At the Expense of Evangelism: A response to the Archbishop’s defence of the Million Dollar Donation to the ‘vote no’ ad campaign.

I recently spoke on a panel event advertised as ‘Evangelicals Supporting Marriage Equality’. In the weeks preceding the event, I had coffee with an Anglican minister to discuss my involvement as a panellist, the use of the word Evangelical, and whether I apply it to myself.

In this piece, I respond to the letter written by the Sydney Anglican Archbishop, in which he defends the million dollar donation made by the Sydney Anglican Diocese to the Coalition for Marriage, urging Australians to ‘vote no’ in the postal survey on same-sex marriage. But my response to that letter is connected to the fact that I do, in certain key ways consider myself an Evangelical, so I will begin with a consideration of that term. Then, in responding to the letter, I suggest that as Evangelical Christians, we should consider how the million-dollar donation, and the defence of this action by the Archbishop, may actively work to detract from the evangelistic work of sharing the gospel.

Labels and Tags: Evangelical

I'm not particularly fond of labels and tags, but, as someone who spends a lot of time in feminist and queer theory, I understand there is value in declaring one’s subject position. Let me do this without the standard tags: I’ve dated a couple of men and – to borrow from Katy Perry -  I’ve kissed a girl, and I liked it. I’m unmarried and childfree. I read feminist theory. I critique cultural marriage narratives. I’m for feminist, transformative politics and subversive story telling[i].  Two of my grandparents were German-speaking Jews who came to Australia by boat, but I’m an inner-city white girl who grew up in the Anglican church.

I will take the label ‘Evangelical’. I do so because as a Christian there are certain key beliefs and values I align with that fall under the 'Evangelical' tag. The great source of knowledge that is Wikipedia defines Protestant Evangelicalism as a Christian movement which:

maintains the belief that the essence of the gospel consists of the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ's atonement. Evangelicals believe in the centrality of the conversion or the "born again" experience in receiving salvation, in the authority of the Bible as God's revelation to humanity, and in spreading the Christian message.[ii]

Amy DeRogatis, writing in Church History, uses ‘Protestant Evangelical’ as an “umbrella term”, for Protestant Christians who “who affirm the necessity of a spiritual rebirth” and are “grouped together by their literal reading of the Bible, their emphasis on inerrancy, the imminent return of Christ, mission-mindedness, and in many cases—though certainly not all—their suspicion of "worldliness" and the perils of secular culture”[iii].  While I do not insist on reading the bible through a literal framework, I do believe in the authority of scripture (and I seek to do justice both to the text and to the lived experience of people around me. I figure this is my duty if I'm to adequately pastorally care for my friends and family). I believe in salvation by grace. I do believe the gospel is good news, and I think most people I know would know that I'm always ready and willing to talk of my own faith, and of religion (and sex and politics).

Spending and Defending One Million Dollars

So here I am, a feminist who is critical of marriage narratives, but has voted yes, and a Sydney Anglican and Evangelical, who is deeply concerned by the words that the (my) Archbishop has used in his defence of the million-dollar donation made by the diocese. I find his defence problematic for several reasons, but I want to focus on a particular paragraph which stands in tension with the core Evangelical goal of evangelism. Let’s look at the words of the archbishop, sent in a letter to churches, read at synod and available on the Sydney Anglicans website:

This is not a debate of our choosing. I am sure that we would prefer to spend our energies telling people about God’s loving message of salvation through Jesus Christ, but in God’s providence, this is the point of engagement with our culture at this time.[iv] 

This statement is a striking admission. Firstly, it privileges donating to an ad campaign over and above the evangelical work of sharing the gospel, that is, the good news of salvation by grace and making disciples of every nation (Matthew 28:19-20). It removes our agency and responsibility (We didn’t choose to debate same-sex marriage, it was thrown at us, and though we would ‘prefer’ to do something else we are, apparently, powerless to do so). An organisation that can find a spare one million dollars to give to an ad campaign cannot, with integrity, claim to be without voice or agency. But perhaps, most significantly, these words and the donation, actively detract from evangelistic or missional work and activities that Christians are currently engaged in as it deters people from seeing the beauty of the gospel.

A story of Evangelism

            Let me tell you a story of friendship, which is, in it’s a way, a story of evangelism. I first invited Lisa[v] to church over five years ago. She was not my “project”, she is my friend, but I confess that behind my first asking her there was a fair slice of evangelistic guilt; I was aware that I was not doing my bit as an evangelical. I was not inviting people to church. So, I asked Lisa.

