This past week, I was listening to Krista Tippett’s podcast On Being as she spoke with Pádraig Ó Tuama. He is a poet, theologian, and leader in the Corrymeela community of Northern Ireland. As he spoke about several things related to the challenges of belonging, reconciliation, and fractured communities, he said, ”The measure of Christian fidelity is more than the positions we take.”
I agree. I interpreted his statement as a condemnation of the ways Christian doctrines and moral positions too often take priority over other matters of faith.
Continue reading “Doctrine and Fidelity by Elise M. Edwards”
I have been thinking frequently about trauma, about what perpetuates suffering and what supports the arduous journey of transforming traumatic experiences, especially in the aftermath of traumas of human design. The violation of bodies lies at the heart of such traumas. Thus, how we practice behaviors that refuse to denigrate bodies are critical and necessary to alleviating suffering and promoting the body’s dignity.
Yesterday morning when I learned about the 
El Presidente was enlarging his war against his citizens. This meant the roads were more crowded than before with refugees fleeing the capital city for safety among the farmers on the plains and up in the hills. Some of these refugees arrived, of course, at the farm of the wicked witch.
Beneath all being is a universal rhythm that is as deep as natural law and as easy to find as the beat of a drum. After giving up an early interest in percussion 50 years ago when a school music teacher told me “girls don’t play drums, ” I discovered this in a World Rhythms hand drumming class at a local music conservatory. The other students, our uber-patient teacher, and I were pounding away, practicing rhythms and counter-rhythms, when we were suddenly all embraced by the flow of a single central pulse and, freed from the constant task of trying to stay on beat, created, for that moment, an entity of sound that was unique, beautiful and complex, and living.
Last month, I attended a lecture by Anglican theologian Adrian Thatcher on his recent book, 
A friend recently asked me whether I believed in sin. It was a strange question for me to consider because the concept of “belief” as applied to “sin” already suggests that sin itself is not a self-evident or manifest reality. Considering the question, I had to answer that I didn’t actually believe in sin as an objective ontic something. Hurt, wounds, violence, injustice, suffering – these are objective realities that I have no trouble identifying. It was in naming the contrast or painful human experiences as sin with which I had the difficulty, since sin connotes moral, spiritual, intellectual, or volitional defect or evil. My intuition pushes back against this reading of the suffering the world reflects, at least in the microcosm, the imperfection of creatures, or perhaps better put, animals, and in a best case scenario, animals in process.
During the January 21st Women’s March in New York City, I was inspired and delighted by so many of the signs women and men had crafted to express their opposition to the current disastrous regime in the United States: “Grab America Back,” “Support Your Mom,” “Sad!,” “Miss Uterus Strikes Back.” But one image stood out, mesmerizing me: that of a woman proudly wearing an American flag as hijab, with a message below—“We The People Are Greater Than Fear.” For several blocks as we made our way up Fifth Avenue, I walked beside a woman carrying that sign, and it became, for me, the most powerful symbol of the resistance we must all wage during the dark time ahead.
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Feminism and Religion 