That may very well be the disheartening truth for many evangelicals, let alone evangelical women. Within each of these tales there seemed a sense that if faith was encountered, it was not because of, but in spite of the Church. However, while reading these “un-testimonies,” I did feel as though I saw a before-and-after pattern emerging. Jessica Belt, on the other hand, finishes a wrestling match with culturally embedded truth by simply stating, “As for me, I no longer knew what to believe.” The potency of this collection is in such unadorned honesty and pain I have no desire to say it ought to be or even can be otherwise. Anne Dayton’s “Going Way Against the Flow” left me in stitches with her apt yet surprisingly charitable description of evangelical kitsch and “the bubble of Christian pop culture.” Dayton creatively expressed her misgivings about the trappings of Christianity, however, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The sheer scope of these stories left me amused, encouraged and troubled.
These women share my reflections on the evangelical church, which have ranged from the droll to the desperate, the endeared to the enraged. As a fellow evangelical woman sharing the struggles of faith and femininity, I found these voices echoing many of my own emotions. , may not have a tidy resolution, and may not lead to an earth-shattering change in our beliefs.” Beyond addressing the untidiness of faith journeys in general, these essays aim to explore the particularly messy expectations of evangelical females.
Notess has compiled the diverse stories of thoughtful, articulate women who all communicate this vital point: a genuine encounter with spirituality is more often than not “an unruly story, a story that refuses to conform to a simple before-and-after pattern. These stories have been published to challenge the once-was-lost-but-now-am-found pattern within which so many evangelical Christians struggle to fit. Esus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical is a colorful patchwork of “un-testimonies” sewn together by editor Hannah Faith Notess, but not for our comfort.
0 kommentar(er)
