“Housewives of God,” a recent article by Molly Worthen in The New York Times Magazine, is about a whole lot more than the person it purports to profile. As was the case in another recent exposé (of Al Mohler in Christianity Today), Worthen’s portrait of Priscilla Shirer is as much about Worthen’s attempts to process her subject as it is about that subject’s actual identity and ministry. Anyone who has read G. K. Chesterton’s biography of St. Francis of Assisi will recognize this tendency of the one telling the story to shape it largely around himself and his own perspectives. In that case, we gain access into a mind full of faith and wit, as Chesterton personally invites us to delight with him in the mysteries of St. Francis’s life. In Worthen’s case, we receive an overlay of revealing questions, as in this article she openly searches for ways to put the pieces of the Shirer puzzle together.
Worthen’s basic question is this: How can a woman both embrace a complementarian view and conduct a public ministry?
BLOGS: Justin Taylor
