1. Why are 2025 women turning to ancient voices in scripture for inspiration?
In a time when systems attempt to silence women, the women of the past remind us how to sing songs that testify to the fullness of humanity’s goodness; they remind us that women have survived for centuries by gathering together, standing their sacred ground, and seeking justice, mercy, and love.
Ancient voices in scripture, and the ones we must imagine because they weren’t recorded or acknowledged, help us see a way forward as workers, protectors, leaders, mothers, and truth-tellers. They bear witness to the fact that oppression can be confronted and transformed through the lives, voices, and stories of women. They point us to a wide-hipped, big-bosomed God who was with them then and is with us now, thanks be.
Why wouldn’t we look to our women ancestors for wisdom and inspiration? Would we even be here, alive and loving, without them?
2. Why did you write this book, and why do you think it’s important for today?
I wrote this book for the women who came before me, for the women who stand beside me, and for the women who come after me. I wrote it for my children, as well as for my mother and my grandmothers. I wrote it for any and all who long for a woman-led faith, a faith that centers and celebrates women as the light-bearers we are.
I wrote this book for the younger me who sat in church pews for years wishing women’s stories were being told by women, for women, and with women. I wrote it for every person who’s ever been told their bodies are not good or holy (because that’s nothing but a lie – your body is perfect, honey). I wrote this book for all who’ve done the work of theological deconstruction but who now find themselves asking, “What do I believe, and who do I believe in?”
What might a faith disentangled from patriarchy look like and feel like? What might a faith with women at the center be able to build?
To this end, In the Beginning Were the Women is vital for today’s world. At a time when women’s rights are under threat and Christian nationalism is on the rise, the women’s stories within these pages make space where there has long been constraint. The book seeks to challenge the status quo and invite people’s imaginations to expand. It is both modern and ancient, weaving modern-day issues with biblical women’s voices so that we learn again that women are timeless, prophetic, and pastoral.
Finally, In the Beginning Were the Women pushes the Church to transform its liturgy because what good are our prayers on Sunday if they make no meaning in our lives on Monday? Therefore, praying with women on Sunday must lead us to advocating alongside women on Monday–at dinner tables, PTO meetings, voting booths, and more. And not just women–advocating alongside all who are maligned by the systems that would rather they not exist, and, in fact, actively work toward their demise. Through story, liturgy, prayer, contemporary connections, and modern-day, woman-led nonprofits, In the Beginning Were the Women is the place where hope can be found and a new faith can be built to the glory of the God who’s always and ever been our Mother. Amen.
3. Highlight some of your favorites from the book. Who are some women we may not know?!?
Zohara (The Woman of Thebez): Judges 9:50-55 (Though she is not named in the scripture story, I named her Zohara, meaning “light or splendor” because, as her story unfolds, we see that she is the splendor by which her entire community is saved.)
Aholibamah: Genesis 26:34–35 and Genesis 36:1–8 (Aholibamah is also referred to as Judith in scripture; however, in her story as I imagine it, she names herself Astarte, after the Canaanite goddess of love and hunting. She is Canaanite and not Jewish, after all, one of the wives of Esau.)
Eliora (Witch of Endor): 1 Samuel 28:3–25 (Eliora is a feminine Hebrew name meaning “God is my light,” which I chose for her as the witch who follows God’s light to reveal truth. Eliora shows us that witches are the ancient spiritual guides of our communities and those who fear them fear the very light of God itself.)
4. How are women’s stories a pathway to healing and transformation?
Imagine having a body that birthed generations of people who are still revered today, but the body from which they came is maligned, ignored, villainized, hypersexualized, forgotten.
Imagine having a voice that sang songs and told tales and preached sermons and offered truth only to be pushed to the side or erased altogether.
Imagine having a story, rich with complexity, deep with meaning, that has never been told.
Imagine never being able to speak for yourself and only having others speak for you.
