Modesty: A Retraction
First, some embarrassing photos:
That hair! What was I thinking? (Don’t miss the West Texas concho leather belt.) But, on the other end of the spectrum, this hair! What was I thinking? Read more
Posts from the ‘Ethics’ Category
Mar 9
4 Comments
Mar 2
Who Would You Dance For?
Someone with The Martyrs Project contacted me to ask if I would post about them. Their icon looks like the one for the Blair Witch Project, crafted to convey: IMPORTANT, ANCIENT, and SCARY. “WHAT WOULD YOU DIE FOR,” the opening screen from the Martyr Project states. (There is no question mark, so it doesn’t actually ask.)
My gut response is: “Blech.” Read more
Feb 4
I [HEART] Motor Sports Ministry
A strange, large metal thing sat on the table next to the powerpoint screen. It looked like a trophy, maybe. “What exactly is this,” I asked an older gentleman in a cowboy hat sitting up front. He looked at me like I am daft. “It’s a trophy.” “Oh, yeah, right,” I nodded. “But, what, exactly is it? Is this some sort of car part?” “It’s a piston.” Ah. Yep. “Are pistons usually this big?”
The dozens of men and two women at last weekend’s Annual Training Seminar in Ministry in Motor Sports were exceedingly kind about my ignorance. Lucky for me, these guys walk the walk. Just about all of the sessions had “PATIENCE” as one of the bullet points. Read more
Jan 26
Corset-of-the-mind; or, Why it is easier for me to say “penis” than appear “Marxist”: a follow-up to the Duke Divinity Women’s Center panel discussion about MEN
One of the most beloved professors in the Yale American Studies Department used to point to the worn elbows of his tweed jacket and say “It is one thing to wear old tweed! But be sure not to become one of those scholars with tweeds-of-the-mind!” I tried to draw on his (much quoted) phrase in a faculty meeting, to explain my concern about how the theological academy can warp women’s brains and stunt our scholarship. We can become so determined to prove to our pious students that we really, really love Jesus; that we really, really are orthodox, it is like we “tie our brain up in a corset,” I said. The room was full of men, and they seemed baffled by my comment. Later, a male friend explained that many of them were probably too distracted by mental images of corsets to get my point. Sigh.
I think I was beset by the evangelical “corset effect” last week during a Duke Women’s Center discussion on masculinity. The discussion will evidently be available online soon, and I hope this can stand as a substantial epigraph to that posting.
First, some backstory. Years ago, when I started teaching on sex and gender at Duke, I took advice from some of the guys in the Mennonite Mafia in the doctoral program at the time and assigned the book Fight Club. A really important passage in that book involves a penis (not symbolically, but quite literally) and, when it came time to talk about the book in class, I was unable to say the word. It was crazy. When Peggy Hill (life-partner of King of the Hill) has to teach sex-ed in the Arlen, Texas middle-school, she is similarly tongue-tied, which gives me some solace. A few students found my incapacity so hilarious that, at the end of the semester, they gave me a quilt with the word “penis” pinned to it. Read more
Jan 22
Service, schmervice, feh! MLK weekend deserves better!
I heard this piece on NPR this weekend, and I nearly had to pull off the highway and hula hoop. Here is a quote: “Volunteers, by their very nature, are an upbeat crowd. That includes a group of a dozen volunteers who came to Tyler Elementary School in Washington, D.C., Friday to organize the school library. The library was kind of a mess, and the kids couldn’t check out books. There’s no librarian here because of school budget cuts.”
“I find myself one day in the world, and I acknowledge one right for myself: the right to demand human behavior from the other.” – Frantz Fanon
Why would I grouse about some friendly people spending their day organizing an underfunded library? Because, volunteerism in the public school system is turning nice church ladies like me into scabs. “Scab” is union slang for someone who works while her brothers and sisters are taking the sacrifice to strike for better (or these days maintained) pay. In this case, I am using the term loosely to make a point. During a time of drastic cut-backs in what were already woefully underfunded school budgets, PTA moms can and should use our moxie to organize for a better education budget. The default game-plan in Durham is to fill the holes of public education with well-intentioned, fairly well-off women, and Duke undergraduates, who are not trained, and who are kindly, sometimes daily, working for nothing – taking up a position that someone used to do for a salary and benefits.
The NPR piece notes that George Bush the First advocated the “thousand points of light” idea – the idea that real people in real neighborhoods doing bits of good was a better strategy for dealing with what are usually called “social problems” than more funding for “social programs.” It traveled over to the U.K. recently, where churches and local charities were asked to fill in for cuts to basic services (all while duly appreciating the princess’s new frock, of course). Read more
