Gospel of Mark – Feminism and Religion

I’m writing a book, a constructive intersectional ecclesiology theologically grounded in the Gospel According to Mark. In other words, a book about what it means to be church today, in light of the constellation of challenges it faces, that turns to the earliest gospel as a resource.

Early in the book proposal writing process, one of my editors gave me a creative writing assignment; I’m sharing the prompt with you here along with my response. Sit back and enjoy a short story about four evil dragons and a struggling community that lost its way…

THE PROMPT (1/15/26):

I want you to pretend that you are going to tell the story of your book to a 6 year old heading off to bed for the night. This needs to be a kind of mythic story – Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived….. And it has to be short. There needs to be an evil dragon, and a wonderous bi princess who slays the dragon and restores peace to the Kin-dom.

There’s a lot of hullabaloo these days about belief in God, atheism, separation of religion and state. However, like it or not, Western civilization is a Christian one.

Ever since the Roman Empire officially became Christian in the 4^th century Christianity has formed an integral part of the Greco-Roman culture, forging the West’s crystallization.

And within this religious-political-cultural matrix, women have been striving for equality of power in virtually every field. Most of the time men had the upper hand.

Yet in Christianity’s early maturation period an egalitarian approach to the gender issue was the accepted norm. Following a good start in gender power sharing in the Early Christian Church, this enlightened approach gradually changed for the worse. In the early 6^th century women found themselves stigmatized and demoted from almost all the major roles in church service and liturgy.

So what went wrong? Continue reading “The Case for a Woman Pope: Mary Magdalene by Frank Shapiro”