Children's Church

If I ever, ever said anything against children's church in the past, I recant fully. I'm sure it can be abused. But so can any good thing.

The "families should always be together for the worship service -- we don't believe in children's church" is a lovely idea in theory. And STUPID in practice. Until the kids are old enough to sit still, and not pull their sister's hair, and not babble about sunshines and trains and cars during prayer time, or loudly declare that the lights are on or off during the next prayer time...nursery and children's church is a good idea.

And I'm not saying this because I give a damn about the people sitting next to the kids...they're not really the ones suffering from this. The one bearing the brunt of it is the mom who wants to be able to focus on God, and prayer, and worship for one hour out of her crazy week, and CAN'T because she's having to police her kids every two seconds to keep them from disrupting everybody else.

Most kids are not perfect little angles by the age of two and three.

I've decided I'm fortunate that I'm not a mom yet, and have the leisure of (theoretically if I were perfect) giving God undivided attention during a church service.

And, yes. This was spurred by the fact that I had to play mom for the neighbor's kids during church in church this Sunday. :-P

Maybe a caveat: if it were a cultural norm for kids to always be along in the service, and no one -- especially the pastor -- blinked when the kids cried and babbled and laughed, we just considered all that a part of what HAPPENED when the family of God got together to worship him...well, yeah. Then it would work. And maybe that more relaxed and communal atmosphere is what we should strive for. But it sure isn't what exists right now.

Fluke of History (Feminism and Progress)

"Hurrah for women's lib, eh?"

"The lib?" Impatiently she leans forward and tugs the serape straight. "Oh, that's doomed."

The apocalyptic word jars my attention.

"What do you mean, doomed? ... Come on, why doomed? Didn't they get that equal rights bill?"

Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different.

"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."

Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons.

"Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch."

No answering smile.

"That's fantasy." Her voice is still quiet. "Women don't work that way. We're a—a toothless world." She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. "What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine."

~ from "The Women Men Don't See" by James Triptree Jr.

After hammering away for a while at the brick wall of feminism, and femininity, and gender roles, and patriarchy, and all that jazz, I do have a handful of conclusions. This seems as good a place as any to start, as I recently ran across Triptree again, for the first time in several years.

I first came across her short story story sometime in high school, I believe in this sf anthology . I've probably run into additional, and perhaps better, articulations of her position at some point, but this one's been good enough to stick with me for quite some time. It was enough, 11th or 12th grade, at least, to make me question the inevitability and permanence of many recent developments in western civilization.

Anyone who's been at Hillsdale long enough will have probably been disabused by some professor or another of any confidence in "progress." (Or maybe just students who run into Dr. Stewart, who seems to make such disabusement a point of his courses). Many professors DO at least give the Enlightenment a pretty bad rap, and see its innovations (in large part) as detrimental to any true historical development. Far from seeing the Enlightenment as the "wave the future," they interpret it as a (mostly) dead end. As many of the recent developments in western civilization, including feminism, are deeply tied up in the Enlightenment, and as the Enlightenment influenced many of our narratives of human progress, introduction to the Hillsdale perspective probably counts as a "disabuse of any confidence in progress."

I probably need to define terms better. No one's going to deny that we've made advances -- "progress" -- in understanding of cause and effect in the material universe, and in applying these discoveries to make better tools. What is up for debate is whether we've made any advances in how we understand the human soul, or in the way we structure society, or in our framework of moral actions toward one another.

It is a kind of a frightening thought, the first time it sticks around long enough to be taken seriously. Wondering if democracy, republicanism, egalitarianism, libertarianism...all the things we've come to associate with modern western civilization, whether for good or ill, actually are inevitable and permanent. Things to which the rest of the world will come on board eventually, and we'll keep persevering from there.

So I do wonder, sometimes, if instead the 21st century will come and go, and people in the future will look at us like we were crazy, and wonder where we got our whacked ideas and ways of life. Including opening so many occupations and areas of life and influence to women. I wonder if our era IS just a fluke, and we aren't really pressing forward into anything new, just messing around for a couple hundred years until reality bites us from behind, and things go back to the way they always were.