She came with me to my local inner-west Anglican church a couple of times. Later when we were both living in London, she would occasionally join me at a small West London church where we attended a traditional prayer book service. Lisa recently told me it was in London that she “fell in love” with “the church service”. Then, when we were both back living in Sydney, and I had found a new church, I again asked her to come with me. We dropped into the afternoon contemporary service, and after a few weeks settled at the early morning, Book of Common Prayer service. For a few years, Lisa came to church steadily and, for a while, went to small group run by a mutual friend. Moved by an announcement in which our minister told the congregation we were at risk of not making our budget, she began to financially give to the church, because she was beginning to consider our church to be her community. During this time, Lisa also came out. 

            Lisa continued coming to church with me. She didn’t, as far as I know, become a Christian. She dates women. She still loves the Book of Common Prayer. She still thinks about Christianity. However, heartbreakingly, as a result of the Anglican Church’s donation to the Coalition for Marriage she has no intention of ever coming back to church. There is no conversion story. No Evangelistic ‘happy ending’ (there’s a phrase I never thought I would write). Some people might think I failed to pray hard enough for Lisa’s conversion. But where I sit, I see many years of investment in a person, in a relationship. I see over five years of actively inviting someone into my spiritual life, by inviting them to church and always being willing to talk about questions of faith and of sexuality. And I also see that in the days following the announcement of the donation, that any sense Lisa had of belonging at church had been eroded. She said to me, “I know it’s not personal, but it feels that way”.

One Story. One Person

            So what. One story. One person. That’s not evidence you say. Sure. It might not be conclusive. But it happened, and it is the truth of our experience. In this week, all I have had time for is to gather personal stories. Anecdotes. I had coffee with a friend on Wednesday. She and her husband are appalled at the million-dollar donation. She sent me a message on facebook a few days later  to say they had spoken with their church leadership and have left their Anglican church. I spoke with a colleague yesterday. A gay man in his fifties, raised in the Catholic church. He’s fully aware of the actions of the Anglican church, and that it is a church I belong to. When people like him look to the church, what do they see? Via messenger, he wrote to me:

it does surprise me that there is enough money to put into some things, yet not enough for others of more importance. I was quite shocked at how much they'd allocated to domestic violence in comparison. I would have thought it was a more urgent and important matter.

Indeed. I’ve seen some clergy try to defend this. They say DFV is getting ongoing funding (which it may well be, and I’m very glad that it is). I’ve seen them suggest that the postal survey is a “once in a lifetime” event, requiring a sudden injection of funds, to stop society irrevocably walking down a path to destruction. The Archbishop’s letter, admittedly puts it more mildly, saying we “should stand firmly for God’s good plan for marriage in a world that has increasingly abandoned that plan.”

            Can we pause and reflect on that for a minute. Even if we work within the framework that views homosexual acts as sinful[vi], what we see in the rhetoric of church leaders, when they describe this money, this campaign to vote no as necessary to stop society abandoning God’s good plan for marriage and walking headfirst into supposed moral decay, is that the prospect of a gay or lesbian couple being married is considered more destructive than domestic and family violence. That is not only deeply insulting to gay and lesbian people, it glosses over the very real danger to those in unsafe relationships.  You might feel like these are very different issues, but at their core, both DFV and same-sex relationships ask us to think about marriage, sexuality and what it means to be ethically responsible. Given that Christians, have traditionally opposed same-sex relationships on the understanding they are immoral, there is also an important question here about what constitutes immorality. Rather than uncritically equate homosexuality with immorality (thereby making a ‘no’ vote seem easy and obvious), it may be more ethically responsible of us to think hard about what immorality is. Because there are many ‘immoral’ or unethical sex acts, and if domestic violence and sexual assault does not evoke at least the same amount of moral outrage and financial intervention as the thought of a committed, monogamous, state sanctioned non-hetero marriage, we need to ask ourselves some tough questions, and perhaps reflect on the bible verse about specks and planks of wood[vii].

Again, I know, the interaction with my colleague is ‘just’ an anecdote. I sometimes wonder when the Archbishop  last had to discuss his actions with a gay colleague or a queer best friend. But even if I am the only person in the diocese with such stories, I believe that even one such story matters. I believe that one person who is no longer coming to church matters. I believe that one family leaving their church matters. I believe that one gay man, looking on at the church while still remembering the hurt of being bullied in school as a 12 year old matters.

