Interfaith panel on nonviolence and torture
Holy Spirit Retreat Center in Encino, CA
“‘They Did Not Know:’ Torture, Denial, and the Imagination of Communities of Faith” at “Religious Faith, Torture, and Our Nations Soul,” cosponsored by the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, Peace and Justice Commission, Commission on Ecumenical and Interreligious Concerns, Progressive Christians Uniting, and Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace
City of West Hollywood/LA Weekly Book Fair
"Praying Our Lives," Harvard Divinity School
Center for New Words in Cambridge, MA
If you are interested in setting up a tour date with Sarah, please use the Contact Form
An award-winning speaker, Sarah Sentilles is available to work with communities of all kinds—divinity schools, seminaries, churches, temples, mosques, book groups—about women’s leadership, Christianity and torture, and challenges facing religious communities in the twenty-first century. For more information, please use our Contact Form.
Sarah is available to consult with your community to determine the answer this question. She will strategize with you about how to create a more welcoming church–analyzing your liturgy, visiting with your community, talking about how you support your woman minister (or why you don’t have one) and helping you think about how to create a church community that is welcoming to all people.
Ever feel embarrassed to call yourself a Christian in public? Ever wonder how words like “life” and “American” and “moral” began to be used as instruments of exclusion and hate? Ever have the desire to reclaim the language of faith? Sarah will talk about the need to salvage words that mean something to you and offer suggestions for reinvigorating them so they might do the work of justice.
If the Bible says women should be silent and submissive, if ancient doctrine says women cannot be priests because Jesus did not ordain any women, if God created woman as somehow less than man, and we ordain women anyway, then how we understand the bible, tradition, and God will be fundamentally and irrevocably altered. Ordaining women offers an opportunity to question what people believe and why they believe it, ushering us into a new relationship with faith. If we ordain women in spite of what the bible or the Vatican or God says, then what else might we need to rethink? How do we hold ourselves accountable for the effects of our beliefs? Why do we say what we say every Sunday morning? Ordaining women unravels belief and offers it back to us, revealing that we are always in the process of constructing, destroying, and recreating our belief systems.
Why are we so afraid of women’s bodies? The women interviewed in A Church of Her Own endured relentless comments about their clothing, bodies, dating lives, and sexuality. Their stories reveal that we don’t know what to do with women’s bodies in the pulpit, largely because we don’t know what to do with bodies in most forms of Christianity. The body–and in particular the female body–has been denigrated, feared, understood as sinful, shameful, something to be covered up, tamed, and mastered. There is something ferocious about our fear of bodies in churches. And yet, at the heart of Christianity are stories about incarnation, about a God that dwells in a human body, a God that makes bodies and breathes life into them.
Almost immediately, women’s calls to ministry, when heard by others, are filtered through cultural expectations about ministers–what they ought to look like, think like, pray like, dress like, love like. What do women’s struggles to live out their vocations as ministers reveal about women’s struggles in other professions? What happens when you encounter roadblocks on your vocational path? How hard is it to live into your sense of where your joy and the world’s need meet? What does it take just to make it through a day at work?
A Church of Her Own reveals how women’s calls to ministry are transformed by their journeys toward ordination. Many struggled to make their complicated life experiences fit into institutional processes that were not made with them in mind. How do women’s experience in the ordination process make visible problems that exist for all people trying to get ordained? How might women’s experience help churches break out of the one-size-fits-all model? What does the ordination process reveal about what churches think it takes to be a priest or a minister? What kinds of ministers are churches, seminaries, and divinity schools shaping people to be?
One of the challenges faced by recent divinity school and seminary graduates–and the communities they serve–is the disjunction between the theology they learn in school and the theology being preached in and professed by churches. There is a vast difference between what denominations claim as official doctrine and what students learn in graduate school. Challenging people’s long-held beliefs–and having one’s own challenged–can be frightening, uncomfortable, even devastating. What’s more, exposing people to a variety of beliefs means making room for people to have a variety of beliefs and raises questions about what makes a community a community: What would a faith community look like that celebrated difference? What is essential? What holds us together? How do we make meaning?
Many of the women interviewed in A Church of Her Own said that the easiest way to get rid of an annoying person hitting on you in a bar is to say that you are a minister–that is, if you are a woman. How do you date as a minister? What does it mean to be a single woman in ministry? How can you bring your whole self to your vocation? How can you keep some sense of privacy? Why is sex such a tricky issue in the church? Why does it feel like congregations don’t want their ministers to be human?
Many of the ministers in A Church of Her Own committed to changing the church from within – often at great personal cost. In their struggles to make churches more just and welcoming places for everyone, they expanded the boundaries of what it means to be a minister, what it means to be a person of faith, what it means to be church. How much of a price–emotional, physical, spiritual–do you have to pay to stay in the struggle? How do you decide whether to stay or to go? What does it mean to belong? Is change best made from within an institution or from without?
How welcoming is your church to women?
How did the words that matter to me get hijacked?
Why do I believe what I believe? What do I believe?
Oh my God, my minister has cleavage!?!
That sounds just like what I experience at work!
Just what kind of minister am I being trained to be?
What will I do with what I learned in divinity school?