Episode Details

Faces of Our Faith: Vashti — The Queen Who Said No

Before Esther ever enters the story, another woman has already shown us what courage costs. In week 5 of our Faces of Our Faith summer series, we turn to Esther chapter 1 and the queen we often forget — Vashti, who refuses a king's drunken command and loses her crown for it.

We trace the reversal that follows — Esther's rise, Haman's fall, and a people delivered without God's name ever appearing on the page — then sit with the poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the 19th-century abolitionist and suffragist who found in Vashti's refusal a model of resistance long before it was fashionable to read scripture this way.

This week's question: what does it look like, in our ordinary lives here in East Tennessee, to refuse the oldest trick in every empire's playbook?