Critic Cal

Jordan Peterson gets ALL the YouTube views but PLEASE don't think that makes him emulation-worthy!  I recently received an email invite to an event named "Preaching like Peterson: Can a preacher learn anything from the rhetoric of Jordan Peterson?" Now, I don't know how the event organisers plan on answering this question. I am quite willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they have prepared something rigorously critically attentive and resistant to Peterson's toxic and dehumanising ideologies.  I'm considerably less willing, however, to actually go and find out for myself... My own answer to what Christians can learn from Peterson about preaching is quite simply "how not to do it." Dog-whistling, contrarianism, fear-mongering and distorted, reductive, pseudo-intellectual, agenda-serving interpretation of the Bible and other venerated sources of authority? Nah, yer alright thanks.  In fact, the very first essay I submitted for m...

A LADY WALKS IN AS I’M LEAVING, AND Pause. “Am I … where I am supposed to be?” Petite, the pastel-two-pieced figure bars My exit, eyeing me confusèdly And blushing as it dawns on her she errs In one of two both-mortifying ways. I muster my most womanliest smile And, firmly unoffended, meet her gaze: “I know! We’re used to queuing!” I freestyle. She breathes relief. I take my person out The unambiguously coded door – As order mollifies her nagging doubt – And lose the mask. I shrug it off, secure In my admission by the status quo; But every body needs some where to go. Carolyn Whitnall, 2019. I’m cautious to write about gender because I don’t want to seem to weigh in on matters that are outside of my comfortably protected (cis female) experience. But one thing I do know a bit about is anxiety, and I see a lot of it (especially among Christians) in response to increasing societal awareness and embrace of gender diversity beyond the assigned sex binary. Every now a...

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. ( Genesis 1 :1-2). On Twitter last year during Advent, Wil Gafney (a womanist biblical scholar I hope you’re all following too) called attention to the problematic ways in which “ light versus dark ” imagery in the Bible gets associated with a “good versus evil” paradigm without proper recognition or critique of the role that such binaries have played in producing and perpetuating racism. [1] It was uncomfortable and personally convicting to realise that the language and metaphors of scriptures that I love (and that pre-date constructions of race) had been so distorted by human, and specifically Christian, sin and oppression that their use (when handled unthoughtfully) could contribute to ongoing harm. [2] I happened to be reading Jordan Peterson’s ‘ Twelve Rules ’ at the time (y’know, to...