Results: 5 (Female) Biblical Scholars who have most influenced us

I am not a "real writer." I am a writer. Without modification.

--Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons: On Becoming A (Woman) Writer

"[I]f you still intend to do the meme or I have missed your post, send me the link," says Mike Koke earlier this week after he tallied the results of his meme.  So far, here the top 4 biblical ("female") scholars:

#1. The winner with 7 votes is Phyllis Trible.

#2. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, April DeConick and Paula Fredriksen received 6 votes.

#3. Frances Young recevied, Adela Yarbro Collins, Mary Douglas, Adele Berlin, Elaine Pagels and Carolyn Osiek 4 votes.

#4. Amy-Jill Levine, Susan Niditch and Marianne Meye Thompson received 3 votes. The rest received one or two votes. 

I'm not intending to tip the balance.  But maybe my late list can help in some way:

1.  Dr. Osiek directly influenced me with tremendous contributions to my own thinking and to my doctoral dissertation!  Her translation, Shepherd of Hermas: A Commentary, was the work that much shaped my research. Although my project was not in biblical scholarship per se (but in feminisms, rhetorics and translation), she was the most proficient Greek reader on the committee and added helpful perspectives, struggling with me over the words, even continuing a dialogue she started in the defense by emailing me afterwards.  She announced retirement at the end of the last academic year, but she's still working I know.  The last email she sent was from a distant land where I know she's researching.  I told her that several in the blogosphere would love to see her there as a biblioblogger; alas, she's not going to start blogging and has her very good reasons.  (I should listen!)  It's thrilling to see so many of you influenced by Carolyn Osiek!!!  My very favorite work of hers is just a little article with a huge implications:  "It does no good to affirm the full dignity and equality of women with men if our language, our imagery, and our metaphors continue to perpetuate inequality." -- "The Bride of Christ : a problematic wedding - Ephesians 5:22-33" Biblical Theology Bulletin, Spring, 2002 - also available online in full for free here.

2.  Dr. DeConick has influenced a good many of us who blog.  Her scholarship is phenomenal!  My favorite books of hers are The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says and The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation: With a Commentary and New English Translation of the Complete Gospel .

3.  Dr. Berlin influences me to see translation from various perspectives. Her Biblical Poetry Through Medieval Jewish Eyes is just absolutely amazing. And I think I found myself quoting her again (in a blogpost) yesterday. 

4.  Dr. Phyllis A. Bird has a classic that deserves rereading many times over:  Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel.  (I'd recommend Bird's book to any rhetoricians reading who don't know it but who love Dr. Cheryl Glenn's Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance.)  And I think I found myself quoting Dr. Bird again (in that same blogpost) yesterday.

5.  Julia Evelina Smith had no doctorate and didn't work in a university teaching and researching.  But she's influenced many of us.  Most famously, she influenced Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Frances Ellen Burr, and the other editors of and contributors to The Women's Bible: A Classic Feminist Perspective.  Burr writes in an "Appendix" that "Julia Smith's translation of the Bible stands out unique among all translations. It is the only one ever made by a woman, and the only one, it appears, ever made by man or woman without help." What Burr doesn't go into are the exigencies surrounding Smith. She was not welcomed into the academy by those men of letters who finally endorsed her project; rather, Smith learned Hebrew, Greek, and translation from her father.  And the translator translated alone because none of the three teams of men translating revised versions of the English Bible at the time would welcome her assistance.  Her persistence paid off, I think, and places Smith in a long line of women (around the world), from Christine de Pizan to Laura Cereta to Ann Nyland, who are self-credentialed biblical scholars.  (Of course, they're also female.)

