Dan J. Brennan

Evangelical Utopia and Unmarried Women

Marlena Graves’ recent post on Desperate for Their MRS Degrees highlighted the desperation of young evangelical women in college to find a husband before they graduate. She pointed out how women will go to great lengths to find romantic "salvation." She wonders how this obsession impacts women and their callings.

As a white evangelical male, I write this with great fear and trepidation.  I don’t know what it's like to walk in the shoes of an unmarried woman in the evangelical sub-culture. But I’ve made it a point to listen to the stories of women. I also know something of the crisis in the evangelical church and unmarried women.

Sheer Delight in Your Friend

We've become so sub-incarnational in friendship, distancing ourselves away from embodied delight in our friend's embodied presence. Delight in your friend is a part of moral and spiritual formation. Evangelicals typically focus on the intellectual part of delight in friendship. But Diana Fritz Cates, in her classic book, Choosing to Feel: Virtue, Friendship, and Compassion for Friends steers us back to embracing incarnation and friendship:

“Intimate character-friends not only respect each other’s goodness and experience a kind of “intellectual pleasure” in the sharing of conversation and other activities. They also long for each other’s company. They are physically and emotionally stirred and delight by each other’s embodied presence...

“Friends can and do choose, for example, to engage in activities that bring them sheer delight in each other’s embodied presence. They can and do choose to take up new activities with each other when the fire in their relationship begins to smolder. They can and do choose to cultivate ways of perceiving each other that highlight each other’s most attractive intellectual, emotional, and physical qualities. True enough, character-friends are attracted to each other chiefly on the basis of each other’s character, but it cannot be denied that a person’s character often finds partial expression in things like her physical appearance and her level of physical fitness. Friends can and do choose, to some extent, to attend in their passionate perceptions to those physical expressions that bespeak what they take to be each other’s most lovable qualities of character. They can and do choose, to some extent, to regard tenderly those expressions that bespeak each other’s deepest vulnerabilities and weaknesses.”

Wendy Wright on Spiritual Friendship

For my blog readers who might be unaware, it was Wendy Wright's small but powerhouse article, "Reflections on Spiritual Friendship" which rocked my world and gave me imagination for intimate friendships between men and women who are not married to each other.

Wright, a Roman Catholic, teaches at Creighton. We had a brief email correspondence back in 2006, I think. She emailed an article she wrote for the Weavings Journal in 1988. In my estimation, it remains one of the best articles ever written on spiritual friendships between men and women. Here, is just a small excerpt and you'll understand how this has impacted me. Kathy Escobar's reference to friendship as a discipline reminded me of Wright's article:

Review: A Year of Biblical Womanhood

She did it!

Rachel Held Evans has created quite a stir in the good old USA with her new book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood. So many well known voices in the evangelical world have chimed in already.

When I was just a young lad, pop singer Helen Reddy came out with the song, “I am Woman.”  It became an anthem for liberating women in the West.

Rachel’s approach in this book, her humor, her depth, her unique and provocative way of stirring the pot, her extraordinary writing power, her transparency, her knowledge of hermeneutical issues—will serve as a liberating voice for women in “biblical” communities.

She is gifted. She is a thinker. She is a lover of the Bible. She is a woman.

Vulnerability, Friendship, and Leadership: Some Random Thoughts

“Vulnerability begets vulnerability; courage is contagious” writes Brené Brown in her newest book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. I am sure many of my readers already know this but Brown is known for her others books, The Gifts of Imperfection, and I Thought It Was Just Me.

Her new book arrived last week in the mail.

What is vulnerability? Is it weakness? Is it connected to our failures? Is it letting it all hang out with boundaryless connections from a place of unmet needs? 

Mutuality and Play: The Boundaries of Human Hope

"He makes us love all that he loves, for his love's sake, 

and makes us take pleasure in him and all his works." 

Julian of Norwich

"The recovery of play is an invitation to friendship. Playfulness means the devalutation of control. Play involves the capacity to trust and surrender. So also with friendship... In the midst of giving myself over to the experience, there seems to be a spontaneous movement from my own enjoyment to enjoyment of my friend." James Nelson, The Intimate Connection

I remember reading this four plus years ago before I had written Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions.  Is there is a healthy wildness to play between cross-gender friends that is delightfully free and a deep affirmation of God's splendor and goodness for men and women? 

I think play is definitely a part of what is included for men and women to be fully alive. If I could translate St. Irenaeus quote for today: "The glory of God is men and women fully alive--and playing together." Is there is a healthy wildness to play between cross-gender friends that delightfully promotes the glory of God in the here and now?  

"Friendships are Marriages of the Souls"

"Friendships are marriages of the soul, and of fortunes and interests, and counsels."  Jeremy Taylor

Friendship, Differences, and Mutual Flourishing

Diana Fritz Cates in her academic book, Choosing to Feel: Virtue, Friendship, and Compassion for Friends muses on friends who choose to share deliberations and choices. Had to share this excerpt on friends, differences and mutual flourishing:

Inappropriate Relationships and Evangelical Therapists Pt. 3

So what would have happened had Scot McKnight asked how his blog readers would have felt had their married adult daughter come to her parents to say, “I’ve been going to a therapist. He’s been helping me work through some issues.”

Would any of them raised issues about emotional boundaries? Would anybody have expressed deep concerns about the daughter meeting alone weekly with another man who is not her husband?  Would Scot have warned about the emotional boundaries and safeguards of “exclusivism” in marriage?

Let’s hit the rewind button for a second. Scot McKnight, a friend, a theologian, one of evangelicalism’s most prolific and respected bloggers graciously introduced my book to his readers when it first came out. I am grateful for Scot’s generosity even though we have differences on male-female friendship, oneness, and marriage.

“Inappropriate Relationships and Evangelical Therapists” provides an opportunity to revisit those differences. You can read parts one and two here to catch up.

Within this series, I am highlighting some significant aspects of an expanding conversation among evangelicals. There are several things to explore with this series: ambiguities, contradictions among evangelicals about emotional depth and fidelity, two-tiered elite/lay system, the “unholy trinity,” and redemptive oneness in marriage and friendship.

Let’s start where Scot and I agree.

Inappropriate Relationships and Evangelical Therapists Pt. 2

As it turns out, if you read part one in this series on “Inappropriate Relationships and Evangelical Therapists” I have something in common with thousands of evangelical therapists which would shock some of them:

If you’re married, it is not inappropriate for you to be alone with a member of the opposite sex (married or not married) with whom you share an intentional dyadic relationship when no one else is present. It’s not inappropriate to nurture shared vulnerability, mutuality, authenticity, deep empathetic connection, and tender, meaningful touch when no one else is around.

That’s it.