We believe in a God who would leave the ninety-nine to go searching for the one. And it just might be that the one, like my friend Lisa, is a lesbian. This week, when Lisa looked at the actions of the church, she learned that, perhaps, in the eyes of the church, she did not matter.

            How I long to tell her she is wrong.

But that doesn't feel genuine. Yes, she matters to me. And I believe she matters to my creator God. But, I cannot, with any sense of honesty tell her she matters to my church. As she walks away from my Anglican church, I want my Archbishop, and my diocese, to know that I didn’t just wish I could have spent my energy telling her about God’s loving message of salvation through Jesus Christ, I did do that. And I want the Archbishop to know that letting an ad campaign take precedence over evangelistic work signals a major shift in Evangelical church priorities.  While I try to find a way to tell myself it was well-intentioned, I cannot help but think that collectively, the Anglican church risks failing to go looking for the one, choosing instead to feed and protect the ninety-nine.

           

           

           

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[i] For ideas on subversive story-telling, see Jack Zipes, (2016),  ‘Once  upon  a  time:  Changing  the  World  through  Storytelling’, in Common Knowledge,  22 (2), 227-283. doi: 10.1215/0961754X-3464961.

[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism

[iii] DeRogatis, A. (2005). What would Jesus do? Sexuality and salvation in Protestant Evangelical sex manuals, 1950s to the present. Church History, 74 (1),97-137. doi: 0.1017/S0009640700109679.

[iv] https://sydneyanglicans.net/blogs/ministrythinking/archbishops-letter-to-churches

[v] Name changed

[vi] For a comprehensive discussion on different approaches to understanding what the bible teaches about homosexuality, I thoroughly recommend, ‘Two views on homosexuality, the Bible and the Church’, edited by  P Sprinkle, published by  Zondervan.

[vii] Matthew 7:1-5

Things i think about while washing up...

When I was a kid my grandma would often suggest I do the washing up, but she could never just ask me.
She would say things like "Can you do the washing up for your mother?" or "Rosie, you should do the washing up before your mother comes home" (other variations included "be a good girl and... ")
...
Now, this used to annoy me a lot at the time, and i never really knew why. Sometimes i would snap back "if **you** want me to do it, just ask me to do it." (while thinking, and don't guilt me into it based on what you imagine my mother might want)
...
it's occurred to me, just now, that there are at least two problematic things going on when we say to someone "Can you do this task for you mother" .. And probably i instinctively knew this, and it's why I always flinched at it.
1) it implies that the only person who might benefit from the task being done is a person's mother, thereby teaching us that only mothers do housework, and only mothers appreciate it being done by someonelse.
2)secondly, and i think this is perhaps more interesting, i don't learn to do the washing up because it is a good thing to do, or simply because it needs doing, i learn to do it, that i might please someone, or be considered a good girl. which is disturbing because housework should not be moral or gendered. it just should be done. (And yes, i am writing a thesis on how we regulate behavior)
...
I then thought about how sometimes, back in the day, i would be doing the washing up at church, perhaps after supper, or after youthgroup and all the kids had gone home, and often I would clean up for my group and other groups, and someone (usually a man), would say something like "Its so good of you to do all this", or they would imply it was my spiritual gifting. And its a good thing I was also gifted with **some** patience or else there might have been a lot of punched faces, because i would politely smile, or with gritted teeth say, 'someone has to do it', but in my head i would be screaming "THIS IS NOT A SPIRITUAL GIFT. THE WASHING UP JUST HAS TO GET DONE. HERE IS A F*@KING TEA TOWEL"
...
but at the same time, i had learned that doing this did somehow make me morally virtuous. maybe people would affirm me and give me a round of applause and say "well done Rosie".
...
and now i think about how i found the New Testament story of Mary and Martha problematic. and i remember how the standard take home was to being encouraged to spend time in God's word, and i used to feel smacked in the face, because somehow simultaneously, i was a good girl when i cleaned up, and people wanted to call it a gift, yet it was also not to be done, because spending time at the feet of Jesus was better.

