished relations. It struck me how female-centric this version of the surrogate spinner(s) is: the girl’s mother lets her go with the queen who offers her son to the girl (rather than the other way around!) as a prize for spinning the flax which the spinsters save her from. This is a marked contrast to “Rumpelstiltskin”’s sole girl being at the mercy of men--father, king, messenger, and Rumpelstiltskin. The only male in “The Three Spinsters” is the prince-prize the girl marries, who is rude and impertinent, controlled by his mother and duped by his wife and the spinsters. This female-centeredness makes sense, as the story revolves around spinning flax, traditionally a woman’s job (especially unmarried women, hence the modern definition of spinster). The “Spinsters” women are portrayed as softer and more moral than the “Rumpelstiltskin” men: the mother lies from embarrassment rather than pride, and the queen is more merciful, as she doesn’t get angry when no thread is spun after three days and doesn’t threaten the girl with death if she fails her task. The spinsters ask only to be honored as family, rather than for jewelry or the firstborn child. In the end, the mother is freed from her lazy daughter, the queen gets spun thread, the spinsters get honored, and the girl gets her prince and out of spinning forever. Might the moral of the story be that everybody wins when women run the show?

Unsung Hero[in]es: In the Bible, What Did Women Do?

The Seventh-day Adventist Church, among many other Christian denominations, has been going through the issue of whether or not women should be ordained as pastors. There are already women pastors, my aunt among them, but millennia of patriarchal misogyny and male gender bias are hard to shake off. The senior pastor at my church, LLUC, has done a sermon series about some of the women leaders of the Bible in order to see what they and their roles may have to teach us about the topic of women's ordination. I wanted to write down the messages in order to remember them.

1. Deborah: Here Comes the Judge! (sermon video) – Don't limit the way God chooses to work. Don't think that God can or should only work in one specific way.
2. Huldah: Prophet to the King (video) – I think this one is something like, Listen to what God is saying regardless of who He's saying it through. God chooses to speak through whomever He wants. God's message is vital regardless of whoever is saying it, even if it's someone you wouldn't expect.
3. Miriam: In the Leadership Circle (video) – "Unsung heroes can have feet of clay." God can speak or work through flawed people. Just because a person is flawed, doesn't mean that God can't work through them or choose them to be leaders. Moses also made mistakes and was flawed, but people don't point to him and say that men shouldn't be leaders because of him. (I almost fistpumped in church when he said this. I definitely made that "sips tea" face)
4. Esther: Living with the If (video) – This sermon was given by a woman. The story of Esther should be sung and remembered because it shows us how to trust in God despite uncertainty and place our lives in His hands. We need to stand up for what's right despite our fear.
5. Priscilla and Junia: The Apostles' Colleagues – Today's church should look like the early church, with both women and men in its leadership and playing important roles.
6. Next week is Mary: A Woman's Place. Not sure yet which Mary it is.

I have loved this sermon series, not only because of the crumbs of representation for women that there is in the Bible and the way this shines a light on women leaders (even fewer crumbs for them), but because this is one of the ways my quiet, prefers-not-to-ruffle-feathers pastor shows support for women's ordination: by preaching from the Bible, the same place opponents of women's ordination turn to. This is simultaneously an ordinary sermon series on Bible characters and a Scriptures-supported feminist endorsement of women's ordination. I see you and I thank you.

Cuentos

Tell me who you are
are you a good witch or a bad witch
neither, you're the other girl in the story
not the love interest (that'd be far too exciting)
you're the girl who sits in dull existence
waiting for the story to be about her
you're the jealous sister, one of the people
in the village or the chambermaid who fetches
the light and perhaps if you are lucky
you'll become the mother (step or otherwise)
of the hero who fulfills the quest

this is something they never told you
maybe you're not the storybook
you're just the bookmark in it