Aristotle's Feminist Subject

Is much changing? How about the pay gap; is it nar...

2012-05-03T15:41:45.944-05:00

Is much changing? How about the pay gap; is it narrowing?

http://narrowthegapp.com/

You would be lovely on twitter

2012-04-24T04:41:32.825-05:00

You would be lovely on twitter

And it shows exactly what "culture" stil...

2011-12-09T05:47:25.342-06:00

And it shows exactly what "culture" still is: clearly not favoring women. This clearly refutes any argument that what Christianity needs to do is fight the imaginary Jezebel spirit. If it's counter-cultural they want, we know where they can start.

Aristotle on the golden rule

Aristotle on Love

Thanks for your comment, Mike. The Jesus of Nazar...

2011-10-25T17:10:15.778-05:00

Thanks for your comment, Mike. The Jesus of Nazareth according to Harold Bloom's reading is not the same Jesus of modern Christianity, that's for sure. I share your interest in understanding (and in understanding the Hebrew Bible by) the hermeneutic of Jesus.

I want to see the Hebrew Bible through the eyes of...

2011-10-24T09:50:28.486-05:00

I want to see the Hebrew Bible through the eyes of Jesus of Nazareth. He extracted more meaning and benefit from its words than anyone else I know.

Strangely, modern Christianity does not seek to understand the Hebrew Bible by Jesus' hermeneutic, and this may account for modern Christianity's impotence.

Thank you, Kristen, for introducing me to Kenneth ...

2011-10-10T15:59:23.237-05:00

Thank you, Kristen, for introducing me to Kenneth Bailey. I am intrigued by how he sees things such as this:

"Thus female activity is used to describe the work of God. In Luke 15:8-10 Jesus likens himself to a woman. The possible dependence of Luke 15 on Psalm 23.... [T]here is only one author who balances together two metaphors/stories, one male and the other female. This is the author of Isaiah 40-55." (Finding the Lost Cultural Keys to Luke 15, page 94)

Too often male authors, story-tellers who are men, get caught up in the binary, what Nancy Mairs calls "the fundamental structure of the patriarchy." Such men narrate the way that Aristotle told was best. To posit, on the other hand, women as authors of Biblical Text -- as Bailey and Bloom do -- is to find a refreshingly different way in to reading the text.

Kristen, Thanks for your post! And I appreciate ...

2011-10-10T15:40:53.681-05:00

Kristen,

Thanks for your post! And I appreciate the discussion following it very much. I'm quite sure that the patriarchy isn't owned by Christians (even by the patriarchal ones), but to use the Bible or culture figures such as Bennett does sure makes for some interesting cultural divides in America.

Ok, my post is up here: http://krwordgazer.blogsp...

2011-10-09T00:11:32.911-05:00

Ok, my post is up here:

http://krwordgazer.blogspot.com/2011/10/christian-male-identity.html

It raises the possible issue of male malaise as something to be taken seriously even as we repudiate Christian patriarchy as the solution.

That my epistemology is derived from and descends ...

2011-10-08T14:57:10.900-05:00

That my epistemology is derived from and descends from others is a truth that I have come to acknowledge. It doesn't make me feel defensive, for some reason. Maybe it's because I have also learned (through websites like this one, and from my college history-of-philosophy classes long ago) that it's possible to examine one's own epistemology and open oneself to other epistemologies. Kenneth Bailey, a Christian scholar and theologian with Middle-Eastern roots, has taught me a lot about reading the Bible through his epistemology. It's like a light that illuminates the beauty of the Gospel, showing colors I had not seen before. Thanks for introducing me to Harold Bloom as well!

This is a very thought-provoking post. I'm pl...

2011-10-08T14:35:43.685-05:00

This is a very thought-provoking post. I'm planning a post on this topic on my own blog shortly, inspired by yours!

Shawna, Thank you for telling the story of your o...

2011-10-08T05:46:50.413-05:00

Shawna,

Thank you for telling the story of your own family. It sounds all too familiar, even though Bennett seems so suddenly surprised by the inequalities and the sexism. How many generations back have experienced exactly what the kind of father and mother that you have grown up with? Three? More!

