Privilege or Silence: Women in Churches of Christ (1897-1907) IV

January 25, 2009

The previous post stated the specific arguments for silence. This post presents the case for “privilege.” In January 1904 the Christian Leader and The Way merged. Though a friendly merger, it was the union of a strong Tennessee paper with a Northern paper whose roots were shared by Daniel Sommer. This entailed some substantial difference […]


Privilege or Silence: Women in Churches of Christ (1897-1907) III

January 23, 2009

In my next post I will turn my attention to “privilege,” but in this one I dig deeper into the argument for silence. The Tennessee Tradition regarded public silence as godly submission on the part of faithful women. Given the Tennessee understanding that women were inferior to men in terms of leadership capacity and excluded from […]


Privilege or Silence: Women in Churches of Christ (1897-1907) I

January 20, 2009

One of the forgotten debates from the first decade of the 20th century among Churches of Christ is whether audible participation in the assembly through prayer, singing, and exhortation was a woman’s privilege or a subversion of the created order. May a woman lead prayer in the assembly? May a woman lead singing in the […]


Texas Vs. Tennessee (1939)

January 13, 2009

George DeHoff (1913-1993), a native of Arkansas but a powerful influence in Tennessee throughout most of the 20th century, entered Harding College in the summer of 1934 and then transferred to Freed-Hardeman College in 1935. He experienced two different worlds in those years. He had previously attended Burritt College between 1929 and 1933 so he was primarily interested in biblical studies […]