Melissa Florer-Bixler

In the hands of coercive power, the Bible is a weapon.

Kesha’s latest album could have been written by Hagar, Tamar, or Ruth.

In God's life, all creatures get attention.

The morning after the House passed its health care bill, my daughter and I planted some seeds.

Naming sexism as sexism is not a failure to engage diverse views.

As the children make their way out the door, trails of leftover communion bread go with them.

For career day at my daughter's school, I brought pictures of some of the things pastors do. The students were mostly interested in the funerals.

Each time I read these words from the beginning of Proverbs, I can't stop thinking about how much I would like to hear a child read them in worship.

In the Talmud, there is a story of a group of rabbis arguing over the status of a particular clay oven. Is it clean or unclean? Rabbi Eliezer stands alone against the interpretation given by his fellow sages, and he begins to call upon nature to confirm him.

James reminds us of the duplicity of language, like a matchstick dropped by singed fingers that leaves behind charred acres. The deception of language is that we believe it is innocent.

I have spent most of my Christian life in deep discomfort with Mark 7. I now read it as an early example of the priesthood of all believers.

“So, what’s your plan? You going to keep working your way up to bigger and better churches and church leadership positions?” This was the end of a conversation I had with one of my parishioners at the church where I am the newly minted minister to children. Over the past few weeks it has become clear how difficult it is for most people to get their heads around my recent change in ministry roles.

The New York Times recently published an article about the revived process of accountability in the Mennonite church between our now-deceased, famed theologian John Howard Yoder and the victims of his sexual abuse. I’m not an expert on Yoder, and, like most people, I too am realizing that there is much I didn’t know about the extent of Yoder’s sexual coercion—both its content and its reach. But I have been surprised by the number of people who were unaware this was part of Yoder’s past.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on why I’ve felt some angst about Ellen Dollar Painter’s post “Why Don’t You Just Adopt?” over on Thin Places.

In her essay in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, “First
Things First,” Kirsten Holst Petersen writes about her experience

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I spent last night curled around my toddler, bowl in hand, waiting for her to wake and vomit again. She had a miserable case of food poisoning that kept us both in and out of sleep until the morning. I was thinking about relaying this episode to a seminary friend who recently asked me to “sell” him on the idea of children.

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I just spent the last three hours trying not to cry my eyes out in pastoral care class. The topic this week was funerals.

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