Good reading in gender and culture

My student (wow - I'm so proud!!) Sam Moore published this essay in Christians for Biblical Equality's summer E-Journal:
Pretty Woman: How to Respond to the Media's Influence

My colleague (wow - I'm so proud!!) Brian Howell of Wheaton College published this one, "Beyond Damsels and White Steeds" in the same journal. If you're in my fall sexuality course, you'll probably see this one assigned.

Me and my shadow(s)

We're back home, glorious home. The first five hours of the trip weren't bad -- only seemed like 4.5 hours. But the next 33 were pretty bad. Max, our sweet baby who has turned into a yelling monster toddler who never sleeps, is the weak link in the family traveling team. My new life philosophy: never leave the house. Since this morning, I've lived by it.

On our four-week trip, I read only two books: The Harmless People (Elizabeth Marshall Thomas) and about three-quarters of Care of the Soul (Thomas Moore). He cites either Carl Jung or James Hillman in describing each person's life as having two shadows: one is the shadow of evil, both in the world and in ourselves. The second shadow is the life we aren't living -- the collective opportunity cost of the life we are living.

Due to the life I am living, there are myriad lives left unlived, but two of them in particular hassle me. The first life is the stay-at-home supermom, the woman I was raised to be. While we were in MN, my husband worked for two weeks (picked up an electrician job from his local union) and was gone 10-12 hours a day. I cooked for my family and my parents (we stayed at their house) and did all the childcare and housework. James showed up for happy-dad playtime at the very end of the boys' day. What huge benefits to that life -- I had more control and autonomy in childcare than I normally do, and had both the responsibility and joy of completing important tasks each day. I committed serious time each day to contemplating what various people would like to eat, and when, and arranging things just so for the people I love. But what downsides -- the boys rarely saw their father, I experienced my responsibilities and joys mostly alone, and I couldn't get even twenty minutes a day to write or think.

My second shadow is the mobile, productive professional academic. The picture in my mind of my professional self is a woman with a baby in one arm sucking an exposed breast, a book in the other hand, and a toddler clinging to each knee. Throngs of unencumbered, happy, smart, well-dressed colleagues, mostly men, are rushing past me as I struggle to move a weighted leg forward. Even if I start running with them someday, I'll never catch up because they'll have a ten-year head start. I could have the productive life, I suppose, if we used more childcare and if I were willing to travel and be away from home. What benefits -- I could write, speak, make a name for myself, contribute to public discourse and local communities. But what downsides -- someone would ask, "Where's mommy?", and wouldn't receive the answer he deserves.

My real life is good, but every choice I make -- to work, to rarely travel, to write less, to make homemade food, to be present in my household -- has an opportunity cost. I need to pay the price and move on, and stop window shopping for lives I'm not going to live. I don't want to shame either shadow, shoring up the life I have by denigrating the ones forgone. Like walking down the sidewalk in the afternoon sun, I want to look at my grey shadow(s) from time to time with interest, but mostly walk tall and strong through the full-color world that surrounds me.

Me with my hands full

Me and Ollie

Leaving home to go home

My article Why I am a Cultural Evangelical is up at Christians for Biblical Equality. A few months ago I had dinner with Sharon Baker and Crystal Downing, both wonderfully interesting and productive colleagues at my new college. During a conversation about the qualities of our personal alliances to evangelicalism, I made a comment about being a 'cultural evangelical', and Sharon said, "You should write that idea up." A few days later, CBE asked me for something for their summer issue on gender and culture. I told Sharon I'd write my idea and show it to her and Crystal, just as a way to create an external accountability for myself. And I did, and they helped with a draft, and now here it is! It feels really good to see this on the day before we head back to Pennsylvania, a reminder that my new home really is a place of creativity, generativity and friendship for me.

How inspiring this story will seem during the eternal car ride we face, we'll see.

Today's meme (from Christy)

I don't meme very often, but maybe this will warm me up today for some other writing. I have to skip number five, b/c I don't know what it means.

