What do we think about this?

Fox-Genovese (whom I refer to quite often) writes: "Recent scholarship confirms the age-old wisdom that young women and young men have different sexual agendas: Young men are much more eager for sexual relations with their steady girlfriends than are the girlfriends, who are primarily seeking emotional commitment. The sexual liberation of women thus serves the interests of young men while compromising those of young women. In practice, the sexual liberation of women has realized men's most predatory sexual fantasies. As women shook themselves free from the norms and conventions of sexual conduct, men did the same. Where once young men had been expected to respect a young woman's no, they might now plausibly assume that the no really means yes. They might err in the assumption, sometimes at the heavy cost of being accused of rape, but not because any social rules discouraged sex between unmarried young people. .... George Akerlof, Janet Yellen, and Michael Katz have demonstrated that the increased availability of abortion and contraception in the late 1960s and early 1970s led directly to the dramatic rise in births to single mothers. The plausibly reason that ready access to contraception and abortion seriously undercuts young women's--and their fathers'--ability to use possible pregnancy as a means to avoid sex before marriage or to secure a promise of marriage should a pregnancy occur. In this climate, increasing numbers of young women appear, however misguidedly, to have used sexual acquiescence rather than sexual abstinence to attract and hold a man. The skyrocketing number of out-of-wedlock births and the declining rate of marriage testify to their miscalculation. But the young women who tried to cling to traditional norms of propriety fared no better. With easy access to women who had no objections to premarital sex, men have no incentive to meet the demands of women who sought to trade sex for marriage. It is not surprising that young men who can obtain sex without marriage defer marriage or avoid it entirely."

Culture of Death

Today on the way in to work NPR was running a story about overweight children ... one third of all children in America. I only heard the tail end, but you can listen to the whole thing here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90880182. This isn't just about kids being to fat, children overweight are unhealthy and more susceptible to disease and other major illness. Guess who is working on this issue for us ... the government. Schools are making major effort to help children assess their problems and training them on diet.

I am not opposed to this, but feel like there is a giant elephant in the room that no one will admit. The powers that be (global economy and intelligencia) have decided that all individuals must be liberated from any obligations ... that freedom means autonomy and choice. Parents have been severed from their children in search of a cheap and ultimately destructive freedom and so the children now have to make it on their own (with the help of public school). But no one can chastise the parents (and on some level they shouldn't) because we don't want to make anyone feel bad for divorce or careers or whatever.

And the real problem or the root of the problem and what makes me angry is the academy, philosophers of culture ... whatever you want to call the people that make up foolish ideas without any concern about how they will affect living people and popularize them without concern of their effect. In our "scientific age" we have more subjectivity than ever ... their is no objectivity when obvious dangers and problems are completely ignored because they will upset our passing fancies. I feel more than ever that our American world is a highly crafted one ... full of tons of unsubstantiated assumptions.

And as intelligent and honest critics admit, all of this comes at a great cost. The cost is falling upon our own children. It would seem that some form of survival of the fittest has shaped our worldview ... perhaps the most insidious version, one that is will to sacrifice its own children on the alter of personal happiness. Pope John Paul designated this "the Culture of Death, a culture that holds human life cheaper and cheaper until it drains it of all intrinsic value, a culture that transforms people into objects or even obstacles." (Fox-Genovese; Marriage, P. 160).

On Marriage

I am reading the latest book by Fox-Genovese. It begins with basically her lecture from Princeton (which you can access and was my first introduction to the brilliant lady. Go to www.princeton.edu/webmedia/lectures and search for her name. Here is some of what you will be in for:

"First, the human species divides into males and females who are at once mutually attracted and sufficiently different to be mutually antagonistic, but whose cooperation is necessary to the perpetuation of the human race. Marriage binds them together into what Willa Cather brilliantly called a state of mortal enmity as well as into the bonds of sacramental love. Second, and more importantly, from the perspective of civilization and the species, marriage proposes a reconciliation of the most fundamental natural difference among human beings--sex. For to flee from engaging that difference is ultimately to flee from all others."

something old that fell out of a book

I remember writing it in New York (upstate) during the summer

My eyes fell upon a ruined house,

A devastated temple

The flesh was old and thin

Something dark and sweet around the mouth

but the belly swollen

The eyes were red and darting about

as if looking for a lost occupant

the spotted skin seemed stretched

to reveal a crooked and falling frame

how old?

