to hear Arcangela Tarabotti

Arcangela Tarabotti was a feminist ahead of her time. Though forced into a convent in 17th century Venice, she wrote blistering attacks on patriarchal repressiveness in the family, the state and even the Church....

Tarabotti's story, and in large measure her daring, may have been exceptional in European Christendom (until the 14th century, generally only nuns were taught reading and writing ). However, the Renaissance era was marked by additional female - and also male - voices that rebelled against the conventions and sought to prove that women were not, as described in the Italian translation of Aristotle, "defective males." The female writers were from the upper-middle class - aristocrats, nuns and courtesans. They wrote fiction, poetry, philosophy and satire, and availed themselves of every literary style of the time. In Venice, too, Tarabotti was not the only defiant - and successful - female writer. Already in 1600, four years before she was born, two books were published there which are still considered milestones among women's works on gender issues. They are "The Worth of Women," by Moderata Fonte, who died eight years earlier in childbirth; and "The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men," by Lucrezia Marinella, a contemporary of Tarabotti's who was a prolific and very popular writer.

[Tarabotti's] family was of Jewish origin, and had resided around Modena before coming to Venice as "conversos." (Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity during the Inquisition).
--- Michal Levertov, "Get thee to a nunnery," haaretz.com

Today, Levertov announces a new edition:

The new annotated English version of "Convent Life as Inferno" is the work of two Italian-born scholars who teach in England: Dr. Francesca Medioli (introduction and notes ) and Dr. Letizia Panizza (translation ). Medioli, director of the Center for Italian Women's Studies at the University of Reading, rescued Tarabotti's manuscript in 1990 and brought about its publication in Italy. Panizza lectures in the Department of Italian at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Her annotated translation of Tarabotti's "Paternal Tyranny" was published in 2004 in a University of Chicago Press series about women's writing in the Renaissance called "The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe." The series now appears under the imprint of the University of Toronto Press, which will publish "Convent Life as Inferno" in 2012.

From it, you'll be able to read Panizza's translation and to hear Tarabotti's insight.  Listen to her a bit now, from her Paternal Tyranny:

After the Lord had created the universe and all the animals - as I have just said - it is written, "And God saw all the things that He had made, and they were very good" (Gn 1:31). He then set about shaping the proudest animal of all; but when He had finished, He did not deem His work perfect and so did not recognize it as good. For this reason, Genesis does not add the same words as before; but foreseeing that without woman man would be the compendium of all imperfections, God said after some thought, "It is not good for man to be alone, let us make him a help like unto himself" (Gn 2:18). Thus He willed to bring forth a companion for man, who would enrich him with merits and be the universal glory of the human race (46).

As soon as His Majesty said the word "help," He immediately added, "like unto himself," implying that woman is of just as much value as man (50).

If he alone had the grace of free will and was superior to Eve, she would not have sinned at all, despite the serpent's promptings and insinuations, for the simple reason that she could not have made choices without her husband's consent (51).

Eve is deceived by the serpent's cunning, and you place all the blame on her. Adam falls for a charming request, and you excuse him. He knew he was offending God; he was not deceived by cunning, but beseeched by an innocent and sincere creature. Have you ever heard of greater wickedness than shielding yourself against your own faults with another's innocence (52)?

Our ancient mother set us a true example: as soon as she was created, she used her free will given by God; her first act was to gaze upon the tree that would bear the fruit of knowledge. Desire pursued her eye; overcome, she aroused the same desire in Adam. It was his excessive gullibility that deprived the whole human race of the happy state of innocence (109).

Adam alone, not Eve, was commanded not to eat the forbidden fruit - which means that his sin, not hers, brought ruin to the world. [...] and for that reason the apostle Paul says, "Through one man sin entered the world [...] (122)."

 [sources:

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/get-thee-to-a-nunnery-1.383496

http://sojourness.blogspot.com/2005/04/not-guilty.html

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo3625872.html

http://crrs.utoronto.ca/pdf/pubs/OVpromo.pdf ]

Recovery: Sex Addiction, Silence, and Women

Too much has already been said on the question of the sex addiction of men like Tiger Woods and Jesse James.

And there's too much silence already on sex addiction of women.  Fortunately, some are speaking up.  And what's coming out is for positive recovery.

