- Amazon Rocks!
- Submission, subservience, servility.
- Editing failure.
- S.A.D.
- Ah, California!
1
I need a new lawnmower. I’m going to try a Fiskars Momentum reel mower — reputedly the best by quite a margin. If I hate it (or my wife, who in recent years mows more often than I, hates it), it will become our backup mower as I go buy a new gas polluter.
Lowe’s doesn’t stock it retail here. Neither does Home Depot. Not here. Not even in Indy.
Both have it on their websites, though, and Lowe’s graciously offered to ship it by September 8.
S E P T E M B E R 8.
“Shipped by.”
Amazon could have had it to me tomorrow, were I willing to pay a 50%+ premium for shipping. I’ll take free, in which case it should be here by S E P T E M B E R 8 (or no later than the 12th). It was cheaper there, too.
I remember wondering if Amazon.com could ever make money. And I still feel a little guilty using it instead of something local. Local parts of megachains were at least my first stop. But I could have saved gas, hassle and money by going to Amazon first.
Oh, yeah: bought it at 10:40 pm, which was convenient for me.
2
I have no idea what Marcus & Michelle Bachmann collectively think about wifely submission, but there sure has been a lot of snarkily dogmatic stuff written about it by people who have no more first-hand knowledge than I have.
For the record, this Get Religion piece highlights some good journalism in The Tennessean that gets the “submission” story right according to about 90% of the Evangelicals I’ve heard holding forth on the topic in my lifetime (lots of them were mum about it, as Evangelicalism had a lot of feminist-inspired ferment going on when I left for unrelated reasons). About 10% of the time, what I heard taught was toxic servility (e.g., “if your husband wants a menage a trois, it’s your duty to go along, and the sin is his, not yours” — that sort of thing).
It seems that Catholics add a scholastic distinction I never heard expressly mentioned in Evangelicalism: economic submission versus servile submission. Economic submission seems to involve whose decision controls when spouses cannot agree over some fairly neutral question; servility would be more like the parenthetical at the end of the previous paragraph.
The Get Religion piece also comments on how the media work these days.
The one thing I thought intriguing was what wasn’t mentioned in the story: Jesus Christ and the church. There is a reference to a part of a Bible verse that instructs wives to submit to husbands as to the Lord. But the passages about the roles of men and women in marriage are almost impossible to understand without understanding their relationship to what traditional Christianity teaches about Christ and the church.
It’s so much a mystery that this is the word used to describe it — a great mystery.
The book of Ephesians tells us that marriage is an image of Christ and the church. After telling all Christians to give thanks always to God for all things and to submit to one another in the fear of God, wives and husbands are given particular roles. The image used is how Christ loves the church and how the church receives that love from Christ. Men are to sacrifice as Christ sacrificed for the church (which, you might recall includes his own death by crucifixion) and wives are to submit as the church submits to Christ.
Now, after the Bachmann thing happened, and I wrote that I aim to be a submissive wife, I had a few radio and television producers contact me asking me to go on air to discuss this. When you’re contacted by producers, they pre-interview you to see if you’d be good for a given show. The pre-interview is particularly important for the television shows.
What was hilarious was when people asked me to explain why I believe in this understanding of marriage, and I began explaining this passage from Ephesians and about Christ and the church, they basically didn’t want to talk any more ….
(Emphasis added) That’s not necessarily because “Jesus” is a forbidden word as it is because “Men are to sacrifice as Christ sacrificed for the church” adds a level of nuance that secular media just cannot comprehend and which they assume (probably correctly) listeners and viewers mostly won’t comprehend, either. And if they tune out, the stations have no eyes and ears to sell to advertisers, thus no revenue to run the station.
I don’t expect to vote for Bachmann. I so completely don’t expect to vote for her that crazy, shallow and obnoxious gossip about her religious convictions can’t provoke enough backlash to change my mind.
But the people who are ginning up caricatures to explain away their snap judgments against an Evangelical Tea Party female never intended to vote for her, either.
If you’re considering voting for her, do yourself a favor by going to the primary sources, some book(s) she wrote, see what she said there, see if it’s nuanced (versus clumsy and legalistic), and see if she’s cravenly back-pedaling now. You’ll never find that out from the mainstream press for sure.
3
The New York Times’ Timothy Egan, as bereft of ideas for intelligent response to Republican anti-government rhetoric as Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus was a few days ago, writes a column “Purists Gone Wild.”
His brilliant insight is that the Republicans are like Prohibitionists. Got that? Wow! Brilliant! Original!
I think he means “puritans” instead of “purists,” but perhaps I’m wrong. It’s hard to know just what he means, other than that “I’m with you, ‘progressives,'” when he writes stuff like this, and editors let it go to press:
The other parallel from the dry years concerns personal liberties. With the 18th Amendment, the prohibitionists took away the right to make a basic choice. Gov. Rick Perry, now leading the Republican polls for president, has vowed to do the same, promising to amend the Constitution in several ways to take away freedoms. One would … outlaw a woman’s right to decide when to end a pregnancy ….
Abortion: the vice that dare not speak it’s name. When you get professional writers in The Newspaper of Record writing multilevel obfuscation about “outlawing a right to decide,” you know there’s tap-dancing going on, apart from the bloodless euphemism “end a pregnancy” for the bloody reality of abortion.
Oh yeah: Rick Perry’s promise is one I take about as seriously as I take Human Life Amendment talk from every Republican nominee since Ronald Reagan who at least (ghost?-)wrote a book suggesting he “got it.”
Flash! The Republican platform is formally (if insincerely) anti-abortion. The Democrat platform is so vicious it doesn’t even pay tribute to virtue.
4
An editor once pressed Frederica Matthewes-Green on how anyone could reject God’s love (an important component of how Orthodoxy tends to view the question of hell). “It’s just not logical that anyone would do that. Can you explain?” That’s the sort of thing a good editor does.
Frederica came up with a parallel. A toddler after early neglect can arrive at a new home with an attachment disorder, whereby physical expressions of love feel like aggression.
I think that works well as a metaphor, which is further than Frederica took it: we’re all, by the time we’re adults, infected by a Spiritual Attachment Disorder. We shrink from God’s embrace as if it were aggression rather than love. I’ll resist speculation on where attachment disorder that comes from beyond the grand (and thus largely useless) generality, “sin.”
When that S.A.D. gets fixed as our permanent posture, we’re hellbound because there’s no escaping God after death. Salvation is primarily a process of healing S.A.D., and then actually becoming attached to God.
5
* * * * *
If you’re missing political rants, I’m sorry, but I was giving the impression that I cared, so I stopped blogging politics. “They” are all idiots except for the ones who are rogues. But RogerWmBennett Tweets about politics and stuff over in the right-hand column. I generally agree with the guy.
Tipsy
Bon appetit!
- Submission.
- Spiritual Attachment Disorder.
- Ah! California!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 