The Androcentrism of Scripture

Biblical scholarship will never yield Bibles full of women. Nonetheless, closer scrutiny and improved methods in this expanding field have shown a remarkable and often overlooked tradition of female authority. Further, critical attention to the history of Biblical interpretation has revealed two and a half millennia of repeated efforts to suppress traditions of female authority and to present misogynistic readings as normative. Most modern appeals to biblical precedent on this subject fail to account and adjust for the cultural medium and biases by which that precedent was established. Reconstructing a world based on a thoroughly androcentric text produces a thoroughly androcentric world. Recognizing this, biblical scholars like Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza have largely abandoned the attempt to recover a robustly egalitarian ministry between the pages of the text partly because it results in the misguided search for pristine origins that conform to the observer’s desired view of the future. Instead Schüssler Fiorenza focuses, as I will here, on possibilities opened by historical accounts in which the struggle between egalitarianism and hierarchy is visible, thereby revealing a past not so dissonant with the present. Attention to the implicit and explicit evidence of struggle within the text has the potential to inform current discourses.

-Cory Crawford, Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol 48, No. 2

How Not to Need Resurrection - Michalle Gould

How Not to Need Resurrection

Children like to play at death—
they hold their breath,
and cross their arms and shut their eyes
until they forget to be dead; then rise
from their nest of pillows and play instead
at being lost or married,
as if their state was mutable, as if, like water
they could flow or freeze or climb without a ladder
into the heavens then drop back down—
they are the first resurrectionists, they alone
understand the trick is not to try,
that once you believe in death, you must surely die.

--Michalle Gould

Frances Lee Menlove - On Institutional and Individual Honesty

It is impossible for the Church to face the great problems and threats of our age without individual members being free to express to themselves and to others what they think and believe. With the almost unlimited possibility for new scientific discoveries, new sociological and anthropological insights, new ways of explaining human behavior, modern man cannot escape perplexity. "What the Church needs today, as always, are not adulators to extol the status quo, but men whose humility and obedience are no less than their passion for truth; men who brave every misunderstanding and attack as they bear witness; men who, in a word, love the Church more than ease and the unruffled course of their personal destiny." The members of the Church are responsible for the Church.

 -Frances Lee Menlove, "The Challenge of Honesty" Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (1966), pg.53

Frances Lee Menlove - On the Limitation of Revelation

Any revelation must be filtered down through the mind and intellect of the receiver, pressed and squeezed into language inadequate to handle it, and altered and changed by the boundaries of human understanding and experience.  Both the fact that the Church exists and expresses itself in a particular cultural and historical context an the realization that we have only finite and limited understanding about infinite matters must be made explicit.  Failure to make these distinctions accounts for some of the most acute abuses of individual conscience.

-Frances Lee Menlove, "The Challenge of Honesty" Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol.1 No. 1 (1966): 49