Here are the rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

7 facts about me:
1. I plan to make my grandma's rhubarb dream dessert today for my dear husband. It's rhubarb custard on a powered-sugar biscuit-type crust.
2. I've worked out every day for the last eleven days, the best exercise I've had since I got pregnant with Max in Sept. 06.
3. I enjoy talking to therapists (about myself, not about them).
4. I hope to live in a big city again someday.
5. I wish my office were smaller - when I'm writing, I prefer to be within a few inches of all my books.
6. In response to an inner voice that said, "Clear out the bullshit," I once sold most of my graduate school books (made about $1000), and set my intellectual life toward clear waters.
7. I've worked out every day for the last eleven days. (I'm feeling very, very good about that.)

Tag seven blogs I like:
Angie at Bring the Rain
Val at Val Weaver-Zercher
Cynthia at Voice Lessons
Al at The Suburban Christian
Juniper at Possible Water
Becca at braincloud
Karen at Cheerio Road

My favorite things so far today are the cadence of this sentence:

"The little pan near Gam was full of blue water, and was surrounded by yellow-leafed trees."

and the description of ostriches that follows it:

"We found two ostriches beside it. The ostriches stared mutely at us first, very wide between the eyes and square at the jaw, until it came to them that we were not ostriches; and with that they rushed headlong away, flapping their ostrich-feathered wings, working their naked thighs and knees like pistons, wildly out of control. They had an air of old people with rough, gray, varicose-veined legs, wearing nothing to hide their nakedness but little feather boas around their waists, which were the wings."

That is from p.163 of The Harmless People by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. When she was 20, she accompanied her parents and brother as ethnographers on a Harvard team expedition to the Kalahari Desert, and this well-known ethnography was the result (published when she was 27, in 1958).

The Harmless People is replacing !Nisa in my Intro to Anthropology class. It was very sad for me to give up !Nisa, but she causes too much trouble. !Nisa is a !Kung woman and also the title of a classic feminist ethnography focused on female sexuality, and it is very challenging for Christian undergrads. !Nisa has too many affairs, and the !Kung are so different in how they integrate sexuality into childhood and adolescence, that it ends up making the !Kung unlikeable. The Harmless People retains the Jo/hoansi's ('Bushmen', of which !Kung are one group) profound otherness, but with a more empathetic and sympathetic result for American readers. Gosh, I love this book. The first thing I'm going to do when my children are raised and I can travel freely is to gather a small group of undergrads for a study tour and head for the Kalahari. It's penciled in my calendar for January 2026; let me know if you want to be on the waiting list.

Thou Shalt Not Make Graven Images for Thyselves (or of Thyselves)

On the one hand, you could just say that photo shoots are tough when your kids are 1, 3, and 3 and you're trying to get a group shot of all four of yourselves plus your sister and her three children under age 8, one of whom is severely disabled. But on the other hand, you could say much more.

My boys aren't domesticated yet. They respond more to their immediate bodily feelings, the wind or the cold, and each other than to a clock or someone else's 'to do' list. Normally I honor where they're at, developmentally speaking, and spend my time setting boundaries around big open spaces where they can run free like horsies. I intervene severely, and only occasionally, to preserve safety or to prevent sibling human rights violations. I believe parents should focus more on obeying God by respecting the created nature of their children than on being obeyed by their offspring.

But at a photo shoot, normal rules don't apply. I _must_ control their behavior. Sit here, not there. Smile, don't cry. Now, not later. I even beg, "please, please, please."

The collective result is 100% predictable: run away, cry until face is blotchy and eyes are bleary, stand on head in a dirt pile, mash a goldfish cracker into the snot on upper lip, make body rigid when carried back to the group. And this with an amazing photographer friend who already knows the boys and takes unstaged photos as we're "playing" together.

At the time I nearly had a migraine, a stroke, and an anxiety attack, all without dropping my perma-smile. But on the way home I said (as much to myself as to them), "Don't ever stop being wild. Don't pose for photos -- don't ever pose for anything. Act up every time people tell you to be inauthentic for the sake of images, results, or profit. I love you. Let's go play."