...
And whatever other lessons might be in that passage, i couldn't hear them, because my self worth (and maybe my salvation) was somehow in the washing up but it also wasn't, and i knew this .
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the take home is not that i often got angry or upset while busily doing things for my church.I did those things (mostly) with energy and enthusiasm, and yes, i do sometimes regret the hours of my life I poured into those activities, but i did them believing them to be of value, and all things said and done, i am glad i did it, and thankful for those years. .. When i started writing this I didn't even realise it was connected to memories of church. that just kind of happened.
...
the take home is that something as simple as how we talk about an everyday task can actually contribute to all sorts of complex ideas about morality and ethics, about identity, about what it is to be a girl, and about who should do housework. 

We Are Not The Problem

I posted these words this morning as a (long) Facebook status update.

I've decided to give it a title and put it here too.

White male editor of a conservative publication laments that Manchester Bombing didn't happen in Sydney and take out the ABC studios, saying those employed there would not be missed as they make no contribution to society. SMH reports this, ABC asks for an apology and for the statement to be retracted.
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This is an incitement to violence. If a muslim or POC said the same words the federal police would be at their door.
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Remember that when a muslim woman of colour made comments on ANZAC Day that we (Australians) should remember the people who have been displaced because of war, The political right, who advocate freedom of speech, had a meltdown, called for her to be fired and even deported, and now the ABC has canceled her programme.

...
We, on the left are not the problem, so if 'we' complain about injustice or racism or sexism, we're not the problem. If we, or anyone of any political leaning, call out violence, sexism, racism or homophobia, we are not the problem. If we say freedom of speech ought to be limited by an ethical obligation to others, we are not the problem. We are not being "politically correct". We are not being "soft". We're not the ones having a meltdown or calling for those who are not "like" us to be deported or for news rooms to be bombed.
...
If you call out injustice you are not the cause of injustice even though you bring it to light.

....

you can read the SMH article here

Apologies & Pixar

This last week I have been thinking about apologies.

Particularly, I have been thinking about the form that apologies can take.

Now, if someone alerts me to the fact that something I have said has upset them, it might seem like the obvious response is to simply say “I’m sorry”. But, the more I think about it, there are a variety of possible responses, indeed a spectrum of responses, and while all of these responses do something, not all of them apologise to the hurt person of allow for reconciliation between us.

Come with me on a journey of thinking about apologies. We’ll consider the form apologies can take, and what the words do. We’ll think about an apology I made, and a Pixar film I wrote about at uni last year that has helped me to think about human relationships.

At the one end of the spectrum we have a response of denial. It denies the hurt of the upset person, and the fact that I said anything that might reasonably cause offense. It takes this kind of form: “Look, you actually misunderstood me, that’s not really what I said”. What happens here, is the fault of bad feeling is placed on the upset person. They had the wrong feeling or the wrong response. I just need to point this out to them, and then we both go on our merry way and nobody has to change. I go on saying, thinking and doing the same things, and the hurt person can go on feeling whatever they like and it is of no concern to me.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have, I guess a response of mortification, where I take on a lot of guilt, and at first our roles seem reversed. I might say “I’m so sorry, I can’t believe I did that, I feel so awful that you feel like this.” Now, I’m not sure this is really ok either, because the hurt person might now feel tempted to give ground and say they weren’t really that hurt, and not to worry about it. They might assume they overreacted, even though they’re thankful for the apology. They might even apologise to me for making me feel bad. So what does this apology do? It makes me a supposed victim, and it still erases the hurt of the person I upset. In short, not only did I upset the person, I then emotionally manipulate and bully them into thinking they hurt me.

Somewhere in the middle there are Quick Fix Apologies and Band-Aid Apologies.

In a Quick Fix response I say something like “hey, I’m sorry you feel like this”. This apology has a silent ‘but’. It is really, “I’m sorry you feel like this, but there isn’t anything I can do about it/its not my fault”. Here I see your pain, but I don’t think its any my responsibility. You probably feel obliged to say “no worries”, at which point we both carry on with our lives. We hope the apology covers up the incident, and business as normal resumes. It’s a quick fix because while it might allow a swift return to smooth operating between us, it doesn’t necessarily safe guard against repeat situations.

Very similar to the quick fix are Band-Aid apologies, but I believe Band-Aid apologies have some potential. In a Band-Aid case, I might say “look, I’m sorry you feel this way, but its really not what I intended”. This is ok. It’s a starting point, and I think we all make these kind of apologies all the time, and they do a lot to helping us to get on with our fellow humans. I acknowledge the other person, and I acknowledge their hurt, but I don’t accept any responsibility for it. This kind of response allows me and my friend to kind of patch things up. To stick a band-aid over the situation. She’s upset, I can see that, I’m sorry the situation happened, but it was all a misunderstanding. My friend is appeased, but there is no guarantee I won’t hurt her again, because I might carry on in the same way, and she might carry on ‘misunderstanding and being upset’.