It's a toggling of perspectives. Just like wondering if church history has 100,000 more years to go (instead of...say...100 - 5000, like most people seem to operate).

Maybe I just have a weakness for dystopian literature and falls of empires. :-P But sometimes I do wonder if one day a comparably "primitive" -- but more-true-to-human-nature's-deepest-motivations -- culture and society will overthrow a modern western society that's lost its chest.

Concrete example for those who like such things: I look at Islam creeping over Europe, and wonder if something parallel to that is what awaits the whole western world.

Some sort of drastic calamity probably WOULD do the trick... making brute survival the priority, and wiping out a lot of our technological infrastructure. Going back to the feminism issue...wealth, education, mobility, liberty, security, and lots of leisure all seem tied to the push for gender equality. WHAM some cataclysm into the mix, and all that could very well go down the drain.

I do think women are different than men, and tend to have different strengths (and vv)...but, yikes. It's oh so easy for this to tip over into "and what they are strong in isn't as important as what men are strong in" or "what they are strong in is properly applied only to this very limited sphere."

Probably because of inherent differences, sexism seems a nastily rooted thing. I don't want to use a word like "sexism," because it's very loaded. But reading Aristotle, talking about how the essence "woman" is inherently less perfect than the essence of "man," I think I'm somewhat justified. Or reading opposition to some of the early feminists, talking about how women's minds are lesser and weaker than men (just look at the poor dears!), and therefore shouldn't be permitted to engage in politics and higher learning and whatnot. Without the constant evidence that women CAN go toe to toe with men, and make accomplishments just as worthy in areas previously relegated to the male sex alone -- I can't see what's to stop a reversion to old ways of thinking.

Those are the bad days, though. On more hopeful days, I think that the change is pretty darn permanent, and that no calamity would actually send things back to ground zero. But we do a darn good job of forgetting and reinterpreting history when it's not to our liking. And, yeah. I have seen the fall of Rome blamed on relaxed gender roles.


::grins:: And the rambling nature of this entry proves my inherent irrationality and intellectual inferiority, no doubt. :) Though I'd prefer you chalk up any confusion to the fact that...

a) I think here ARE difference between men and women, and that historical gender roles (and occupations) aren't some grand conspiracy, but in a part arise out of these different tendencies. (Hence the "more-true-to-human-nature" comments)

b) But I'm bloody glad a lot of those roles got shattered, because by them women were confined and limited in their range of vocation and action far more than men. I hope that during the next 300 years we can learn what it's like to be womanly professors, womanly musicians, womanly businessman, womanly leaders, womanly journalists, womanly academics, womanly theologians...because, dagnabbit, I think there is such a thing as a valid and womanly way to embrace these occupations, and we've never really had a chance to try it.


An endnote: Apparently "The Women Men Don't See" is Triptree's most famous story. So I suppose it has a lot going for it, even though I don't really care for the thing as a whole (I just like a passage or two here and there). I personally like "Love is the Plan the Plan is Death" better. Definitely won't appeal to everyone, but it's one of the most successful attempts I've seen of an author writing from the perspective of an alien consciousness.

Summer Reading

Harry Potter
Harry Potter 7 is very good....I think the best of the series. It's tightly written (unlike 4-6), and deals with deeper themes than the earlier books. Rowling keeps deus ex machinae to a minimum this time, and even gives decent explanations for several events I had previously labeled as machinae. In addition, the book is replete with occasions in which plans and clues go wrong, plunging the characters into deeper confusion and trouble. (A helpful reality check and counterbalance to any potential d.e.m's).

I didn't think she'd be able to pull of a "quest" story. But creating a mention between Hallows and Horcruxes made the the characters' search far more complex, and I hardly even noticed there WAS a quest going on.

Finally: othrs may disagree with me on this, but I think Harry GREW UP in the second half of the book. I've found that this is a main difference between people who find chapters 35-37 powerful and moving, and those who see them as melodramatic whiny angsting.