For example, today Katelyn Beaty posts her interview with Marnie Ferree:  "Female Sex Addict: Not an Oxymoron."  Most postively, Beaty asks and Ferree begins to answer the questions about positive recovery for the woman sex addict and for those who are in her life:

How would you advise a single Christian [woman] sex addict to proceed in recovery?
Bless her heart. It is hard. I think obviously to proceed in integrity and holiness, I think to really focus on her healthy relationships, and they can be of opposite gender, but to be certain about what’s driving them and what the foundation is. And I think to embrace her sexuality, and by that I mean to be very aware of and in touch with her feminine side, whether that’s her appearance or her creative side or her athletic side. To really be a whole person and not just focus on “Well I’ve gotta find a man.”

What do sex addicts need most from the people who love them?
They need loved ones to educate themselves about sex addiction, especially about women. They need to understand the extraordinary challenge that the female sex addict is facing. Second, female sex addicts need their loved ones to be working on themselves. My husband would say that he enabled me for years by his passivity. I’m still totally responsible for what I did, but it sure would have helped had he been healthy enough to put his foot down and say, “I am not going to live with a wife who is unfaithful to me.” That’s what I mean by doing their own work: setting healthy boundaries, learning themselves how to address their own attachments and the impact they have had in their own life.

Ferree's language -- such as in the phrases "embrace her sexuality," "working on themselves," "enable," "responsible," "healthy boundaries," and "attachments" -- is not only important for beginning to open up and to talk about sex addition.  But her words, such language, is also helpful for engaging in the positive process towards recovery.

In her book, No Stones: Women Redeemed from Sexual Shame, Ferree has this section on recovery:

Working the Twelve Steps

        Merely attending a Twelve Step support group isn't enough.  In my experience, lasting recovery requires actually working through the Twelve Steps.  Many who're new in recovery fail to grasp what that means.  It's an enormous undertaking.  One woman naively thought she could work the Twelve Steps in a matter of a few weeks.  "After all," she said, "there're only Twelve of them.  How long could that take?"  Most women find it takes a minimum of a year to work through the Steps - and that's only the first time.  Revisiting the Steps regularly is an on-going part of recovery.  [Page 182]

One of the important parts of recovery, implicit in Ferree's paragraph here, is that one works from one's own experience.  Not surprisingly, Ferree makes clear in her own experience (and even in her book too) that one cannot recover easily (if at all) without support, without a group for support.  And yet, Ferree suggests also that one cannot force another to go through steps of recovery, nor can anyone do any part of recovery for anyone else.

Furthermore, Ferree not only says something about recovery; she also does something.  Freere is not just being an exemplar; rather, she's revealing her own experience as part of her ongoing process of recovery for herself.  One's own experience in recovery -- that is, not being silent -- is eventually one of the points of dis-cover-y, of un-covering.  Thus, a related matter of recovery is safety, safety when speaking up and speaking out about one's self and one's own experience, safety in revealing oneself in a group of others who have or have had the same experience and are supportive as a group, committed to the safety of confidentiality.

I believe J. Keith Miller has, likewise, advised that revealing oneself to and in a support group is not a "strip tease"; but, quite differently, revealing one's struggles in the safety of one's support group is much more purposeful, as with the purpose of willingly taking off one's clothes before going into surgery so that the medical group can help the patient.  Miller makes these points in his book, A Hunger for Healing: The Twelve Steps as a Classic Model for Christian Spiritual Growth. 

I'm bringing up Miller's book when talking about Ferree's book because both have addressed Christian audiences.  But they stress (and so I want to emphasize, perhaps to caution as if it's not already known) how recovery sometimes is not safe in the Christian church.  Miller addresses men and women, but Ferree speaks to women more directly.  Ferree speaks primarily to women because the church often compounds the problem of recovery for women.  The silence and silencing is troublesome, for women, for women struggling with sex addiction, within the Christian community.

Ferree is at the place in her recovery where she is able to feel safe talking about her experience in the church, and with those now in the Christian community.  For example, Ferree is able to give her interview to Beaty, who is an editor of "Her.meneutics - (n) the Christianity Today blog for women."  

And Ferree, at her own website, bethesdaworkshops.org, is able to give her own "testimony" as if to the Christian community.  Her experience, her story, what she reveals is how personally responsible she has had to be for her own sex addiction; and she adds the other struggle, one of the reasons for her silence so long:

It was the religious folk I was afraid of. The Christians - the church people - those were the ones I wanted to avoid. I knew how the church dealt with sinners like me. They still threw stones. Maybe not literal ones, but sharp ones nonetheless.

