Yesterday there were rallies to Unite against the war on women all across the U.S. to protest political attacks on women’s and reproductive rights. I attended and spoke at my local rally and gave some brief remarks on the importance of being intersectional in how we think about and take action to [...]

Day 6 of NaBloPoMo: Bringing the Sunday news roundup back! I haven’t done one of these in a long time, but I’m hoping to get back into the habit. Here’s some of the interesting reading I’ve come across this week: the righter you get it: Great post that addresses, among other [...]

I laughed when I read the above phrase, the title of a kind of absurd TIME article by Meredith Melnick on masculinity and male gender identity. It so perfectly captures the contradiction at the heart of patriarchal claims about masculinity. According to complementarians, masculinity is all about being strong, aggressive, independent, [...]

Heavy trigger warning – detailed discussion of transphobic violence. Last week, Chrissy Polis, a transgender woman, was viciously attacked and beaten by two cisgender (or cis, i.e., not transgender or trans) girls at a McDonald’s in Baltimore, Maryland. Several people, including employees, merely stood by and laughed as Polis was [...]

James Poling’s “The Cross and Male Violence,” (earlier referenced here and here), addresses the concept of “practical theology,” a branch of academic theology that looks at the real-life effects of doctrine in various contexts.  Poling argues that it’s not enough for theologians and pastors to determine whether a teaching is [...]

Trigger warnings for sexual abuse/incest. In “The Cross and Male Violence,” James Poling argues that patriarchal narratives of the crucifixion provide a kind of script for abusive relationships between men and women in Christian contexts, in which male abusers can take on a godlike role (all-powerful, all-knowing, to be obeyed), [...]