Simple Sunday Reflections: Recent Episodes
Bob Nease
A close look reveals Jesus’ genuine, open, and downright dependent approach to women. So why are so many Christian teachers and pastors so insistent on keeping women out of leadership roles and into their "proper" place?
LINKS & NOTES
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The Wesley quote comes from a very heated letter that he wrote to his wife (see http://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/the-letters-of-john-wesley/wesleys-letters-1774/)
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The faith statement of the Southern Baptists can be found at https://www.utm.edu/staff/caldwell/bfm/1963-1998/report1998.html
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The Pat Robertson quote comes from one of his fundraising letters; see https://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/26/us/robertson-letter-attacks-feminists.html
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The Fowler quote comes from a set of bible study notes he wrote; see http://www.christinyou.com/pages/womeninchurch.html
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I couldn’t find a more reliable source for Driscoll's comments than this website of quotes (https://quotefancy.com/quote/1541711/Mark-Driscoll-Women-will-be-saved-by-going-back-to-that-role-that-God-has-chosen-for-them) but I did run across an interesting profile of Driscoll in the New York Times Magazine (https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11punk-t.html). Driscoll was accused of abuse by the board of one of the organizations he founded, and was asked to resign. Within months of his resignation, the Mars Hill Church dissolved. Driscoll is currently the senior pastor of Trinity Church in Scottsdale, Arizona – a church that he founded in 2016.
What does it take to really talk before you rock?
LINKS & NOTES
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The US Department of Justice reports that the median prison time served for murder is 13 years, while the median time served for rape is 4.2 years – slightly higher than the median 4.0 years served for negligent manslaughter. See https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/tssp16.pdf.
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For more on reported regrets following one-night stands, see https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1474704916682903.
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You probably looked this one up faster than reading this footnote, but here’s the link to the Wikipedia entry on Aziz Ansari anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aziz_Ansari
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Yahoo provides a pretty good overview of the findings of a couple of studies: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/women-having-unwanted-sex-maintain-220000835.html. More here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/1471-6402.t01-1-00075; https://law.unimelb.edu.au/news/archive/consensual-but-not-mutually-desirable-how-unwanted-sex-can-harm-womens-equality; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224490903132051
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See https://contexts.org/blog/hookups-sex-and-relationships-at-college/
It’s no accident that Jesus was drawn to those who were down and out after breaking the rules!
LINKS & NOTES
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- There’s a question about the authenticity of the passage in John describing the case of the woman caught in adultery. Here’s how Wikipedia summarizes the issue:
“There is now a broad academic consensus that the passage is a later interpolation added after the earliest known manuscripts of the Gospel of John. Although it is included in all modern translations it is typically noted as a later interpolation, as it is by Novum Testamentum Graece NA28. This has been the view of ‘most NT scholars, including most evangelical NT scholars, for well over a century.’ The passage appears to have been included in some texts by the 4th century, and became generally accepted by the 5th century.”
For more, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_the_woman_taken_in_adultery
- It’s not lost on me that both of the passages that I’ve zeroed in on here deal with women who have been judged over their sex lives, and that there are zero stories about men being judged for something similar. I suppose this is a reflection of the patriarchal times during which Jesus walked the Earth. It burns me too, and it is a reminder of how unfairly women are still treated when it comes to the sexual activity and decisions.
Secular humanism has a problem: the theory of evolution is a powerful explanation of how we came to be, but it also means there’s nothing particularly special about our sense of right and wrong.
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For more details about what secular humanists believe, see the American Humanist Association’s Manifesto: https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/manifesto3/
Evolutionary scientist Leda Cosmides has done some fascinating work on how the human brain as evolved to, among other things, detect cheating. See, for example, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/20411984_The_Logic_of_Social_Exchange_Has_Natural_Selection_Shaped_How_Humans_Reason/
Careful noodling on words that we use interchangeably often offers some interesting insights. In this episode, we give it a spin with a threesome of hefty words: belief, trust, and faith.
LINKS
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