Thanks also for sharing so personally how you have changed things for yourself! To be honest, much of my own life, similarly has been one of change; I remember as a young child making promises that my marriage and my family would be, would have to be, different.

Someone also needs to tell Bennett that men refusi...

2011-10-07T12:07:15.901-05:00

Someone also needs to tell Bennett that men refusing to grow up is nothing new. My father has never grown up, and it is in large part due, to my domesticated mother who believed the 1950s brainwashing that her job was to suck it up and keep the family together regardless of what my father did. I can think of a quite a few men on both sides of my family in 3 different generations that have never grown up.

The only difference now is that most women don't put up with it and leave and find men who are adults. Or like me: wait to marry later, insisting that we are going to marry an adult man to begin with.

Interesting information, Kurk. I seem to remember...

2011-10-05T16:29:08.427-05:00

Interesting information, Kurk. I seem to remember someone -- maybe it was Arthur Conan Doyle, or Dorothy L. Sayers-- who had a character in one of their novels say that a certain letter was certainly written by an Englishman, for such awful English grammar could only have been written by a native speaker. The same, apparently, could be said of German. *grin*

Lest anyone else cares, it may be important here t...

2011-10-05T14:33:43.099-05:00

Lest anyone else cares, it may be important here to raise the issue that Hitler really did type on a typewriter. And he really did do so very awfully. Here's Historian and documentarian Timothy W. Ryback again:

[[ At age thirty-five [some 3 years after he had dictated or had typed the Gemlich letter], Hilter had not even mastered basic spelling. He writes "es gibt" -- "there is" -- phonetically rather than grammatically as "es giebt." But the remnant pieces I studied, including Hitler's original draft for the first chapter of Mein Kampf, as well as an eighteen-page outline to five subsequent chapters, demonstrate he took his writing seriously.

It has long been assumed that Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to his fellow prisoners, in particular his personal secretary, Rudolf Hess, and his chauffeur and bodyguard, Emil Maurice. In fact, Hitler had begun work on his manuscript before either one of them arrived in Landsberg. This first draft, typed in Pica with faded blue ribbon, shows a fitful start to the four-hundred-page book that was to follow. A single line is typed across the top of the untitled page, "It is not by chance that my cradle," then breaks off, drops two carriage returns, and begins anew. "It must be seen in my opinion as a positive omen that my cradle stood in Braunau since this small town lies directly on the boarder of two German states whose reunification we young people see as a higher goal in life," Hitler writes with an evidently measured cadence, though he misspells higher -- hohre rather than höhere -- before pulling two more carriage returns and plunging into an emphatic claim that this reunification is driven not be economic considerations -- "Nein! Nein! he hammers -- but by the common bond of blood. "Gemeinsames Blut gehört in ein gemeinsames Reich!" he writes. "Common blood belongs in a common empire."

At some point in the opening paragraphs, Hitler paused, took a blue pencil, and went back to make amendments, striking out his first failed sentence, making one grammatical correction, but overlooking several others. ]] (page 72)

I've inserted the image of this page that Ryback describes -- at the end of my blogpost above. It is page 73 in Ryback's book.

Kristen, Thank you for lending your expertise and...

2011-10-05T14:01:29.502-05:00

Kristen,

Thank you for lending your expertise and your education to the possibilities. What you are suggesting is certainly consistent with the known facts. There is also evidence that Hitler did not really care so much, at certain stages of writing, how cleanly texts were produced. Historian and documentarian Timothy W. Ryback says:

[[ When Hitler boasted of his education at state expense, he not only flaunted his disdain for the Bavrian penal system but also exposed hiw meager understanding of serious education, a fact that is revealed in Mein Kampf both in terms of its vacuous intellectual content and its painfully flawed grammar. In the surviving bits of unpublished Hitler texts I found in archives across Europe and America, [Hitler] the collector-cum-author emerges as a half-educated man who has mastered neither basic spelling nor common grammar. His raw texts are riddled with lexical and syntactical errors. ]] (page 71, Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, my emphases.)