Jonthan Strange and Mr. Norell
Better than Harry Potter. Rowling's writing style tends to be fairly banal; Clarke's sparkles and dances across the page.

I found a hardcover copy the book for $7.00. The prices at Barnes and Noble are usually atrocious...but their bargain table is amazing (assuming you can actually find a book you want).

It's a wonderfully delightful book, set during the Napoleaonic wars in an alternate universe where most things are parallel to our own. But in this world, magic existed in England during the middle ages and disappeared sometime before the Englightenment and scientific revolution. When it reappears in the 1700s, it's initially analyzed and treated like science by the man who revives it.

Susanna Clarke has a wry sense of humor, employs vivid language and descriptions, and creates utterly believable characters. (I usually dislike insane villains...but she's written one of the best antagonists I've seen).

Also refreshing is her determination to write her characters in line with the spirit and perspective of the Augustan era, rather than make some of them walking talking propagators of 21st century values. Her responses to her critics are often an exasperated, "I wanted to write a story about English identity and the return of magic, not about feminism and woman's suffrage! Yes, I rather wish there were more women in the book myself...but how I've written it reflects the era, where women had a less prominent public role."

I don't know what the book would be rated...probably PG-13 for graphic and eerie violence. Her faerieland is NOT a safe or pleasant place...it's unearthly, dangerous, eerie, unhuman, and reads like a horror story. There's also plenty of madness, darkness, ravens, and dismemberment throughout the book, especially toward the end. It WORKS, and very well..but this isn't a kiddie story.

On the other hand, she also shows that you don't have to write like GRR Martin to publish cutting-edge fantasy. In terms of sex, there's some discussion of various extramarital affairs, and an illegitimate child or two. In terms of language..."d--m" appears twice (maybe thrice), always written with those dashes.

Films and Links

Fantasy Films
I need to read The Dark Is Rising sometime soon...it's apparently one of the few books prominent in evangelical subculture that I haven't read, and now they're making a movie of it.

New Line (wow!) is doing The Golden Compass. Here's a wikipedia link about the books, the official site, and me mentioning the books two years ago. The girl they've got for Lyra feels spot-on...the site says they said looked at 10,000 girls, and I believe it. The rest of the characters I'm not as sure about.

Interesting thing -- the cinematography doesn't feel right. Too clean? Bright? Cartoony? Lyra's world has a bit more soot and grime and grittiness to it. And gobblers and soul-eating spectres lurk in unlit alleyways, preying upon the unwary. It's a bit of a grown-up place, and would be better off losing the antiseptic computer-animated feel.

I only notice this, because, recently, a lot of movies seem to have done a good (or good enough) job capturing the tone of their source books. This is the first one that's struck me as very wrong. One of the first things I noticed about the books was their "tone" -- hard to define and describe, but just as the diction of Lewis's Narnia laces the books with a sunlight and childlike joy, and Harry Potter keeps a tongue-in-cheek absurdity even as the books grow darker -- Pullman's style is a sober and achingly beautiful. I don't know if this selection illustrates it well, but it might.

I also think it's strange how many big-budget epic fantasy films have been made recently. And how many series are being tackled. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Narnia, Eragon, Golden Compass, The Dark is Rising...and just the other day I ran into Stardust, and have no idea how many other films are in the works out there. I know studios produced fantasy films made before, but they seem to have been few and far between, largely forgettable, and hardly ever given a blockbuster level budget. Big-budget (and/or memorable) sci-fi films have been going on for a long time; this seems like the first real corresponding wave of fantasy films.

YouTube
And now for two shorter clips...these guys are hilarious. Check out Rules of Sidewalk Etiquette and How to Give a Great Man to Man Hug.

Turkey and Twain

It started raining today, right after I finished watering our neighbor's flowers. :P

After my gushing about Turkey, Alisa Harris gives a more balanced picture. She's a much better writer than I; she's quoting Mark Twain half the time; it's well worth reading.