Ferree has felt the need to recover beyond the church.  She's created Bethesda Workshops for "Sexual Addiction" and "Co-Addiction" so that others, with the assistance of a safe staff of licensed therapists and support groups, can begin the process of recovery.

Ferree's experience of silence, as a woman struggling with sex addiction, is not unique.  Although Dr. Drew's popular tv show Sex Rehab includes women, there is generally much more attention given to sex addiction among men in the popular media and to the recovery helps offered to men; there's been more public attention given to men struggling with sexual addiction than than to women struggling with sexual addiction.  Similarly, in the blogosphere (even the Christian blogosphere), recovery advice is more offered to men -- as at the blog "Porn Free: To offer sexual redemption through Christ to those who are slaves to pornography."  For example, at a Porn Free post entitled, "12 Steps to Sexual Purity," a person identifying herself as Nicole, a self-identifying Catholic, says:

Your site is very god bit i noticed something….. your mnistry seems to be directed specificaly to men suffering from porn addiction. When are we going to see somr help fpr us ladies who suffer the same? We express our addictions difernetly for men....

... I am a female sex addict and have been searching on the Internet for resources and information and I only find information geared to men. it can be very isolating and frustrating when it is assumed that only men have this problem. it is more prevalent than you would think.

Fortunately, Nicole has begun to speak out and like many others has found (and goes on to share) positive helps, such as Ferree's Bethesda Workshops and her story of recovery.

Nicole brings up an important point about the differences of sex addition for men and for women.  Often men are the ones who tend to abuse women and children.  For boys abused, there is often a cycle created in which they grow up to be abusers.  Statistics on these cycles can be cited, but they are sorely under-reported given the shame.  For girls and women, the shame is compounded by the public perceptions that a woman struggling with sex addiction is an anomaly and is abnormal (in comparison to a male's struggles).

Ferree has another helpful essay on the website of the National Association of Christian Recovery.  Entitled "Women and Sexual Addiction," the article also explores "The Link Between Abuse and Addiction."  Ferree's essay, some of her readers's comments, and the NACR site all give links to places and resources for recovery.

Joy's Own Surprise

I've posted a bit from Joy Davidman's letters (her autobiographical stuff) in comments at a couple of other blogs.  Figure we might as well read it here.  She's known by many as a wife, and famously as the wife of C.S. Lewis (the wife played by the wonderful Deborah Winger in the movie Shadowlands, in which she goes by Joy Gresham, the name of her first husband.).  Lewis entitled one of his autobiographies after Davidman, punning on her first name with Surprised by Joy.  In his story, Joy is also the mystery of illusive Beauty that points him to God.

Knowing a bit more of her own story and journey helps us see just how much C.S. Lewis learned from Joy Davidman.  Here's the bit:

“For I was a well-brought-up, right-thinking-child of materialism. Beauty, I knew, existed; but God, of course, did not. By now there is a whole generation like me in the cities of America. I was an atheist and the daughter of an atheist; I had assumed that science had disproved God, just as I had assumed that science had proved that matter was indestructible….

As a Jew, I had been led to feel cold chills at the mention of his name. Is this strange? For a thousand years Jews have lived among people who interpreted Christ’s will to mean floggings and burnings, ‘gentleman’s agreements,’ and closed universities. If nominal Christians so confuse their Master’s teaching, surely a poor Jew may be pardoned a little confusion. Nevertheless I had read the Bible (for its literary beauty, of course!) and I quoted Jesus unconsciously in everything I did, from writing verse to fighting my parents. My first published poem was called ‘Resurrection’ — a sort of private argument with Jesus, attempting to convince him (and myself) that he had never risen. I wrote it at Easter, of all possible seasons, and never guessed why.”

--from Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman by Don W. King, pages 83… 86

Recovering like Philip Yancey

"We in the church have as much to learn from people in the recovery movement..."
--Philip Yancey

When Yancey wrote those words, he was writing a "back page" essay for Christianity Today magazine, and it was about the alcoholics anonymous recovery movement.

