The Paris Project

A fifth cackling

This could go on forever, I know, but I want to consider two practices either raised in earlier comments, or just important to me.

From thinkingoutloud, “what makes something women friendly? recently i attended a national event and out of the 18 speakers that were featured only one was female (one other canceled at the last minute and was replaced by a african american male). i confronted one of the organizers and asked him what was up with this. i asked him if it was a theological issue and he said no; if not, why? his answer was rather lame (in my judgment) and had something to do with not being able to connect with the right female voices at the right time. i strongly suggested he and the organizers be more pro-active about this for future events. he asked me a question: how many presenters should be female? he said he was opposed to doing some sort of affirmative action kind of thing just for the sake of balance.”

Inviting women just for balance is about the weakest reason and shows a lack of understanding of why women would be helpful. There is no answer to the question of “how many?”, because any answer would just create a law that could be followed in letter but not spirit. The answer is never one, however. One woman does not speak for women, nor does an African-American man speak for African-Americans, nor are women and African-Americans interchangeable as “Others.”

This conference, which I don’t know much about, announces "Our culture is changing, ARE YOU?” and then offers five male speakers and eleven male musicians who will mentor us into ministering in a changing culture. They do seem to have included culture – one ‘cross-cultural’ band and one Salvadoran speaker, but when the ratio of men to women is 16:1, I wonder whether they don’t believe in women in leadership (but don’t Bill Hybels and Erwin McManus affirm women in leadership? I don’t really know). And, by the way, advertisements for events featuring only men rarely run in The Christian Century -- I think mainliners have cultivated a different culture around this issue.

Another benchmark is representation. If your issue is, say, white men’s spirituality in English-speaking America, then by all means stack the deck with those guys. But if your topic is God, or church, or mission, then consider hearing from people with significantly different vantage points on the issue. Postmodern philosophy regarding standpoint theory or positionality (perspective shaped by social location) can be oversimplified into identity politics (perspective determined by identity), but if honored in its fullest sense, postmodern philosophy requires us to hear from a variety of subject positions on any given issue.

But there just aren’t women in my field of interest or area of expertise… (next topic)