Heretic Rachel Held Evans Is Dead at 37
May 4, 2019 15:22:43 GMT -5
Post by schwartzie on May 4, 2019 15:22:43 GMT -5
Hopefully, she repented before she died. She was a proponent of abortion, gay rights, and called herself a "progressive" Christian - which is an oxymoron.
Rachel Held Evans, the Hugely Popular Christian Writer Who Challenged the Evangelical Establishment, Is Dead at 37
By RUTH GRAHAM
MAY 04, 201912:40 PM
Rachel Held Evans, an influential progressive Christian writer and speaker who cheerfully challenged American evangelical culture, died on Saturday at a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. Evans, 37, entered the hospital in mid-April with the flu, and then had a severe allergic reaction to antibiotics, as she wrote on Twitter several weeks ago. According to her husband, Dan Evans, she then developed sustained seizures. Doctors put her in a medically induced coma, but some seizures returned when her medical team attempted to wean her from the medications that were maintaining her coma. Her condition worsened on Thursday morning, and her medical team discovered severe swelling of her brain. She died early on Saturday morning.
“She put others before herself,” her husband, Dan Evans, said in an email on Saturday. “She shared her platform. She always remembered how others had helped her. She enjoyed seeing other people in contexts where they thrived. She didn’t hold grudges, would forget as well as forgive. She had little time for pettiness and a big heart for people. And these are all things I wish I had told her more while I still had the privilege to keep her company.”
Evans was a forceful and winsome public voice for progressive evangelicalism, first as a blogger and later as an author and sought-after speaker. She started her eponymous site more than a decade ago, and in her years of writing she confronted every controversial issue in American evangelical culture. She wrote about biblical literalism, racism, abortion, evolution, theology, marriage, patriarchy, women in leadership, and evangelical support for Donald Trump. She advocated for the full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the church and analyzed her own complicity in racial bias after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The Washington Post once called her “the most polarizing woman in evangelicalism.”
Evans’ political and cultural polemics attracted the most attention. But she also wrote passionately about her own evolving faith, her prayer life, her wrestling with doubt, and her love for the church. “Anyone who has loved the Bible as much as I have, and who has lost it and found it again, knows how a relationship with the Bible can be as real and as complicated as a relationship with a family member or close friend,” she wrote in her most recent book, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again.
Evans was a forceful and winsome public voice for progressive evangelicalism.
Evans announced in 2014 that she was leaving evangelicalism, exhausted by “wearing out my voice in calling for an end to evangelicalism’s culture wars.” She began attending an Episcopal church. But she remained widely read within evangelical circles and among Christians and others who had left evangelicalism but still felt connected to it in some way. Evans was famous enough among Christians that many referred to her online simply as “RHE.” When her friends and colleagues, the writers Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu, announced an online prayer vigil for her on April 19, the hashtag #PrayforRHE became a trending topic on Twitter.
High-profile female writers and speakers in American evangelicalism have traditionally focused on spiritual questions and shied away from controversy and confrontation. But Evans often used her platform to challenge male pastors and leaders. Over the years, she sparred about theology, culture, and politics with prominent Christian men including Russell Moore, John Piper, Rod Dreher, and Mark Driscoll. (Many of them have expressed their prayers for her in recent weeks, after Evans shared the news of her illness.)
Evans reacted righteously to injustice wherever she saw it: She published a series on her blog about abuse in the church in 2013, years before many evangelical institutions began to seriously confront the problem. But her writing was also warm and funny. For her second book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, she spent a year following the Bible’s instructions for women literally, gamely camping out in her yard in obedience to Levitical instructions for menstruating women. “She put so much of herself into her books,” her husband said. “I tell people: If you want to know Rachel, read her work.” She was the author of four books, and the co-founder of two major conferences aimed at progressive Christians, Why Christian and Evolving Faith.
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Rachel Held Evans, the Hugely Popular Christian Writer Who Challenged the Evangelical Establishment, Is Dead at 37
By RUTH GRAHAM
MAY 04, 201912:40 PM
Rachel Held Evans, an influential progressive Christian writer and speaker who cheerfully challenged American evangelical culture, died on Saturday at a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. Evans, 37, entered the hospital in mid-April with the flu, and then had a severe allergic reaction to antibiotics, as she wrote on Twitter several weeks ago. According to her husband, Dan Evans, she then developed sustained seizures. Doctors put her in a medically induced coma, but some seizures returned when her medical team attempted to wean her from the medications that were maintaining her coma. Her condition worsened on Thursday morning, and her medical team discovered severe swelling of her brain. She died early on Saturday morning.
“She put others before herself,” her husband, Dan Evans, said in an email on Saturday. “She shared her platform. She always remembered how others had helped her. She enjoyed seeing other people in contexts where they thrived. She didn’t hold grudges, would forget as well as forgive. She had little time for pettiness and a big heart for people. And these are all things I wish I had told her more while I still had the privilege to keep her company.”
Evans was a forceful and winsome public voice for progressive evangelicalism, first as a blogger and later as an author and sought-after speaker. She started her eponymous site more than a decade ago, and in her years of writing she confronted every controversial issue in American evangelical culture. She wrote about biblical literalism, racism, abortion, evolution, theology, marriage, patriarchy, women in leadership, and evangelical support for Donald Trump. She advocated for the full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the church and analyzed her own complicity in racial bias after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The Washington Post once called her “the most polarizing woman in evangelicalism.”
Evans’ political and cultural polemics attracted the most attention. But she also wrote passionately about her own evolving faith, her prayer life, her wrestling with doubt, and her love for the church. “Anyone who has loved the Bible as much as I have, and who has lost it and found it again, knows how a relationship with the Bible can be as real and as complicated as a relationship with a family member or close friend,” she wrote in her most recent book, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again.
Evans was a forceful and winsome public voice for progressive evangelicalism.
Evans announced in 2014 that she was leaving evangelicalism, exhausted by “wearing out my voice in calling for an end to evangelicalism’s culture wars.” She began attending an Episcopal church. But she remained widely read within evangelical circles and among Christians and others who had left evangelicalism but still felt connected to it in some way. Evans was famous enough among Christians that many referred to her online simply as “RHE.” When her friends and colleagues, the writers Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu, announced an online prayer vigil for her on April 19, the hashtag #PrayforRHE became a trending topic on Twitter.
High-profile female writers and speakers in American evangelicalism have traditionally focused on spiritual questions and shied away from controversy and confrontation. But Evans often used her platform to challenge male pastors and leaders. Over the years, she sparred about theology, culture, and politics with prominent Christian men including Russell Moore, John Piper, Rod Dreher, and Mark Driscoll. (Many of them have expressed their prayers for her in recent weeks, after Evans shared the news of her illness.)
Evans reacted righteously to injustice wherever she saw it: She published a series on her blog about abuse in the church in 2013, years before many evangelical institutions began to seriously confront the problem. But her writing was also warm and funny. For her second book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, she spent a year following the Bible’s instructions for women literally, gamely camping out in her yard in obedience to Levitical instructions for menstruating women. “She put so much of herself into her books,” her husband said. “I tell people: If you want to know Rachel, read her work.” She was the author of four books, and the co-founder of two major conferences aimed at progressive Christians, Why Christian and Evolving Faith.
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