In Parable of the Brown Girl: The Sacred Lives of Girls of Color, ordained minister, speaker, and author, Khristi Lauren Adams shares the stories of girls of color to spotlight their dreams, struggles, and worlds. By centering the lives of Black girls, she raises the reader’s awareness of the forces that girls of color face, as well as the resilience of these girls and their communities.

The first sentence of the introduction clearly and concisely lays out the issue When Others Shuddered hopes to address: “we have too few female heroes of the faith” (11).

Andrew Bartlett’s Men and Women in Christ is a tremendously helpful contribution to the debate that rages in evangelicalism over the “roles” of women. Bartlett is concerned that the sharp divide between complementarian and egalitarian viewpoints has harmed the unity and witness of the church. He has a degree in theology, but his career has been in the field of law and his specialty has become arbitration. A judge or arbitrator is different from a lawyer.

The gospel is indeed good news for women. However, as Dr. Amanda W. Benckhuysen observes, it also “tends to come to women with strings attached.” Men may be free in Christ, yet “women assume the yoke of a new law—restrictions and requirements assigned to them” by virtue of their gendered status as the “weaker vessel.” To depart from this gender ideology “is to reject God’s divine commands and undermine the authority of God’s Word, the Bible” (1–2).

Aimee Byrd’s book, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, is an invitation for churches to identify and move beyond the negative impact of the biblical manhood and womanhood movement. In Byrd’s opinion, this movement was the response of some Christian denominations to the sexual revolution of the 1960s that sought to create parameters around appropriate expressions of what it means to be male and female. She is inviting church leaders to identify and correct any areas of inequality in training women to participate in church ministry.

In her foreword, Sarah Bessey offers a concise summary of Defiant: What the Women of Exodus Teach Us about Freedom:

Dharamraj reads the Song of Songs intertextually with the prophetic texts; within a literary culture, texts grow out of a shared linguistic, aesthetic, and ideological substratum, and then influence the interpretation of each other when they are read together. Song of Songs paired with the prophetic texts profiles the ideal human-human and divine-human love relationships.

I am a woman, I work in biblical interpretation, and I am not alone. This is the gripping truth presented in Amanda Benckhuysen’s book The Gospel According to Eve. She opens her work with the claim, “In the history of the church, there have always been those who have questioned notions of women’s inferiority and who have believed that the Bible intends woman’s full emancipation and equality” (1–2). The book then outlines the overwhelming historical testament of women interpreting the Bible, and specifically interpreting the figure of Eve, since the beginning of the church.

In her book, 7 Deadly Sins of Women in Leadership, Kate Coleman outlines what she believes are the seven most destructive behaviors that women in leadership succumb to: limiting self-perceptions, failure to draw the line, inadequate personal vision, an unhealthy work-life rhythm, the ‘disease to please,' colluding instead of confronting, and neglecting family matters.

Larry Crabb’s book Fully Alive purports in its subtitle to “live beyond stereotypes.” Unfortunately, readers are almost immediately confronted with a view of gender essentialism, which suggests that men and women, or even young girls or boys, all essentially act along certain gender-determined ways. For example, after noting we must move beyond stereotypes of what it is to be “masculine” or “feminine” (25), he goes on to discuss how he wonders “God will welcome my wife by warmly saying, ‘Well done!