Inside & Out--Ordained Women Embodying the Paradox of Servanthood & Authority April 29th 1.30-3.00pm General Seminary

April 29 – Panel: Ordained Women Called to Servanthood and Authority

by CHAD RANCOURT on MARCH 19, 2014 · in NEWS, UP CLOSE

Ordained Women Called to Servanthood and Authority: Embodying the Paradox Inside and Out
Tuesday, April 29, 1:30–3:00 p.m.
Optional lunch 12:30–1:30 p.m.

at The General Theological Seminary
440 West 21st Street
New York City

Lunch and Program: $20
Program Only: $10
Net proceeds will go to the Global Women’s Fund.

Register at womenofgeneral.eventbright.com.

Jesus called his disciples to lead as one who serves, saying of himself, “I am among you as one who serves.” Yet Jesus taught as one having authority, and gave authority to his disciples to do works in his name and to “bear fruit, fruit that will last.”

How best can ordained women—indeed all those called to ordained ministry—find balance in embodying the paradox of being a servant-leader, while bearing fruit in an authentic way? Please join us for a theologically inspired discussion in which we will explore this vital topic, its invitation and challenges, and as women, discern ways to express our individual clerical style of authority and service, right down to the clothes we wear.

Join us as we discuss:
•  Women’s issues of balancing authority and servanthood at the altar, in church, in public
•  Discovering and expressing one’s individual clerical style
•  Best resources for women’s clergy-wear: from collars to blouses, dresses, albs, and chasubles

Leading off our discussion will be our distinguished guest, the Right Reverend Chilton R. Knudsen, Assistant Bishop, Diocese of New York.

Our panelists representing the neighboring dioceses and The General Theological Seminary:
•  Diocese of Long Island: The Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers, Canon for Missional Vitality
•  Diocese of New Jersey: The Rev. Ophelia Laughlin, Rector of St. George’s by the River, Rumson, NJ
•  Diocese of Newark: The Rev. Lauren Ackland, Rector of Grace Church, Madison, NJ
•  Diocese of New York: The Rev. Deacon Denise LaVetty, Interim Director of Deacon Formation Program
•  The General Theological Seminary: The Rev. Dr. Amy Lamborn, Professor of Pastoral Theology

The Rev. Danielle Thompson, Chaplain, GTS, will be our moderator, and the Rev. Canon Jeanne Person, Canon for Pastoral Care, Diocese of New York, will also participate in the event.

Prof Susannah Heschel: "The Aryan Jesus in Nazi Germany: The Bible and the Holocaust" at Creighton U, Omaha in Nebraska

An important and wonderful talk by Prof Susannah Heschel on “The Aryan Jesus in Nazi Germany: The Bible and the Holocaust,” The Kripke Center for the Study of Religion, Project Interfaith and the Institute for Holocaust Education, Creighton University, April 23, 2013.

Homeless Jesus?

An article in the Huffington Post relates that

This 'Homeless Jesus' statue has found a home after similar works were rejected from cathedrals in New York and Canada, but not all are welcoming it with open arms. The moving work by Timothy P. Schmalz has provoked diverse responses since being installed at St. Alban's Episcopal Church in Davidson, N.C.

Rev. Doctor David E. Buck, the church rector, sees it as an evocative combination of beauty, art, and religion. "It's Jesus representing the most marginalized of society," he told NBC Charlotte. "We're reminded of what our ultimate calling is as Christians, as people of faith, to do what we can individually and systematically to eliminate homelessness. Part of a faith commitment is to care or the needy."

 The sculpture by Timothy Schmalz  is inspired by Matthew 25. 

Women and public speaking by Mary Beard in LRB

Mary Beard, fellow of Newnham College Cambridge where she teaches Classics has an excellent piece on women and public speech in the LRB:

My aim here – and I acknowledge the irony of my being given the space to address the subject – is to take a long view, a very long view, on the culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment: politics in its widest sense, from office committees to the floor of the House. I’m hoping that the long view will help us get beyond the simple diagnosis of ‘misogyny’ that we tend a bit lazily to fall back on. To be sure, ‘misogyny’ is one way of describing of what’s going on. (If you go on a television discussion programme and then receive a load of tweets comparing your genitalia to a variety of unpleasantly rotting vegetables, it’s hard to find a more apt word.) But if we want to understand – and do something about – the fact that women, even when they are not silenced, still have to pay a very high price for being heard, we have to recognise that it is a bit more complicated and that there’s a long back-story.

