By Abby Gan | Staff Writer
The conversation about women in the church is changing, in part because of Dr. Beth Allison Barr’s book, “The Making of Biblical Womanhood.”
Barr, who is the James Vardaman Endowed Professor of History, said her book has led people to reexamine what they originally thought.
“There’s a couple of churches in Waco that have written public responses because they don’t like what I said in it — but at the same time, they now have to answer … for [what] they believe about women in the church,” Barr said. “I think that’s a good thing that [they] can’t simply say, ‘This is because God set it up this way.’ I helped unpack that that’s not the story. There’s many other elements to the story.”
Barr said she got a direct message from a professor in Asia soon after the book’s release, saying they had a student who had read it and written a letter for her.
“It was just an incredible letter,” Barr said. “And you know what she said? She said, ‘I found my Jesus again, and I wanted to say thank you.’ She also said, ‘I now know that God is for women and not against them.’ This was worth it, writing this.”
In 2015, Barr started writing for Patheos — a public religion website with blogs for people who write on a variety of faith-related topics.
“That was really exciting to me, because it was really the first time since I had become a professional historian that I was asked to write for the public,” Barr said.
After this, Barr was invited to contribute to outlets like Religion News Service and Christianity Today, among others.
“I remember the first article I wrote for [Christianity Today],” Barr said. “I stayed up all night writing it. The next morning was when the announcement was made that Linda Livingstone was appointed our new president. I actually ended that article because it was on women working in Christian higher education, … with that recognition that Baylor had just hired a female president.”
Barr said learning to write in the public blogging space and having more media start to reach out to her helped lay the foundation for her book.
“It was a surprise bestseller,” Barr said. “You know, I tell people I knew my life was going to change when … I was in the dean’s office and I got an email from NPR asking me to be on Morning Edition. I got a direct message on Twitter from Eliza Griswold, who’s a feature writer for The New Yorker, … and then I got an email from the Holy Post … asking me for an interview. This is before the book came out.”
Humboldt, Calif., doctoral candidate Katherine Goodwin works closely with Barr and said she came to Baylor in order to work with her.
“[Barr] has just been an incredible … shepherd, guiding through the twists and turns of research and graduate school life,” Goodwin said. “I came to work with her because she’s one of the few people who is working on medieval women in the church.”
Goodwin said Barr is a committed Christian who is able to study the historic faith tradition because she’s a part of it.
“I think that she models Christian faithfulness in scholarship that can look scary and threatening, but it is … bringing light and wisdom and truth to places where we forget to think deeply,” Goodwin said.
Barr said “The Making of Biblical Womanhood” reflects the lectures she teaches in her women’s history sequence at Baylor. She said the origin of the book was a blog post written a long time ago called “The Myth of Biblical Womanhood.”
“My goal was to help modern Christian women who were taught that their divine role was to follow the leadership of men,” Barr said. “My goal was to help women understand where that idea came from and to also understand that idea is rooted in history, not actually in scripture. My thesis for [the book] is just real easy: It’s that biblical womanhood isn’t biblical, and that it’s actually something that’s been created in culture.”
Barr said her writing and teaching go hand in hand. Her writing is born out of her teaching, and her teaching supports her writing.
“I use my voice, my teaching voice, to help me write, but then I’ve also found it works in reverse,” Barr said. “It helps me when I think about the way I teach my lectures. Now, I often think about them in terms of writing a chapter — like, you know, starting off, what’s the point that I want my students to get across? What are the main pieces of the story? What’s the storyline that we’re going to talk about in class today? And then how can I get them involved in that storyline?”
Barr said she explored the lives of ordinary people while researching, which was a challenge in terms of sources.
“I also got interested in ordinary women because I really care about ordinary people,” Barr said. “That’s what led me to sermons. And once I found medieval sermons, I was just so fascinated by them that I’ve just really never walked away from them.”
Barr said she echoes the words of a medieval woman named Marjorie Kemp.
“She heard a sermon that quoted Romans 8:31, and it said, ‘If God is for you, then who can be against you?’ And she used that to go on a pilgrimage by herself … because she believed that God was for women too,” Barr said. “God created man in His image, and … the image of God is only complete with both the humanity of women and the humanity of men.”
