Sarah Kinney Gaventas has a really fun name. Roll that off your tongue fast a few times and enjoy! It sounds like a glamorous cocktail: “I’ll have a sarahkinneygaventas, please, waiter, with an extra cherry.”
Sarah Kinney Gaventas was kind enough for direct me to this article from the Young Clergy Women Project’s on-line mag this, which you should read. Right ON, lady. I hadn’t thought about the fact that the hideous shape and design of female clergy blouses is tied to the misogynist history of the Church, but you got yourself a legit theory there, I think. Maybe Dan Brown could write another trashtastic novel about the history of the issue (he would, of course, make most of it up but everyone would read it as factual), leading to a movie starring Diane Keaton and Brittany Murphy and lots of subsequent gal clergy appearances on CNN and Jon Stewart!
Meanwhile, I just want to raise my hand over here and say that I, too, am a major fan of the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Speaking of which, when is someone going to make a feature film based on THAT material that isn’t starring Michael Landon in anachronistic permed hair? Because that’s a movie I am DYING to see.
See, here’s a good idea for when someone asks, “What should I get my beloved female postulant to Holy Orders on the occasion of her ordination?”
A really nice clergy shirt designed to fit her well!
Thanks, PeaceBang! My doctor thinks my name sounds like the beginning of a children’s book, “Sarah Gaventa and the Seven Gray Hairs” and whatnot. Just a clarification–the article was not in my blog, but in the online magazine of the Young Clergy Women Project. [Whoops! Sorry! I’ve fixed the error. — PB]
Hey, thanks for the shout out about the article! It’s actually in an e-zine called Fidelia’s Sisters that is part of The Young Clergy Women Project, an organization for ordained women under 40. We hope the magazine appeals to those beyond our group’s demographic, though!
Appreciate the mention, and would be happy to have your readers check us out at http://www.youngclergywomen.org!
And now I’m off to contemplate just exactly what the ingredients of a sarahkinneygaventa would include….
But have you read those LIW books as an adult? I tried to re-read my cover-falling-off-from-1000-childhood-readings copy of Little House in the Big Woods recently and gave up after 20 pages from total boredom.
Enough with the churning and sorting buttons already…
[Actually, Jun, when I re-read them as an adult, I had a new appreciation for what I previously considered “the boring parts!” – PB]
I wasn’t bored with them, but somewhat embarrassed and horrified reading them with my daughters. Let’s just say portrails of Native Americans are different now…. Thank goodness.
[Seriously, remember Ma saying, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian?” Even as a kid I was like, “Whoa, Ma, that is MESSED UP.” And she was always so gentle with her little soft wings of hair over her modest ears. Never liked the woman, to tell the truth. I was more of a fan of that crazy lady Laura roomed with when she first taught school (and ‘Manzo would drive 40 miles in the sleigh to get her for the weekends! SO ROMANTICAL!), and Lena Brown, and the mean schoolteacher who slapped the kids around. I liked reading about the women who were straining at the seams under the hardships of frontier life. Ma always drove me nuts with her passive-aggressive piety and her china shepherdess. Still, she endured a lot. I still say “no great loss without some small gain” to myself now and then. – PB]
Oh, I still love them! Obviously we’re in a better place as regards colonization and genocide, but there is so much more to those books!
Thanks for the correction, PeaceBang!
I haven’t tried to read the books since I was a kid. I don’t know if I could handle the trauma of them not being as engrossing and fabulous as they once were!
PB – maybe they were more boring as a kid because you already had sisters. I have only brothers and as a kid I could not get enough of reading anything about the dynamics between sisters….
I recently listened to most of the Little House books on CD (read by actress Cherry Jones and accompanied by a wonderful fiddler whose name escapes me), and found them just as fabulous as ever, of course excepting Ma’s racism and the terrible scene in which Pa’s minstrel show is the hit of the Friday night social. Almanzo Wilder remains my first and best literary love. The sound of sleigh bells approaching the school house that first Friday afternoon . . . sigh . . .