She says that there are only two exceptions: 1) Women are given speech as victims and martyrs (think of early Christian women, some of whom even "changed gender" at the point of public discourse) and 2) on occasions when women speak out "to defend their homes, children, husbands or interests of other women." Think here of the mother of the Maccabean martyrs. 

The issue is larger than this, however,

What I mean is that public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender... Public speech was a – if not the– defining attribute of male-ness. A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman. We find repeated stress throughout ancient literature on the authority of the deep male voice. As one ancient scientific treatise explicitly put it, a low-pitched voice indicated manly courage, a high-pitched voice female cowardice. Or as other classical writers insisted, the tone and timbre of women’s speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator, but also the social and political stability, the health, of the whole state. So another second-century lecturer and guru, Dio Chrysostom, whose name, significantly, means Dio ‘the Golden Mouth’, asked his audience to imagine a situation where ‘an entire community was struck by the following strange affliction: all the men suddenly got female voices, and no male – child or adult – could say anything in a manly way. Would not that seem terrible and harder to bear than any plague? I’m sure they would send off to a sanctuary to consult the gods and try to propitiate the divine power with many gifts.’ He wasn’t joking.

and she concludes that we need to

raise bigger questions about the nature and purpose of speech, male or female. We should perhaps take our cue from this, and try to bring to the surface the kinds of question we tend to shelve about how we speak in public, why and whose voice fits. What we need is some old fashioned consciousness-raising about what we mean by the voice of authority and how we’ve come to construct it. 

How Colm Toibin wrote The Testament of Mary

At 192 Books last week, a group of us went from the seminary to hear Colm Toibin read from several of his books. When one of our number asked him how he came to write The Testament of Mary, he explained that one Friday night whilst everyone was out dancing, he stayed at home and read the Introduction to E.V. Rieu's (1953) translation "The Four Gospels." Of John, the author of the fourth gospel, E.V. Rieu writes in the Introduction (p xxix), "It is not unlikely that he read Euripides and Plato." Deleting the words " not un(likely)," Toibin imagined that if John had indeed read Euripides and Plato, (at our event, he said "Aeschylus") then the world of Greek tragedy including tragic women opened John's gospel to his imagination and he considered how Mary (in John?) might be a figure like Antigone or Medea.

This makes sense of much of the book. Where a Jewish Mary once went to a synagogue, Toibin's Mary, living in Ephesus, at the end of the book goes with other women to the temple of Artemis. Her sensibilities are not those of the gospel writers who pester her to say things about Jesus. (Toibin says that on Mary the gospels were no help.) "They will thrive and prevail and I will die," she says. "If you want witnesses," she says to them, "then I am one and I can tell you now , when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it." 

Presentation in the Temple & Theological Education Sunday, Feb 2nd, 2014

Presentation in the Temple & Theological Education Sunday

St John’s Cathedral, Albuquerque, NM

Today’s gospel is about seeing and holding, hearing and being heard.

To see and to hold and to hear, you have to have an object. In today’s gospel that’s Jesus. Jesus is a baby whose parents present him in the temple. Later in Luke’s gospel an adult Jesus will be the subject not just of Luke but the assumed subject of Luke-Acts.

In today’s gospel

·      Anna and Simeon do the seeing

·      Simeon does the holding

·      And we try to see what they see, hold what they hold and hear what they say

What does it matter? It matters, because in seeing and holding and hearing babies, as Anna and Simeon do, we can create trust in and with those around us, and in these circles of widening trust, we have the chance –through small acts--to make and re-make the world.

But first, we have to practice listening.

There was, said the great conductor Claudio Abbado, a certain sound of snow—

·      Not from underfoot crunching but

·      The sound of falling flakes

·      New down dipping on an ocean of spray

·      Pianissimo, fading into silence

Claudio Abaddo had learned listening skills from his maternal grandfather, an expert in ancient languages. Together on holidays they would walk in silence near the Matterhorn. And as an adult he walked there again, “specifically to test on the silence the orchestral scores that flowed, perfectly memorised, in his head.” (The Economist, “Claudio Abaddo” obituary, Feb 2, 2014)

Listen.