As you can see, I'm a bit biased towards and mostly influenced by bible scholars who are translators.  Didn't mean to get to Mike's meme so late but was slog blogging through a bit of elaboration on the lists for Ken's meme on those influences on my reading of the bible:

Homer, the LXX, Kenneth Lee Pike, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Philip Yancey; then Ruth Behar, Anne Carson, Cheryl Glenn, bell hooks, Gayl Jones, Anne Lamott, Nancy Mairs, Toni Morrison, Krista Ratcliffe, Alice Walker.

influences: on how I read the Bible

Here are 10 most immediate and lasting influences on how I read the Bible that were not named in the earlier post:

1. Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart
2. Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
3. Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance
4. bell hooks, Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics
5. Gayl Jones, Corregidora
6. Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
7. Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer
8. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
9. Krista Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness
10. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose
    

These writers and these works of theirs in various ways inform my readings of the Bible. Some of you wanted me to mention Willis Barnstone on jewish translation of the jewish new covenant; C. S. Lewis on second meanings and humble non-jewish christian reflections on the psalms; William Webb on hermeneutics and male, free, straight perspectives on women, slaves, and gays; Ann Nyland on classics and bible translation; Francis Schaeffer and my own son named at the end of postmodernist David Hopkins's essay rationalizing his own goatee; James K. A. Smith's fall of interpretation. And I really wanted to say something about Hélène Cixous and having to read her articles in translation only; and about Sherry Simon and Luise von Flotow and canadian feminist translating; and about Aspasia forgotten; and Maya Angelou's insistence on reading Aristotle. "Our Father has a bone to pick with this world," I want to quote instead; "... and oh, he picks it like a sore. Picks it with the Word. His punishment is the Word, and his deficiencies are failures of words as when he grows impatient with translation and strikes out precariously on his own, telling parables in his wildly half-baked Kikongo." (But then, if I did say that, you'd recognize I was quoting from "The Judges" of The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, and you might think it was one of Nathan Price's daughters.)

books on the book

υἱέ μου
φύλαξαι
ποιῆσαι
βιβλία πολλά οὐκ ἔστιν περασμός
καὶ μελέτη πολλὴ κόπωσις σαρκός
--Solomon, wise even in Greek

Tonya and Daniel of The Hebrew and Greek Reader have posted their lists and have tagged some of us. Seems they'd been tagged in a meme by Ken Brown (of C. Orthodoxy), who writes:

1. Name the five books (or scholars) that had the most immediate and lasting influence on how you read the Bible. Note that these need not be your five favorite books, or even the five with which you most strongly agree. Instead, I want to know what five books have permenantly changed the way you think.

2. Tag five others.

Here goes (with 10 more unnamed):

• Homer's most influenced how I read the Septuagint.
• The Septuagint's most influenced how I read the rest of the Bible.
• Then there's Kenneth Lee Pike (linguist, rhetorician, translator - who lets us view language N-dimensionally).
• Then there's Jacqueline Jones Royster (afrafeminist, rhetorician, historian - who says the subjective position is everything).
• And there's Philip Yancey (scholar? recovering).

Now I tag April DeConick, David Ker, Suzanne McCarthy, James McGrath, and Jane Stranz.

Miscellany: Reader's Game

Yes I do - I do read your blog - which blurs those boundaries between screen and page and digits and ink and conversation and literature and who you really are in your "real" life and who you are blogging, really. So, after going to the library with my eldest daughter this week, and hearing how she chooses books, I thought of a game for you and me. She chooses good books by opening some of the first pages and reading at random then any two paragraphs in sequence. By her method, I've found several wonderful books by a few incredible writers.

The game, then, is Guess whose book I've chosen.

Here are your clues - two paragraphs from two different books (the second is my mother's Mother's Day gift):

1.

A few weeks later, the same thing happened to Maw Hamrick, which is what I call Hugh's mother, Joan.  Her worm was a bit shorter than her son's, not that size really matters.  If I was a child and saw something creeping out of a hole in my mother's leg, I would march to the nearest orphanage and put myself up for adoption.  I would burn all pictures of her, destroy anything she had ever given me, and start all over because that is simply disgusting.  A dad can be crawling with parasites and somehow it's OK, but on a mom, or any woman, really, it's unforgiveable.

"Well, that's sort of chauvinistic of you, don't you think?" Maw Hamrick said.  She'd come to Paris for Christmas, as had Lisa and her husband, Bob.  The gifts had been opened, and she was collecting the used wrapping paper and ironing it flat with her hands.  "It was just a guinea worm.  People got them all the time."  She looked towards the kitchen, where Hugh was doing something to a goose. "Honey, where do you want me to put this paper?"

2.

