Sunday Gathering

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Sunday’s Program and Reading:

Sunday, October 8, 2023
We Have Questions: Why Are Girls Going Fundamentalist?

Speaker: Dr. Sarah Kornfield is Associate Professor of Communication at Hope College, and affiliated professor of Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research combines rhetorical criticism and feminist theory to analyze three pillars of U.S. public culture: entertainment television, Christian religiosity, and politics. She is the author of Contemporary Rhetorical Criticism, and the upcoming publication from Johns Hopkins University Press, Invoking the Fathers.

Musician: Hannah Laine is a musician and vocal empowerment coach from Grand Rapids, best known as the vocalist for the Future-Soul band Earth Radio. She began singing and songwriting at a very young age, and has found refuge in music as a way of healing and processing her life experiences. Skilled in piano, vocal improvisation, beat-making, layering effects, and looping, her abilities to create a soundscape or groovy bop are limitless.

Music: Hannah Laine

Gathering Host: Chrys Moelter-Gray

Music: Hannah Laine

Meditation: Charity McMaster

Moment of Silence

Reading/Teaching: Dr. Sarah Kornfield

In tandem with efforts to promote ‘biblical manhood and womanhood,’ an elaborate ‘purity culture’ was taking hold across American evangelicalism. Purity culture emerged as a cohesive movement in the 1990s, but it drew on teachings long championed by conservative evangelicals accustomed to upholding stringent standards of female sexual ‘purity’ while assigning men the responsibility of ‘protecting’ women and their chastity. Female modesty was a key component of purity culture. If men were created with nearly irrepressible, God-given sex drives, it was up to women to rein in men’s libidos. Wives were tasked with meeting husbands’ every sexual need, but it was the responsibility of women and girls to avoid leading men who were not their husbands into temptation.”
-Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 169-170

Studying the 1990s and 2000s purity movement, Dr. Christine Gardner summarizes its message to girls like this, “God says you are a princess” and thus, “your behavior and the choices you make must be governed by that value if you are aiming for the sunset ending in your love story. You must present yourself as you would priceless china.” Notably, this collapses princesses (which–although tightly bound to damsel type narratives–have some potential agency and activity) into china teacups, which are delicate and beautiful because of their passive and fragile nature.
– Christine Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy, 74

Music: Hannah Laine

Gathering Host: Chrysteen Moelter-Gray

Music: Hannah Laine

.pdf of Bulletin/Matters

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