Emily Nielsen Jones is President/Co-Founder of the Imago Dei Fund, foundation in Boston, MA. Her “Women’s Liberty Bell Blog” connects with others to Establish Justice for girls and women. She is a guest blogger here at DavidDrury.com today. They recently featured an article I wrote here at DavidDrury.com on what “empowering women” means to me, which Christin Taylor also interacted with here. I invite you to read her call for male involvement below and follow the link over to her page for the rest, and for more ways to engage. – Dave
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The purpose of the Women’s Liberty Bell Blog is to promote dialogue around how to more fully enlist our faith traditions in the ongoing work of uplifting girls/women around the world, not only in the form of charity/humanitarian efforts, but even more fundamentally to establish a very clear, spiritual framework for women’s human equality around the world.
Religion, as we all know, has conflictual forces within it which lean both forward and backwards when it comes to advancing justice and equality for all. No where is this tension felt more acutely than in the domain of gender where throughout history and still today we see both empowering/disempowering forces which both encourage women to rise up above patriarchal ideas/norms and also to stay in “their place”.
Like so many today, we at the Women’s Liberty Bell Blog believe that our world is in a unique moment of time where the sheer shock of how low the floor has dropped for women’s human rights around the world has created a holy catalyst not just to engage in humanitarian relief for women but also a deeper change of consciousness of the underlying hierarchical model of gender which has for centuries devalued and disempowered women as the subordinate “lesser than” gender. Key to this deeper transformation is the involvement of men embracing gender equality/justice not just as a “women’s issue” but as a common human struggle. Without this, all we will have is these tiring gender battles which divide us unnecessarily, make us out to be totally different species rather than brothers and sisters who share the same human DNA, drain our spiritual vitality as both men and women, and militate against all of the humanitarian progress so many are working toward. (For more info on this regressive gender movement which is cropping up with renewed vigor within men’s ministries and family/parenting resources encouraging men to “reclaim their rightful place” as leaders/patriarchs, check out this blog.
All this is to say… we need your partnership to step up together to be fully empowered human beings and to create a better world for our daughters and our sons to thrive as human beings…
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The image needs three blocks in a column : blue block, red block, blue block . This image would show that women occupy the middle of society while the bottom block is occupied by the homeless, the incarcerated and those at risk of dying at work. Even so, nearly every male in the top block funds at least one wife.
Perhaps there are many blocks, when we think globally… and in global terms women occupy the bottom, or perhaps I should say, girls do.
The exception may, as you say, be incarceration in the United States… and the homeless, both of which are peopled by men most.