My interview with Mary Kassian (and other cut material)


by Rachel Held Evans Read Distraction Free
True-Woman.jpg

As I have mentioned before, my editor and I cut a whopping 50,000 words from A Year of Biblical Womanhood. This was a painful process indeed, but one that ultimately made the book leaner and cleaner. Casualties included a story about practicing the Sabbath, an account of the Puritan ducking chair, an interview with a courtship couple, an in-depth look at the it-couple of the Early Church (Priscilla and Aquilla), and and a far too detailed description of the beautiful grotto at St. Bernard Abbey in Cullman, Alabama 

Another casualty was my interview with Mary Kassian and my experience at the True Woman conference. Mary and I disagree on a lot of things, but we respect and like one another despite those differences. Mary has expressed disappointment that her organization’s vision of biblical womanhood was not presented alongside some of the other complementarian groups I feature in the book, like The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, The Vision Forum, The Danvers Statement, Debi Pearl, Dorothy Patterson, John Piper, Wayne Grudem, the contributors to Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and others.  

My book was never intended to be a polemic against complementarianism, (the word is only used once in its 315 pages), so I don’t spend a great deal of time fleshing out all the nuances and differences of the movement, though conversations in response to the book have revealed these nuances and differences to be many.  (I was under the impression that the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was considered a mainstream representation of complementarianism, but perhaps I am mistaken.) 

Still, I take the responsibility of accurately representing other people’s views seriously, so in hindsight, I probably should have made space for this enlightening interview with Mary Kassian.  So I’ve decided to share that in the first link below, along with links some of the other material that ultimately got cut from the book. Perhaps in future editions, I’ll get the chance to include more of these!

Tomorrow I’ll be sharing some of my favorite pictures, tweets, reviews, and responses to A Year of Biblical Womanhood, as we finally WRAP UP the launch!  

The True Woman Conference 

Biblical Ways to Lose A Body Part 

The Ducking Chair

Is Voting Biblical?

Beef and Stout Stew

Dear President Obama...

The Passover Seder

A Sabbath for the Birds

Babysitting 

Greenlife 

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