Danielle in Baton Rouge

  I don’t expect this post to be super groundbreaking or mind-and-heart-transforming. Most of what I am going to write has been written by many others, and I will do some citing and directing to some of those sources as I go along. Then why write? In part, because the writings of others have helped me along my own journey of faith evolution as I have asked hard questions and wrestled with different ideas. Writers like Rachel Held Evans , Sarah Bessey , Jeff Chu , and Jen Hatmaker have “held lanterns” (as Jen says ) for me, and I want to do my best to hold a lantern for others. I also write because it is exercise for my soul. Sometimes, the itch to write strikes and for days things bounce around in my head and heart until I get them on paper. June is Pride month, which is a time of celebration for the LGBTQ+ community. For those of us who are not part of the LGBTQ+ community, it should be a time to offer support to our friends and siblings who are, and to stand in solidarity with them

 I’ve been thinking about child sacrifice this week. What triggered this topic was a key term we discussed in one of my sociology classes: patriarchal bargain. Basically, this is when people make excuses to justify or act to maintain a harmful system (in this case, patriarchy) even when they are aware of the costs, because it is also a system that benefits them in some ways. In class, we were discussing some examples of patriarchal bargains. And then something clicked in my mind. We make these types of bargains in other settings as well. I've made these bargains when I’ve been silent about my convictions to maintain belonging in certain communities. So, child sacrifice. Most of us would consider it peak evil to sacrifice an innocent child. Indeed, growing up in the church I remember being taught that one thing that differentiated the God of Israel, the God in the Bible, was that He valued life, protected the innocent, and created the Law (the rulebook at the center of the Old Tes