The Language of Divorce with Valerie Hobbs

Recovering God: The Conversations

Valerie Hobbs has been a Christian for most of her life and said that she was brought up in a series of abusive church communities. She grew up around men who dehumanised and abused women, and also weaponised certain women against each other. Because of this, for a significant portion of her life, she was unable to read the Bible because she heard only the voices of these hateful men and women. She has spent the last 25-30 years deconstructing all the many layers of her upbringing. But she can also say that the testimony of her life is the enduring presence of the love of God. God has brought various people into her life over the years, who have adopted her into their love and friendship, and showed her the compassion and faithfulness of Jesus Christ. One such person is her husband Andrew, to whom she’s been married for 20 years.
In her work life, she has been an academic for close to 20 years. She is a linguist at the University of Sheffield, and has particular expertise in religious language. She’s particularly interested in the ways religious language reveals our most sacred commitments in all their complexity. Her book on religious language was published earlier this year, and she has also published articles on such topics as religious language and disability, religious language and divorce, and religious language and violence against women. She also has a blog about the Bible and enjoys making short videos about themes in the Bible.

You can follow Valerie:
Twitter: @vhobbs5
https://drvhobbs.com/
https://lampofthelamb.com/

Valerie’s book is ‘An Introduction to Religious Language: Exploring Theolinguistics in Contemporary Contexts’.

She’s a research associate at the Centre for the Study of the Bible and Violence. The Academic Arm of the Centre aims to study questions appertaining to Bible and Violence deeply and rigorously in collaboration with scholars from different (or no) faith traditions, nationalities and academic disciplines. One of her most recent collaborations with the centre director, the Rev. Dr. Helen Paynter (a former speaker on the podcast), was an analysis of fascist rhetoric in connection with the violence carried out by a white supremacist mob at the United States Capitol in January, 2021. https://www.csbvbristol.org.uk/2021/01/12/qanon-christian-apocalypticism/?fbclid=IwAR0sCpsv8trk9hqjqQFbfdm4RTSq1eosLBSyk1tZXX_ZdRozrtNZPQVKFE4

Listeners may also be interested in a piece that she wrote about the restricted set of largely invisible and unpaid work assigned to women which forms the backbone of a patriarchal system within organised religion, such as Christianity.
https://www.csbvbristol.org.uk/2020/07/20/womens-holy-burden-and-patriarchy/

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Follow the Recovering God Podcast:
Twitter: @RecoveringGod
Instagram: RecoveringGod

If you have any comments, please let us know at: [e-mail]

Please remember to rate, subscribe and tell others who you think will be interested.
The Recovering God Podcast has been in existence since the summer of 2019. The team has changed over those years but we're delighted to still be offering relevant discussions covering the broad topics of feminism and the Christian faith!