A Link and Some Initial Thoughts

This is a good post, concerning worldviews, intellect, imagination, and liturgy. One point of the article: logic and the intellect work within and "fine tune" the larger imaginative picture we already have of the world. Thus logic will not tend to get one out of a wrong view of the world, only an exercised imagination. Another key point: we're incarnate beings, not body-shells where the truly important thing is the mind.

I liked his thoughts on anemic "worldviews":

By working in terms of an anthropology that presumes the primacy of the intellect, Reformed Christians have often failed to develop and harness the power of the imagination. We talk a lot about ‘worldviews’, but worldviews are generally understood in very ideological terms. A ‘worldview’ is seen as a set of propositions or a conceptual construct that shapes the way that we view reality. However, such ideological grids do not play anywhere near as much of a role in our vision of reality as Reformed people generally presume. Mere reflection on our day to day lives should expose the weakness of the notion that our engagement with reality is primarily mediated by ideological systems...

If I am right in my claim that a true ‘worldview’ is practically identical to ‘culture’, it is worth questioning to what extent we can speak of a Reformed worldview at all. Reformed Christians have an ideological system, but an ideological system is not sufficient to constitute a worldview. If we do have a worldview, it gives us a narrowly intellectual and insubstantial vision of reality....

Oh, dear. I don't hate Reformed/Calvinist theology. Really. I've grown up in it; I've gotten rather beat up by it; I don't think it's the ultimate final answer to everything; I think it gets a HECK of a lot righter than a lot of other traditions. I'm grappling my way through its systemic strengths and systemic weaknesses, and trying to figure out what it is about parts of Reformed thought that make me react so strongly against it at times. I have not tended to be entirely fair and balanced in the process. Harriet Beecher Stowe -- of whom I will post later -- humbles me by her ability to walk the same path with deep compassion and understanding, and I can only hope to someday come close to her insight and humility.

In either case, this section here doesn't mention anything about Reformed theology, and I think it's the best part:

The Christian faith presents us with a beautiful story and a compelling vision of the world. Christianity’s hold on the Western imagination is great, even among those who try to reject the faith. The Christian message appeals to our imagination before it addresses our logic and reason. Unfortunately, the vision of the world that most Christians operate in terms of today is quite anaemic and lacks the fullness of classic Christian thought. This, I suspect, is one of the reasons why Christianity is becoming less and less of a force within our society. People regard Christians as ideologues rather than as people with a rich cultural vision and grasp of the ‘good life’. Christianity is seen as a set of disincarnate ideas, rather than as a world-encompassing story that we can truly be at home within, a form of renewed life and a fertile vision for culture and society.

Some running thoughts on the matter...Logical consistency of ideas is important for something to be convincingly true...yet I'm guessing that for most people (and I know for myself), mere logical consistency not what convinces, or what makes the true thing hit us deep, and "ring true."

Though I can't defend it at the moment, I'm going to step out on a limb and say that un-beautiful logic does not "ring true" to us at a deep level...and rightfully so. One can present a logically coherent system to a person, but if they feel that the system is all that there is -- that it's failed to catch up into itself the depth and messiness of reality and human experience -- it will not "ring true" to them. (And rightfully so.)

I should have the "rightfully so" part a bit better worked out eventually. It'll probably have something to do with George MacDonald and presuppositional apologetics and Job.

Hair, Reprise

For the record, I am now happily reconciled to my longer hair, now that it's stopped looking like a mullet.

Also a potential reason for the reconciliation: (female?) music majors can get away with long hair. In fact, they can do far better than "get away" with it: long hair is fitting for them, in a way it just really isn't for other majors and professions who are trying to look professional.

A final jumble of reasons: Erm...some marginal additional advantage in the mating game might not be so bad? (Why NOT maximize available external assets?)

Why TURKEY? Oh, boy...

The Danish Customs Official
On the way back from Turkey, our groggy and exhausted group passed through Danish customs as we switched planes in Amsterdam.

The inspectors questioned us most thoroughly: "where exactly did you stay?" "did you pack your own luggage?" "so your roommate had access to your luggage -- do you trust her?" "do you trust all the people you're traveling with?" -- etc.