Now, imagine sitting in a sacred circle in which your body is honored for all it has endured and all it has created. Imagine sitting in a sacred circle in which your voice is invited to sing and speak and preach and pray without judgment, evaluation, or constraint. Imagine sitting in a sacred circle in which your story, as complicated as it may be, is told by you and you alone and received with openness and love. Imagine sitting in a sacred circle in which you speak for yourself and no one is there to correct or overpower you.
Might this sacred circle offer healing? Might it begin to transform you? Give you wings, help you fly?
Women have been circling up and sharing their stories with one another forever, showing the world a way toward liberation, not through dramatic, large-scale acts, but through simple, communal togetherness. To hear women tell their stories in churches and from pulpits, not as a one-off, special event, but as a regular practice of faithfulness can be one of the many ways we begin to heal from the harms of patriarchy and turn our culture and our world toward justice and love. If that’s not healing, I don’t know what is.
5. What is your definition of “woman” and how might those of us who do not identify as such connect with your work?
In In the Beginning Were the Women, I define “woman” more as a verb than as a noun.
I write in the introduction:
“To woman is to live in such a way that uproots and uplifts the untold, incomplete stories of our lives and places, at the very center, the voices and the names of those whom society, culture, and systems have relegated to the sidelines, or tried to erase altogether. In this way, one’s body does not make them a woman as much as one’s life and how they live it does. However, our bodies do matter because of the ways women’s bodies have been hypersexualized and shamed (especially when those bodies are of the conquered and colonized people) while men’s bodies are, by and large, unexamined and lifted as the standard bearers for all. Therefore, placing women, our bodies, and the stories we hold within them at the very center of our sacred narratives is an essential practice for the reclamation of our faith in God and of God’s faith in us.
“In a conversation with Gloria Steinem at The New School in October 2014, bell hooks said, ‘Patriarchy has no gender, and I think we have to remember people’s allegiance to patriarchy isn’t static. People can start out in feminism and end up in patriarchy.’
“Hence, when I pray things like, ‘Women forever and ever amen,’ I mean women and men and nonbinary people who follow the divine feminine spirit of justice, love, and mercy. I mean those who stand their sacred ground amid the violence and toxicity of patriarchy and keep the world spinning in love. I mean those who sing the world into being. I mean those who hum and dance and breathe and move to the rhythms of God’s grace.
“While I’m certain there’s a better word than woman for the wise, warrior, mother, mystic women of this book (and of this world), I continue to use it because it is the word I was given, and it’s the one I keep choosing. I refuse to let patriarchy take what Eve embodied so beautifully in the garden all those many moons, myths, and mysteries ago when she reached for the fruit to feed herself and her family.”
To this end, however we identify, my hope is that hearing the stories of ancient women from my sacred imagination (some of whom are queer and fall in love with other women, by the way) both transcends our traditional ideas of womanhood and connects us to womanhood anew.
Claire McKeever-Burgett is the author of In the Beginning Were the Women. She hails from the dry plains of West Texas, and though she’s lived in Washington, D.C., Austin, TX, Louisiana, and Nashville since 2013, she still claims Texas as her home. A graduate of Baylor University with a degree in English and Professional Writing, Claire began her career working at Sojourners magazine on Jim Wallis’ New York Times bestselling book tour for God’s Politics. From there, Claire worked in the nonprofit sustainable food world in Austin, Texas, and then made her way to Vanderbilt Divinity School where she earned a Master of Divinity in 2011.
An author, creative contemplative, and spiritual leader, Claire has dedicated her life to bridging spirituality and social justice. She has served as a clergy, led congregations, and facilitated transformative writing, movement, and liturgical practices centered on healing and embodiment. A mother, certified birth and postpartum doula, and a yoga, dance, and martial arts instructor, Claire lives with her family in Nashville, Tennessee.
Her debut book, Blessed Are the Women: Naming and Reclaiming Women’s Stories from the Gospels, shares stories of women from the Gospels in their words, with their own names, interwoven with Claire’s personal story of growing up as a woman with a vision and a voice in a conservative, Southern Baptist, male-dominated world. Claire’s writing invites people to pray, dance, sing, and create with women at the center in order to heal from religious and theological trauma and to find a place of welcome and peace within a reimagined, woman-led faith.
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