Dear Sidney,

Susan Scott is a wonder.  We sold over forty copies of the book, which was very pleasant, but much more thrilling from my standpoint was the food.  Susan managed to procure ration coupons for icing sugar and real eggs for the meringue.  If all her literary luncheons are going to achieve these heights, I won't mind touring about the country.  Do you suppose that a lavish bonus could spur her on to butter?  Let's try it--you may deduct the money from my royalties.

Now for my grim news.  You asked me how work on my new book is progressing.  Sidney, it isn't.

When I went to the store to buy book 2 for Mom, there was an updated edition in which the second author praises her co-author who had just passed away.  Here, then, are additional clues for you from book 2 (a passing from fiction to factual reflections):

I grew up in a family of storytellers. In my family, there is no such thing as a yes-or-no question, a simple answer, or a bald fact. You can't even ask someone to pass the butter without incurring a story, and major holidays always end with the women gathered around the table, weeping with laughter, while our husbands sit in the next room holding their heads.

Obviously, with so much practice, my family is rich in fine storytellers but my aunt Mary Ann Shaffer was the jewel in our crown. What was it about Mary Ann turning a tale? She was one of the one of the wittiest people I ever met, but wit wants the essence of her gift. Her language was lustrous, her timing was exquisite, her delivery was a thing of beaty and a joy forever, but none of these reaches to the center of her charm. That, it seems to me, was her willingness to be delighted by people--their phrases, their frailties, and their fleeting moments of granduer. Together with her delight was the impluse to share it; she told stories so that the rest of us, listening, could be delighted with her, and, time and again, she succeeded.

Of course, now you have the name of one of the authors of book 2, so the game's almost done for you, right? Let me give one more hint of the wonder of the book:  it's a novel composed entirely of letters (except for those author's notes), which means you'll be reading somebody else's mail if you read it (and reading somebody's praise for somebody who might just have been delighted with you, and with me).

So who wrote these books, and what are they?

So far, a saga

So blogger David Ker, who once on a dare posted here once upon a time, calls me "impossibly verbose" and then dares me and some of his "friends" to play his write-your-life-in-fifty-words-as-a-saga meme.  He writes his but tells us to get our muse first from a writer in Narcotics Anonymous.

Since it’s the holidays and all, and because rape and heroin depress the hell out of me not to mention what they do to you, I went straight to “Xmas.” I’ve pasted the happy story here as the next paragraph. (And my impossibly verbose paragraphs here always have fifty words.)

Christmas is always a time of horror and misery for her. No family, a past that makes her wince and hang her head with shame, a future that fills her with fear and hopelessness. Walking past the Macy’s displays, she realizes she’d rather be a mannequin in the store window.

Maybe there’s a reason for all those words.  Maybe I feel shamed into doing it or something, but I’m more or less parroting the Lingamish’s story-structure.  You’ll "get" mine next, sort of. Why do I feel like I’m answering my dad the patriarchy?  Now I tag Jane, Rachel, Stefan, Bob, and Charlotte.

trong ngày có trận đánh mà mẹ 

bị nghiền nát với các con cái

Childhood in wartime

ia memboroskan uangnya 

dengan hidup berfoya-foya

Adolescence in godlessnonsense

Grown(ing) missionary kid 

meets match in 

grown(ing) preacher’s kid:

Life in love!

Peaceful rewards in recovery,

fuller in family, 

in friends:

οὐδείς σε κατέκρινεν?

Laughing at Your Blog? A Truth or Dare Meme

1. What gets the biggest laugh about how you blog?
2. What gets the biggest laugh about what you blog?

Your readers won't tell you to your face, so you may just have to drag your imagination out of denial. This is an open meme, if you can play. Would you dare post, honestly, on 1. and 2.?

(Don't wait for your friends or the researchers to tease this out of you!)

One of my friends on campus who's doing Ph.D. research on blogging, met with me in my office yesterday.

Involuntarily, he laughed (talking about my blog):

"What I find most interesting is your readers' comments to you! It's fascinating that there is anyone on the planet who can talk feminism and rhetoric and translation all at once."

He was laughing at my blog's what. Was he also laughing at me and you too? Are we also The Who?