“In rehearsal this was almost his only word, accompanied by a gesture, finger to lips, or one of his quick, dazzling, toothy smiles, or a sudden glance of the eyes that were, he thought, his most effective tool. He did not dominate the music, but was its servant. So no shouting, like Toscanini. No furious baton-play or maestro posing, like Karajan, whom he had succeeded in 1989 at the Berlin Philharmonic.

·      Strings, listen to brass

·      Flute, liaise with oboe

·      Those playing G sharp, flow around those playing C.

·      Those with the top melodic line, let the depths surge through.”

Listening to other musicians, orchestras become more cohesive and the sound is almost like that of chamber music.

Abbado also knew these magical moments disappear as suddenly as they occur-- always different, never the same.

That’s the thing about listening—it’s about receiving sounds & voices so as to absorb and be transformed by what we hear. To listen better we have to practice. And listening to others is not just what music is all about, it’s about learning and growing through trust and deepening relationships. It’s about the joy of being humble enough to receive God and God’s presence in our lives.

Listening is at the heart of education, which is why I mention it on Theological Education Sunday.

It takes many forms (visual, auditory, sensory), but is the only way to understand someone else’s life and experience. Yet most people today have been taught the opposite. We are told and we even believe that what is important about an education—and a life—is to express your opinions, to tell the world what we think. All day long, -- and I’m guilty of this too--we text, we tweet, we post our status updates on our Facebook pages. We are thus in danger of eclipsing listening, and without it, we cannot access lives, experiences, and beliefs that are different from our own. We cannot create trust. Learning how to truly listen may be the most important global lesson of all. And by showing up here in the Cathedral we are doing just that. Like Simeon and Anna we are ceding control to God: we are open to hearing because we trust.

Simeon and Anna are true saints of Israel. They seem to have lived their lives open to the Spirit.  As prophets they reach out to hear, touch and hold. Probably frail and able to achieve little that counts in terms of worldly value, they are wise to the things of God.

Ears can be deaf to the sounds and voices of others. But the ears of Simeon and Anna, and through them our ears, can undo isolation and dishonor by listening, valuing, inducing trust, respecting others and thus growing in faith and love of God.

Let us pray in the words of St Theresa:

Christ has no body but yours,

No ears but yours, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes through which to look out

Compassion to this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the ears, through which he blesses all the world. Amen. 

Two New Poems of Sappho

Two new poems of Sappho have been found and a preliminary translation released here. The poems are in a fragment dating to 2nd and 3rdCentury CE which may have come from Oxyrhynchus. An article in Daily Beast on the find gives an indication of scholarly reaction:

“The new Sappho is absolutely breath-taking,” said Albert Henrichs, a Harvard classics professor who examined the papyrus with Dr. Obbink. “It is the best preserved Sappho papyrus in existence, with just a few letters that had to be restored in the first poem, and not a single word that is in doubt. Its content is equally exciting.” One of the two recovered poems, Prof. Henrichs notes, speaks of a “Charaxos” and a “Larichos,” the names assigned by ancient sources to two of Sappho’s brothers but never before found in Sappho’s own writings. It has as a result been labeled the Brothers poem by Prof. Obbink.

Prof Catherine Keller --Union Theological Seminary Feb 3rd 7pm "Eco-Theological Uncertainty and Planetary Entanglement"

Forrest Church Memorial Lecture Featuring Feminist Theologian:  DR. CATHERINE KELLER

WOE, WOE—WHOA! ECO-THEOLOGICAL UNCERTAINTY AND PLANETARY ENTANGLEMENT Dr. Catherine Keller Introduced by Dr. James Cone Monday, February 3, 2014Reception: 6:00 p.m.Lecture: 7:00 p.m. Dr. Catherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology at the Theological School of Drew University. In her teaching, lecturing and writing, she develops the relational potential of a theology of becoming. Her books reconfigure ancient symbols of divinity for the sake of a planetary conviviality—a life together, across vast webs of difference. Thriving in the interplay of ecological and gender politics, of process cosmology, poststructuralist philosophy and religious pluralism, her work is both deconstructive and constructive in strategy. She is currently finishing Cloud of the Impossible: Theological Entanglements, which explores the relation of mystical unknowing, material indeterminacy and ontological interdependence. Union Theological Seminary is proud to host the Fourth Annual Forrest Church Memorial Lecture. This annual series honors The Rev. Dr. Forrest Church and his extraordinary legacy of leadership as a Unitarian Universalist theologian and as a leading voice for liberal religion in public life in the United States and abroad. Registration is required. RSVP online!

