What if the church took an entire year to focus on stories of women in the Bible?
The Women's Lectionary reimagines the liturgical preaching calendar to do just that. These women are daughters, wives, and mothers. They are also strong leaders, evil queens, and wicked stepmothers.
The book includes well-known figures like Miriam and Mary, lesser-known women like Huldah and Sapphira, and a deep examination of feminine metaphors for God. This comprehensive resource features more than one hundred commentary essays, with an Old Testament and New Testament passage for each Sunday of the year and special holy days in the calendar.
What People are Saying
“In The Women's Lectionary, Ashley Wilcox offers not only a full course of preaching texts for an entire liturgical year, but a vivid and interconnected commentary drawing out the richness of the biblical stories and the opportunities for proclamation of the good news particularly through the lens of women's stories and the divine feminine. Wilcox's delicate balance of academia and wonder makes this a fantastic and engaging read for church book groups as well.”
— Emmy Kegler, author of One Coin Found
“The Women’s Lectionary is a fresh new approach to texts about women in the Bible. It allows women to tell their own story, magnifying the voices of those who had one and giving voice to those who did not.”
— Cynthia L. Hale, Senior Pastor, Ray of Hope Christian Church, Decatur, Georgia
More about The Women’s Lectionary
U.S. Catholic
Whether you’re new to preaching, a seasoned pro, or just looking to more inclusively engage with scripture, The Women’s Lectionary offers wisdom to aid you in breaking open the word.
Homiletic
Wilcox’s lectionary provides the weekly scripture references (not the actual passages) and retells the text in accessible language, inserting insights and interrogatives that may prompt preachers to see the women in the text for the first time or to see them in ways that disrupt narrow views of women in the ancient world.
Religion News Service
It is not only the human characters who bring feminine viewpoints to Scripture, according to Ashley Wilcox, a Quaker minister, whose “The Women’s Lectionary: Preaching the Women of the Bible Throughout the Year” was also published this year. She points to feminine depictions of God in the Bible as a hen gathering her chicks under her wings or an angry mother bear.
Friends Journal
This book empowers people of faith to be mindful to place topics of the Bible in “social and historical context” and to translate elements of biblical messages to make them relevant to our own era and experiences. Wilcox’s goal is to make the Bible more accessible for diverse readers, and she certainly opened up the text for me.
Working Preacher
God is working through these women to bring new life to old structures. And as we look through the Bible, we can see how God, like a mother hen gathering her brood under her wings, has been doing this work all along.
The National Catholic Reporter
Ashley M. Wilcox is a Quaker minister who created The Women's Lectionary scheduled for publication in August. Her resource focuses on feminine imagery for God, passages about women in the Bible, and "reimagines the liturgical calendar of preaching for one year."
Photo by Emily Weaver Brown
Ashley M. Wilcox is a Quaker minister and founder of the Church of Mary Magdalene. She is a graduate of Candler School of Theology and Willamette University of Law.
Learn more about Ashley and book her for speaking engagements