But he might as well have been writing about recovery from the church.  He's written lots about his upbringing and early adult life in Christian fundamentalism, and his movement out of it.  He's also written about recovery of the histories of Jesus.  He says the gospel writers tend to write like Barbara Tuchman, who's histories read as if they're happening suspensefully for the first time (like watching the movie "Titanic" for the third or forth time, thinking perhaps all will survive and the ending will be happy ever after).  He writes a history of Jesus that way, humbly, as if he never knew certain things about him.  It's a history looking at the facts of the underbelly of the story, so he says.  He's often disappointed with God, he says.  He's disappointed with people who wear God like a bumpersticker, I say.  There's a physical realism to his thinking that reminds me some of some good feminisms.  Feminist recovery work.  This is how and why he some in significant ways influences how I read the Bible.

Once upon a time in a blog post, I quoted Yancey - a quotation about how women were witnesses to the resurrection in the gospels.  Today in a blog post, April DeConick quotes Origen quoting Celsus - a quotation about how women were witnesses to the resurrection in the gospels.  The trouble is, when reading the bible, that many men have used women for many things.  What if they are witnesses?

Gertrude Hobbs: Who Brought You "My Utmost for His Highest"

David Ker has a post up in which he tells he's been "reading My Utmost For His Highest. . . [by] Oswald Chambers . . . [who] writes in wartime to young men who might the next day face fire in the trenches." If you've ever read the book, maybe you've noticed what Martha Christian discovered: that Chambers himself never wrote it.

So who wrote My Utmost For His Highest? If not Oswald Chambers himself, then who wrote the "more than thirty titles [that] bear his name"?

Christian gives the answer as she tells her story of recovery research:

I came across a well-known book titled My Utmost For His Highest. It lay on my night table for a couple of days before I had time to open it. Then one day, after completing the day's responsibilities dealing with family, work, cooking, and mopping up from supper, I eagerly planted myself in a chair and opened the book. It was a whole year, however, before I noticed the initials B. C. at the very beginning.

The forward noted that the daily readings in My Utmost for His Highest originated in the early years of 1900 but that the author, Oswald Chambers, had died in 1917. . . . How can the book be copyrighted in 1935? I wondered. . . . "approximately 1917 from 1935 equals eighteen years." That got me nowhere.

It was a mystery to me. "And one needing to be solved!" . . . . why the initials B. C. but no name? They couldn't have been Oswald's, or the initials would have been O. C. . . . Why was there no name? . . . .
Since the beginning pages . . . referred to London, I decided to call England [from the U.S.A.] and find out what I could. . . . so I went through several operators on both sides of the ocean in order to narrow down the options. . . .
"I'm really sorry to bother you, but I'm looking for someone by the name of Chambers."

"Yes," the voice responded. . . .

I lost all hope that this elegant lady would ever believe I was sane, but I blurted out the reason for my call anyway. "Would you happen to know anything about a minister who was named Oswald Chambers who lived a long time ago?"

"Yes." I thought I heard her chuckle. "He was my father."

Suddenly speechless--which is unusual for me--I contained my excitement and quickly continued. "Well then, maybe you would know what the letters B. C. stand for in the front of the book My Utmost for His Highest."

She replied, "B. C. stands for Biddy Chambers. She was my mother."

"Oh! You must be Miss Kathleen Chambers!" I responded.

"Would you like to tell me who you are?"

Of course, who she is is Martha Christian. As noted, she's writing here about beginning the recovery research for her book, Searching for Mrs. Oswald Chambers: One Woman's Quest to Uncover the Truth about the Woman behind the Most Celebrated Devotional of All Times. (The quotations above are from pages 13-17).

What Christian quickly uncovers from Kathleen Chambers is that B. C. was once Ms. Gertrude Hobbs. "Biddy" was the nickname that Oswald Chambers gave Hobbs after they met. And from her earliest days (even as "Biddy" and as Mrs. Oswald Chambers and as "B. C."), she like many women remained silent and very much in the background:

Gertrude Hobbs was born into a world where a married woman could not even own property. Her inheritance from her family became her husband's property once she was married. If a wife separated from her husband, even for legitimate reasons, she had no rights of access to see her children. A divorced woman had no chance of acceptance in society again.

So much for the life of a single mother. "If Gertrude had any idea of what life would hold for her, she might have changed her mind and not been born," I [Martha Christian] muttered, shuffling through more research notes. "Not that she could have chosen, of course!" I smiled as I stacked the papers into orderly piles.

