The One With With Women, Christianity And North America

Or as the class is actually called, Women in North American Christianity.

There are three reasons why I chose this course:

1) I like Christianity.

2) I'm in North America.

3) I spend most of my theological energy talking about women in Christianity, also known as, God calls women to be priests shut up you misogynisitc, ignorant fools. (In a loving Christian way...)

WINAC as I shall refer to it henceforth, is the other half of my Emma Anderson-day and is the better half. There's no annoying first year in this class plus I prefer the subject matter. It does what it says on the tin really; it's about women in North American Christianity and I think the course looks fascinating. It will look at women from Canada's "birth" all the way through to the present day! I'm probably most looking forward to studying Kateri Tekakwitha who will be venerated in October. She was an Algonquin-Mohawk Catholic. A fervent practiser of mortification of the flesh, she died tragically young, aged just 24.

In today's class, we looked quite closely at women and self mortification in Christianity. It's the kind of thing that sent the Womens' Studies majors into a frenzy about how dreadful it is, but from a theological perspective, it's really rather intriguing. Now, I'm in now way glorifying self-harm or promoting physical suffering by way of becoming closer to the suffering Christ (he took the pain, so you don't have to), but from a colonial perspective if we're being specific to Canada, and from a general Christian perspective; if you're being persecuted, mortification of the flesh takes the control of inflicting pain away from the persecutor and restores the power to the persecuted.

Personally, I'd never go for the hair shirt or self-flaggelation or forced-TOWIE watching; to me, it kind of undermines God the healer. I feel like these past two posts haven't actually been that informative about my classes, for which I profusely apologise!