Thursday, 8/21/14

  1. Swinish heresy with a ThD
  2. Gender madness!
  3. We are the very model of a modern Major General
  4. There are no Christian Arabs (and they’re creepy too)

1

I never thought I’d live to see the day that a Pope was more popular among Southern Baptists than in the Catholic Theological Society of America, but James Keating reminded me of Robert Jenson’s quip to that effect about John Paul II.

This is what comes of trying to give “theology” the same sort of academic cachet as other disciplines, where earning a doctorate requires contributing something new to the discipline. “New” in theology often means “some swinish old heresy with new lipstick.”

2

“Coming next: a feminist charity dedicated to providing bicycles to fish.” (Rod Dreher, responding to this the idea of non-women who need abortions).

Although my need for finality and certainty has diminished for reasons I’ll not try to explain (as if I fully understood them myself), I still believe that the purpose of an open mind is to be able eventually to close it around something solid. Unfortunately, I am getting nothing but mush from all the news and commentary (that I formerly tried to follow a bit and still cannot seem entirely to avoid) premised on a supposed distinction between sex and gender. It finally dawned on my that the idea of non-women who need abortions means one of the 48 genders other than simply male or female according to Facebook’s infamous gender taxonomy.

Even I’m a straight woman married to a woman. It hasn’t been easy. My husband became a woman and our marriage is stronger than ever seems awfully muddled. Something tells me that Dr. Paul McHugh and Johns Hopkins, which stopped sex-change surgery 35 years ago, are going to be vindicated big time eventually. But first, we must savor our higher cultural development.

If somebody has come up with a semi- or pseudo-scientific gender screen, I’m almost positive I’d be among one of the 48 novelty genders. My voice is high. I have almost completely lost interest in competitive sports. I don’t hunt. I don’t fish. I don’t lie on my back under the car doing manly things to, uh, things. I sing – first Tenor! Classical music, not misogynist rap. I once did needlepoint (back when Roosevelt Greer made it trendy). I’m religious. I like women, even as friends, better than men. Just what the heck lousy excuse for a male am I? Maybe I’m a male Lesbian. Is that one of The 48 Improbables?

Sorry to beat up on academics today, but there’s a reason for the saying “Some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”

Isn’t all this gender stuff the result of (1) some PhD candidate in need of a novelty for a thesis, followed by (2) people in need of transgressive diversions and (3) people with a horse in the race who want their urges to conform to a stereotype, even if one must multiply stereotypes to get there?

Am I impossibly simplistic to think that if a mammal is pregnant, it’s a female, if it impregnates, it’s a male? And that there’s a whole lot of variability among females and among males? And that people are people, whether or not they conform to some stereotype (which, than God, few of us do)?

3

…convinced that the cultural process is a progressive development and that our own culture is the most developed of all cultures, we assume that every change in our cultural condition is evidence of a higher cultural development.

(Anthropologist J.D. Unwin)

4

Why The Worldwide Silence On Christian Persecution?

That’s easy to explain: because to many American conservatives, even conservative Christians, the Arab Christians of the Middle East are invisible. As far as they know, all Arabs are Muslims. Foreigners. Unlike us. End of story.

And to many American (and European) liberals, all Christians are basically Pat Robertson and Fred Phelps. Christians are the yucky people they dislike at home, the ones who, as they see it, hate sex, women, gays, and Muslims. All Christians around the world are the same, and they are always and everywhere the persecutors, never the persecuted. The persecution of Christians does not suit the Narrative.

(Rod Dreher)

* * * * *

“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.