My research [for Searching for Mrs. Oswald Chambers] was giving me a headache. It's a good thing I have Kathleen to talk to, I told myself. (page 46)

After several talks, Kathleen Chambers sent to Christian a copy of a note that her father, Oswald, had written her mother in 1916. It acknowledged her contributions to him already:

When I consider how completely and nobly you have foregone all quiet civilised influences that other women have and have been living a literal hand-to-mouth existence all transfigured by your great love for me and Him, I must bow my head in dedication and say God bless thee!" (page xi).

The life story of Gertrude Hobbs, aka "Biddy" Chambers or B. C., is one of a dedicated wife and parent, and of a widow and single mother. Her story, that story which may intersect with your own story, is the story of a skilled stenographer and a wonderful book editor.

A writer for RBC ministries website notes: "Although Oswald Chambers wrote only one book. . . , more than thirty titles bear his name. With this one exception, published works were compiled by Mrs. Chambers, a court stenographer, from her verbatim shorthand notes of his messages taken during their seven years of marriage. For half a century following her husband's death she labored to give his words to the world."

The RBC link also gives other book length biographies of "Biddy" Gertrude Hobbs Chambers.

In addition, "The official web site of Oswald Chambers Publications ASSOCIATION Ltd." provides a quick online sketch of her life with Mr. Chambers.

Gertrude Hobbs remains in the background as thousands continue to read what she wrote down and edited without their knowing or asking who B. C. is. Without her, not many would know who Oswald Chambers is. And without Gertrude Hobbs "Biddy" Chambers you would have never read a single page of My Utmost for His Highest.

Why (You Can’t Ask Me Why) I Am A Feminist: Some Frank Thoughts

Fly, fly, fly, my baby gets me high
I spent too much time in taxicabs,
Please don't ask my why.
We'll honeymoon in Haifa and have lunch in Galilee,
Hitchhike up through Switzerland and drop in at L'Abri
We'll spend our winters in Laguna
And our summers on the farm
And the rest of life in heaven locked in each others' arms.
--Larry Norman
So Long Ago, The Garden

A family may place undue pressure upon a child of the family by expressing abnormally high expectations of behavior or achievement—just because the child is a child of their family. . . Some people are totally caught in this, but all of us have something of it within ourselves, swinging pendulum-like between conceit and despair.
--Francis August Schaeffer
True Spirituality, page 135

There is that within us that tenaciously wants to remain on the throne of our lives, our sense of omnipotence and egocentricity. In our words, attitudes, feelings, and behaviors we can hear the infant, “his majesty the baby,” inside sometimes shouting, “I want my way. I want what I want. I want to be in control of all that has to do with my life, and I will prove that I am.”
--Harry Tiebout
Alcoholics Anonymous, page xxii

I wish you could join us for my birthday party this week. My wife has invited her birth parents and mine over for dinner to celebrate at our house.

I wish you’d ask yourself why you’re (not) a feminist. If it helps, you’re invited into my story.

The first time I ever heard my birth-father apologize to my birth-mother was when I visited them in their home at the winter break of my freshman year of college. Dad, a professional minister, was as excited as a new Christian. He just kept finding moments in our conversations to repeat a certain expression of another pastor who’d led a conference in the USA they’d just returned from, a conference for pastors and missionaries “and their wives.” My Dad kept confessing this expression: “We practice daily what we believe; all the rest is religious talk.” And one day, and when she really needed it, for the first time I ever heard it, he told Mom he was sorry. That was the beginning of the transformation of my father, their marriage, and our family, in many ways.

The changes have been painfully slow but wonderfully steady. And yet, by the time practice and religious talk met belief, I’d already as a little kid made many “never land” promises to myself and my future spouse and our children. In sum, I’d vowed this: “I will never treat you that way!” I'll turn 46 this week, and I'm still getting to know and listening to and learning from my wife and children. (You know, a change’ll do you good.)

These are hardly speakable things, but why should they be left to your imagination? You tell me. (I’ve already told you some of my story; and have let you meet some of my mothers; and some of my teachers. And you may have already imagined that I began learning something new in Professor Charlotte Hogg’s first class day in the Rhetoric of Women Writers, a course that wasn’t my first choice in the Ph.D. my first semester, when she had us students talk those very first fifteen minutes about what “feminism” means to us—though it meant less to me, at the time, than even the rhetoric of women writers, who are writers that can think and write so much differently than the men I’d been reading at the time; Professor Hogg had the audacity, the second quarter hour, to make us write privately who it was we were reading, and I so had to confess then and there to myself that I’d read mainly men, including Francis A. Schaeffer a good bit once upon a time, but thought much less of the writings of his wife Edith Schaeffer, and probably because she is a woman).

