A Random Numbered List of Reasons Why I Hate Those Lists and Haven’t Posted Much Recently

Last updated on: September 9, 2013 at 3:04 pm By Caryn Riswold

Starting a semester with three seminar classes full of energetic undergraduates. Including fifteen first-year students adjusting to college. With nineteen students learning about women’s studies via things like the Defined Lines feminist parody. (It’s a #sexcrime …) The numbers on these lists are arbitrary and meaningless. Coordinating three local agencies hosting said first-year students doing service-learning. My own related volunteer service at another local agency. Leading eleven students through the history of the Catholic Church’s arguments against ordaining women. Writing a... Read more

Laboring For Justice

Last updated on: September 2, 2013 at 10:32 am By Caryn Riswold

Jamilah King over at Colorlines has a great post this Labor Day weekend, beginning with a note about struggles for economic justice today: “Across the United States, thousands of fast food workers have walked off the job and staged strikes for higher wages. Service work—one of the fastest growing sectors of the job market—is tough to find. And economic struggles in the United States are still colored by race—the black unemployment rate, for instance, continues to be twice as high as the rate... Read more

“Challenge Our Labor to Set People Free”

Last updated on: August 27, 2013 at 4:25 pm By Caryn Riswold

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Pictured here is Daisy Bates, “the only female organizer who spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.” The commemoration this year has turned a lot of people’s attention to the ongoing work for justice, jobs, and freedom. It also rightly reminded the world about the sermonic ending of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech that day, after Mahalia Jackson said, “Tell them about the... Read more

Fall Back Into School ~ Your Reading List

Last updated on: August 25, 2013 at 4:31 pm By Caryn Riswold

Fall semester classes start this week, so I thought I’d share the list of books that I’m teaching and using with you. They are all pictured here. I’m teaching three classes this fall, a normal load where I work, that include contributions to our college’s first year experience, gender and women’s studies program, and religion department. My first year seminar is titled “Food, Faith & Justice in Autobiographies,” and part of the description could read like the opening of a... Read more

“On the Basis of Sex”

Last updated on: August 20, 2013 at 10:36 am By Caryn Riswold

In another lifetime and in another state, I sat in a meeting with church leaders lamenting the declining number of young people in confirmation classes and other weekday church activities. The reason for this declining youth participation in church, according to one old white man? Title IX. What? Yes, he said, quite convinced. “Ever since girls started playing sports in school too, families just have no time for church.” I’ll never forget that comment, though I have happily forgotten that... Read more

At the Intersection of Fruitvale & Clay

Last updated on: August 13, 2013 at 10:34 am By Caryn Riswold

The following is an excerpt of a piece I wrote that was published earlier this month in my local newspaper, the Jacksonville Journal-Courier: I left some flowers at the corner of Morton and Clay … just a few I’d picked from my garden and tied with a ribbon, laid on the corner next to a couple other small bunches. I didn’t know her. I never met her. Why would I leave flowers to mark the place where Caryn Thomas died?... Read more

On Feminist Pioneers & White People Getting Out of the Way

Last updated on: August 14, 2013 at 3:04 pm By Caryn Riswold

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America made history today by electing the first woman to serve as its Presiding Bishop. Rev. Elizabeth Eaton has served as bishop of the Northeastern Ohio Synod of the ELCA since 2006, and was ordained in 1981. That was eleven years after the church began ordaining women in 1970. It took 43 years to go from battles over whether or not women can be ordained to calling a woman to lead the national church body.... Read more

A Church Assembles

Last updated on: August 13, 2013 at 7:30 pm By Caryn Riswold

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is in the middle of its biennial (soon to be triennial) churchwide assembly in Pittsburgh this week. It marks the 25th anniversary of the official formation of the ELCA from predecessor church bodies, and includes 952 voting members representing the more than four million baptized members of the national denomination. About this year’s theme, “Always Being Made New,” the church says this: “We are being made new every day. In Jesus Christ we are not... Read more

At the Intersections: Response to Need

Last updated on: August 9, 2013 at 10:54 am By Caryn Riswold

Many good people live and work at the intersections … of feminism and Christianity, of ministry and justice, of religion and politics, of gender and society, of race and inequality, of everything and then some. I’ve invited a few people to tell a story from their intersections, and will be sharing their stories from time to time here. Today’s piece comes from Mary Beth Fraser Connolly, Assistant Director of the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts and instructor at... Read more

Honorable Mention: Southern Comfort

Last updated on: August 7, 2013 at 11:34 am By Caryn Riswold

I’m a little delayed in my discovery of this film, but after a friend referred me to it multiple times, I finally got it on my Netflix queue and watched Kate Davis’ multiple award winning 2001 documentary Southern Comfort. Here’s a description: SOUTHERN COMFORT is a 90-minute feature-length documentary about the life of Robert Eads, a 52-year-old female to male transsexual who lives in the back hills of Georgia. “A hillbilly and proud of it,” he cuts a striking figure:... Read more