Bodies that menstruate, birth, nurse. Bodies that grieve and sacrifice. Bodies that are infertile. Bodies that are taken advantage of and mistreated. Bodies fighting for survival. Bodies that are broken and sacred. Women’s bodies. My favorite part of Katey Zeh’s book Women Rise Up is that she highlights, over and over again, a piece of […]
Marcy Litle reviews Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom
Tressie McMillan Cottom is a black sociologist and public intellectual. I had never heard of her—which, it turns out, is a significant theme in her book—until I read a review of her newest book, Thick, at the beginning of this year. Something in that review made me want to check it out. I’m very glad […]
Summer Workshops
Things move a little slower around the RCWMS office during the summer months, but there are still plenty of upcoming workshops in June and July you won’t want to miss! First up, join Allison Kirkland June 21-22, 2019, at Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church in Durham, NC for To Taste Life Twice: Building the Personal Essay. […]
Coming soon!
Be on the lookout for our summer fundraising campaign starting later in June! Your support has helped us add new programs and publish artist-in-residence Bryant Holsenbeck’s wildly successful book, The Last Straw. This summer we’re raising $4,500 to support folks at the intersection of feminism and faith, contemplation and action, social justice and spirituality. Your support makes […]
Save the Date: Homegrown 2019
Save the date for the 8th annual Homegrown: NC Women’s Preaching Festival: October 3-4, 2019, at Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church in Durham, NC. Watch for registration details, as well as preacher and workshop leader announcements, on the RCWMS website later this summer! In the meantime, you can learn more about the festival vision here and […]
VIDEO: Jeanette Stokes and RCWMS Labyrinth in the News & Observer
Earlier this month the Raleigh News & Observer filmed a wonderful feature on Jeanette Stokes and the RCWMS labyrinth while it was set up in Duke Chapel. Click on the image to view the video.
RCWMS is seeking applicants for paid internships!
The Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South (RCWMS) will offer paid, part-time internships for those interested in the intersections of justice, feminism, and religion. RCWMS is an intergenerational, interfaith organization that weaves together feminism, spirituality, and social justice through its programs in women’s preaching, LGBTQ spirituality, issue advocacy, writing and art, anti-racism, […]
RCWMS Artist in Residence Bryant Holsenbeck on UNC-TV
Check out Bryant Holsenbeck, environmental artist and author of The Last Straw, on UNC-TV! Watch the recording by clicking on the image.
Holistic Enneagram: A Spirituality of Head, Heart, and Body
Last week Adrienne Koch led an Enneagram workshop as part of our younger women’s spirituality program. A group of people under 40 gathered at the RCWMS office to learn about this system of nine personality types. As we went around the circle introducing ourselves and sharing our types, or what we suspected our types might […]
The Courage to Say No
On the morning of January 31, 1969, I was about to give birth to my first child. I was 20 years old. Whether the child was a boy or girl, I knew what the baby’s name would be. I hadn’t thought much beyond that—except that I knew I wanted to raise a child who was […]
Dispatches From the Front
My heart is moved by all I cannot save so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. Adrienne Rich, “Natural Resources” The past two years have been a daily barrage of news flashes portending the downfall of our […]
Across the Great Lakes
“Haunting” is a word that comes to mind as I reflect on Lee Zacharias’ new novel. Set largely in the mid-1930’s on Lake Michigan and the harbor town of Frankfort, Across the Great Lake is the narrator’s vivid, jagged, time-bending recollection of her childhood and the trajectory set by one of the central events of […]
Events for The Last Straw by Bryant Holsenbeck
As I moved through my friend Bryant Holsenbeck’s new book, The Last Straw, I was struck by its accessibility. The book, ostensibly about Bryant’s journey to rid single-use plastic from her life, is really about us. I found it subversive how she asks us to see the world through her eyes, stealthily offering a blueprint […]
Territories of the Soul
Nadia Ellis’ Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora brilliantly articulates how black diasporic belonging transcends dominant understandings of identity based on locality/time/space. By analyzing the modalities in which “difficulty and loss” (5) become affective spaces of communal negation, Ellis explores the “gap between here and there” where the black diasporic subject’s […]
Ursula K. Le Guin
Once upon a time I used Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea in a first-year writing class centered on the theme of what makes a hero. I loved it. The students loved it. Since then, though, she has mostly hovered around the edges of my consciousness, even though she is among the most […]
Labyrinths
I wasn’t familiar with labyrinths until I started an internship at the Resource Center back in 2009. One of my duties during that year was helping Jeanette Stokes haul our large canvas labyrinth around to different spaces in North Carolina and set it up for people to walk. A few weeks ago, for the first […]
Whiskey & Ribbons: A Novel
Click here to read RCWMS Communications Director Meghan Florian’s review of Whiskey & Ribbons for The Englewood Review of Books. Whiskey & Ribbons, Leesa Cross-Smith’s first novel, is a love story folded inside of a love story. It is a novel about grief, about family, about how we hold one another together when everything falls apart. The character […]
Wild Mountain
In Wild Mountain, Mona Duval has concocted a tidy life for herself in the rural town of Wild Mountain, Vermont. Escaped (mostly) from a bad marriage, she runs a general store next to an historic covered bridge—a bridge she loves so much, she literally wrote the book on its history. When an ice storm collapses the […]
The Handmaid’s Tale
I recently found a used copy of The Handmaid’s Tale at a local library book sale. In preparation for Hulu’s television adaptation I decided it was finally time to fill in this gap in my reading life, since I generally avoid watching screen adaptations of books I haven’t read. The timing was…well, not quite good, […]
Faithfully Feminist
“Survival is a creative act,” Erica Granados De La Rosa writes in her essay, “What Has Remained.” Survival is a creative act. And it is from such creation, and Creation, that the stories of Faithfully Feminist emerge. Faithfully Feminist is a collection of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian womyn speaking back at the question: why do […]
Something New
I love food. Growing it, cooking it, eating it, sharing it with friends. I also love to read, so it should come as no surprise that when I came across Lucy Knisley’s graphic memoir Relish: My Life in the Kitchen I knew I had to have it. I picked up a signed edition at a conference, and Knisley had […]
The Humble Essay
As memoir has surged in popularity, this other beloved nonfiction form, the essay, seems to go in and out of style. Critics alternately lament the demise or herald the resurgence of the essay, and despite the wild success of recent volumes like Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, there are plenty of people ready to tell you that essay […]
Summer Reading Retrospective
This summer I set out to read only books by women. This was not hard to do, though I struggled once or twice to maintain my commitment when I came across the occasional intriguing title by a man. They could wait. I’ve spent most of my life reading books by men. Most of us have, […]
Citizen: An American Lyric
Those unfamiliar with the breadth of contemporary poetry may be surprised when they crack the cover of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. A collage of prose poems, short essays, and images, Citizen often reads more like experimental nonfiction than poetry. None of this is to decry the book’s merits; on the contrary, it is smart, finely crafted, as […]