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Christine Houghton

Women Rise Up

July 25, 2019 by Christine Houghton Leave a Comment

women rise up book cover, white with blue and red letters

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 […]

Filed Under: Books

Marcy Litle reviews Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom

July 23, 2019 by Marcy Litle Leave a Comment

stack of books

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 […]

Filed Under: Books, News

Summer Workshops

May 28, 2019 by Meghan Florian Leave a Comment

blooming sunflowers

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. […]

Filed Under: Events

Coming soon!

May 21, 2019 by Meghan Florian Leave a Comment

small pink flowers blooming in a field of green grass

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 […]

Filed Under: News

Save the Date: Homegrown 2019

May 14, 2019 by Meghan Florian Leave a Comment

woman standing in a church sanctuary looking at stained glass windows

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 […]

Filed Under: News

VIDEO: Jeanette Stokes and RCWMS Labyrinth in the News & Observer

April 16, 2019 by Meghan Florian Leave a Comment

labyrinth in duke chapel with people walking by dim lighting

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.

Filed Under: News

RCWMS is seeking applicants for paid internships!

April 4, 2019 by Meghan Florian 2 Comments

rainbow old painting close up

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, […]

Filed Under: News

RCWMS Artist in Residence Bryant Holsenbeck on UNC-TV

April 2, 2019 by Meghan Florian Leave a Comment

Check out Bryant Holsenbeck, environmental artist and author of The Last Straw, on UNC-TV! Watch the recording by clicking on the image.

Filed Under: News

Holistic Enneagram: A Spirituality of Head, Heart, and Body

March 21, 2019 by Meghan Florian 1 Comment

three silhouettes of women's figures against a sunset over mountains

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 […]

Filed Under: Events Tagged With: spirituality

The Courage to Say No

March 5, 2019 by Joan Tilghman 1 Comment

crowd of protestors carrying a black lives matter banner

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 […]

Filed Under: Essay Contest

Dispatches From the Front

February 28, 2019 by Mindy Oshrain 1 Comment

post cards spread across a table next to a potted succulent plant

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 […]

Filed Under: Essay Contest, News

Across the Great Lakes

February 19, 2019 by Fran Wescott Leave a Comment

Across the Great Lakes book cover featuring image of young woman and a ship

“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 […]

Filed Under: Books

Events for The Last Straw by Bryant Holsenbeck

January 29, 2019 by Marya McNeish Leave a Comment

Bryant Holsenbeck reading at the Durham Co-op Market

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 […]

Filed Under: Books, Events

Territories of the Soul

November 8, 2018 by Melissa Gamble Leave a Comment

book cover Territories of the Soul by Nadia Ellis

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 […]

Filed Under: Books

Ursula K. Le Guin

May 3, 2018 by Marcy Litle Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: Books, News

Labyrinths

April 18, 2018 by Meghan Florian Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Labyrinth

Whiskey & Ribbons: A Novel

December 20, 2017 by Meghan Florian Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: Books

Wild Mountain

July 11, 2017 by Savannah Lynn Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: Books

The Handmaid’s Tale

June 20, 2017 by Meghan Florian Leave a Comment

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, […]

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Abortion, Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Faithfully Feminist

September 1, 2016 by elizabeth mcmanus-dail Leave a Comment

“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 […]

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Faithfully Feminist

Something New

June 2, 2016 by Meghan Florian Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: Books

The Humble Essay

May 5, 2016 by Meghan Florian Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: Books

Summer Reading Retrospective

August 25, 2015 by Meghan Florian Leave a Comment

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, […]

Filed Under: Books

Citizen: An American Lyric

February 9, 2015 by Meghan Florian Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: Books

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