Fall Arts & Crafts Sale on December 9

‘Tis the Season . . .

For colorful, hand-knit scarves,

Pretty homemade pottery,

And beautiful beaded jewelry.

‘Tis the season . . . 

For sharing gifts and treasures with the ones you love,

A pretty pair of earrings for a friend,

A warm knit hat for a Stranger.

‘Tis the season . . .

For giving gifts that reflect the love and care of the people who made them,

And that symbolize the love of the Holy One for all who will receive them.

This year, consider donating a treasure that you’ve created to the Women’s Center Fall Arts & Crafts Sale, which will be held on December 9, 2011.  That’s less than two weeks away, so start working on your treasures now!  We would like to receive all donations by Wednesday, December 7.

Proceeds from the sale will support the work of the Women’s Center.  Drop by the Women’s Center* or email for an appointment to drop off your items.

* Women’s Center hours: M-F 9-12, MWF 12:30-5:30

Thank you!

Amy Hartsough

Student Coordinator

Women’s Center at LPTS

http://wimminwiselpts.wordpress.com/

WOMENSCENTER@lpts.edu

 

A Call to Preach Peace for Women This Advent

A Call for Peace

Those of us who have participated in the Christian liturgical year for while know that Advent is a time of preparation. During Advent, Christians prepare once again for the astonishing and life-bringing incarnation of the Christ, and renew their commitment to prepare for the still-anticipated, still-promising, fulfillment of the Reign of God. During Advent, Christians meditate on the hope that accompanies these preparations, the peace towards which they point and for which we long, the joy that already animates these hopeful preparations, and the love that they rehearse, which is called forth by the Love that is already good news for the world to meet that Love in action.

During Advent, we are already poised to proclaim the need to prepare the way of the Holy One in concrete ways, by repenting of our violent or thoughtless commissions, our hard-hearted or apathetic omissions, and by renewing our commitment to transformation in our own lives, our congregations, and our world.

This Advent, the Women’s Center at LPTS calls upon the preachers of our community to make December 4, the Second Sunday in Advent, a day to preach as “an activist and transformative response by the church to violence against women.”¹

Specifically, we invite those who will preach on the Second Sunday of Advent to incorporate explicitly the three goals of preaching against sexual and domestic violence identified by John McClure in his essay on that topic:

• to “speak a word of hospitality, resistance, and hope to victims and survivors;”
• to “send a message that the church will cease to be a place of easy rationalization adn cheap grace for abusers;”
• and to “invite the congregation as a whole to consider how it might become a ‘safe place’ and a force for compassion and resistance in relation to sexual and domestic violence.”²

We invite preachers to name violence against women as one of the wrongs we work to eliminate as we “prepare the way” for and live into the coming Reign of God; to call for repentance from our own acts of violence, and from the attitudes and practices that promote or facilitate them, like continued support for violence as a means of resolving conflict, or persistent acceptance of men’s legitimate control over women; and to identify the elimination of violence against women as a mark of the shalom towards which bend our efforts. We further invite preachers to make this Advent the beginning of a regular practice of preaching against violence against women.

Rationale
We issue this call because we recognize that preaching is a form of activism, and that it calls the people of God to further transformative action; because the ongoing reality of violence against women cries to heaven for the active justice- and peace-making of the church, and because the church is called to active engagement in the continuing effort to eliminate violence against women; and because preaching that names violence against women as a wrong is a way to stand in solidarity with women and men around the globe who will be participating in the international effort “16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence.” We believe that global effort will benefit from our solidarity, as will we. Finally, we believe that explicit preaching against sexual and domestic violence, and against the structures like militarism and patriarchy that perpetuate it, is itself a form of repentance that is appropriate to this new beginning of the liturgical year.

