Laura Barringer

(Opinion) It is the evening of Yom Kippur as I write these words. My Jewish friends are preparing for their holiest day of the calendar year. They are preparing for the annual Day of Atonement, a day on which Israel tells the truth about itself and then by God’s grace receives forgiveness and the fruits of reconciliation. My colleague Dena, before she left school today, instructed me: “Don’t say happy Yom Kippur to me.

Allow me to first introduce myself and share a small part of my personal story because it––and its resulting connection to the good folks of Converge––is an unusual one. I am a full-time kindergarten teacher who accidentally became an author of two books, one of which became an unexpected bestseller. You read that correctly. I did not plan to become an author. I was trained as an elementary educator at Wheaton College and I spend my days in the joyous albeit chaotic presence of five-year-olds.

By Sarah Bucy Klingler The title of chapter 7 in Heather Matthew’s Confronting Sexism in the Churchimmediately grabbed my attention: “Politics, Power, Pornography, and the Perpetuation of Sexism.” Wow! Take that in for a moment. Each one of those words in and of themselves packs a punch, but taken together they serve as a breathtaking indictment of some of the issues behind the misogyny far too many women face in Christian spaces.