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...

Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.  What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:5-8) CONTRACTIONS The Spirit gives birth to spirit. The Spirit gives birth. Except a man be born of water and the Spirit he – Except – And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And the Spirit is not 'It,' they said. Amen! The Spirit is 'He.' The Spirit gives birth. You must be born again. Look, here is water – Darkness is upon the amnion. Let fall the form and content I would hold regardless; Spirit Who gives birth, Deliver us. Carolyn Whitnall, 2019/21. The word the Hebrew Bible uses to describe God's Spiri...

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...

Through prayer and study over the course of many months I came to believe that: a) church should celebrate and support same-sex covenant partnerships no less than we do mixed-sex ones, and b) church should welcome gifted and called people into all areas of ministry at all levels, without barriers of gender or sexuality. [1] There are people (I was one of them, once) who would see such a position as popularity-seeking. Ha. My circle of acquaintance mostly divides into: those who are understandably shocked I could ever have believed otherwise, and disturbed that it took me so long to change my mind [2], and those who are appalled at my "rejection of truth” and have no further interest in anything I might say about anything. Well. OK. It’s not like I was popular to begin with. But if you are in that latter semi-circle, I urge you – for the sake of neighbours and siblings in Christ whose flourishing, well-being, dignity, and sometimes even lives are at stake – to examine your...

In Doris Lessing ’s The Golden Notebook , the protagonist is repeatedly approached with proposals to adapt her novel into a screenplay, all of which eschew the challenging societal critique at the heart of the book in preference for comfortable, familiar-story-arc reductions likely to please and appease a wide audience. It got me thinking about how we frequently and instinctively do that with the Bible – and about how much we risk missing or diminishing when we default to readings that conform to our prior expectations, rather than allowing scripture to conflict with and challenge those expectations. No doubt I’m desensitised to this when it suits me. But I’ve grown quick to notice when the Bible’s accounts of female characters, already fewer in number than its stories of men, are read through a filter of familiarity and a priori gender assumptions. The book of Ruth is a prime candidate – partly because we do love a good love story, and partly because it is hard for us in the here...

A few months back, increasingly anxious about Jordan Peterson 's growing influence among Christian men, and wanting a fuller picture (beyond the eek-inducing soundbites) of exactly what it was they and so many others were embracing, I gritted my teeth and, to Mr. W's horror, read 12 Rules for Life . It left me with Many Thoughts, but too disturbed and weary to share them straight away. I hope I will get around to doing so properly one day – I'm especially keen to unpack the aspects of the book's ideology that seem to me so flagrantly at odds with Christ-like self-giving and the subversion of dominance hierarchies characteristic of God's royal reign. In the meantime, here is a poem which it may or may not have had something to do with. 'And Mary said: “My soul glorifies the Lord [...] He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the...

Judah got a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death. Then Judah said to Onan, “Sleep with your brother’s wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to raise up offspring for your brother.” But Onan knew that the child would not be his; so whenever he slept with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death also. ( Genesis 38:6-10 ) According to Google's answer to what (let's face it) must be right up there among the most-asked questions since the invention of the search engine, this story is the closest the Bible comes to saying anything directly about masturbation. And it isn't a story about masturbation. It's not even a story, not really, about birth control methods – although they feature. It's a story about the denial...

"Those who call themselves feminists – whether "biblical" ones or otherwise – seem to have one belief in common, and only one that I have been able to extract from their arguments: They agree that there is no difference between men and women , apart from the physiological one. It is on this level and this level alone that they recognize men and women as functionally noninterchangeable." (Elisabeth Eliot, The Mark of a Man , 1981, p25; emphasis my own). As a "biblical" feminist myself, this (from a book that I read "for balance", but found too woefully un balanced to recommend) is news to me. Here is my best (deliberately brief and vague) stab at the "beliefs" that feminists mostly (perhaps, just about, on the whole) hold in common: Women and men are of equal worth. Our equality is not borne out in lived reality. We shouldn't just accept this. So, "there is no difference between men and women, apart from the physiol...