Repentance: Breaking Our Silence
All too often, the topic of violence against women and girls – whether it is domestic or intimate partner violence, sexual assault, or other forms of coercion and abuse of power and control directed at women – is absent from the pulpit. This silence creates the impression that the church either does not perceive the reality of violence against women and girls, or countenances it, or has no word to say in the face of it. Despite the PCUSA’s official stance of opposition to domestic violence in particular, despite the General Assembly’s 2000 resolution calling for comprehensive efforts at all levels of church life to confront domestic violence and to promote healing for persons affected by it, and despite the General Assembly Mission Council’s passionate theological statement against it, many congregants have never heard a word spoken against violence against women from the pulpit. When the church, through its preaching, remains silent, its members cannot see it standing in solidarity with survivors of violence, nor hear it calling perpetrators to account, nor feel it challenging bystanders to become more actively involved in building a non-violent world.

The Second Sunday in Advent, December 4, is an opportunity to commit to making a change, by joining with others preaching on the same theme at the same opportune time. It is an opportunity to embrace the larger goals of preaching about violence against women, and to commit to incorporating the challenge of facing and eliminating it into future preaching.

Relevance
Christians are sometimes tempted to deny the relevance of violence against women in the life of the church. Christianity, as we like to remind ourselves, is a religion of love and peace; most of us think of ourselves as peaceful people who, insofar as it is up to us, live at peace with all people, in accord with Romans 12:18. We imagine our congregations as violence-free zones.

In fact, however, the prevalence of violence against women means that experience with violence is predictably present in our congregations, albeit usually silenced. In the United States, National Institute of Justice statistics indicate that 1 in 4 women will experience intimate partner violence during her lifetime. (The corresponding figure for men is 1 in 13.) 1 in 6 will be a victim of rape.

The United Nations defines violence against women as any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.

Globally, 1 in 3 women will experience such violence in her lifetime; in a warring world, that violence will often be an effect of armed conflict.

The Advent anticipation of peace speaks directly to this experience of violence, calling Christians to understand the demands of peacemaking as specifically including binding up the wounds of women who have experienced violence, and calling for justice in a world that positions women and girls as convenient and acceptable targets of violence.

Why December 4?
We are calling for a concerted preaching action on December 4, the Second Sunday in Advent, to coincide with the international effort 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence. This effort to focus attention and action on the cause of eliminating violence against women and girls was inaugurated in 1991 by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University. The 16 Days run between November 25 – International Day Against Violence Against Women – and December 10 – International Human Rights Day – and were chosen to emphasize the linkage between violence against women and human rights, to dramatize the understanding that violance against women is a violation of human rights, and to make possible an international effort to raise awareness and focus energy towards the elimination of violence against women. The Center for Women’s Global Leadership annually outlines themes that unite women working for an end to violence around the world; this year, the theme continues its focus on the linkages between militarism and violence, under the heading “From Peace in the Home to Peace in the World: Let’s Challenge Militarism and End Violence Against Women!” [Read the 2011 Theme Announcement here.] We are excited about the prospects of bringing the voice of the church, with its specific promise of hope and ultimate healing, to this worldwide effort.

Resources – Links

More statistical information on violence against women is available from:

Centers for Disease Control – Violence Prevention [CDC resources include a fact sheet for the United States and a comprehensive report on the Cost of Intimate Partner Violence]

Domestic Violence Resource Center

National Domestic Violence Hotline

National Institute of Justice

Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN)

A valuable collection of resources addressing violence against women from a theological perspective is available through the FaithTrust Institute

For resources available from the PC(USA), visit

Presbyterians Against Domestic Violence Network (PADVN)

and consult Turning Mourning Into Dancing!, the 213th General Assembly’s Policy and Study Guide on Domestic Violence

References
¹ Barbara Patterson, “Preaching as Nonviolent Resistance,” in John S. McClure and Nancy J. Ramsay, eds. Telling the Truth: Preaching About Sexual and Domestic Violence (Cleveland, OH: United Church Press, 1998) 99-119, 99.

² John S. McClure, “Preaching about Sexual and Domestic Violence,” in John S. McClure and Nancy J. Ramsay, eds. Telling the Truth: Preaching About Sexual and Domestic Violence (Cleveland, OH: United Church Press, 1998) 110-119, 110.

