We will discuss pages 1–11 of Renita Weems’ book, Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets, examining the role that images of violence against women plays in Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. We will consider questions about our own faith tradition’s use of those texts.
It is not necessary to have read this part of the book to participate fully in this day’s class. We will start reading the book in the following week.
After this brief discussion, we will imagine ways through poetry and visual arts, we might build support and healing with and for women who have been harmed by threats of violence in our own time and space.
We will also discuss the structure of the class and a culminating event to take place on the weekend of April 1–2.
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Today’s session was sparsely attended, but very productive. We discussed the reason for the class, considered how different the ancient contexts for these texts are from our 21st century experience, and considered how we might appropriately respond to texts that represent a different world view, but continued to be read as sacred in our own time. How do we combat the harm that can sometimes arise from treating ancient texts as normative?
We ended our time together by writing guided prose-poems based on seven words taken from the introduction to Renita Weems’ book. [Thank you, Dorothy, for leading this exercise!]