Spiritual Misfits Podcast · Meeting Ground

(Not) Rescuing the Text (Michelle Eastwood)

·49 min·3 clips

Michelle Eastwood says her faith crisis came after being "absolutely screwed over" by purity culture.

1. Spiritual Misfits Podcast features Michelle Eastwood on "(Not) Rescuing the Text," a conversation about faith, scripture, feminism, and aging. 2. Will Small interviews Dr. Michelle Eastwood, whose degrees in psychology, history, education, and theology shape her reading of the Bible. 3. The episode asks what it means to read scripture honestly, without forcing it to fit certainty, and why that matters for faith. 4. Eastwood says she grew up with a minister father, a Lutheran minister grandfather, and a long German Lutheran family line. 5. She recalls being shocked that other Christians did not know Luther's small catechism or the "96 theses" the way she did. 6. She describes leaving the Lutheran church after a minister rewrote her newsletter piece on women's ordination and published it under her name. 7. She says she spent about 10 years in Anglican churches, trained at Pilgrim Theological College in Parkville, and did her PhD at a Catholic college. 8. Eastwood explains that feminist reading came through years of reading scholars such as Phyllis Trible, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and the junior project. 9. She says a scholarship pushed her into aging research, and she chose Psalm 71 after Googling Bible verses about aging. 10. Her PhD, "The Shame of the Old Woman," led her to read Psalm 71 through shame, poetry, liturgy, psychology, and menopause. 11. Eastwood says there is not one "old woman" in the Bible, and that women's stories are often invisible in the Hebrew Bible. 12. She gives examples such as Sarah and Naomi while also naming a trans woman, an Indigenous woman, an immigrant, and a woman who never had children as possible readers of the psalm. 13. She says some women may feel comforted by Psalm 71, while others may read it and feel that God was absent or untrue to their experience. 14. Eastwood says her Substack title, "Not Rescuing the Text," came from a 2021 trip to Israel where the guide contrasted "what the text says" and "what the land says." 15. She argues that the Bible can be treated as a flawed document written by people struggling with faith and still remain spiritually useful. 16. Eastwood says the urge to rescue the text usually comes from a desire for certainty and faithful obedience, but it can erase nuance and empathy. 17. She uses the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the offer of the girls, to show how rereading can disrupt inherited assumptions. 18. She brings in psychology to discuss in-group and out-group thinking, saying it helps explain why some readers excuse harm from the in-group. 19. The tone is reflective and analytical, with a calm interview style that moves between biography, scholarship, and pastoral questions. 20. People interested in feminist theology, biblical interpretation, and church trauma will likely want this episode; listeners wanting a simple proof-text debate may skip it.

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