 

Let me introduce myself.

Hi!  I’m Amy Hartsough, and I am the Student Coordinator for the Women’s Center this year.  Allow me to share with you three introductory facts about me:

1)  I’m a first-year M.Div. student at LPTS, in the ordination track with the PC(USA) — that’s the Presbyterian Church, USA.

2)  Today in chapel, I was reminded of the simple pleasures of honey, when I asked a friend to drizzle said substance on my communion bread.  (My hands were full, as I was holding an apple and a banana as well as the bread – the Table at LPTS is filled to point of overflowing, amen?)

3)  I am a coffee drinker.  I try to be a consumer of locally sold, fairly-traded coffee when I can.  But today, I made what might be a seasonal shift for me.  Today, I am drinking tea.  Carmel apple flavored tea with, you guessed it, honey, and a splash of milk.

So, now that we’ve been properly introduced — (I’m trusting our readers to leave comments introducing themselves!) — let’s talk a little bit about my presence on this blog.  Allow me to share something else about me, this time, some insight into my sense of passion and purpose.

I am passionate about language.  I remember reading one of Emily Dickinson’s poems in college; her words prompted a sort of mental “gasp” within me.  I “got” what she was saying.  It resonated with my own experience.  And then I thought, “how remarkable, that a woman in a particular time and place in the past wrote these words, and I’m reading them now, and they’re becoming my words — they’re about my life too.”  Since then, I’ve been fascinated by the way that human beings use language to create meaning and connections across these chasms of space and time.  As an English major, I became very aware of the privilage and power that I have because I know how to use words.  I can read, write and think about an endless number of things.  I can participate in so many conversations in my culture, because I have access to the tools of meaning-making.  I am a thinker, feeler, lover, friend, daughter, woman, human being.  And because I am also a student, speaker, writer, poet, liturgist, I am in a position to share my experiences with the world.  Or at least with particular parts of the world.

I continue to be in awe of the position in which I find myself.  As I continue in seminary, and with this blog, I hope to be guided by the unending purpose and hope of working towards the realization of a world in which all people’s voices are heard and celebrated, as mine has been and continues to be.

May it be so.

 

What We Are Doing This Fall!

What's scheduled for Fall (most of it, anyway)

 

Something We Do: Advocate

Think Advocacy

A recurrent question around LPTS is “What is the Women’s Center?” and “What does the Women’s Center do?” It’s tempting to answer the question with some kind of list: it does things like bring in speakers at lunch, arrange film nights, sponsor the Katie Geneva Cannon Lecture, organize a team for the AIDS Walk, put on The Vagina Monologues, that kind of thing. Or, with directions: it’s in White Hall, where the sign is in the window. But the question could be answered a little more formally, by looking at what the Women’s Center says about itself, in its mission statement. This month, partly in honor of experienced students’ return to campus and new students’ arrival, it seems wise to do that. In the briefer mission statement, the Women’s Center says it will:

1. Discern new ways of being and living into these realities by support and advocacy for women and other disenfranchised groups;
2. Supplement the academic program of the Seminary and provide a prophetic voice on the Seminary campus;
3. Celebrate and affirm the gifts and contributions of women in all spheres of life in past and present;
4. Provide a safe space to discuss and hear one another’s stories and supply resources for information and edification.

September seems like a good time to elaborate some on each of these larger kinds of activities, which together might be summed up as: “Advocate, Educate, Celebrate, Congregate!”

Many people do think of the Women’s Center as an advocacy organization of some kind – where advocacy means something like “The act of pleading or arguing in favor of something, such as a cause, idea, or policy; active support.” Sometimes people think of advocacy as roughly equivalent to “shouting” – which can make people uncomfortable – or “always going on and on about, you know” – which can be boring.