But by far his biggest "LOL" literally to my face, right in my ears, was on my blog's how. Here's what he tried to tell me:

"Some of your posts are two (chuckle) . . . are two thousand (snicker) . . . are two thousand words long (guffaw). Are you trying to be blogger counter cultural? Do long posts (just smiling now, but a repressed smile) really win you readers? Do you think the world audience is really that patient? That understanding?"

(Which sent me into a bit of slump trying to answer.
I kept wondering about Aristotle's comments on audience,
and what it would have been like if he'd been able to blog his long treatise called the Rhetoric.
And whether university professors of "rhetoric" could assign their graduate students to read his blog.
And about the women, whom Aristotle's blog leaves out, reading his many posts.
And whether anyone who didn't read his Greek would use google translator tools online or alta vista's babelfish.

Now I'm just humming Larry Norman again:

nothing really changes
everything remains the same
we are what we are, till the day that we die

would aristotle be an acid head?)

Who's reading now, and will you play along? Dare you.?

I don’t know how to love him

I don’t know how to love him










It’s Corsicana, Texas, 1964, where and when the Jim Crow laws are still in effect. I’m a little white boy. Mother and Daddy are at church (also white and Southern Baptist), some meeting or something, where he’s the preacher. Nancy is a black woman, our nanny, at home. She’s telling us stories, my brother and me, until she can go home at the end of her day and tuck in her own kids, and tell them the stories, rightly resisting somehow. Somehow she’s teaching us: singing now, “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” and then “He Never Sleeps.” But we beg her to play the turn table, and this weird thing happens. She presses down a little 45 and lays on the needle. Through the cracklings we hear a choir of women singing, “We’ve a story to tell to the nations, that shall turn their hearts to the right, a story of truth and mercy, a story of peace and light, . . . for the darkness shall turn to dawning, and the dawning to noonday light, and Christ’s great kingdom shall come on earth, the kingdom of love and light” (Side A). So we say “flip it, please, Nancy.” And the three of us listen, to a choir of men: “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus, going on before. . .” The door opens; Daddy’s face flushes, “The children are not to play with the turntable.” “Yes, Sir,” we hear, and “Sir, I am sorry; please, they just wanted to hear a little of the songs of yalls church.”

It’s Fort Worth, Texas, 1969, Travis Avenue Baptist Church. Our family is standing in front of the congregation like the Von Trapp family. Except we’re singing in Vietnamese. (We’d seen “The Sound of Music,” in Sai Gon in late 1965, so I know what they felt like). We’re back for furlough from the mission field, South Vietnam. Our childhood friends, and enemies, had taught my brothers and me to rock fight—we did live in a war zone, after all—and some pretty choice words, the tones on which make for some good singing if you get the melody synced right. (Missionary hymns didn’t). And Chị Năm, our nanny, had taught us this little song, which makes for pretty weird worship in the USA: “Vì Đức Chúa Trời yêu thương thế gian, Đức Chúa Trời yêu thương thế gian, đến nỗi đã ban Con một của Ngài, là Jêsus, hầu cho hễ ai tin, hễ ai tin, hễ ai tin Con ấy, không bị hư mất bao giờ, không bị hư mất bao giờ, mà được sự sống, được sự sống, được sự sống đời đời, A-men!”

It’s Ba Ngoị, Việt Nam, 1971, at home. Bill Roberts, an American GI, is over and has brought a new record. He likes to taunt Daddy and Mommy with worldliness. It’s “Jesus Christ Superstar,” but not weird worship at all, if you keep it out of the churches. Mary Magdalene or Yvonne Elliman is confessing, “I don’t know how to love him.” Bill looks at us kids and says, “She’s a prostitute, ya know.” Of course, we did know that English word. It came blurting out alongside those dressed up women on the streets in Số Chín (which the GIs called “Sue Chin,” a place they seemed to populate as well in broad daylight), on our drive to Cam Ranh. What’s really weird is this: the great worship song, the same year, was Elliman’s #28 chart hit and Helen Reddy’s #12 in the USA (with Reddy even titling her album after the song), and in Ireland, for Tina & Real McCoy, it hit #1. The next year, in the UK, for Petula Clark, it made #47. Less known is Angela Carrasco’s version en español “Es más que amor” and the Cadets Drum and Bugle Corps arrangement of it. You Aussies will remember Kate Ceberano’s #38 hit in 1992, when we in the US heard Sarah Brightman sing it here. You Brits have brought it back time and again, by Joanna Ampil in 97, Leanne Dobinson and Helena Blackman in 06 (on the reality television “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”), and Bonnie Tyler but also Sinéad O’Connor last year. But did anyone visiting LA in August 2006 see Yvonne Elliman’s one night come back, with the original Ted Neeley Jesus, but also Jack Black as Herod? Did I mention it is weird that the same churches allowing Mary Magdala in keep her great worship song out?