This response though could start a dialogue of reconciliation and apology, because underneath Band-Aids we do often heal. I might follow up my initial comment, and say “I’m sorry you feel this way, and it isn’t what I intended, what can I say or do to avoid this happening again?” And then, my friend and I can enter into a dialogue and discuss the situation, and I can listen to them, and come to understand how my action was hurtful, and which point I might say, “I am so sorry. I’m sorry my words hurt you”.

Now, its possible that I might have said that last apology straight away. I might straight up say “I’m sorry my words hurt you. I’m sorry I hurt you”. Here, I acknowledge hurt, and I acknowledge that I said or did something that created hurt. This is an apology, and again this allows for reconciliation, and it allows for growth. We can grow together.

You might be reading this and thinking, but what if it was a misunderstanding? Or what if that person was having a bad day, was already on edge, or just thinks everyone hates them? Well, first off, I want to say, if someone claims you hurt them, you don’t get to decide that you didn’t. It may have been a misunderstanding, and maybe they do already feel like the world is against them, but if a person feels like the world is against them, then I say we go and stand with them and face that world together, and I can only do that if first I say sorry, and if second I go and listen to them, to paraphrase Maria Lugones, I have to be willing to travel into the world of the hurt person. The idea of seeing from the place of the view point of another, of world traveling is at the core of Lugones’ thoughtful and influential article, ‘Playfulness, “world”-travelling, and Loving Perception’, in which she insists that a failure to identify with another is a failure to love them. Lugones teaches us through the example of her relationship with her mother, as she writes:

To love my mother was not possible for me while I retained a sense that it was fine for me to and others to see her arrogantly. Loving my mother also required me to see with her eyes, that I go into my mother’s world, that I see both of us as we are constructed in her world, that I witness her own sense of herself from within her world. (Lugones: 1987:8).

What Lugones’ is hoping to show us is that empathy, love and understanding of others are interwoven. And an apology, a reconciliation is an act that requires empathy. If I’m to apologise effectively, I must be willing to imagine how my words sound in the ears of the other, even if they sounded fine to me.

Let me tell you of an apology I made perhaps a decade ago, that was made after a misunderstanding, and taught me to look from the eyes of the hurt person, even though they had misread me.

I was in church, perhaps 9 or 10 years ago, and I was sitting towards the front. I was very busy in this particular church. I was on Parish Council, I was a youth group director, I was on the roster at our youth/contemporary service as a Service Leader. I went to regular meetings to plan  and pray for the direction, activities an character of that service.  I was not without influence, though I don’t think I always felt that way at the time. This one evening at church, while I was sitting towards the front, we started to sing a particular song, and I turned to the person next to me and made a face. If you know me, this probably doesn’t surprise you. I’m not shy in letting people know I don’t like the vast majority of songs in the contemporary church repertoire. So, whats wrong with what I did. I don’t like a song, or I thought it was silly, and I make a face. I don’t have to like all the songs, so what’s the big deal? The deal is the song leader saw me, and read my face as being against her. She assumed I was casting judgement on her, on her musical abilities, her service and contribution to the church. She mentioned her hurt to a leader at our church, and I was spoken to and asked to write an apology. At first I was pretty indignant. I wanted to plead my case with this leader. I wanted to justify my actions. I wanted to explain that I didn’t have a problem with the song leader in question, but the reality was a woman at my church was upset because of something I had done. It didn’t matter how justified I thought my action was, what mattered was that I made steps to be reconciled. And as Christians, I think this matters particularly because we are told that to be reconciled with our brothers and sisters needs to happen before we come before God.

I wrote the apology. It was hard. I wanted to say “I’m sorry you are upset”, but my flatmate pointed out to me that this was not an apology. I’m going to be honest here. I don’t remember what I wrote. I don’t remember if my words were good enough. I don’t know if my apology did everything it had to. I don’t know if back then, in my mid twenties, I was capable of seeing that I had hurt a member of the body of Christ. I don’t know if I thought about the fact that if part of the body was hurting that perhaps the whole body was. I really doubt that I did. And I wish I could have done better. But I learned,  learned to be careful of my responses, of my in-jokes, in case they not always be thought of as witty or funny. I learned, but I’m not perfected, and I still sometimes catch myself eyerolling at a key change that I find unnecessary, and I remind myself that instead of demanding that all music be to my taste I should work towards being thankful for the time and talents other members of my church are willing to offer in service of our community.

