On Fences and Fears

Mary Todd Daystar Free Conference II One Body/One Spirit Mundelein, Illinois 30 October 2000 [© 2000 Mary Todd. All rights reserved. Not to be reprinted without permission of the author.] I will readily admit to you that I am a reluctant keynoter today. I had agreed to be conference chair long before David cornered me about…
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A Fable

Mary Todd Once upon a time a woman was invited to write a book on gender that her church wanted to publish. She was told she could write whatever she wanted about women, but she had to agree not to mention the O-word, for the ordination of women was not a subject the church wished…
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Rites and Wrongs in God’s Lifetime

By Mary Todd I have a number of friends who were quite sure that I would leave the Missouri Synod as soon as I finished my dissertation a decade ago. My work examined the synod’s identity over its 150-plus-year history through the lenses of authority and gender and used the issue of the service of…
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Defining Terms or Defined by Terms

By Mary Todd I have moved from a small-e evangelical campus to a capital-c Catholic campus. In learning about my new Catholic world, I find that, more and more, we need not only to understand the words we use but to ask—in an attempt to understand—about the words others use. When I heard that the…
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