Posts tagged with: rape

Pentecost 18

This week’s lessons are difficult. They present the incestuous rape of Tamar by her half brother Amnon, the complicity of her cousin who set her up to be raped and, her father’s abandonment of her after the rape. The physical and sexual violence that characterized David became a signature of his dynasty and descendants. I...... Read More

Ritualizing Bathsheba’s Rape

In the powerful image by Pauline Williamson (who creates as Sea), Bathsheba sits with her dead or dying child produced from David’s rape while he prays for the child. See her own interpretive work on this passage here. It is Shrove Tuesday, the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday when Christians traditionally went to confession and were...... Read More

Trafficked into Marriage

Today black women in the United States and perhaps some of our allies are wearing geles, traditional West African head wraps like those worn in Nigeria to call attention to the hundreds of our daughters, kidnapped and sold like the Israelite daughters at Shiloh more than three thousand years ago. Some folk still have not...... Read More

Hosea’s Mothering God: Back to Egypt

Listen to the recording (mp3 file) Hosea 11:3 I, I taught Ephraim to walk,  I took them up in my arms; yet they did not know that I healed them. 4 I pulled them along with humane restraint,  with ties of love. And I was to them like those who lift babies to their cheeks,...... Read More

Savaging Women (and Men)

The festering scab of our rape epidemic has been ripped off (again), revealing the festering flesh underneath. Women and girls snatched off the street and held in chains for years as sex slaves; predators talking their way into the homes of struggling single mothers for access to their children; male soldiers and defense contractors raping...... Read More

Rape Culture, God and the Bible

Rape is at the forefront of our civil discourse in ways it has not been in my memory or experience: A young woman raped to the point of death in India has been the focus of international media. During the run up to the presidential election Rep. Todd Akin articulated his belief in legitimate and...... Read More