With straight back

“So linguistically intense that it even seeps into a man.”

This is how Peter Skov-Jakobsen, Bishop of the Diocese of Copenhagen, writes about the book “Med rank ryg. A story about faith and motherhood”, published by Bibelselskabets Forlag on May 12, 2021.

Lawyer, director, debater and author of the bestseller “The Lady” Malene Lei Raben calls the book “a proposal for a female manifesto, whether you are a believer or not”. The former director of KVINFO, Elisabeth Møller Jensen, says that the book “effortlessly throws the patriarchal interpretations in the Bible so far away that I want to read the texts all over again.”

Author Anne-Cathrine Riebnitzsky has “read and cried” and calls it “a really, really good and necessary book.”

It was also necessary for me to write. Three out of four are members of the Danish National Church. Half of them are women. Women who have given birth and experienced abuse. Have lost and felt the grief right down to their bones. Where is the Christian faith in that? Isn’t it oppressive to women? Surely you can’t find strength there?

Yes, you can. I can. But I couldn’t read about it anywhere. That’s why I wrote.

As the preface says, I write about “what it’s like to be a woman of faith”. I “explore how faith can matter when you carry life and lose it, and how you can be crushed into a gender role as a young person by a man who may not have even realized what he was doing.”

By going all the way back to the Bible, I gain strength for the motherhood that defines everything in my life, from love to the size of my pension, and I find a way for men and women to talk despite the often harsh tone of #MeToo.

The conversations have already started everywhere.

Thank you.

“A book that sticks in your mind”.
Sørine Gotfredsen, Kristeligt Dagblad, four stars

“There is not much to say. That’s good.”
Carsten Bach-Nielsen, theologian, art historian, author of “The Bible in Denmark”

“Shows that Jesus, in his encounters with women, sovereignly transcended the patriarchal attitude of his time … which has not only destroyed many women, but also many relationships between men and women.”
Lisbeth Smedegaard Andersen, theologian, author, hymn writer

“When God shows himself at eye level, she gains strength, including the strength to speak out. The book does both good and evil in the reader – and that is actually good.”
Niels Henrik Gregersen, Professor, PhD, Systematic Theology, University of Copenhagen

“Dare to tackle the painful and shameful (and taboo).“
Dorte Toudal Viftrup, reader

“Shows in a liberating and much-needed way that the Bible never functions as a dusty reference book with fixed prescriptions, but as a passionate dialog partner that can speak into the concrete modern woman’s life about the vulnerability and strength of love.”
Liselotte Horneman Kragh, theologian and author