This Spring was a slow book month. I’m an audio book girlie who depends on long commutes to down titles quickly but most of my clients were local this quarter. Here’s the whole TWO books I read this Spring:
Becoming the Pastor’s Wife
Becoming the Pastor’s Wife by Beth Allison Barr is a must-read for people who love church history and religious social issues. Through gripping storytelling Dr. Barr maps out the journey from the women who historically served in leadership roles in the church to the complimentarian gender-role model most American churches have today. Dr. Barr also touches on how we arrived at what many of us church staffers have come to call the two-for-one-special. I heard about this book from the companion miniseries podcast, All the Burried Women, a deep-dive on the abuse cases of the SBC.
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Othered
It’s difficult to find the words to review a book that so closely mirrors your own experiences of spiritual abuse without revisiting all of those old feelings. I consume a lot of books on this topic, but Jenai Auman’s Othered was so raw and personal story-based that I had to listen in small chunks and pay attention to my nervous system as I went along. This book is a must-read, but trigger warning for those who have experienced religious abuse.
I loved Auman’s use of Genesis 3 to show how the roots of what drive behaviors like spiritual abuse are as deep as mankind itself. I also loved how she reframes the story from centering on man’s sin to what God did in making a way for relationship and restoration to continue.
“People in power who do not know how to separate feeling seen from feeling shamed will hide all the parts of themselves they’ve deemed bad. Misuse of spiritual power is how humankind sews together the fig leaves”. – Jenai Auman
Reflections of a Variant 
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