The most amusing and revealing question, however, was my inspector's response to the answer, "We were on a senior trip with Hillsdale College Honors program."

"Ah," he said, "so why go to TURKEY?"

I mumbled through some kind of an answer. Something about a religion professor heading the trip, and early church sites. Which was indeed why our group headed out to Turkey instead of some other country.

But the question, "why Turkey, of all places?" was admittedly on my mind sometime before the trip as well.

Because...well...where do senior trips usually go? France! Germany! Italy! Greece! Plus this is Hillsdale, where we prize the Grand Old Western Heritage and Tradition. You'd think we'd end up at least in Europe. But, no -- we strike out for the Middle-Eastern just-pulled-itself-out-of-the-third-world Islamic country of Turkey.

It's a good question, "why Turkey?"

After two days in Turkey I had half an answer. After four weeks I have a fuller one, which I shall attempt to mangle my way through. Because, right now, I can't think of a better country to have visited.

Geography and Ancient-Modern History
Turkey is a difficult country to process, at first. For one thing, it possess vast geographical variety -- plus it's a got complex and layered interweaving of thousands of years of immensely varied history.

The geographical variety was one of the first elements that struck me. There are deserts, and fertile croplands, and hills covered with flocks of sheep. There are rocky coastlines, and mountains that continue row upon row...not just a chain, but a whole square region. There are regions with European architecture and red-tiled roofs, and regions with flat-top roofs where you swear you are in the middle-east.

Then you have layers of history: the ancient Hittite mountaintop capitol of Hattusa, stone-age settlements. The Greeks Hellenized large portions of Turkey, and the Roman empire layered itself on top of that. Combined with these, you have innumerable varieties of traditional Turkish cultures and customs; our tour guide, Arzu, listed at least five distinct regions, from the supremely hospitable eastern sheep-herders, to the blue-eyed fishermen of the Black Sea coast.

Then you had early Christianity flooding Turkey...it's full of hidden cave-churches, and monasteries, and the Hagia Sophia...the center of Eastern Christendom.

Then...WHAM! On top of all this came the Ottoman Empire! And with it Islam. Ottoman imperial castles (and Arabian architecture), every church turned into a mosque, stricter gender roles, the whole shebang.

Westernization
And then, in 1920, there was Ataturk. General, war hero, revolutionary, statesman...He united Turkey into an independent nation-state. He secularized the country. He made Ottoman-empire Turkey into a constitutional democracy. He changed the alphabet from Arabic script to western letters. He changed their numbers to western numerals. He made everyone wear western clothes. He transformed the economy. He instituted an education system, from elementary schools to universities. He established gender equality; women were elected to the senate a few years later.

So throw Ataturk into the mix that is Turkey as well. And with him throw in the eighty recent years of super-intensified industrialization and westernization. Turkey's done a heck of a lot in that time, turning itself inside out, and catching up to the rest of the world. It's pulled itself out of the third world into the first, and it hasn't yet completed the process. Walking through Turkey, one sees a constant juxtaposition of the old and the new. Rundown mud-brick houses, with laundry hanging in the wind...and a satellite dish on the roof. Snazzy commercial-district streets (you would swear you're in Europe) -- but go back a block or two and you're in third-world-ville. On a larger scale, there's the highly industrialized and westernized west...and the impoverished, ill-educated, underdeveloped east, into which the government is now crazily pouring money and college graduates.

Ye Olde Conclusion
I can't think of another country where such variety exists -- geographical, cultural, western/non-western, 1st world/3rd world, secular/Islamic -- in such a convoluted and complex and contented tangle. Turkey has weathered culture after empire after culture, and engrafted large portions of all of them into its rhythms of life. And, unlike many other third-world countries, it hasn't destroyed itself in the upheaval entering entering the 21st century.

For these reasons, among others, I've come to greatly respect the country and its people. GO visit it, if you have the chance. I shouldn't judge European countries, as I haven't visited any since I was five...but right now I personally think Turkey pretty much pwns them.

And, if nothing else, Turkish food is amazing. ;)