This conversation is over a year in the making. When I first heard about this project last spring, I was intrigued and completely unprepared to read this book, much less do an interview. What Sarah Stankorb has done in Disobedient Women is extraordinary. For fans of Kristen Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that work kept coming to mind over and over again as I read this book. What I have said of that work is that Du Mez pulled back the curtain on a culture, the culture that discipled me for so many years. “It’s like the Jesus and John Wayne for the topic of women within white American evangelicalism,” I kept thinking! I literally could not put it down, reading the first 60 pages on a porch surrounded by wind gusts preparing the way for a storm to hit the city. What Sarah has done, both in the book and in this episode, is report on what she discovered as she allowed herself to become privy to the women who were disobedient enough to speak out about the abuses, coverups, and misogyny they suffered at the hands of men in the church and the cultures that keep them in power. The reason this conversation was a year in the making is because I, as a 40-something woman who grew up in the Bible belt in an SBC church, was not ready to face what I already knew in such concentrated, well-researched, albeit compassion-filled form. But after a year of more stories of the same that just keep coming out, I became ready to talk and I reached out to Sarah. Gratefully she didn’t hesitate to meet me and I can’t wait to share our time together with you.
Mentioned in this episode:
Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors, and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning by Sarah Stankorb
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy by Cait West
You might also enjoy:
Ep. 186 with Caryn Reeder, biblical scholar and #metoo advocate
Ep. 189 with Nijay Gupta, New Testament scholar, conversing on women in ministry in the early church
Ep. 249 with Scott Coley, professor of philosophy