23 was his reply.

Its time to rebuild.

Christ was it your Life 

that kept rot and decay from you

even in death.

But my composition is reversed

for in my living I have already begun to rot.

Although death may not be better

for this, my delicate skin and fragile frame.

So rebuild! Rebuild!

The words of Jesus are:

"Consumed with zeal for my house!"

Tear apart my temple and rebuild it Lord Jesus.

Life and Death

I just finished my first novel by Wendell Berry (did you know he hand-writes everything?)

Andy Catlett is about (I think) Berry when he was a boy. The novel is told as if Andy is now an old man, but is remembering a trip to his grandparents house during WWII just before he turned 10. These are some of his reflections toward the end of the book.

Time is told by death, who doubts it? But time is always halved--for all we know, it is halved--by the eye blink, the synapse, the immeasurable moment of the present. Time is only the past and maybe the future; the present moment, dividing and connecting them, is eternal. The time of the past is there, somewhat, but only somewhat, to be remembered and examined. We believe that the future is there too, for it keeps arriving, though we know nothing about it. But try and stop the present for you patient scrutiny, or to measure its length with your most advanced chronometer. It exists, so far as I can tell, only as a leak in time, through which, if we are quiet enough, eternity falls upon us and makes its claim. And here I am, an old man, traveling as a child among the dead.

We measure time by its deaths, yes, and by its births. For time is told also by life. As some depart, others come. The hand opened in farewell remains open in welcome. I, who once had grandparents and parents, now have children and grandchildren. Like the flowing river that is yet always present, time that is always going is always coming. And time that is told by death and birth is held and redeemed by love, which is always present. Time, then, is told by love's losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost. It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb. The great question for the old and the dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given, however much. No one who has gratitude is lonely. Let us pray to be grateful to the last. 

We are alive in this flow of time ... I currently have four grandmothers, two mothers and two fathers, one wife (I'm not mormon you know) and three kids. This will change over time ... let us be grateful for this time that we live, for this present moment ... where we have the chance to be quiet enough to "let eternity fall upon us and make its claim."

Power Games

I came across a quote by that deserves some attention:

"For once we have toppled God and nature as authoritative sources of the difference between the sexes, we are indeed left with gender understood as a conventional or 'relational' organization of the darkling plain of fluctuating relations among individuals, each of whom is jockying for maximum power."

Sadly, this is much of what is going on in our world between men and women. In one of Dallas Willards books he talks about how our throwing out of all authority and absolutes, even rites, rituals and customs, leaves us paralyzed in a vacuous freedom. It is as if becoming aware of violence and oppression perpetrated by our boney fists, we decided to remove the bones altogether. Once that happened we quickly sluffed off the filthy skin and now we are exposed and without shape in a world that seems more frightening (not less).

I don't know the best way to understand gender roles, but I think she makes an important point that if we throw out God and nature, we aren't left with much. If all roles, rites, inclinations, etc. are simply social constructs (arbitrary and disposable) how do we not end up in a power game. There is not time to go into it fully, but I like how Paul dealt with this massive problem.

The world of the first century was most certainly a time of male domination and female oppression. Women were not considered equal, as a gender or as individual wives or daughters. Fathers kept wives to bear sons and sought mistresses and concubines for pleasure. They had the power to literally, drop their daughters in the trash (one of the early Christian ministries was to save these forsaken orphan girls). Men, as husband, as father, as master, had all the power in that society. So Paul (see Ephesians 5) goes after them. He tells men three time to love their wives, in a culture were they didn't love their wives. Twice it is love your own wife, in a culture where faithlessness was the norm. He goes right at the powerful and tells them to love like Christ. He goes right at the powerful and explodes the power game by saying that you must follow Christ to the cross. Your love must be sacrificial. You must lay your life down.

I think if Paul were writing this letter today he would have to tell both men and women in the words of Christ from John's gospel; "you must love one another, as I have loved you." He would tell both genders to forget the power game and follow Jesus to the cross. He would tell both genders to lay their lives down. As Paul says, we preach Christ and him crucified.