Francis and Edith begot Franky Schaeffer. I want to talk now about this young man. He represents in some ways Why (you can’t ask me why) I am a feminist. (You see, or maybe you don’t: Frank and I wear some of the same labels, and that might help you with your own story).

Some labels you can choose: feminist, Christian, postmodernist, atheist, modernist, agnostic, Greek Orthodox, linguist, academic, ESL teacher, rhetorician, student, novelist, autobiographer, and biographer of your son, and biographer of your father. But other labels are chosen for you: man, woman, missionary kid, preacher’s kid, red (skin), yellow (skin), black (skin), white (skin), and your native speaker status for all the languages you learn before puberty.

When people talk about you or the labels that are chosen for you, then you (especially if you’re Jacqueline Jones Royster) can write an article entitled, “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” She says her Mother told her (and so she tell us her readers) to watch our manners—remember your home training.

When you share the labels chosen for you, and when you share those labels with someone else, then it’s a family conversation. If you’re not in the family, then you’re an eavesdropper.

You have my permission to overhear some of the things I talked about with Frank when he was blogging nastily (at Huffington Post) about his mother and father. He wrote:

“Those of us with evangelical/fundamentalist backgrounds are doomed to a lifetime spent trying to re-imagine the divine.”

and I replied:

Yes, we’re doomed; and yes we're blessed. Re-imagining is no bad thing. Neither is this irony: your father's writings have actually helped me escape from “anti-worldly, don't-think-for-yourself” evangelical/fundamentalism. Now I'm an in-process-in-the-moment-substantially-feminist-academic-anti.modernist-evolutionist whom Jesus seems okay with embracing. And like you (and your own mother), Frank, I'm a missionary kid (with evangelical-Christian parents). I'm also married to a (recovering) fundamentalist-Christian preacher's kid. Like you and your spouse, we have children too. (Now they get to experience their parents’ recovery from captivity to evangelical/fundamentalist parents. Can you imagine what they'll blog some day about us? By the way, my son has your son's name and your dad's: he’s the kid at the end of David Hopkin’s online article, “Francis Schaeffer: The Last Great Modern Theologian.”)

I'm glad you’ve co-written things with your dad and with your son. I mostly love what you’ve written. But just I’m puzzled that you feel you have to save your God from your father. Why announce, for example, that his friends were people like Falwell (as if these were his main companions or the only ones he influenced)? Are you really so black and white (like a fundamentalist)? Re-imagining the divine is no bad thing, unless we’re really doomed to a lifetime spent trying to re-imagine the (more-than-fundamentalist) shadows of our fathers (as simple, simply unimaginative evangelical idiots).

Then one of my good friends sent me the rather unChristian Christianity Today article on Frank’s latest book reviewed by Os Guinness (who confesses he—Os G—is not a “family” member). So you can hear my response (and notice Os hasn’t used the f-word, and see how I also don’t use the “feminist” self label with this friend because he tells me he doesn’t like the word, and I want him, otherwise, to hear my disdain, to hear some of the pain). So I whine:

Is Guinness's saying that Frank's view is “overwhelmed by a blindness and bitterness that cannot be excused” excusable? Os goes on with his enumeration of the flaws of the book, the flaws of the more favorable responses to the book, and the gravest of central defects--Frank's ostensible “neglect, guilt, nepotism, and spoiling.” Who better to make such claims than the “best man” in Frank's wedding? What are members and close friends of the Schaeffers to do with the book and now with the review? What are members of the larger family of God?

True, how can Franky read Paul to Timothy with any conviction at all? “Do not sharply rebuke an old man but appeal to him as a father”

Franky Schaeffer's blogging at Huffington Post has been malicious for some time. He's railed against both his father and his mother, and has caught flack from readers. I even sent in a comment which he posted, comparing him with his mother, also a missionary kid. No longer a little Napoleon in his parents home, he's been writing as a father of his own son (two books, one with his son) and writing seris of novels (in which the protagonist is a "fundamentalist"-missionary-kid son). Does he know what a father is?