We think of advocacy as something a little quieter (well, sometimes), and more interesting. Advocacy means creating a base of supporters who are educated about women’s issues, their relationship to fundamental theological, ecclesial and pastoral concerns, and their implications for the living out of Christian faith. These supporters are then in a position to become advocates as well, advocates of a more inclusive and comprehensive vision of the transformed world towards which Christians are called to bend their efforts. Advocacy involves taking the persuasive case for something to people who otherwise might not have heard it, or realized how glad they would be once they did.

A main message of Women’s Center advocacy is that women’s issues and gender issues are relevant, important, and concern everyone.

That’s a simple message, really. It doesn’t seem controversial. And yet – it is not always obvious that women’s issues are relevant. It is still easy to think that when our main concerns are theology or Scripture or designing worship, gender is really beside the point. It is still easy to fall into the trap set by our culture, of ignoring gender except for when it’s in the “right” places, like the family, private life, intimate relationships, or shopping for gender-appropriate clothing. We can then imagine that if we don’t think about or refer to gender, our theological reflection and ideas are gender-free, our construction of the political life of the church has nothing to do with gender, and so on. Advocacy is how we remind our collective self that whether we ignore the influences gender has on us, or whether we pay attention to them, they are there in everything we do – and if we ignore what we do with them, we’ll miss whatever chance we have to do anything new and better with them.

It is not always obvious that women’s issues are important. It is easy to think that what is most important is what appears – in newspaper headlines and TV trailers, on seminar agendas and reading lists, in all the best commentaries and the classic theological sources. Women’s issues don’t always seem to rank up there with the economy and the environment, or global mission and evangelism, or ethics and the Christian life, or whatever we recognize as things that really matter because we know the people they matter to really matter. But. As we learn to see how gender is relevant, we come to realize that in every human issue we know is really important, there is always already a women’s issue present; women are human, and every human issue is a women’s issue. There is no significant justice issue that does not reveal significant gender dynamics – when we bother to look. There is no significant intellectual issue that does not sound profoundly different in gendered conversation – when we bother to listen.

It can, in fact, happen that the ubiquity of gender influences masks their importance. Presuppositions about gender are woven into basic aspects of human life – appearance, gesture, language. Individually small but continuous, ubiquitous practices, that operate at a glacial pace, have a large effect. Efforts directed at changing those influences can seem like a focus on trivialities. Until – for instance, in the matter of “inclusive language – someone is challenged to count up the instances of masculine language used for God in the average worship service, and then multiply that by the number of all the worship services someone attends in a year, or 10, or their lives, and then to consider whether the influence exerted on a person’s understanding of the divine is or is not a sizeable one.

It is not always obvious that women’s issues and gender issues concern everyone. It’s still easy to dismiss the language of “gender issues” as code for things people who are not straight men would care about. It’s easy, because gender still defines many people to such an extent that “gender” itself seems like those people’s exclusive property. Advocacy insists that gender is a property of everyone’s humanity, that each of us has a particular gender through which we interact with everyone else in our lives. Each of us has an experience that gender — our own, and others’ — has had a hand in crafting. So “gender issues” are everyone’s issues. If we want to understand ourselves, and others; if we plan to counsel others; if we anticipate attending or planning or leading worship that will speak to people where they live; if we hope to extend the welcome of Christ to anyone in the body they live in, then we will do well to pay attention to how gender affects the way we do those things, and how people respond to us when we do.

Some people think that the time for advocacy around women’s issues has long since come and gone. According to that story, “all that ‘women’s liberation’ stuff” is so that 70s show; women have votes and jobs and grad school and pastoral calls now, so what is left to advocate for? According to us: just things like an end to violence against women and girls, access to education for women and girls around the world, the flourishing of lively and profound worship that fully incorporates women’s experiences and revelations, and all the other tremendous things that people who recognize that gender is relevant, important, and concerns everyone become able to wish for and work for.

 

Coming Soon!

It's almost here!

