As a teenager she was quoted in Christianity Today supporting President Bush’s abstinence-based sex education, and she later represented her high school’s Bible club on the homecoming court. William Jennings Bryan was the lawyer who argued at the trial against the teaching of evolution by John Scopes, and in his honor locals founded Bryan College-Evans’s alma mater.Įvans’s family moved to Dayton when she was 14 so that her father could be a teacher and administrator at Bryan. Yet she never drew attention to her studiousness, showed no evidence of anxiety about a lack of academic accreditation, and seemed comfortable operating as a journalist.Įvans can’t be understood without attention to her hometown of Dayton, Tennessee, the site of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial (which is alluded to in the title of her first book, Evolving in Monkey Town). Hers was an intellectual project, and she took on the most daunting of subjects: how does the church read scripture and live it out well.
She was more than a companionable, winsome, self-effacing memoirist of the journey out of fundamentalism. Without past seminary training or ecclesial position, she found a voice online.
She never pursued a graduate degree or sought credentials from a denomination. She was armed only with “a library card and a blog,” as she once put it. Read our latest issue or browse back issues. Ask any seminary admissions officer who their applicants-especially women applicants-have been reading, and you’ll see that the claim is not overstated.
She is the most influential mainline theologian of her generation, the C. If you don’t know her work, check out the Twitter hashtag #becauseofRHE and behold the vast, digital church she planted, with moving testimonies from those who, through her work, were wooed into following Christ, called into ministry, and summoned from despair into an affirmation of life. These musings were prompted by the death earlier this year of Rachel Held Evans, who was one of the great theological translators, bridge builders, and preachers of our time. I prefer “preaching,” since whatever is true, good, and beautiful serves in the classroom as well as the pulpit. “Translation” makes sense if one acknowledges that a good translation is a work of art in itself. “Mediation” and “bridge building” are better, both for their christological echoes and their suggestion that traffic goes both ways. What metaphor does one use to describe the way the work of scholars is passed on to everyday Christians? “Trickle down” is not good, for it implies that the academy is an endless pure font, with only some tainted refreshment making it to the plebs.
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