The Friday Five: 08/31/12

Okay, so I'm trying a new thing. I'm re-branding This Week In Cool Stuff as The Friday Five. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

So here are my favorite 5 stories/blog posts/crazy crap from the past week:

1. Jessica Bowman talks about her struggle with giving herself grace. Excerpt:

Sometimes I think I’m just beginning to understand the truth that God loves me and to understand the depth and compassion of that love.  I tentatively take the tired and canned phrases of grace and love off the shelf of my theology and shake out the contents to examine them more closely, hold them up to the light.

Boy, do I need help with that one!

2. Kathy Escobar shares five nonviolent ways to help win the war on women. I would post an excerpt, but you're gonna have to check it out for yourself!

3. Nathan Bransford explains the publishing process using GIFs. HI-larious!

4. Shay Kearns shares why he is still a Christian. Excerpt:

I believe that there is something life giving in the Christian story. There are themes of liberation and justice throughout the Scripture, there is a story of a God who is intimately involved with God’s own creation.

There is the incarnation. The story of God becoming human: the story that tells us both our bodies and our spirits have worth and are holy.

I find meaning in Jesus a man who was so wholly in touch with his own divinity and so wholly human. He teaches me that I can find the spirit of God in myself. I believe that Jesus tells us something important about God and what God is like.

(This story is actually from last week, but since I didn't share it last week, I'm sharing it this week.)

5. Finally, Rachel Held Evans gives us "Confessions of an Accidental Feminist:"

It wasn’t a formal feminist education that taught me to be frustrated with gender stereotypes. It was all the women’s Bible studies that focused on domesticity, motherhood, sweetness, and submission, and that thrust upon me flower-speckled books that turned Proverbs 31 into a job description befitting June Cleaver rather than a poem of celebration befitting an ancient Near Eastern royal wife.

It wasn’t a formal feminist education that taught me about rape culture. It was the preachers and evangelists who insinuated that girls who dressed immodestly were “asking for it.” And it wasn’t a formal feminist education that taught me about victim-shaming. It was the response of evangelical leaders who,  when confronted by abuse survivors about troubling language regarding submission and sex, dismissed their concerns as silly, chastising them as “bedwetting feminists,” stirring up division.

So there you have it. My top five stories of the week. Got any you'd like to share?