Make sure to plan for the Monday After the Katie Geneva Cannon Lecture, September 19 — there is still room in the workshop with Traci West, “U.S. Christianity and Violence Against Women” — REGISTER ONLINE NOW for this event — which will be followed by lunch and closing worship in the Women’s Center.

Note that this Fall, the Katie Geneva Cannon Lecture comes first in a full schedule of Women’s Center events, which continues in September with:

Light + Lunch with Rev. Melissa DeRosia on Friday, September 23; Melissa will share the story that led to the publication of her new book, Girlfriend’s Guide to Minstry, over lunch in the Women’s Center.

Participation in the Louisville AIDS Walk on Sunday, September 25. Now is the time to JOIN TEAM WOMEN’S CENTER, WOMEN AT THE WELL, AND MORE LIGHT AT LPTS, and raise money that will benefit people living with HIV/AIDS and their families in the Louisville area. The Team will gather on Sunday, September 25 at 2:00 p.m. at the Belvedere for the walk, which gets underway at 3:00 p.m.

We are looking forward to a scintillating September — sparkling speech, setting fire to new ideas, and next steps.

Click here to help fill the Women's Center's cup.

There is still time to make sparks fly at the Women’s Center, before Summer Donation Days stop in September!

You can go to OUR ONLINE DONATION SITE, the LPTS Online Donation Site (designate your gift to the Women’s Center), or send your check payable to LPTS – WOMEN’S CENTER FUND to The Women’s Center at Louisville Seminary, 1044 Alta Vista Rd., Louisville, KY 40205.

Thank you!

 

Disruptive Christian Ethical Newsreading

by Heather Thiessen

The Women’s Center subscribes to Inter Press Service’s “Gender Wire”, which reports on events around the world that affect women. This week, the news included the report that the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had ruled against the United States in a human rights case, the case of Jessica Lenahan (formerly Gonzales). [full story here] Its ruling holds that a local police department’s failure to enforce a restraining order against an abusive ex-husband, and subsequent actions of US courts, constituted a violation of the plaintiff’s human rights. Domestic violence infringes a human right, and it is among “the duties of the State to respond to situations of domestic violence with diligent protection measures.” Ms. Gonzales and her children received no such protection.

The facts in the case are truly “horrible,” as acknowledged by Justice Scalia in the opinion of the US Supreme Court, which nevertheless denied Gonzales’ claim that her expectation of protection under her existing restraining order constituted an enforceable “property right.” They are outlined in the OAS report on the case’s merits, and can be summarized as follows: Jessica Gonzales, of Native American and Latina American descent, held a valid restraining order against her ex-husband, Simon Gonzales, due to his abuse of her and her daughters. She was unsuccessful in having Castle Rock Police Department officers enforce this order when she first learned that her daughters Leslie (7), Katheryn (8), and Rebecca (10) had disappeared, then learned that they were with their father at a Denver amusement park, and then again when they did not return home by bedtime. Simon Gonzales drove to the Castle Rock Police Department in the early hours of the next morning, opened fire on the building, and was shot dead by police. Officers discovered the dead bodies of the three girls in the back of Mr. Gonzales’ pick-up truck after the shoot-out. Mr. Gonzales had purchased a 9 mm. automatic weapon shortly before 8 p.m., after picking up the girls and before taking them to Denver, clearing an FBI background check. US Courts ruled that Jessica Gonzales’ restraining order did not require its enforcement by local law enforcement officers; this fact appears to have influenced the US Supreme Court’s decision to rule that, however tragic the outcome, the Castle Rock Police Department had not violated Ms. Gonzales’ civil rights by not doing more to intervene in the situation.

In its ruling on the merits of the case, the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded that

The restraining order was the only means available to Jessica Lenahan at the state level to protect herself and her children in a context of domestic violence, and the police did not effectively enforce it. The state apparatus was not duly organized, coordinated, and ready to protect these victims from domestic violence by adequately and effectively implementing the restraining order. These failures to protect constituted a form of discrimination in violation of the American Declaration, since they took place in a context where there has been a historical problem with the enforcement of protection orders; a problem that has disproportionately affected women since they constitute the majority of the restraining order holders.