I should add that Charles Hamilton Jr. is probably the leading expert on Hitler's authentic signature; he's attested it in numerous cases with many examples, and he's even described it in detail in his Leaders and Personalities of the Third Reich. And yet, not only can we take Hamilton's word as credible with respect to the originality of Hitler's signature on the Gemlich letter in the Simon Wiesenthal Center but we can also look to other experts who have verified the signature in various contexts. Since Anonymous is a collector, he's surely even familiar with online sources of these original signatures of Hitler, in collection for review and sometime for sale, collectors such as this one.

Katherine: Thank you for your kind words! What se...

2011-10-05T13:38:00.183-05:00

Katherine: Thank you for your kind words!

What seems incredible is the laws of the Romans that the Korinthian men (and their women) would have had to obey; for example:

In De Re Public, Cicero (c. 106 – 43 BCE) records this very interesting set of laws:

"VI. The judgment of the censor inflicts scarcely anything more than a blush on the man whom he condemns. Therefore as all that adjudication turns solely on the name (nomen), the punishment is called ignominy.

Nor should a prefect be set over women, an officer who is created among the Greeks; but there should be a censor to teach husbands to manage their wives.

So the discipline of modesty has great power. All women abstain from wine.

And also if any woman was of bad character, her relations used not to kiss her.

So petulance is derived from asking (petendo); wantonness (procacitas) from procando, that is, from demanding."

In D.1.5.9., Papinian (c. 140 to 212) writes:

"there are many points in our law in which the condition of females is inferior to that of males" (deterior est condicio feminarum quam masculorum)

In D.50.17.2, Ulpian (c. 170 to 223), writes:

"females are debarred from all civil and public functions" (feminae ab omnibus officiis civilibus vel publicis)

Anonymous, I'm a paralegal with a degree in En...

2011-10-05T13:07:43.573-05:00

Anonymous, I'm a paralegal with a degree in English-- and I can attest that many writers in English do not manage to follow English rules of grammar, punctuation or spelling. Since experts have confirmed this letter genuine, then if what you are saying is also correct, it makes sense to believe that the person who typed it was not a skilled writer or typist, but was instead perhaps a low-ranking military officer without good command of German, to whom Hitler dictated the letter.

Dear Anonymous, Lest there is any doubt in your m...

2011-10-05T12:06:47.777-05:00

Dear Anonymous,

Lest there is any doubt in your mind that Hitler did write this letter, you may also want to examine other secondary sources confirming this is Hitler's first letter to mention Jews and to articulate his anti-Antisemitic program. Here are a few:

Ernst Deuerlin's article, "Hitlers Eintritt in die Politik und die Reichswehr," in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeshicte 7 (1959: 177-227).

The book by Axel Huhn and Eberhard Jackel that reproduces Adolf Hitler's letter to Adolf Gemlich, namely, Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1980); see pages 88-90.

Anton Joachimsthaler's work, Hitlers Weg begann in München 1913-1923 (München: Herbig, 2000). There, on pages 231-35, you may find a facsimile of Gemlich's request, Hitler's response, and some related documents.

Dear Anonymous, Would you care to say who you are...

2011-10-05T12:03:30.614-05:00

Dear Anonymous,

Would you care to say who you are? Identifying yourself would not only be polite, it might also help you "as long time militariy collector" to warrant your claim.

Time Magazine reporter Nate Rawlings has confirmed what you so absolutely doubt. The letter is, in fact, authentic:

[[ In 1990, handwriting expert Charles Hamilton Jr., who gained fame for exposing fake Hitler diaries in 1983, authenticated Hitler's signature on the Gemlich letter. ]]

Likewise, Der Spiegel reporter Werner Von Maser confirms the authenticity of Hitler's letter typed at Gemlich's request. And the news journal actually reproduces a long excerpt from the letter, and the reporter mentions the typewriter:

[[ Auf der Dienst-Schreibmaschine seines Regiments schrieb er Einladungen zu DAP-Versammlungen, warf sie in Briefkästen oder überreichte sie Straßenpassanten. ]]

