Reflections on the Journey: Open Your Eyes
Jeff Bass shares his journey with the Girl Child.
Blog
Courageous Conversations: Men of Faith for Gender Equality
Rev. Domnic Misolo, Rev. Patrick Musembi, and Jeff Bass are three men of faith who use their spheres of influence to champion gender equality by empowering women and educating and empowering men to become allies for gender justice. In this video conversation, they tell their stories and share what they’re doing as men of faith to promote gender equality.
Let Courage Lead! Cultivating Everyday Courage
Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.” Come and learn as one of our Girl Child Long Walk Fellows, Maame Afon, teaches us about courage.
Her name is Hadija
Imagine being a young girl with multiple disabilities including autism, cerebral palsy, and epilepsy. You are locked in a one-room hut made of mud. It’s hot. There are no windows, water, or food. There hasn’t been any all day. When your father comes home, he beats you to get the demons causing your seizures to leave you. You have never known care from another person. All you know of God is that He cursed you. You don’t cry because no one comes to help anyway. This is all you’ve known. How you would feel is how she does. Her name is Hadija.
A Journey to Discovery
Priti Bhattarai shares her journey of untangling the patriarchal traditions that surrounded her upbringing and finding her own path of discovery and healing.
Ashes to Ashes: Gender Equality for a More Sustainable Tomorrow
A lenten reflection on patriarchy unfolding before our eyes in the Ukrainian conflict while also celebrating gender equality on International Women’s Day. May the brave Ukrainian women serve as an image of Sophia Wisdom to us.
Why Translation Matters: Promoting Access, Inclusion, and Equality
“What’s going on here?” This question animates Understanding our History of Patriarchy: What’s Faith Got to do with it?, a short animated video produced by the Girl Child & Her Long Walk to Freedom in 2019 that succinctly explains the ancient origin and systemic nature of patriarchy, as seen through the eyes of the “Girl ...
Remembering Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu
The following remembrance is from Girl Child project advisors, Will Keepin and Cynthia Brix, founding directors of Gender Equity & Reconciliation International. My dear Brothers and Sisters, we are ONE human family. . . We can be human only together. Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu We pray for the peace of the soul of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond ...
The Natural World is our Teacher: Advent as Pilgrimage into the Darkness
The bud stands for all things, even those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness. from Saint Francis and the Sow, by Galway Kinnell Advent is one of my favorite times of the year, even though I am always sad ...
The Rotten Fruit of Patriarchal Theology and the Biblical Template for Resisting it
“Women’s worship should be inaudible, while men’s should be audible.” He was in the middle of a tirade on how God had an “order” and men were on top, women were on bottom. Women were to submit to men in everything, they were easily deceived and should cover up lest men be tempted to lust ...
My #GirlChildLongWalk Story: Maria Lígia Conti
As part of our blog series #MyGirlChildLongWalkStory, we are pleased to share this personal story by Maria Lígia Conti from São Paulo, Brazil. Lígia discovered the Girl Child project after googling the word “patriarchy” which led her to our animated explainer video Understanding Our History of Patriarchy: What’s Faith got to do with it? Finding ...
Welcome to our 2021-2022 Girl Child Long Walk Fellows!
At its core, the Girl Child Long Walk reading journey, the signature effort of the Girl Child Long Walk project, seeks to inspire people all over the world to “put their faith to work through love” to improve the lives of women and girls. After two years of iterating and improving the reading journey, the ...
The Steps of Progress in the Catholic Church
I would like to thank The Girl Child & Her Long Walk to Freedom team. For many of us participating in the reading journey, this was an amazing experience to learn more about global issues impacting girls and fearless faith-inspired change agents from all walks of life. When I was asked to write something from ...
Reckoning with Infallibility and Inerrancy—A Pastor’s Path Out of Abusive Church Culture
Like many, the church and religious system I grew up in taught emphatically that the Bible was my rule for faith and conduct. The Bible was the “all-sufficient Word of God” deemed to clearly lay out rules for what I was to believe about God and how to live. Over the past 20 years, I ...
Are you ready to take this journey with us?
Greetings! It is our honor to extend an invitation to you to join the third cohort of a seven-month reading journey called The Girl Child & Her Long Walk to Freedom: Putting Faith to Work Through Love to Break Ancient Chains. We wrote and launched this effort out of a firm resolve to do our ...
