Weekly Links: a Day Late

Good reading from around the Web for your . . . Monday.

I hope you still like reading when it's a Monday.

"Flat Book Cover Design: Why Do So Many of This Year's Book Covers Have the Same Design Style?": a look at trends in literary art.


"Small Surprises in Growing Up":

I blinked at the email, in a sort of shocked pause. My boy is too young to have to register for the draft. Except he isn’t. Not anymore. 

"20 Years Ago This Week: A Look Back at 1995":  a photo essay.


"Fasting for Beginners":

When Jesus returns, fasting will be done. It’s a temporary measure, for this life and age, to enrich our joy in Jesus and prepare our hearts for the next — for seeing him face to face. When he returns, he will not call a fast, but throw a feast; then all holy abstinence will have served its glorious purpose and be seen by all for the stunning gift it was. 

Until then, we will fast.

"Lists of Things that Women Cannot Do: The Problem with John Piper (and Me)":

Whatever happened before, and in, and after the garden of Eden affected relationships between men, women, and God – and we have hard theological work to do to figure out where in that journey we are.

"Not All Conservatives": this is an answer to the article above - I love the conversation they're having on this blog! Well-worth subscribing to.

Complementarianism might be better understood as one expression of gender conservativism. As a response to evangelical feminism, complementarianism developed and flourishes in a specific cultural context, namely a western, white, middle-upper class context; because of this, it will reflect western, white, middle-upper class assumptions about work, economics, and home. The fact that Pastor Piper is even concerned with answering the question “what jobs can a woman do” reflects this.

"How to Weave on a Cardboard Loom": why does this fascinate me? I really don't need another hobby . . .


"Mysteries of Consciousness":

Whatever the case, though, such experiences should chiefly remind us how many and how deep the mysteries of consciousness really are. And the profoundest mystery of consciousness is consciousness itself, because we really have little or no clear idea what it is, or how it could either arise from or ally itself to the material mechanisms of the brain.

"How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive": I love cursive. And now I want a fountain pen.



Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Weekend Links!

Some good reading for your weekend, from around the Web:

"Aspergian Christianity":

. . . I soon came to see it as a gift that those with Aspergers or others on the autistic spectrum have to offer to the church and the world: the gift of truth-telling. Instead of being offended by the forthrightness or clarity of speech from those who have Aspergers, we can welcome it as a reminder of the way we use our words, and the power that they have. When choose beating around the bush, or gently trying to imply what feels like a blatant truth, we can learn from those who speak the truth plainly. We must always choose gentleness when communicating that truth, but we ought to pursue speaking the truth.

"Things I Love about the Things I Love" (this one has great pictures and GIFs):

The way it always feels miraculous when you look down at the finished product and think "this used to just be string." 

"Why You Do What You Do" - I'm still in the middle of listening to this podcast interview with Carolyn McCulley, so I can't endorse it whole-heartedly (yet, anyway), but I'm really appreciating her distinction between the idea of "women in the workplace" and "women being productive". Lots of good thoughts here.

"I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days. Here’s What It Did to Me": frightening stuff.

"It’s Just Better with Community":

God never meant for us to live our lives by ourselves. God lives in perfect community with Himself, and we as His image bearers are also to live in community with one another. When Christ ascended to the Father, He commissioned a community—the Church—to embody His message to the world. We need to live life with others. 

And finally, after hearing the sad news of Robin Williams' death, I found these two articles particularly helpful:
-"What Does the Church Say About Suicide?": I'm not Catholic, so I don't agree with every nuance here, but it's a really good place to start thinking about these issues.
-"the depressed Christian: why the dark night is no measure of your soul":

I wanted their souls to be better, stronger, more determined. I had no idea at all what their brains were going through. But now I know. And I am humbled beyond words.

I hope you have a lovely weekend.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Keeping Advent: Watching, Working, and Waiting: the duties and vocations of women

My Advent thoughts this week have been prompted by my Bible reading, which is probably a good thing. The St. James Devotional that I use has been taking us through some of the more dire parables in Matthew, and so I've been pondering things like the Parable of the Talents.

