I know, I know, you’re tired of the topic and we “bibliobloggers” have moved on to fight other fights. But in keeping with the spirit of my previous “listening to women” post, I would like to point out some additional reflection happening outside the fold of biblioblogdom. A couple weeks ago, around the same time I asked the Emerging Women for assistance, I also asked the RevGalBlogPals for some help thinking this through. I believe RevGalPals has been around since about when I discovered what a website was and had my own cheesy teenager personal webpage. They were first a vibrant “webring” for websites maintained by women “of the cloth” (and otherwise theologically educated, I think). When blogs hit the scene, they made the transition to a vibrant ring of blogs authored by women and those who support them in religious life. [If I've gotten any of that description wrong, somebody correct me!] Here are the requirements for joining the ring of blogs:

1. Women clergy, women church professionals, and women religious, or those discerning a call to Christian ministry.
2. Women or men blogging pals of (1).
3. All committed to building a supportive online community for women clergy, women church professionals, and women in religious life.
4. You must be an active blogger for the previous three months in order to join and to maintain membership.

Well, they keep things on a schedule over there and couldn’t get to the topic until today, but the comments have started coming in already. Some of the same themes as before are coming up, but again, these are the voices of women who have some sort of training or interest in theology/biblical studies, but have chosen not to participate in the same sort of discourse as the biblioblogging world (for the most part).

So, if you’re interested in reading more, please take a look at the RevGalBlogPal blog post where the discussion is happening. A big thank you to Songbird who was willing to take up the topic with her RevGalBlogPals. Also, you may be interested to stop by the previous post at Emerging Women, which has continued to gather some helpful comments.

I will leave you with this woman’s comment (leaving you to agree or disagree with her assessment):

I think it’s the academic discipline itself. As a woman who did my doctoral work in biblical studies back in the 80’s, it seemed like a field that both narrowly construed the issues it dealt with and relied strongly on the good-old-boy network. Over the years since, though as I’ve moved into a parish, I’ve largely left that academic discipline (at least as it’s done in traditional academia), it doesn’t seem like much has changed on that front. So, few women in biblical academia, few bibliobloggers.

Carry on.