Things like, “May His light shine on you always” or “May He bring peace and love to you” or “Let your hearts be filled with Him so that His grace may be with you now and always.” My husband and I have always scoured the cards in order to find ones with art we like, but this year I rejected more than one hopeful because of the message inside. This newly recognized-and-openly-named feminism keeps popping up at the most inconvenient times, making me wonder if there isn’t a way to shut it off, at least temporarily.īuying Christmas cards this past year was even more of an ordeal than it usually is. She writes about how “following Jesus made a feminist out of her.” Apparently, following Jesus is making a feminist out of me, too. Several months ago, I encountered Bessey’s book, Jesus Feminist. I have started to read blogs of women like Rachel Held Evans and Sarah Bessey, women who claim “feminist” as a description for them, too. “Did you hear that? Let saints their songs employ! Saints, not just men!” When a popular Christian musician replaced “men” with “saints” in a carol on his Christmas album, I stopped rolling out pie crust to share my excitement with my husband. I have even started to wonder about words like “fellowship.” (I’m not a fellow, after all can I still have fellowship?) I realized that I can’t stand words like “brotherhood” to describe the Christian family, and I cringe when a song refers to “men” and means the whole body of Christ. I announced my intention to refer to the Holy Spirit as “she” instead of “he” or “it.” (“You’re one of those people,” responded a friend.) I listened to classmates declare that they have gotten “Him’d” out of male depictions for God. Of course, it’s not quite fair to say that nothing has changed. Not because something radical has changed about what I believe about women and men, but because I’ve realized that I’m no longer interested in hiding from a word in order to avoid other people’s ideas about that word.

Not long ago, for the first time, I used the word “feminist” to describe myself.

Jesus Feminist by Sarah Bessey