Is it a coincidence that in English "talents" means gifts or abilities, and that when I read the Parable of the Talents I can't help but think of "gifts or abilities" rather than "denomination of coin"?

When I think about this parable, what comes to mind first is Milton's sonnet on his blindness, where he complains, "When I consider how my light is spent/Ere half my days in this dark world and wide/And that one talent which is death to hide/Lodged in me useless . . ." He was a writer who couldn't see; what had he to offer God then?

The poem famously leads him to a consideration of the majesty of God, who has thousands upon thousands of other servants to perform whatever acts of service He desires. Milton concludes that God doesn't need him, and yet it is God's good pleasure to have him ready and willing for whatever order may come. Milton concludes, "They also serve who only stand and wait."

And Advent is a season of waiting. So Milton's sonnet seems a fit conclusion for me to reach. I stand and wait.

And yet . . . and yet I know what the blind Milton went on to do: he wrote Paradise Lost in his blindness, dictating each stanza to his daughters. He was willing to only stand and wait, but that wasn't what ended up being required of him.

So.

I said above that my Advent thoughts this week have been prompted by my Bible reading, but that's only part of the truth. They've also been prompted by my Sayers reading; I just reread her powerful collection of essays entitled Are Women Human?

(The answer, in case you're wondering, is "yes.")

These essays, perhaps surprisingly, are largely about work. One of Sayers' primary concerns, in promoting the humanity of women (women, she points out, are human ("homo") first and female ("femina") second) is that they be allowed to do their proper work.

She doesn't insist that every woman everywhere has a special vocation, instead she says:

I have admitted that there are very few women who would put their job before every earthly consideration. I will go further and assert that there are very few men who would do it either. In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.

I can't help but be reminded of Sayers' character Harriet Vane, who, when challenged about the "unwomanliness" of her job of writing murder mysteries retorts that her challenger would no doubt rather she did something more feminine, like washing floors. The only problem, says Harriet, is that:

". . . I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job."

The idea of a "proper job" captivates me, probably because I know what mine is. It's to write fiction. (Is there any wonder I go back to Harriet Vane's story again and again?)

And yet I also have my duty - the duty that does come on me not as a human, but as a woman, and as a married woman: the care of house and children. "Duty" sounds cold to our modern ears, but I don't mean it that way. My children are the delight of my heart and my home is the happy center of my earthly universe.  But "duty" in the sense of "the normal tasks appointed in the normal course of things, without which I could not be healthy, well, or sane".

I'm not quite sure what the solution to the problem of vocation and duty is, mostly because I'm not quite convinced that it is a problem. (Clarification: I'm not sure it's a philosophical problem. I do see (oh so clearly!) that it's a practical problem.) I just can't see an earthly reason why it should be "duty versus vocation" rather than the simple "duty and vocation". It feels like the former, sometimes, but I firmly believe that God always gives what He demands, and that it's all a question of how and when and not what.

But there is one section, in the final pages of Are Women Human? that seems to at least frame well the  at-least-apparent-if-not-actual conflict between duty and vocation:

God, of course, may have His own opinion, but the Church is reluctant to endorse it. I think I have never heard a sermon preached on the story of Martha and Mary that did not attempt, somehow, somewhere, to explain away its text. Mary's, of course, was the better part - the Lord said so, and we must not precisely contradict Him. But we will be careful not to despise Martha. No doubt, He approved of her too. We could not get on without her, and indeed (having paid lip-service to God's opinion) we must admit that we greatly prefer her. For Martha was doing a really feminine job, whereas Mary was just behaving like any other disciple, male or female; and that is a hard pill to swallow . . . Women are not human; nobody shall persuade that they are human, let them say what they like, we will not believe it, though One rose from the dead.

Mary was a contemplative. She is, I think, a fitting model for this Advent season, wherein we watch, we work, and we wait.