Feb 4th 7.00pm Colm Toibin, Testament of Mary, 192 Books: 10th and 21st, NYC

Tuesday, February 4

7:00pm

 

 

An Evening with

 

COLM TOIBIN

 

 

The Testament of Mary

 

(Scribner, 2012)

Available in Paperback on February 4, 2014

 

 

 

 

 

Upon the paperback release of The Testament of Mary, 192 Books is honored to host one of our favorite and perennially best-selling authors for an evening of reading and conversation. Feel free to bring a full range of questions and comments for our renowned guest.

Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney lectures on Women Prophets and Royal Women in Israel, March 10-11, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities

Susan Draper White Lectures in Women’s Studies
Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, M.Div., Ph.D..

MONDAY, MARCH 10, 2014, 7:30 PM 
TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014, 11:00 AM
Bigelow Chapel

Wil Gafney Associate Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia March 10 - "Women of the Word: Women Prophets and Scribes in and around Biblical Israel" March 11 - "She Reigns: The Royal Women of Israel and Judah and the Israelite Queendom"

The Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney is an associate professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. Her course offerings include: Heroines, Harlots and Handmaids: the Women of the Hebrew Scriptures and Prophetic Constructions, which explores prophets who do not have canonical books attributed to them, including better-known prophets such as Miriam and Elijah, along with lesser-known prophets such as the woman with whom Isaiah fathered a child.

Her approach to teaching the Hebrew Scriptures includes emphasizing archaeology, comparative ancient Near Eastern literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Her interest in the ancient Near Eastern and biblical portrayals of Lilith and other night-stalking creatures led to her participation in two HBO documentaries on the origin and evolution of vampire mythologies, True Bloodlines: Vampire Legends and True Bloodlines: A New Type in 2008, airing before the series premiere of True Blood.

Dr. Gafney is an ordained Episcopal priest and a member of the historic African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in Philadelphia. Founded in 1792, it is the first Episcopal church in the U.S. founded by and for African Americans. More...

Fee: The lectures are free and open to the public.

Registration: Register online or contact Renee Flesner, 651.255.6138.

More Information: Call 651.255.6137 for more information about the lecture series or the speaker.

This endowed lectureship was established by Priscilla Braun ’83 in memory of her grandmother, Susan Draper White, for the presentation of two annual lectures in the area of women in religion, theology, and ministry. It is the major public event offered through the seminary’s Women’s Studies program.

Lecturers have included Eunjoo Mary Kim, Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Mary Farrell Bednarowski, Jane Dempsey Douglass, Nancy L. Eiesland, Marie M. Fortune, Rita Gross, Beverly Harrison, Mary Hunt, Ada Isasi-Diaz, Karen Lebacqz, Barbara K. Lundblad, Joretta L. Marshall, Joyce Mercer, Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore, Damayanthi Niles, Judith Plaskow, Marjorie Procter-Smith, Letty M. Russell, Marjorie H. Suchocki, Emilie M. Townes, and Renita J. Weems.

Elaine Pagels at Trinity Wall Street Sunday Jan 12th at 10.00am

Revelation: Prophecies that Provoke

The Epiphany series of Discovery classes begins this Sunday with leading theologian Elaine Pagels talking about the Book of Revelation. Don't miss this chance to see Pagels speak about a subject she wrote about at length in her 2012 bookRevelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation. Throughout this Discovery series, a diverse group of leading scholars and teachers guide the exploration of this most challenging and influential biblical book. From Handel’s classic "Hallelujah Chorus" to the best-selling Left Behind novels, The Revelation to John has fired imaginations for centuries while keeping its secrets in enigmatic images and evocative poetry. Written in turbulent times, it continues to exert its fascination in periods of upheaval and change, like our own. Time and Location Sundays | 10am | 74 Trinity Place (the office building behind Trinity Church)

January Schedule JANUARY 12 Elaine Pagels: The Book of Revelation and Its Time JANUARY 19 Mary Callaway: Of Dragons, Whores, and Saints: The Story Behind the Images in The Book of Revelation JANUARY 26 Sergey Trostyanskiy: Prophecy and Heresy: The Eastern Orthodox View on Revelation