An MK, a PK, a son, a Christian, a postmodernist (who reads with amusement Os Guinness's CT phrasal grenades, “postmodern sneer,” “the postmodern disease,” then “Our postmodern age is a free schooling in cynicism,”), a writer, a reader, and a father who's named his own son “Schaeffer” after Francis, I've got a few more thoughts on this. But I'm not able to take more time in this email to say anything else, as if you want or need to hear any of that. So thank you for sending the book review!

So if you’ve stayed with me this long, then you’re beginning to see that I must leave much to your own imagination why I’m both a Christian and a feminist. Imagination is good. Yours is very good, I must say! Some things are unspeakable.

Now let’s just end with three good and imaginative and related things:

1. Larry Norman imagines this tragedy:

if we could live in shakespeare’s day
i wonder who we’d be
if people then could live today
i wonder who we’d see. . .

would henry viii use etiquette
in a busy new york luncheonette?
would cleopatra die when when bit?
or save herself with a tourniquet?
would beethoven join a jazz quartet?
would ben hur drive a blue corvette?
would aristotle be an acid head?
would cain kill abel with a bayonet

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

3. You adults who struggle with imagination may want to read Edith Schaeffer’s autobiography for children in which she’s really, truly named Mei Fuh.

4. Anyone (listening in to family conversations and) still bitching and moaning about Frank breaking one of the 10 commandments (i.e., that one about honoring mother and father) may want to read Edith’s book, 10 Things Parents Must Teach Their Children (And Learn for Themselves).

There still are a few things to learn for ourselves, and I speak for myself. Thanks for stopping by.

Book Review & Make Up

The book I'm reviewing here is A Communion of Friendship by Beth Daniell. I’m going to give away the ending now. Daniell writes:

A Communion of Friendship is like [the 6-year-old, dress-tugging] Karen’s [saying] “Look, mommy, a cat.” The truth I [Daniell] tell [you my reader] depends on whether the community I write for [including you] sees the cat or at least takes my observations into account in discussions about the existence or nature of the cat.

I didn’t say I was going to spoil the ending because Daniell has written so much more than that up to those final words of the book. You’re just going to have to read it for yourself to really get it. That’s not to say it’s a difficult book to get at all. It isn’t. But it is to say, I’m tired and just gave a long-winded explanation of something else. And 2) Daniell is very right to leave you some things at the end. Her book is an ethnography, and it's subtitled Literacy, Spiritual Practice, and Women in Recovery. She’s researching women in recovery, as you can imagine. She’s listening to their "little narratives." Little narratives are, for Daniell, not the metanarrative that postmodernists say modernists tell. Modernists don’t need recovery. The women Daniell hears and speaks with do. Daniell is most curious about the ways the women use literacy and spirituality in their recovery. Let me just offer a hint here. Just as Jacqueline Jones Royster is not the cold objective historian in her Traces of A Stream but is also part of the traces of the stream she writes about, so Daniell has such subjectivities. But there’s a little difference. Daniell hides her subjectivities until the end of her book. I think she has to. I think you’re not ready to hear who she really is while writing such a book. Let's let her be anonymous until you join in with her.

Which turns me to something else I heard at a recent rhetoric symposium. A feminist scholar was researching AA and presenting it at the rhetoric conference. Her claim is that the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous is sexist because there are more personal testimonies by men than by women. So I asked her whether she saw the process of “recovery” and of story telling in recovery and of collaboration in recovery and of anonymous safety in recovery as feminist discourse. I asked her if she’d read Daniell’s book. She said No to both questions. She elaborated that Step Two invokes a higher power, and concluded quite tersely that that is masculinist. End of story. I wanted to ask her if she thought Step Nine (which calls for making direct amends to people) was in any way related to Step Two, but she’d been asked enough questions, some less polite than mine. This then ends my review of Daniell’s A Communion of Friendship except to add that it reads like a parable and may get you reflecting on your own communion of friendship while you read about theirs.

I’ve been reflecting on my own communion of friendship. Through email there’s been some direct amends. Publicly here I just want to add that I was wrong to disparage friends in a blogpost when I had the opportunity and the responsibility to make sure first that they could respond without simply having to use the comments. I want to make up, as my siblings and I had to do when we mistreated each other when I was around 6-years-old. Forty years older or so now, I ask for forgiveness and pledge to be more considerate in the future. I’m also most grateful for their personal candor, and friendship. (And to all of you who prefer to make anonymous comments on this blog, or any comments of any kind, please be assured that you also are welcomed and that we will be friendly).

