Talk: Women in the New Testament

This is a talk I gave in church a few weeks ago, so you might notice that there are some genre elements that are different than usual:

Today, I’m going to talk about how the women in the New Testament are different than in any other type of scripture because they are not introduced or usually primarily characterized by their relationship to men. I am pretty convinced that that’s because Jesus was there, because you can’t tell Jesus’s story without telling at least some of theirs. He cared about them too much, talked to them too much, interacted with them too much for them to disappear in scriptures about him. 

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Power and Control

Austin gets grumpy during the semi-annual Sunday school lessons about the difference between joy and happiness, the ones in which we’re instructed to seek after “joy” (which is true and long-lasting) rather than “happiness” (which is fleeting and worldly). I think what actually bothers him is the repetition paired with the expectation that we pretend that this discussion is new to us, but what he usually says is, “They just made that up! I could have said happiness is lasting and joy is fleeting! That difference is pretend!”

This is obviously true—as we’ve discussed before, all words are made up distinctions, and they get especially slippery around any God talk. But here I am. About to do this same thing.

Power isn’t control. Power is actually control’s opposite. And I know these words are slippery and the distinctions are a line in the sand but, as we’ve discussed before, sometimes a line in the sand is all I’ve got. So let me draw the line a little deeper and offer the definition of control I’m working on: I mean absolute control. I mean control like the ability to make something happen, to determine the outcome. Control is a zero sum game—the more that one person has, the less that another has.

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