More Advent thoughts found here, at A Ten O'Clock Scholar.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

ETA: An update on this entry can be found here.

Book 1 of 15: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

If women are by nature inferior to men, their virtues must be the same in quality, if not in degree, or virtue is a relative idea; consequently, their conduct should be founded on the same principles and have the same aim. - Mary Wollstonecraft

I've wanted to read this book in its entirety for a long time. I read large excerpts of it in college, and last year, when I read Dorothy Sayers' "Are Women Human?", my desire to read Wollstonecraft was reignited, and I ordered my own copy.

It sat on my bookshelf till GirlDetective's 15 books in 15 days challenge, and now (after staying up way too late last night, perched on the top bunk in the kids' room next to a small sconce, 'cause we have no good bedside light in our bedroom, and we had a guest on the pull-out couch downstairs) I have read it.

It was good. The main thesis is - and you must remember that this was written over 200 years ago - that women are not as weak and devious as they seem due to their nature, but rather to their education. Wollstonecraft argues that even if women cannot be virtuous to the same degree as men, because they are also human beings their virtue must be of the same kind, and therefore they ought to be taught to use their reason (the exercise of reason, in her very Aristotelian view, leading to understanding, which will lead to virtue) just as men are taught to use theirs.

She also argues that this will not make them less womanly, but more, because they will then be fit to be good mothers and wives, capable of friendship with their husbands, capable of ordering their households and capable of educating their children. She argues that if the only education women receive is how to adorn and comport themselves to snare a husband, it is not a wonder that they are incapable of rising above trivial thoughts or infantile behavior. At the end of her books she says: 

. . . I have endeavoured to shew that private duties are never properly fulfilled unless the understanding enlarges the heart; and that public virtue is only an aggregate of private.

There were several things I found very interesting in the book, but one was that it became clear to me that her argument - which is, indeed, the basis for all other feminist arguments - is only possible because of her Christian worldview. It is, to be sure, a sort of Enlightenment Christianity, but the reason she is able to jump from Aristotle's view of reason leading to virtue leading to happiness for men to reason leading to virtue leading to happiness for mankind is because Christianity allows women to have immortal souls. Wollstonecraft, arguing against current moralists who argued that women need no more education that that which fits them for marriage, dryly observes:

How women are to exist in that state where  there is to be neither marrying nor giving in marriage, we are not told.

It's a good point, and well-made. 

It is also a point made over and over and over. She has one real argument, and spends two hundred pages trying to show how true it is from many points of view, using as many examples as she can muster. It's good public relations to make your point a hundred times rather than one, so that hopefully it gets through at least once, but it did make for slightly wearing reading after awhile.

Still, however much you might disagree on minor points here and there, I think any woman reading this - any woman with a college degree, any woman who enjoys her right to vote, any woman grateful for the equal protection of law - ought to make her polite curtsy to the shade of Mary Wollstonecraft. It's thanks to this brave and bright manifesto of hers that the conversation about the humanity of women really got started in modern times.

peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

ETA: A couple more quick notes:

-M. W. is pro-life and pro-breastfeeding*. Interesting both because it shows that those debates are not at all new and also because it points out the vast gulf between Wollstonecraft's feminism and modern feminism.

-M. W. advocates chastity (more of that gulf) - and advocates it for both women and men (the latter was the radical part in her day). This is more of the virtue-in-one-sex-being-virtue-in-the-other thing.

-Reading this book takes away the illusion, if the reader had it, that the good old days were good. Every age has its corruption: political, moral and otherwise. Her rant on education, not just of girls, but of children in general, was fascinating. It was also interesting to read some of her disdain for ostentation in government - things that I'd probably find picturesque if I visited England - things like horse-mounted guards at government offices.

*Modern feminism is usually pro-breastfeeding too, but theirs is a "if you wish to do it, you should certainly have the right to" whereas M. W.'s pro-breastfeeding viewpoint is more along the lines of "if you pass your child along to a wet nurse out of laziness or a desire to retain your sexual appeal, you are being a negligent mother."