It’s Jakarta, Indonesia, 1976, Asrama Baptit (the missionary kid high school dorm), where the Kebayoran Baptist Church youth group meets. My hair is as long as they’ll let me grow it, a closet atheist aware of the penalties of getting caught doing certain substances and doing certain other things with certain types of people (all with long hair for some reason). We’re made to go, to youth group that is. And some sing: “Cotton candy clouds so fluffy and white, who put you there in a sky so blue, or do you just happen to float along, pretty and white, in a sky so blue?” There’s some weird lines too about “tall mountains, deep valleys, fast rivers, cool streams,” and I think the song is worshiping the “Master Designer,” although evolution, for us, is just a smoke screen argument for doing certain things (with smoke). If it’d been done right, the Beatles could have sung the song (and I always wondered about those lyrics to “Lucy in the Sky.”)

It’s Fort Worth, Texas, again but now 2008, at a church. The band plays like the Beatles sometimes, and hair is not such a huge thing now. And yet, there’s weirdness again: “We're gonna shout loud, loud until the walls come down shout loud, loud until the walls come down, loud until the walls come down, Because we've already won, And You don't have a chance. . . [on and on and loud].” The “You” isn’t the one who they started worshiping. I wonder what my kids are thinking. Anyway, is that five yet?

Can I just add three more things (before I tag anyone)?

First: thanks to Eclexia for her power of persuasion. Second: we could blame David Ker for weirder things I suppose. (But there’s enough of that from Miss “bitty” Wilson, which explains why he played dodgeball so long; may he get technorati ratings galore now.)

Third: one of my own teachers once said this thing.
I only know that because one of the other students translated it this way, so that even Aristotle and I could understand it:

προσέχετε δὲ τὴν δικαιοσύνην ὑμῶν μὴ ποιεῖν ἔμπροσθεν τῶν ἀνθρώπων πρὸς τὸ θεαθῆναι αὐτοῖς εἰ δὲ μή γε μισθὸν οὐκ ἔχετε παρὰ τῷ πατρὶ ὑμῶν τῷ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς . . . σὺ δὲ ὅταν προσεύχῃ εἴσελθε εἰς τὸ ταμεῖόν σου καὶ κλείσας τὴν θύραν σου πρόσευξαι τῷ πατρί σου τῷ ἐν τῷ κρυπτῷ καὶ ὁ πατήρ σου ὁ βλέπων ἐν τῷ κρυπτῷ ἀποδώσει σοι

My dynamic equivalent relevant translation of Matthew 6:1 . . . 6 is this:

“Woe, a Warning: worship is woefully weird in every way whenever and whereever one is waiting on someone, anyone, to watch. It’s not a dance for, it’s a dance with. At the risk of cliché, it’s not rules but a real good natural relationship. I’ll wait for you, but never overwhelm you. Unless you find me loveable, forget it. When you don’t know exactly how, then you’ve got it down.” (Keep reading because there’s a verse 7,8 warning about all us and yall who are goyim too).

now tagged:

Iyov, who like David Ker at first avoided my one and only meme, but who unlike Lingamish doesn't get his feelings hurt while waiting to be tagged. Wow, look he already did it.

The curiously quieter Voice of Stefan, who I must remind also, like Lingamish and Iyov, avoided that best teacher meme.

Molly, who has likely already been tagged, but for her Adventures in Mercy, we have to make sure.

Nathan, so he can take time out from his Greek lessons for something really weird. He said No, then Yes. (It was around his birthday, and he was working on saying how weird this really is.)

Sue, aka Suzanne for the incredible Suzanne's Bookshelf. She's so quick, maybe I tagged her after the fact.

Into the Wild at the Kitchen Table

It appears I have been tagged by Suzanne.

