Hulga-Joy

redscharlach: notcanonyet: I demand an answer. I can only...

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:54:09 -0400

notcanonyet:

I demand an answer.

I can only reply that perhaps I was right all along? But whatever the reason, the beauty of this visual coincidence is a source of total delight to me…

"What if youth and youth adults were simply encouraged live in pursuit of wisdom, knowledge,..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 22:29:13 -0400

“What if youth and youth adults were simply encouraged live in pursuit of wisdom, knowledge, understanding, education, wonder, beauty, glory, creativity, and worship in a world marred by sin, as Abraham Kuyper encourages in the book Wisdom and Wonder. No shame, no pressure to be awesome, no expectations of fame but simply following the call to be men and women of virtue and inviting their friends and neighbors to do the same in every area of life”

-
Anthony Bradley, Acton Institute

(via onwork)
Abraham Kuyper FTW.
(via bluedollar)

...and the women will follow

Thu, 09 May 2013 19:56:36 -0400

Something’s been bugging me for a while. I wasn’t going to address it in a public space, at least not an Internetty sort of public space, but I read a couple of things today that reminded me that what I heard isn’t an anomaly, but a symptom of the sort of clueless gender talk that still permeates the church’s discourse about itself.

So several months ago there was an extended survey/ focus group sort of exercise at my parish about what we thought we needed, as a church to follow God’s mission well. It was a fairly extensive survey, and the summary of the results was pretty interesting.

It’s worth noting that the team that compiled the results, my husband among them, tried to convey many different opinions and desires (often conflicting) so that everyone who took the survey felt heard. So just because this got said out loud at a parish meeting does not mean that it represents the convictions of the parish leadership. Just wanted to make that clear.

What I heard was this:

“We need to draw Godly men into the church. If we draw Godly men, the women will follow.” *

Um.

When this was read aloud, there was a ripple of (positive?) noise in the audience. It was loud enough that I don’t think many people more than a few rows away heard the woman behind me—a fabulous, intelligent, capable woman, active in service to the parish and completely unaffiliated with any man, as far as I know— saying, “Hello? We’re here! We’re here.”

But that’s just the thing that’s bugging me, that’s so worrisome about the statement above. What it says to women, in essence is, “We don’t see you. Unless you are affiliated with a man, you are not of value. If you’re single, we’ll have a ministry for you to try to get you a man, so you can then be married and thus become visible and valued.”

Do I think the originator of that statement (who could very well be reading this post) intended such a message? Very likely not.** But that’s the message that this kind of statement sends, that it’s men who are important and it’s more men we want to see and we don’t need to attend to the women among us because, married or single, their presence and participation in the life of our community hinges on relation to a man.

That is the message we send, and we (and I’m not talking about only my parish, but about the evangelical church in the USA in general) send it pretty much every day.

I’m a home schooling mom of young children. I’m in a pretty busy and exhausting stage of life. My parish, and most evangelical churches I know, offers a lot of support for women like me. They do a wonderful job and I am so, so grateful. But imagine what it feels like to be a single, professional woman and all you ever hear is how family friendly we need to be, or how we need to make church friendly to men and don’t worry about the women, they’ll just follow the men right on in. Think about what it implies when all the women’s Bible studies are offered in the middle of a weekday. If you’re not a mother or a wife, and especially if you aren’t particularly focused on achieving motherhood or marriage, you are invisible. Or you can easily be made to feel that way.

Church. O, church. Please be careful. Think about the words you say. Think about the words you leave unsaid. When you talk about the kind of people we need to focus on bringing into the church, think about what that means for the people we choose not to focus on.

As always, a little cultural comparison can help us see how insufficient our assumptions and language are when it comes to building up the body of Christ. My husband works on a project that offers training to trauma healing facilitators in a country suffering from the aftermath of decades—centuries, really—of instability, exploitation, and war. He recently went on a trip there to document the work of the trauma healing teams, and in the area he was in, widows made up 80% of the congregations he visited.

80%. In this place, where God is moving and healing people and churches are springing to life one after another and growing, growing, growing? Single women ARE the church—single professional women, because they are almost all the breadwinners for their households. Can you imagine what the statement above would sound like from the pulpit of one of those churches?

And in a crazy way, the widows my husband met are already benefiting more from the support of the Western evangelical church because they are distant and different and exotic. We can send money and pray for them without the fuss and bother of actually attending to the matter of empowering them for full participation in the life of our communities. You know, they way we’d have to do if we attended to the voices and full humanity of women like my sister in the pew behind me that night at the parish meeting.

I’m aware that I’m doing this annoying thing here, where I speak from a place of privilege on behalf of someone or a group of someones who lack that privilege. Maybe I have let my imagination run away with me and I’m just completely full of crap. Ideally, what I should do instead of blathering on is do my best to quietly draw your attention to these women and support them as they speak so that their voices will be heard. So. Imma shut up and get out of the way now. I’m going to commit to listening to and seeing the unheard and invisible with as much respect and honor as I can.

