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 ...
“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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
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 ...
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 ...
“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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Between birth and death lies the journey of becoming . . . Once at a conference, I was asked by a group facilitator to describe myself in a haiku. After thinking about it, I came up with the following: “Poet, leader, warrior, healer, and breaker of chains.” If I had been allowed two more words, ...
“You need to accept that you are just a little girl and girls can’t do what boys do.” Bell hooks is an acclaimed intellectual, feminist theorist, cultural critic, artist, and writer whose life cause has been ending domination in all its forms through dialogue, education, critical thinking, and a determined effort to understand and dismantle ...
When I was a little girl, I watched my mama tear her wedding pictures into pieces. The pictures had been beautifully displayed on the wall in our house, depicting my mama and father looking crazy in love and happy. I couldn’t understand why my mother would tear up these pictures, the only evidence of beauty ...
When news about the local outbreak of infectious pneumonia of an unknown etiology hit headlines in December 2019, most here in Kenya viewed this with skepticism. Never would we have imagined that what we thought was just a small localized infection was in fact a global health pandemic spreading its tentacles around the world. Never ...
What matters is faith working through love. ~ Galatians 5:6 (HCSB)
If you find your curiosity piqued and a movement of love arising in your heart to see more of and better understand this ancient yet very contemporary gender-based legacy of slavery – which has its own monuments we need to take down – we invite you to consider joining our 2020–21 #GirlChildLongWalk “reading journey” cohort. The reading journey begins on October 11, International Day of the Girl Child, and runs through March 8, International Women’s Day.
These are opportune times to transmute the energy of angst into actions that deepen our insight. ~ Dr. Kamilah Majied, mental health therapist, educator, and consultant on inclusivity and contemplative pedagogy and practice. Visit her website at joyfullyjust.com.
Though the pandemic has been unfolding and wreaking its havoc in varying degrees and timelines, we are all collectively emerging into a drastically different world than the pre-COVID-19 one we left behind a few months ago. Between the massive economic impacts and the more recent anti-racism protests and Confederate monuments being taken down, we are living through a time where change is happening right before our eyes. As we have watched the taken-for-granted structures of our world crumble, many have felt a renewed sense of shared human purpose and urgency to lean in and do our part individually to care for the whole and recreate a new normal that is more just and life-giving than the world we left behind.
The truth will set you free. ~ Jesus in John 8:32 (DARBY)
In the spirit of truth telling, we have been busy working on a tool—a five-minute animated “splainer” video called “Understanding Our History of Patriarchy: What’s faith got to do with it?” – which we hope will add value to the larger gender justice ecoystem and help friends and partners like you tell the truth about the ancient patriarchal roots of slavery. We created this video in partnership with animator Ruben DeLuna and communications strategy firm Do Good Better, which has also been supporting us to reboot and upgrade this reading journey.
You cannot dismantle what you cannot see. You cannot challenge what you do not understand. ~ Layla F. Saad in Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor
Living within and alongside both the global pandemic of COVID-19 and our world’s racial injustices is another oppression that is being laid bare: a deeply rooted misogyny, which is the fruit of an ancient social system called “patriarchy,” aka “male supremacy.” Because this form of human subjugation goes back millennia to the cradles of what we know as “modern civilization,” and because it is laced with so many traditional and sacred cows that make it appear virtuous and just the way things are, we have not yet as a society fully named patriarchy for what it truly is—the oldest, most enduring root of slavery. Patriarchy is where the human family first began normalizing the unnatural, immoral, and inhumane notion that one human being could own and subjugate another as property.
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