Women Reclaiming Faith
We’ve just released our fourth issue of The Unmooring, and we wanted to touch on our motto as a way to help connect new readers and followers, and share our mission of “women reclaiming faith.”
We live in a world that is inherently fraught with violence, death, and trauma. Nothing elucidates this truth better than the recent events in Uvalde, Texas or Buffalo, New York, or the countless other places across our country facing the ramifications of our failure to care for one another. We know that our reality as Christians is a fallen world, and that self-serving human nature and evil itself is apparent in day-to-day events.
A horrific war continues to rage in Ukraine. Countries around the world are facing extreme heat and famine. COVID continues to take countless lives in the United States and abroad, particularly affecting vulnerable populations like older adults and children, even as heath care workers are fleeing the burnout and trauma of previous surges. Climate change is ravaging nations, including our own, while we watch in real time and argue over how to respond. There’s little that we can all wholeheartedly agree on across the political spectrum.
Our lives are multi-dimensional and complex as we experience both the temporal and eternal, political and spiritual. We exist in these realms individually and as part of our larger society. There’s no clean division between how we live, care for, and love others in response to issues like justice, representation, human rights, individual freedom, and equity initiatives.
Somehow, over the past 100 years, despite (or possibly because of) making strides in women’s rights, holistic care, advances in pay equity, feminist and intersectional analysis, and education, the Christian Church has become more divided, more polarized, and, in many cases, less representative of the very Gospel that Christ preached. The Church has seemingly moved further away from the early believers, further from recognizing each of us as human and worthy of love, forgiveness and grace.
In fact, whether merited or not, calling yourself “Christian” today feels polarizing. Christians, in American society in particular, have become more synonymous with Christian Nationalism and Evangelical (capital “E”) movements that divide our culture and judge those outside the faith while preaching about the grace of Christ. Within the Church an internal struggle for transparency, equality, and real leadership is tearing apart congregations and denominations, with more and more disaffected Christians dropping out of community altogether. Christians have moved so far from the call of the Gospels to be a people who love one another, who help and forgive.
Like so many, we’re exhausted by the constant tirade of anger, abuse, and disregard for human rights and dignity by the Church. We want to take back our faith, the teachings of Jesus and the heart of scripture—the prophets who cried out against oppression, the psalms that beg for help in times of trouble, the wisdom of the apostles who sought to glorify Christ in the midst of hostile communities.
We are called to be the remnant that has endured since the earliest days of the faith, persevering and providing hope, love and peace even as the world around us feels like it’s crumbling under the burden of natural disasters, human indifference, and the violence of hate. We know that individuals from across Christian traditions—Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant—are part of the remnant. We’re holding up women especially because for so long—centuries—their voices have been dismissed as playing a critical role in the active work of redemption that we know we are all part of.
We’re reclaiming our faith, our heritage as members of the greater Christian tradition that has so often disappointed, so often wounded, but sometimes gotten it right—a people that at our best offers unbounding love to complete strangers in their darkest moments and serve as a reminder that God is present in every part of our earthly home.
Our offering through The Unmooring is small, but God has already used our work to share striking art, prayers, liturgies and essays from women across the country and the world, evincing the sacred heart of Jesus and the beauty of the Christian faith. Please join us in our efforts in this time of reformation, and may God bless you on the journey.