Speak up, sisters. I’m listening, and I hope everybody else will, too.

*(That’s not a verbatim quote, but I no longer have access to the document. It’s very close to the original, though.)

**My husband offers a charitable reading of the statement along these lines: “The demographics of the church have shifted in the last few decades. There are far fewer men than women. The commenter who said that was probably responding to the demographic shift.” Perhaps. I contend that there was more causality implied than hubs’ reading offers. Even if he’s correct in evaluating the intent of the statement, though, I contend that the effective message is the same as the one I address above.

"If the Church was faithful to its mission towards gay people, the idea of Christianity as homophobic..."

Thu, 02 May 2013 07:51:16 -0400

“

If the Church was faithful to its mission towards gay people, the idea of Christianity as homophobic would not just seem wrong, it would be a punchline. It would be like saying the Red Cross secretly infects people with polio, or something. People wouldn’t even debate it, they would scoff. And a strongly-worded blog post isn’t going to make that happen.

Yes, we need to improve our language, but that’s not the challenge, or it’s only one peripheral consequence of the challenge. The challenge is to make it dead-obvious to the entire world that any gay person will be embraced and affirmed in any church, in any family, in any community. And yes, in this day and age, that includes “Side A” gay Christians, which doesn’t mean jettisoning orthodox Christian teaching, because hey, we’re all sinners, and we’re all wrong about something. (I uncomfortably straddle “Side A” and “Side B” teachings, since I am bound to affirm the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on the morality of gay sex, yet support legal civil same-sex marriage.)

That’s the challenge, that’s the real challenge, and if it’s not obvious, it’s a tremendous challenge. Let’s get started.

”

- PEG (via wesleyhill)

redscharlach: Downton Avengers! Because Iron Man 3 includes a...

Thu, 02 May 2013 07:16:05 -0400

redscharlach:

Downton Avengers! Because Iron Man 3 includes a Downton Abbey reference, so obviously I had to create a gratuitous costumed crossover…

"We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s coming..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 18:00:36 -0400

“We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s coming judgement is a good thing, something to be celebrated, long for, yearned over. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgement.”

- N.T. Wright, Surprised By Hope (via churchfu)

YES

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:32:12 -0400

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

- Flannery O’Connor (via thefullnessofthefaith)

grooveland: (via Ella Fitzgerald Loves Her Jim Beam | The...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:30:43 -0400

grooveland:

(via Ella Fitzgerald Loves Her Jim Beam | The Immaculate Consumption)

The internet is full of win today.

Vinegaroon

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:27:20 -0400

Vinegaroon:

This is a harmless Whipscorpion, Mastigoproctus giganteus, also called a Giant Vinegaroon or Grampus. Legend has it that the bite of a Vinegaroon will cause the person to taste vinegar for weeks.

Came upon this today while looking up Latin derivatives with the 8yo.

boldaswellas-strong: “Metropolitan Paul Yazigi (top) of the...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 15:28:22 -0400

boldaswellas-strong:

“Metropolitan Paul Yazigi (top) of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Aleppo (brother of His Beatitude Patriarch John X of the Great City-of-God Antioch and all the East), and Mar Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim (below) of the Syriac Orthodox Archdiocese of Aleppo, were both abducted yesterday morning, Monday, April 22nd, while they were traveling together on the road between Antioch (Antakya, Turkey) and the north Syrian city of Aleppo. The driver of the vehicle in which they were traveling was killed in the attack. Your prayers are requested.”

"The humanities will not go quietly. They won’t disappear unless and until we agree to be machines..."

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:55:17 -0400

“The humanities will not go quietly. They won’t disappear unless and until we agree to be machines instead of persons. As long as we still ask about a past before we were born, or the lives of others in distant places, or the meaning of actions and objects we don’t understand, or the values by which we choose to live, there will be the humanities. You can starve them, but you can’t kill them off.”

- The humanities change lives (via savage-america)

"Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual..."

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:47:31 -0400

“Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual experience, for many of us, amounts mostly to an essential, deeply felt and necessary, but ultimately inchoate and transitory feeling of oneness or unity with existence. It is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a shard of glass in your gut. Christ is God crying I am here, and here not only in what exalts and completes and uplifts you, but here in what appalls, offends, and degrades you, here in what activates and exacerbates all that you would call not-God.”

- Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss, 121. (via invisibleforeigner)

archimaps: The Castle and National Gallery, Edinburgh I NEED...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:45:58 -0400

archimaps:

The Castle and National Gallery, Edinburgh

I NEED TO BE THERE.

alwaysalwaysalwaysthesea: Bathroom of an 1880s home on...

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 19:20:15 -0500

alwaysalwaysalwaysthesea:

Bathroom of an 1880s home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

(via NYT)

eeee, the ceiling!

"In any class in which I assign poetry, I ask students to memorize and recite fifty lines or more..."

