Twice Rebels

Beginning writing my next book

My book is flying from my fingertips, and I am praising God every day for it. After researching women Christian writers (focusing on 20th c) for the past several years, I am finally writing the story I’ve been eager to tell. Tentatively titled Twice Rebels, the book centers on the hidden figures who are dropped from history because they are too Christian for the feminists and too feminist for the Christians. Their lives overcome the false either-ors that the church and society regularly placed before them.

“As long as a woman is for birth and children, she is as different from man as body from soul. But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman, and will be called man.” —St. Jerome (Commentarius in Epistolam ad Ephesios)

The fallacious choice is to be a mother or like a man, once set before women as early as St. Jerome in the 4th century or as recently as by Simone de Beauvoir in the 20th century. But what if women rebelled twice and chose to be whomever God made and called them to be—mothers, artists, activists, holy fools, etc? What if women were just as human as men?

I’m relaying the story of Katharine C. Bushnell whose 1921 book God’s Word for Women blazes a better path forward for women than the rejection of the Bible by some modern feminists or a rewriting of it in E.C. Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible. If you want to know more about Bushnell, read Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell & the Challenge of Christian Feminism (2015).

In other Substacks, I’ve sung the praises of Anna Julia Cooper who rejected Booker T. Washington’s idea of education as technical training and argued for women’s education in liberal arts—decades before women were granted degrees at Oxford or Cambridge University. She’s chapter two.

Dorothy L. Sayers shows readers in my third chapter a Christian imagination on vocation and work. Instead of asking the question, “How can women balance motherhood and career?” Sayers assumes that all human beings are called to specific work, which is sometimes domestic and sometimes public.

I’m also writing on Edith Stein, Agnes Maude Royden, and Maria Skobtsova. While I am narrowing the book’s scope to 1900-1940, I’m reading every book that I can in this vein of thought. If you have titles or authors for me, please share.

Recently, in conversation with Beth Allison Barr, she recommended the novel The Wind (1925) by Dorothy Scarborough, a Baylor University professor from 1905-1915. As a native Texan, I was intrigued by the premise: a Virginia belle is orphaned and forced to move to West Texas in the 19th c. to rough it among cowboys and cattle ranchers. “The Wind” becomes its own character in the book, seeming to compel the protagonist Letty Mason to do things against her will. Like demon possession, the wind is an unseen force.

Read through a certain lens, the wind sounds like the expectations of society, forcing Letty to make choices that she doesn’t want. For instance, as a woman, she has no money or options for work. She laments, “Oh, why aren’t girls taught to make their living and take care of themselves, the same as men?” Society propels her towards marriage, even though she insists that she doesn’t want to marry. The wind keeps shoving her along into choices and decisions until Letty loses agency, will, and even self. Without giving away the ending, I’d recommend the novel. It’s a quick read (despite being 350 pages). I swallowed it whole on my recent plane ride from DCA to LAX.

Plane rides are the best time for reading for me. A friend joked that he wished someone would design pods that looked like plane seats where you could sit and just read. I read Barbara Newman’s (1995) From Viril Woman to WomanChrist on the ride west to east this past weekend. If it’s possible to be an academic fangirl, I’m one of Barbara’s.

This is the third book I’ve read by Newman, and I picked it up because of the chapter on Pope Joan (the myth about the woman who became Pope in the 9th century), which is minimal. But the rest of the book was worthwhile. She opens it with Abelard’s arguments about women’s equality in Christ and closes it with Agrippa’s ludicrous speech regarding the superiority of women. Newman documents a collection of Christian orthodox stances as well as heresies regarding women in the church from the 11th-16th centuries. We really are sequestered in our historical moment, and books like this one pull us out of the fog of current setting.

What I’m Reading

During Pepperdine’s graduation, I read Crystal Downing’s The Wages of Cinema: A Christian Aesthetic of Film in Conversation with Dorothy L. Sayers, which I heard about through Hearts & Minds Bookstore. Downing writes a bit about why she wrote the book in The Christian Scholar’s Forum. Reading the book was like going back in time—seeing the start of the film industry through the lens of Sayers’s biography and interaction with the burgeoning world of cinema. Only Downing could have written this book given her deep knowledge of Sayers (who apparently tried writing film scenes before mystery novels!). The book also places Sayers’s aesthetic theories in dialogue with that of classic and contemporary film masterpieces. Imagine if Sayers instead of Robert Osborne was introducing the next TCM on air. I highly recommend the book.

On the previous plane from DC, I endorsed a handful of books, so I’ll list them here for you to preorder or watch out for in the coming months:

Last night I finished reading Clare Boothe Luce’s 1936 The Women, and I was surprised how in keeping the 2008 film version was with the original. I’m writing about this play in contrast to Sayers’s 1938 Love All. Both about women and cuckolding and work, but from vastly different perspectives.

What are you reading this summer? Please share recommendations.