A Women's Lectionary for the Whole Church Year B

Download or read book A Women's Lectionary for the Whole Church Year B written by Wilda C. Gafney and published by Church Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this project I propose at least two new lectionaries, a year "W," a women's readings year that can be added to the current Episcopal or Revised Common (RCL) Lectionaries, and a new three-year cycle. How would a lectionary centering women's stories, chosen with womanist and feminist commitments in mind frame the presentation of the scriptures for proclamation and teaching? More simply, what would it look like if women built a lectionary focusing on women's stories? How is the story of God told when stories of women's brutalization and marginalization are moved from the margins of canon and lectionary, and held in the center in tension with stories of savvy and strong women, women whose contribution is not limited to or does not even include childbearing? There are more than two billion Christians in the world according to the Pew Research Center demographic projections (Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life, Global Religious Landscape, December 2012), 2.3 billion in 2015. With Roman Catholics making up an estimated 1.2 billion, and accounting for Orthodox Christians, Anglicans, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and other Reformed traditions along with some Baptist and congregational churches that use a lectionary, the overwhelming majority of Christians receive their scripture mediated through a lectionary. Based on the numbers in the Pew Research Center's 12 May 2015 report, "America's Changing Religious Landscape," as much as sixty percent of American Christians attend services in churches that use lectionaries. Those lectionaries are not simply as androcentric as are the scriptures, but in my experience as a congregant and priest, women are even less well represented than they are in the biblical text. For example, there are one hundred and eleven named women in the Hebrew Scriptures-which is itself under-represented in preaching lectionaries-not accounting for the numbers of unnamed women and girls. The lectionary is a catechetical tool. All many congregants know of the bible is the texts they hear read from their respective lectionary. As a biblical scholar it is my hope to see congregants exposed to the bible more broadly and deeply, and see them equipped to engage the sacred texts of their tradition critically, with nuance. This book will be for use in liturgical contexts in parishes and the institutions of the Church, in seminary classrooms-particularly worship and liturgy, and for individual devotional use"--