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 20:34:09 -0500

“

In any class in which I assign poetry, I ask students to memorize and recite fifty lines or more from the poems we have read. Those fifty lines can come from one poem, or from several, by different poets. (I tell them that if they want they can take one line from fifty different poems, but no one has taken me up on that offer yet.) When students memorize a poem it works its way into their minds — they develop an intuitive and often unconscious grasp of its structure, its way of working. As George Steiner has commented, “The private reader or listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life force.” And to recite the memorized poem is to bring it to life in your own voice.

So I sit in my office chair while a student sits across from me, and then I turn aside so I’m not looking at them. (This tends to make them less nervous.) Sometimes they go too fast, and the words blur like telephone poles from a speeding car; sometimes they stutter and stumble. That’s all fine: I tell them that there are no style points. The point is learning by heart, and speaking the poem in one’s own voice.

Once a student came in and announced that she would be reciting the last fifty lines of W. H. Auden’s poem “In Praise of Limestone.” My heart sank a bit. The lines of the poem are long and, because it’s in a quantitative meter, not regularly rhythmical; a tough poem to memorize, and not easy to recite. But I smiled and turned aside, and she launched in — hesitantly at first, as I had feared. But then, somehow, she found her balance and rhythm, and as she moved towards the poem’s conclusion — “if / Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead” — she spoke with such assurance that I knew she had gone to the very heart of that great poem. When she finished, and I turned to congratulate her, I saw that tears were rolling down her cheeks.

”

- Alan Jacobs (via wesleyhill)

"Many centuries ago….Saint Ambrose said that ‘it did not suit God to save his people by argument.’ Of..."

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 23:39:28 -0400

“Many centuries ago….Saint Ambrose said that ‘it did not suit God to save his people by argument.’ Of course arguments have their uses. When people argue against the existence of God, it helps to have some points you can make to counter the idea that belief is just completely irrational. But what is it that shifts people’s imagination and vision and hope? The Bible has no arguments for the existence of God. There are moments of conflict with God, anger with God, doubt about God’s purposes, anguish and lostness when people have no real sense of God’s presence. The Psalms are full of this, as is the book of Job. Don’t imagine the Bible is full of comfortable and reassuring things about the life of belief and trust; it isn’t. It is often about the appalling cost of letting God come near you and of trying to trust him when all the evidence seems to have gone.”

- Rowan Williams in Tokens of Trust (via ajshinythings)

lukescommonplacebook: “Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped...

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 21:01:34 -0400

lukescommonplacebook:

“Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said.”
via, via

It’s the Diamond Age!

"It is a fearful thing to hate whom God hath loved. To look upon another – his weaknesses, his sins,..."

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 20:53:34 -0400

“It is a fearful thing to hate whom God hath loved. To look upon another – his weaknesses, his sins, his faults, his defects – is to look upon one who is suffering. He is suffering from negative passions, from the same sinful human corruption from which you yourself suffer. This is very important, do not look upon him with judgmental eyes of comparison, noting the sins you assume you’d never commit. Rather, see him as a fellow sufferer, a fellow human being who is in need of the very healing of which you are in need. Help him, love him, pray for him – do unto him as you would have him do unto you.”

- St. Tikhon of Zadonsk (via hislivingpoetry)

This is really, really important.

Licia Ronzulli, member of the European Parliament, has been...

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 04:24:29 -0400

Licia Ronzulli, member of the European Parliament, has been taking her daughter Vittoria to the Parliament sessions for two years now.

I love this so much. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if this were unremarkable because we all understood and assumed that public life needn’t be cleansed of children, that babies belong with mama, that women belong in public life and therefore so do their infants?

(And yes, I recognize that it would still only work for some jobs. Babywearing gets more complicated if you’re a fry cook.)

"There is a general sense of resignation to fate. People have developed dependence on help from..."

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 04:14:57 -0400

“There is a general sense of resignation to fate. People have developed dependence on help from outside sources … this dependence hampers all rehabilitation and development efforts. People no longer feel motivated to work, or better their lots … Even within refugee camps, people did not show interest in self-help programs like vocational training and income-generating projects. Outside camps, people appear to have resigned themselves to just surviving … They seemed to live a half-life, as though they were ‘walking corpses’ or the living dead.”

- A psychiatrist retells an account of Hiroshima survivors in 1945

(cite: Somasundaram 2007, quoted Schauer & Schauer, ch 16 in E. Martz [ed.], Trauma Rehabilitation After War and Conflict, Springer 2010).

This seems to me a significant factor behind the rise of zombies in popular culture. We often have few words for PTSD/depression/trauma symptoms. And untreated trauma explains some pervasive issues among certain groups, as well as the failure of relief and development efforts in many war-torn places worldwide.

Schauer & Schauer say: “When traumatic memories remain unprocessed, they start leading a life of their own as disturbing symptoms, and we observe that victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and their communities become dysfunctional in the course of time.”
(via triadic)