By Rev. Simone Oliver

I recently read somewhere that the business of faith is a “messy business” and, as quiet as it is kept, indeed it is. As a matter of fact, it can be pretty slapdash, slipshod and sloppy. In spite of its foils, we have the assurance that the gates of Hell will never prevail against us, and with all of its foibles, we can be certain that God’s grace in Christ yet abounds and that God still uses ordinary people. So this is not to belittle the church but to call the church into honest conversation and create a dialogue that has the potential to transform church culture with its changeless traditions and create space for repentance, renewal and restoration so that the church might once again be formed by Breath and Spirit.

By Marisa Franco

Feminism has been a stained word, made into an archetype of angry women who shame and emasculate men, which is why many of us who eventually identified as feminists first went through periods of denial: like yeah, I think men and women are equal, but that doesn’t mean I’m a feminist. But feminism, in its most bare bones definition, simply means exactly that: a person who believes that men and women are equal, that one gender is not superior to the other. If people ascribed to the true definition of the word, the number of self-identified feminists would spike.

Beyoncé wrote an essay titled "Gender Equality Is a Myth!" for the new installment of Maria Shriver's Shriver Report, a study that the journalist publishes alongside the Center for American Progress.