The rules of this game:

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more.
(No cheating!) Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

Fire up the MacBook Pro in the kitchen this morning and, reading the rules of this game, fumble around in the dark for the nearest book. Flip on the light switch. It's my daughter Amelia's Lost Star: The Story of Amelia Earhart by Patricia Lauber. 106 pages. Next book. It's the one Amelia gave me for Christmas, that my wife's now reading. (Why I won't cheat, I don't know. Not even tempted here in the quiet.)

More and more of the classes he took addressed such pressing social issues as racism and world hunger and inequities in the distribution of wealth. But despite his aversion to money and conspicuous consumption, Chris's political leanings could not be described as liberal.
Indeed, he delighted in ridiculing the policies of the Democratic Party and was a vocal admirer of Ronald Reagan.
Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer

From this kitchen table in Texas, once the wild wild West, I tag Billie, Deborah, Hugo, Lily, Philip.

The Best Teachers

On Monday, one of my teachers passed away. On the same day, another of my mentors “no longer with us” joined me by video to help me teach a class of aspiring language teachers. The former is Mildred Godwin Taylor, who lived 93 years on this planet. The latter is Kenneth Lee Pike.

Both teachers in very personal ways continue to teach me. For instance, Aunt Mildred and Dr. Pike renew my reluctant respect for Aristotle (if only in this respect):

As of Monday, I’m reminded that 17th century Lincoln School Headmaster John Clarke opined that “Alexander was right in claiming that he had owed more to Aristotle his teacher than to Philip his father.”

Is this all that different from Philip Yancey’s learning from Fred Rogers (aka “Mr. Rogers”) the value of giving personal and public credit to one’s best teachers? Yancey, “recovering from church abuse,” is inspired by Rogers to write the book Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church. The author details all that he’s learned from Martin Luther King, Jr., G. K. Chesterton, Paul Brand, Robert Coles, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mahatma Gandhi, C. Everett Koop, John Donne, Annie Dillard, Frederick Buechner, Shusaku Endo, and Henri Nouwen.

Now I’m challenged to do this if just briefly in a blog post. And I’d like to make it a meme:

Who are the thirteen teachers who have most personally influenced you and how?

Would you share your baker’s dozen of mentors with the world?

Here, in some chronological order, are my teachers and the greatest bit of what each one has taught me:

1. Mom, taught me to read and, then, still teaches me to learn from good *teachers.

2. Dad, teaches me the measure and the capacity of a man.

3. Aunt Mildred modeled humility and service to students, even a 16-year-old atheist who watched her enjoy and contemplate her incarnate God.

4. Ἰησοῦς ὁ Ναζωραῖος models humility and service to many, translating a 16-year-old boy out of his atheism into enjoyment and contemplation.

5. Dr. Richard Cutter taught me enthusiasm in learning Greek by his electric eccentricity in teaching.

6. Julie, my best friend and life partner, teaches me to live passionately with honesty.

7. Dr. Kenneth Lee Pike taught me good language and behavior for being an outsider and an insider (either one moving towards the other).

8. Schaeffer, my one and only son, teaches me to be loyal to friends and to enjoy one’s compulsions.

9. Hallie, my eldest daughter, teaches me to talk thoughtfully with high ideals.

10. Amelia, my youngest daughter, teaches me to laugh a lot.

11. Dr. Charlotte Hogg teaches me feminisms and rhetorics of those in the margins from my places of privilege.

12. Dr. Richard Leo Enos teaches me rhetoric of the Greeks and Romans by his own masterful rhetoric of complex simplicity.

13. Dr. James Reeves teaches me how the ceiling on my spiritual maturity is my social-emotional immaturity (and that there are twelve steps ahead).

*My other teachers, the other top 13 my Mom by teaching me to read taught me to learn from, include these I’ve never met: Anne Lamott, Anne Carson, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Nancy Mairs, Edith Schaeffer, Francis A. Schaeffer, C. S. Lewis, Philip Yancey, Dallas Willard, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Now I tag these friends:

• Billie
• Jason
• Suzanne
• Wayne

In a late update, I tag some very interesting bloggers:

• Deborah
• Debra
• Hugo
  
• Iyov
• John
• Lingamish
  
• Stefan