Wonderings

Sometimes I wonder if all theology is really theodicy. If a great idea, a great sermon, or a great exegesis doesn't speak to your aching need, or even aggravates it, can you hear it? Four years later, I still filter Christian words, sermons, and people through my experience of infant loss. And on days when that isn't at the tip of my emotions, I consider other people's suffering, of which there is always plenty to consider. Today on Christian radio I heard a man say in what sounded to me like a sing-song voice, "Well, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and Lord, we just pray for those Boy Scouts you've taken home to be with You." That just seemed like the dumbest thing I've ever heard, so I offered up a quick counter-prayer, "Lord, please don't let those boys' parents be listening to this radio station right now. Amen." Maybe counter-praying is the dumbest thing you've ever heard, I don't know.

Yesterday I watched A Birth Story, the cable show that shows women having babies. My heart started pounding, my uterus started cramping, and I started crying. It really took me back! When her baby was born, she cried, and I cried, and I'm sure the thousands of women who love that show cried. My body was remembering Max, my youngest son born a year ago. Like the baby in the show, he was a singleton born whole and healthy in a relatively quiet and sparse room. It was a normal birth, and he was a normal baby. The nurse handed him to me, and I held him, and felt for all the world like I was getting away with something big. I was, and I am.

When I see pregnant women, twins, triplets, hospitals, or newborns, I almost always react negatively with feelings and thoughts of nausea, vomit, pain, sickness, death, terror, and invasive medicine. This "A Birth Story" is the first time my body put the good times before the bad, calling forth the sweating, breathing, and cramping of a successful delivery instead of the panic of a doomed labor and delivery (for new readers, my first triplet pregnancy ended with the stillbirth of one and deaths of two). Maybe faith isn't all about mind and spirit. Maybe 'fixing' theology isn't the most important thing. Maybe, just maybe, by living into my reality -- I really did birth a healthy baby -- my body has taught my soul something about peace and rest. And of course, maybe body and soul aren't as far apart as I might think.

It's your day!

Today we celebrate the twins' third birthday. They accept the spotlight, presents, and compliments with such ease. "Of course it's our day," say they, "and we'll enjoy it." All other days, too, are theirs, and they relish each one whether or not it comes with balloons. It inspires me to take up this day, this life, this body, this self, as my own and savor it like a birthday.

Gender and emergent consensus?

Would an egalitarian perspective on gender (women in church leadership, equality in marriage) be a point of consensus for emergent?

I'm reading something that describes emergent with a list (engagement with culture, multisensory worship, etc.), but of course 'social' issues like gender or race are minimized while theology and ecclisiology are maximized. (I can't even spell ecclisiology, and I'm not going to learn how until theologians start taking gender and race seriously. This pursuit will probably only result in me being perceived as a bad speller, but that's a risk I'm willing to take). I tend to see power relations animating theology, and gender power relations as a huge one in the contemporary church. Sometimes when theologians speak of 'Trinity", "Bible", "Tradition", or even "atonement", what they mean to say is that they value theological hierarchy at least in large part b/c it preserves institutional and cultural power hierarchies that position themselves favorably. Or have I taken my childhood fundamentalist eschatological conspiracy theories into my postmodern adulthood?

As I read the list of emergent characteristics, I wonder whether gender equality would be a defining characteristic of emergent churches and thinkers, or whether gender is something over which emergent folks disagree? I think it would be important enough to include in general descriptions of emergent consensus, if it is true. In the emergent vs. young Reformed celebrity death matches, I think gender animates conversation more than anyone acknowledges, though I already wrote eight posts about that so I'll let it rest for now.

Tell me what you think about gender and emergent.

ACTS, the organization

You might think ACTS means adoration-confession-thanksgiving-supplication, God's preferred order of prayer. But for me it means Association of Christians Teaching Sociology, the conference I attended at St. Olaf College last weekend.

First, let me just say that St. Olaf costs $42,000 a year to attend, and if you mention that you think that's expensive, an Ole will tell you that Carlton is up to $50,000. There better be really great husbands available at that price.

The ACTS conference is a very small gathering (30 people or so) of Christians who teach soc, mostly at Christian colleges. The median age of participants was 60, according to the planner. Mike Leming, probably in his 60s, thanked Russ Heddendorf for his mentorship. Russ, age 78, thanked David Moberg for his mentorship (David is at least in his 80s). Amazing - three generations of scholars over age 60.