Dignity for All: How “Purity Culture” Harms Girls and Women
When I decided to participate in The Girl Child & Her Long Walk to Freedom reading journey, I was anticipating the ways in which it would enrich my current work with Tostan, an African-based international non-profit that empowers communities to develop and achieve their vision for the future and inspires large-scale movements leading to Dignity ...
Honoring the Real Work of Fathering this Father’s Day—Personal Reflections
As we celebrate Father’s Day, let’s make every day a fathering day where we roll up our sleeves and do the real work of what it means to be a father.
She is a Tree of Life to All Who Embrace Her
In honor of Mother’s Day or Mothering Day, which is celebrated in many places around the world in the month of May, let us give a big hearty salute to our world’s mothers whose love, strength, and care are like a towering tree with deep roots and far reaching branches which hold us in Her ...
Praying to a Feminine and Masculine Presence
I like to set aside some time every day to pray, usually in the time after I wake up. Most mornings, this looks like doing Centering Prayer for 20 minutes, reciting a few favorite prayers, sitting quietly and starting a conversation with God, or all the above. I am an eclectic prayer. When I free-form ...
One Step at a Time
“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.” — Ruth Bader Ginsberg The Girl Child and Her Long Walk to Freedom book opened my eyes to the oppression of the Girl Child. I was raised in a family that valued my sister and myself just as much as my brother. I was encouraged ...
Redeeming Women’s Stories
In a small, war-torn, West African nation, sweat began pouring off my brow. The temperature in the room hovered around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, but tensions rose as I facilitated a new course we had just written called, “Women and Men Leading Together.” Attending was a small group of local Christian leaders and a few pastors. Even ...
“Now what?” The Girl Child Action Maps
As our team surveyed and interviewed participants in the 2018–2019 Girl Child & Her Long Walk to Freedom reading journey pilot, we heard loud and clear that they wanted to know, “now what?” With heads and hearts full of new data and stories, participants were eager to do something: to share, to continue to learn, ...
TGC Origin Story: Untangling the Contradictions at the Nexus of Faith, Freedom, and Development
We are about 3 years into the #GirlChildLongWalk project, which began as a pilot in the fall of 2018 with 88 readers from 15 countries around the world, and is wrapping up a second cohort this month. This project has grown out of the founding DNA of the Imago Dei Fund as we have sought ...
My #GirlChildLongWalk Story: Ven. Scholar Wayua Kiilu Mbai
A Long Walk towards Faith and Excellence When I was growing up, my mother was the laughing stock of not just my family but of my entire community because she had given birth to three girls and no boy. I grew up watching my own mother being openly mocked for giving birth to me and ...
The Girl Child in 2020
Dear Friends, Happy New Year to you and yours! We hope that this new year finds you safe, healthy and in peace. 2020 was quite a painful and challenging year for all of us as the pandemic brought the world to its knees, and the Black Lives Matter movement mobilized droves of multicultural stakeholders in ...
Hope & The Ongoing Work of Exodus from Systems of Supremacy
A new year, a new day is dawning for each of us individually and collectively. We are excited about all of the progress of the Girl Child Long Walk project this past year and hope you are well and finding reason for hope as we turn a page on a very hard year. At its ...
In Thanksgiving, For Our Shared Conversation
Dear friends, we are almost done with the first leg of our journey following in the footsteps of the Girl Child, our guide on this trek from International Day of the Girl in October to International Women’s Day in March. I (Emily) began writing this on Thanksgiving here in the U.S. and wanted to pause ...
Patriarchy in My First Language – Mfumo dume
As a development specialist, I have come across many forms of Patriarchy. In Kiswahili, the word Patriarchy means “mfumo dume ” or male system. In the Southern Highlands of Tanzania where I now live and work, mfumo dume means much more than the ‘rule of men over women’. It is even more than the web ...
In the Spirit of Two Notorious Giants who Left us in 2020, Join us for some “Good Trouble” this Fall
What a notorious year 2020 has been, one we will all remember for how it has turned our lives upside down. The word “notorious” is actually a perfect word for this year as it is one of those vague words, like “interesting”, which can evoke both positive and negative sentiments. As Merriam-Webster dictionary describes, “Although ...
Echoes of Patriarchy in our Climate Crisis
As some of the worst climate wildfires we’ve ever seen rage through California, Oregon, and Washington right now, we’re feeling called to pause and reflect as people of faith. As we’ve continued trekking along and inviting others to join us on this journey, we’ve heard reverberations of the same theme: I care about the Girl ...
