Klassen & Lofton, “Material Witnesses: Women and the Mediation of Christianity”
Excerpt: “Christian identity is inextricable from gender identity. Throughout Christian history, determining how individuals incarnate divine authority has been critical to the communication and legitimation of Christian testimonies. What can the words emanating from a particular physical body signify for the broader social movements that have fuelled Christianity? Evaluating such testimony might even b3e understood as the original practice of Christianity, insofar as the witness of a single male, Jewish body provided its genesis as a sectarian movement, and insofar as disagreements over subsequent witnesses and their ecclesiastical legitimacy became the grounds for nearly every denominational discord, theological innovation and mystical experimentation with that diverse tradition. Whether it was Peter appraising Mary Magdalene, Hilarianus adjudicating Perpetua, or John Winthrop assessing Anne Hutchinson, refereeing a witness’s testimony has been a primary task of (male) ecclesial authorities. Knowing whether (and how) you, as a particular embodied witness, have the right to speak about God (and what it means when you do) has encouraged the grand diversity of Christian expression . . . In this chapter, we consider how women have utilized various media to channel and articulate their testimonies in twentieth- and twenty-first-century North American contexts, paying specific attention to the connection between mediation and materiality. We argue that there seems to be a particularly comfortable connection between the material witness of women and the intimate commodification of their living scripts.”