The tattoo on Nadia Bolz-Weber’s left arm says “wild and holy.” Her other arm reveals a rendering of Saint Mary Magdalene announcing the resurrection to a group of startled male disciples. Bolz-Weber got the tattoo when she was training to become a Lutheran pastor.
Back then, it would’ve seemed rebellious: sleeves of vivid art from her shoulders to her wrist. But as Bolz-Weber noted a few years ago, what was unsettling and mutinous back then has become mainstream today.
And so it is with Bolz-Weber’s new crusade. The pastrix — as she calls herself — has exhorted faith communities to lead with acceptance, grace and mercy. She jokes that the church she founded — House for All Saints & Sinners — “is a bunch of people who really don’t belong in church.”
Neither — for too long — did the idea that human wholeness must include sexual health. Church hierarchies used chastity, denial, purity pledges, shunning, ignorance and manipulation to push healthy sexuality into the shadows.
Bolz-Weber is calling for nothing less than a “sexual reformation” free of shame and judgment and retribution. She writes in her new book, “Shame-Less” — with a well-placed hyphen between the words: “We deny our natures, identities and desires in order not to anger an easily disappointed God. The result is suffering — outer darkness — and it’s not of God’s making.”
This spring and summer, I’m diving into several books on women of faith, and this is a great place to begin.
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