I learned a lot about how sociology programs at Xn colleges have changed since the early 60s. ACTS supported professors as they innovated soc programs when Bible colleges became liberal arts colleges at mid-century. Significant changes since then: professional orientation of students, cost of education, competition with social work and criminal justice, diversity of faculty and students, postmodern thought. Changes also in scholarship expectations of Christian college faculty, which makes younger faculty choose national professional association meetings over smaller gatherings like this one. I found myself allied with the older perspectives on some issues, and allied with my students on others. It was extremely helpful to get a 'long view' on my professional niche so I can carry the best of that tradition forward in my career and department, and respond to challenges that remain unmet.

And I saw two former colleagues from Bethel and got caught up on news of friends and colleagues....good for my spirit.

I Love You, TV

Well, now I know. A journey of a thousand miles ends the same way it begins: with doubts about whether or not it's worth it. That was an ABSOLUTELY AWFUL trip. We drove 800 miles the first day, from Harrisburg to Madison, WI, and then the final 300 miles the following day. The trip was filled with whining, crying, fighting, wiggling, and stickiness. Whoever said, "They'll sleep eventually" was wrong - Wesley went 15 hrs without sleeping a wink.

The low point for me was when we sat in a shadeless parking lot feeding an undefined meal (some cross between lunch, snack, and dinner) to the boys. I was getting shaky from anxiety and fatigue, and flipped the plate onto the parking lot. I sat down on a curb and said, "Go ahead, eat it", and they scarfed down bananas, grapes, chips, cashews, and peanut butter sandwich crackers off the ground. I came to my senses when Max begged me to clean off his banana, which was covered with asphalt and a cigarette butt.

Things that helped quite a bit: Elmo DVD, any DVD, the DVD player, and the Elmo DVD. Oh, and the Elmo DVD.

Things that helped a little: blowing up eight balloons and hitting them around the car, toy motorcycles, books, having eight sippy cups filled with milk in the cooler.

Things that didn't help at all: yelling, crying, trying to sleep, trying to read, feeding cold spaghetti to the baby while the van was in motion (somehow I thought that was a good idea when I packed the spaghetti).

I was trying to decide whether the trip was as bad, or not as bad, as being in labor with Max. I decided the trip was more like the pregnancy - interminable, intolerable, and inescapable - you just have to keep going forward until it ends. It really wasn't much like labor and delivery at all, except it raises this 'would you rather' question. Would you rather experience terror and blinding pain for less than an hour (Max's delivery was severely bad for less than an hour), or intolerable discomfort for 35 hours? I'm not sure which I would choose, but I am sure of this: having babies is absolutely awful, but nursing hormones and maternal love dull the memory, and so you find yourself doing it all over again for love's sake. This trip is just like that -- the joy of being with my family and in Minnesota will dull the memory of the journey, and we'll do it again next year.

For now, I just want to enjoy my time here and not think about the fact that we'll have to drive back to PA pretty soon.

How is it again that one begins a journey of a thousand miles?

My apologies for asking for blogging ideas and then not blogging. Be assured you have sparked my thinking, but I'm packing and planning for a trip and don't have time for much else. We're leaving early tomorrow morning for Minnesota, a journey of 1008 miles.

Things I want to see in MN: my parents, my old house, my old workplace, the Mississippi River, friends, church, perhaps IKEA.

But I'm very, very anxious about the journey. If I wanted to take a roadtrip, I wouldn't invite three grubby little kids along, that's for sure. And if I wanted to live with three grubby little kids (which I do), I wouldn't plan a roadtrip. Every meal, every tantrum, every bowel movement is a messy, sticky hassle (don't even ask how they make tantrums sticky - they just do). I did consult the Fuller blog for toddler travel suggestions and have my books, puppets, and ziploc bags of trinkets packed. Max is such a happy 14-month-old, he'll probably laugh at mommy singing Twinkle Twinkle for 17 hours straight. And I can sing it for that long just for his laughs.

I hope the trip will be a milestone marker -- one year since we moved away. To what extent has PA become home, and to what extent am I still in a liminal space of transition? What does Minnesota mean to me now? How much better is life today than one year ago, than six years ago (I guess I already know the answer: much, much)?

And I hope the trip will be one of immediate experience -- not too much reflection, not too much projecting. Just some good time in a good place with good people.

Maybe I'll blog, maybe I won't...