Critic Cal

Then Jephthah came to his home at Mizpah; and there was his daughter coming out to meet him with timbrels and with dancing. She was his only child; he had no son or daughter except her. When he saw her, he tore his clothes, and said, “Alas, my daughter! You have brought me very low; you have become the cause of great trouble to me. For I have opened my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot take back my vow.” ( Judges 11 :34-35) MEN OF THEIR WORD   Now Jephthah was a mighty promiser; A man Of Gilead, by Fallen Matriliny but His father’s son Unstinting in ambition. Jephthah was A leader of his brothers, Takers-back of land together, for the glory, Hallelujah, Of the Lord, the land, his brothers For his father’s house. He was a worshipper, According to the true profession, Jephthah Burned with holy fire On the threshold of his premises. He did His people proud. And so It is a custom, to this day, among the people That the fathers of their daughters Every year asse...

I'm a reluctant traveller but there's something about the 'liminal space' of an airport that captures my imagination, drawn as it easily is towards questions of order and chaos, boundaries and negotiation, norms and transgression, "exclusion and embrace" (see, e.g., Volf) , etc. As such – and helped by the fact that my dread of missing flights tends to leave me with above-average amounts of waiting time to fill – the process of flight travel has emerged as a recurring theme among my recent poem attempts. Except ... well, even before I was done admiring my latest effort, the whole exercise struck me as grimly ironic. Just how much unheeding privilege does it take to find an airport 'interesting'?! Where I see  symbols  of the status quo (inviting my imagined metaphorical subversion), other people are experiencing the oppressively, dehumanisingly tangible outworkings of it. [1] So (a bit like a cryptography researcher who proposes a secure scheme ...

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...

Unusually for a Christian book, William P. Young's  The Shack   (Now A Major Motion Picture ) caused quite a stir in the wider publishing world. For those unfamiliar, it is a story about a man in the wake of life-wrecking tragedy, who finds himself the invited guest of the triune God in a shape-shifting cabin in the middle of a forest. All sorts of healing and self-understanding and provocative conversational exchanges ensue, as you might imagine. The book was unexpectedly popular (topping the New York Times Best Seller list for fiction between 2008 and 2010) and predictably controversial. Among the several charges laid against it by 'concerned evangelicals' was the 'idolatrous' depiction of the first and third Persons of the Trinity – as an African-American woman, in the case of God the Father, and as an Asian woman, in the case of God the Holy Spirit. Now, actually, old habits die hard and I am still 'concerned evangelical' enough to be rather uncom...

A tipsily cheerful, older-than-me chap in the pub where I go to write recently informed me that, d'you know, he'd walked past my table a couple of times and  he couldn't decide whether I was a man or a woman! To be fair to my new friend, I wasn't dressed as a woman. I wasn't dressed 'as' anything. I was just there in jeans and a conference hoodie – ideal for the (coldish) weather and the errand-y to-dos on my list, but hardly apt to give a person curves they don't already possess. My medium-length hair had been styled by the elements, my complexion was as even and clear as OK-ish hydration and cleansing would have it, and I hadn't so much as sketched a single facial feature. And yet, here I was outside the confines of my own home and apparently quite comfortable to be seen in public. It does seem like more the sort of thing a man would do... Not that all men choose to present themselves 'as-is', but at least it's socially acceptab...

I remember the first time I choked on the word 'evangelical'. We had joined for the Sunday service of the  Metropolitan Community Church  [1] near our hotel in San Francisco. The (himself gay) minister had just given a raw and real sermon on either Luke 6 or Matthew 5 , I'm not sure – "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. [...] Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you." ( Luke 6 :27-28, 37). Hearing this passage applied in the particular context of deeply felt griefs inflicted on the LGBT+ community by the wider church was humbling to say the least. He welcomed us after the service – asked us what we were doing in the city and took an interest in our own church backgrounds. The 'e-word' was out before I had a chance to consider the extra political and personal loadings it i...

You've let yourself go, you're a 3, you're a 9 but you're vain, you're too thin, you're too fat, you're too much at the gym, you have body hair, pores, too much make-up, you're dressed like a frump, like a tramp, you're a prude, you're a prick-tease, a turn-off, a slut, you're too girly, too butch, you're not smiling, you're endlessly styling your hair, it's too frizzy, too flat, you spend too much on products, you're visibly ageing, you must have had work done, you've lapsed in your duty of care, you're no more than a housewife, you're too career-driven, you've got no ambition, you're talking too much and too loudly, you've nothing to say, you're a bimbo, too smart, too assertive, a doormat, behaving too much like a man, you're a typical woman. In short, there are no "fine lines" here: achieving acceptable womanhood isn't a balancing act, it's impossible. Logically  imp...