All of this may seem like a summons to mutter “how awful,” and maybe to say a heartfelt prayer for the peace of women and girls everywhere. But while it would be wrong to discourage that prayer, and while we are no doubt right to recognize how awful the story is, the summons is really very different. It is, rather, a summons to recognize this story as a profoundly relevant source of moral knowledge and a call to ethical reflection; an appropriate response to such a summons is to notice the ways I, myself – or we, ourselves – are actually implicated in this episode of our public life, rather than to see it as something randomly and disconnectedly “out there.”

At least, I think that is what I have been learning from reading Rev. Dr. Traci C. West’s Disruptive Christian Ethics. One of Dr. West’s points is that most Christians need ways to develop understandings of our world that help us stop seeing manifestations of institutional callousness as having no connection with our own ethical lives, and to develop ways to stop tolerating institutionalized immorality that stems from tacit understandings that support the dismissal and oppression of the powerless. Her work focuses on the need to permit particular moral concerns – such as those encoded in the story of Jessica Gonzales/Lenahan’s ordeal – to inform and challenge the abstract, universal terms and categories we use in developing our ethical responses, and to cultivate an ability to see these particular moral concerns as connected both to our own “in general” ethical reasoning, and to our own particular practice of it.

A full and careful analysis of this case, in its embodied, raced, gendered, classed, institutionalized, nationalized and globalized complexity, is beyond the scope of this reflection. It seems clear that it cannot, or anyhow, should not, take the form of a consoling apportionment of blame to easy others — as if I were in a position to know how I, myself, could and would have done better a job for which I’ve never trained, under circumstances I have no appreciation for, and as if I’ve never experienced the stomach-churning realization that something I did an hour or a week ago more or less routinely, thinking I knew what I was doing, has suddenly revealed itself to be a human disaster that I would do anything to undo. But it does seem to call into question some of my assumptions about what ought to be or “realistically have to be” priorities in doing any kind of work. (How different would my own work look if care and justice were consistently my top professional concerns, instead of . . . well, instead of the other things that are sometimes, right then, more on my mind?) Just as it seems to call into question a collective willingness to let the knowledge that consistent commitment to care and justice is hard work function as a justification for official lapses, rather than as an impetus to change the conditions that make it so hard.

And then there is the heartbreaking detail that one of the Castle Rock Police Department officers, with whom the mother of three little girls spoke on their last night in life, said that he couldn’t do anything because the children were with their father. If the children had been with someone else, could someone have done something? Would it then have been more permissible to consider that they really might be in some kind of danger? How much does all that we Christians say to sentimentalize the relationship of parent to child, and to sanctify that relationship in our collective imagination, and to deify the relationship of father to child in our ritual symbolic life, even to the point sometimes of insisting that lethal violence can be a property of the most profound paternal love, contribute to how difficult it can be to perceive facts in evidence in a particular case (like the existence of a restraining order against an abusive husband/father) that do not fit the overriding picture in our cultural mind’s eye that assures us that, universally, “children who are with their fathers are OK”?

And then there is the fact that the anguish a reader feels in encountering the report of this case, and the knowledge that the reader’s anguish can only be a pale reflection of the anguish of the people most intimately involved in it, is a source of moral knowledge. We know, because of how we feel about this particular story, that “this is wrong” — and so are in a position to know that whatever made this story true is wrong. The challenge of moral knowledge like this is to hold fast to the uncomfortable threads by which we ourselves are tied to whatever that is, so as to be able to follow them to the place where they knot together – around something that we together could yet loosen, and thereby change. At least, I think that is part of the lesson, difficult but promising, of Disruptive Christian Ethics.

Rev. Dr. Traci C. West will deliver the 2011 Katie Geneva Cannon Lecture Sunday, September 18, 7:30 p.m., Gardencourt. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION.