Tuesday, May 7, 2019

The Radically Inclusive Christianity of Rachel Held Evans

From The New Yorker-

Late on Friday evening, as Rachel Held Evans, a thirty-seven-year-old Christian activist, lay in a coma, in her hospital bed, in Nashville, Tennessee, her friend Nadia Bolz-Weber, a progressive pastor, anointed her forehead with frankincense. “Lord, let your servant go in peace,” Bolz-Weber intoned, beginning the liturgy of last rites. She couldn’t believe that she was performing them for her friend, and she told me later, “In times that we are collapsing, these are words that have been worn smooth by generations of the faithful.” To Bolz-Weber, and to Held Evans’s millions of fans, her sudden illness was inconceivable. She had two small children, and, just a month earlier, she and Bolz-Weber had been laughing about the challenges of motherhood. But soon after, while hospitalized for complications from the flu, doctors realized that she was experiencing seizures and placed her in a medically induced coma. Later, after weaning her off the coma medication, the medical team found that swelling of her brain had caused extensive damage from which she could not recover. She died on Saturday morning.

More here-

https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscript/the-radically-inclusive-christianity-of-rachel-held-evans

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