What's more, New York Times reporter Jack Ewing offers additional evidence that this is Hitler's typed and signed letter for Gemlich:

[[ Johann Pörnbacher, a historian and representative of the German state archives in Munich says the version in the archive is the one that has "corrected some typographical and punctuation errors." Moreover, "the Munich copy adopted some nonsensical commas written by hand in the Wiesenthal Center document." ]]

What's more:

[[ "This wouldn’t make sense to a forger," Mr. Plöckinger said. "So structural aspects speak in favor of the authenticity" of the document acquired by the Wiesenthal Center.

Now, to be sure, the Wiesenthal Center's Rabbi Hier was, at first, as doubtful as you are. And then he, like experts Johann Plöckinger and Charles Hamilton Jr., was able to examine all the facts.

So here's more:

[[ Rabbi Hier said he had a chance to acquire the letter when it first came on the market in 1988, but was skeptical of the document because it was typed. That seemed odd to him for the period in question, when Hitler was an ordinary soldier in a country devastated economically by war. Typewriters were very costly in 1919 and even many military units did not have them. "How did he get hold of a typewriter?" Rabbi Hier asked.

This year, Rabbi Hier learned that there was a plausible explanation. In 1919, during the upheaval that followed Germany’s defeat in World War I, Hitler was attached to a military propaganda unit of the Bavarian Army in Munich that was trying to stamp out Bolshevik sentiment carried home by prisoners of war in Russia....

Hitler either wrote the letter in longhand and it was typed by someone in Captain Mayr’s office, or Hitler dictated the letter, according to a 1959 article in a German historical quarterly, which appears to be the first scholarly mention of the document. ]]

Thus, Anonymous, I hope you can open your mind, and concede, that given the evidence, "THIS letter is [not] 100% FAKE !" In fact, this is one of the most authentic documents of Hitler ever written.

I am German and all I can say is, that this letter...

2011-10-05T10:53:10.391-05:00

I am German and all I can say is, that this letter contains many errors, orthographic mistakes and even the signature has some very strange errors. The letter is typewritten, which is very strange. In 1919, Hitler was a young man and attested poor. To own a typewriter was luxury !
Space error, a lot of comma faults, use of smal and large words, the word UND in the beginning which is absolute not German style, the word UND after an comma which is absolute no German style, one sentence makes absolute NO sense and is too too long, the word Führernsicher does NOT exist in German language, sentences which are NOT German, but foreign script and style, some words to end a sentence are just missed !the writer was 100 % not a German and even misspelled the word Pogrom !!, and last but not least: The continental typewriter already had a German "ß", "ä" and "ü", but the writer of the letter didn´t use theese letters. My opinion as long time militariy collector. THIS letter is 100% FAKE !

I'm with Kristen: I think you just blew my min...

2011-09-30T21:10:50.973-05:00

I'm with Kristen: I think you just blew my mind. Excuse me while I go pick up the pieces...

Kristen, On the link to your blog, I think it may...

2011-09-30T11:51:05.499-05:00

Kristen,

On the link to your blog, I think it may show once you post again.

Kristen and Dana,

Thanks for your further thoughts about OIKOS! You've made me think a lot more about this whole question, and I posted again on it here.

The sensibility of "household of God" is...

2011-09-29T12:22:05.676-05:00

The sensibility of "household of God" is how Orthodox Christians understand oiko. One of the things I love about Orthodoxy is what's called "economia". It's a bending or suspension of "the rules" - it's more like "house rules":)

Economia is invoked, for example, if a person' health would be damaged by fasting to the extent asked by the church. In my case, I have diabetes and I'm the only Orthodox in my family, so in economia I have a blessing to eat small amounts of non-fasting food with my husband at dinner, and if Liturgy is going to be later in the morning so that communion will be after noon, I eat some breakfast. IOW, the point of fasting is not fasting. Same goes for other "rules".

The purpose of economia is to further the health and healing of a person's relationship with God, so, in a sense, for that to be "further birthed".

Dana