ALSSI Newsletter
February 2025
Hello!
Hard to believe we’ve almost survived the year that is February. How does the shortest month crawl by so slowly?
March means we’re in the homestretch for Season 9 of the podcast. This season will wrap April 15, and then we’ll take a break for a few months to recover and refuel…if you can describe a book launch as rest.
Speaking of books:
Our next At Last She Read It meeting will be held April 17, 2025 at 7:00 pm Mtn. Please register by clicking here. You can also find a registration link under the Events tab on our website.
We’ll be discussing Beth Allison Barr’s book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. If you haven’t started reading yet, you still have plenty of time! And if you don’t have time to read the book in advance, our book club discussions are so worthwhile, it’s definitely still worth attending!
Dr. Barr is associate professor of history and associate dean of the Graduate School at Baylor University. If you read the book a while ago and want to refresh your memory prior to the meeting, why not revisit our conversation with her from Episode 141?
“From Mary Magdalene to Waldensian women, Ursuline nuns, Moravian wives, Quaker sisters, Black women preachers, and suffragette activists, history shows us that women do not wait on the approval of men to do the work of God.”
― Beth Allison Barr
Thankfully women don’t wait on the approval of men to write books either. That of course includes our book, At Last She Said It: Honest Conversations about Faith, Church, and Everything in Between, due April 28 from Signature Books!
You can preorder at the link above, or through your local bookstore. Right now we’re busy working on the audio book. The print edition, ebook, and audio book should all be available on the release date. Thanks to everyone who’s already ordered … we can’t wait to share this book with you, and hope you’ll have friends you want to share it with too.
Maybe you have a group you’d like us to speak to? Whether an in-person gathering or online fireside, we’d love to see if we can put something together. We’re planning on some travel this summer … maybe to your neck of the woods! For now, we hope you’ll save the date for a May 10 book launch event hosted by Signature Books in Salt Lake City. More details to come!
Reminder:
We announced it last month but want to remind you that our editorial calendar has changed a little. The first Say More issue of the month will be a single essay and will go to all subscribers—this is replacing the message portion of our monthly newsletter. The 2nd will be the Say More you’re used to, available to paid subscribers only for the first month, and to everyone after that. We’re always looking for more submissions. If you have anything you’d like to share, we hope you’ll consider saying it in a future Say More! You can find our editorial guidelines here, or under the Submissions tab on our website.
Our curator Blakelee has created a few new prompts, in case you need some inspiration to help you get started:
We, like the religious leaders of Jesus’s day, build obstacle courses and hedge mazes around our hearts to make the greatest commandment a checklist we can mark off instead of a way of life to embody. We trade loving God with knowing about God and end up flat on our faces in both efforts.
—Erin Hicks Moon, I’ve Got Questions: The Spiritual Practice of Having It Out with God
March Calendar:
That’s all!
Reminder that if you donate to ALSSI at our subscriber levels and would like a comp subscription to Substack to have access to all our paid subscriber features, send us an email and we’ll hook you up.
Thanks for your support!
Susan, Cynthia,
and the ALSSI Team