I write these thoughts after I took part in facebook ‘discussion’ among Christians, where a few loud voices spoke back and forth at each other, and in the end, I don’t know if any of us benefited, or if any of us have had the opportunity to learn or grow from our interactions. In the end, the initial content of the conversation mattered much less to me than the suggestion by one of contributors that a hurt person had to prove they were sufficiently hurt (by him), before he would apologize. Of course, it’s possible I misunderstood him. I don’t know. I wonder, if when we find ourselves thinking someone needs to account for their hurt, if we might think differently if we were willing to travel into their world, and even if we’re sure we’re not to blame, maybe, just in case we are, we should try stepping into their world and seeing what they see.

Last year I wrote about the film Inside Out and the relationship between the anthropomorphised emotions Joy and Sadness. I used them to illustrate a concept of relational  identity and Posthuman subjectivity, as explained by theorists such as Allison Weir (through whom I encountered Lugones) and Rosi Braidotti (who I have been lucky enough to meet!). As I began to learn about relational identity I learned that through empathy and affective solidarity we can begin see the world not as self vs other, or us vs them, and instead we learn to grow in response to our encounters, our relationships, and our embodied experiences in the world. When I reflect on this interaction on facebook, in which a queer girl Christian told a straight white man Christian that his words contributed to an archive of hurtful actions on the part of the church even though he was well intentioned, I wonder what Joy and Sadness might be able to teach us here.

You might recall that early on this film Joy tries to erase and overlook Sadness by finding an out of the way corner for her, drawing a circle round her, and asking her to stay there. What good is Sadness in this mission of making the protagonist, Riley, happy? If you’ve got to insist on being sad, that’s fine, just be sad where you won’t get in the way. Its not until Joy and Sadness are both expelled from headquarters, have together suffered many trials and setbacks and then been separated that Joy, now alone in Riley’s memory dump, sees the value of Sadness. Here in the memory dump Joy can forget herself and cry. Reaching in to the bag she has been carrying which contains Riley’s core memories, Joy takes out a memory she has always considered a happy memory. As Joy replays the memory the beginnings of relational, transformative identification with Sadness occurs. On her second watch, Joy is able to see the memory turn blue, the colour representing sadness. Joy sees that this ‘happy’ memory is more complex, it contains multiple stories. The memory becomes happy only after it was held together in sadness. For Joy, this new identification with Sadness “becomes a process of remaking meaning” (Weir:2008:125). Joy learns to see the value in Sadness, and she learns that valuing sadness need not necessarily make her less joyful, instead it will allow them to work together more productively.

Joy and Sadness remind us that sometimes we need to travel out of the world where we are in control to learn what it is like to be hurt, to be upset, to be outside. To not be in control they remind us that empathy and apologies allow for reconciliation, for getting to know people properly which allows us to identify with people we thought were not like us. If I am a Samaritan on a lonely journey and I come across my cultural other, a Jew, beaten and left for dead, I can step into my other’s world. I can pick her up, and place her where she can recover from the hurt that in this instance, I did not cause, but that maybe I have contributed to or allowed to happen through years of inaction.  If I can do this I have learned to love my other, even though we have our differences.

For me, learning to apologise and to stand in the world of another, is part of learning to love. 

..

references:

Braidotti, R (2013) The Posthuman, Polity Press: Cambridge & Malden

Lugones, M (1987) 'Playfulness, "world"-Traveling and Loving Perception, Hypatia, 2:2 pp 3-19

Rivera, J (Producer) & Docter, P (Director) (2015), Inside Out (animated motion picture), Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Productions, France and America.

Weir, A (2008) ‘Global Feminism and Transformative Identity Politics’ in Hypatia 23(4), 110-133. Indiana University Press. Retrieved August 20, 2016, from Project MUSE database.

  also, a google image search sourced the pic of Joy and Sadness for me... and apparently it was posted here

 **If you're a christian person and you're thinking about your connections, friendships and relationships with LGBTIQ people, and thinking about the necessity of apologising to LGBTIQ people, whether you should do this, or how it might be done, one thing you might like to consider is visiting Equal Voices, and taking a look at this info on an apology **