I just read two awesome books called Finding Holy Spirit Mother by scholar Ally Kateusz and Our Mother The Holy Spirit by scholar Marianne Widmalm. According to them, there is good evidence that the early church and Jesus referred to the Holy Spirit as Mother. This feminine metaphor for the Holy Spirit was edited right out of Christian texts […]
A Brief History of the Holy Spirit as Mother Read More »
We are all familiar with the myths surrounding Christmas, such as that Jesus was born on December 25. But some erroneous assumptions hang on, such as: –that Joseph was the only helper at Jesus’ birth –Middle Eastern shepherds were middle-aged men, and that –the Magi were men. Though these statements seem factual due to our
The Women of the Nativity Read More »
I may always think of Rachel Held Evans in May, the month in which she died last year. May is also Mother’s Day month. One of her last tweets in April of last year was this: I’ve written four books, hundreds of blog posts, and dozens of articles, and only once have I used a
Four Reasons God Is Your Mother, Too Read More »
This week I have been thinking a lot about well-loved progressive Christian writer, Rachel Held Evans, who passed away after a brief illness on Saturday, May 4. In honor of her mission of truth-telling in the church, I am returning to my own calling to help others see the feminine images of God in the
Sometimes God is the invisible Mother in the Bible, like the moms at the park holding the kids’ jackets. God-as-mother appears in the pages of Scripture, but often in a way that modern readers don’t notice. This Mother’s Day, let’s take time to see and appreciate God’s motherhood in the Bible. We can start with
The Born Again Have a Mother Read More »
Do we have to make God the Mother a love muffin and God the Father the Big Boss? Does God the Father get to be Omni-Everything and God the Mother simply present? If we 1) become aware of our own unconscious, societally-based sexism; 2) correspondingly adjust our view of mothers; and 3) see how power
Is Mother God Just a Love Muffin? Read More »
The Old Testament writers use the mother bird metaphor for God. For me, it’s a new category of feminine imagery for God, as I don’t think of the winged creatures as female when I read the Old Testament. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, in The Divine Feminine: Biblical Imagery of God as Female, says there are two
May 8 and May 13 are the feast days of Lady Julian of Norwich (1342-1416). She was the first woman to write a surviving book in the English language: Revelations of Divine Love. Julian was an anchorite, an early form of the Christian monastic. She lived in a simple room attached to the local church, receiving
Women, Children and Sheep Could the Lord be my Shepherdess? The more I find out about sheep, the more shepherds and shepherdesses remind me of God as Mother. Margaret Feinberg writes about her time with a shepherdess in Oregon in Scouting the Divine: My Search for God in Wine, Wool, and Wild Honey. I don’t
The Lord is my Shepherdess Read More »