Women Influencing (Aristotle)

A blogger friend of mine, Suzanne McCarthy, just posted at Suzanne's Bookshelf on an incredible woman who influenced many of us: Lottie Moon. Suzanne shows how "Lottie Moon is one more of those admirable 19th century feminists." But most histories of the amazing Moon have not conceived of her in this robust way. Thankfully Moon was not silent, and some following her influence recall her voice.

This post is a request for similar recovery. How can we imagine the robust Greek (woman's) discourse around Aristotle's influential Rhetoric when we don't know (well) the women around him?

Thankfully because of the recovery work of historians such as Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, Rory Ong, and C. Jan Swearingen, we are coming to know a good bit more about the influences of Sappho, Aspasia, and Diotima on their own histories, their own rhetorics, and their own societies of women and men (including the likes of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander). Thanks to the translation work of translators such as Anne Carson, Willis Barnstone, and Jane McIntosh Snyder, we get the robust discourse of Sappho. (And Carson's is the best because she provides us readers with an interlation: her [i.e., Sappho's] very Hellene fragments and her [i.e. Carson's] also poetic English).

But what do we know of Phaestis (Aristotle's mother), Erpyllida (the foster mother), Arimneste (the older sister), Pythias (the first wife who bore their daughter), Pythias (the daughter), Herpyllis (the second wife who bore their son Nichomachus, the namesake of Aristotle's father)? Who are Aristotle's grandmothers, and what do we know of them, and what did he know because of them? Does anyone still hear the voices of these women who Aristotle, likely, could not help but hear?

And (She) Said

בחר הוהיב ינרק המר הוהיב יבל ץלע רמאתו הנח ללפתתו
:ךתעושיב יתחמש יכ יביוא-לע יפ

και ειπεν εστερεωθη η καρδια μου εν κυριω υψωθη κερας μου εν θεω μου επλατυνθη επι εχθρους το στομα μου ευφρανθην εν σωτηρια σου

And [she] said, "My heart in master was [under]stood; my horn in my god was [raised] high; to enemy [attention] my mouth was opened: blessed sounds [and songs of giving thanks] in your salvation!"

First Step: Translation in Recovery, Hyperbole, and Parab(o)le

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—
that our lives had become unmanageable.

μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι
ὅτι αὐτῶν ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν

εἰς ἑαυτὸν δὲ ἐλθὼν
(ἔφη . . . ἀναστὰς πορεύσομαι . . . καὶ ἐρῶ :
ἥμαρτον εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ ἐνώπιόν σου
οὐκέτι εἰμὶ ἄξιος
ποίησόν με ὡς ἕνα τῶν μισθίων σου
καὶ ἀναστὰς ἦλθεν)

μετανοεῖτε
ἤγγικεν γὰρ ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν

ἡ δὲ εἶπεν ναί κύριε
καὶ γὰρ τὰ κυνάρια ἐσθίει ἀπὸ τῶν ψιχίων
τῶν πιπτόντων ἀπὸ τῆς τραπέζης τῶν κυρίων αὐτῶν

ἤρξατο λυπεῖσθαι καὶ ἀδημονεῖν
τότε λέγει αὐτοῖς
περίλυπός ἐστιν ἡ ψυχή μου ἕως θανάτου
μείνατε ὧδε καὶ γρηγορεῖτε μετ' ἐμοῦ
καὶ προελθὼν μικρὸν ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ
προσευχόμενος καὶ λέγων

Aristotle is not an alcoholic. And he is not anonymous.

Aristotle is not a woman, not a barbarian, not a slave, not poor, not homeless, not uneducated, not afraid for his daughter who is dominated by a deity, not crying out in a “safe place” in profound pain to his closest friends and his dear father all about to abandon him.

Aristotle is neither in recovery nor in need of doing recovery work.

Aristotle may well manage to be our father of Western modern mathematics, of physics, of biology, zo-ology, medicine, psychology, sociology, anthropology, civics, politics, political science, the art of war, ethics, history, linguistics, literacy, literature, poetry, theater, philosophy, metaphysics, writing, and rhetoric. But where does that get him? And were does it get us?

Aristotle does not translate. And by his own Aristotelian philology he will not be translated well. He does not have a translation theory. He does not even take the first step.

A (good) translation theory starts with admission of ambiguity and humility. (And now I begin listening humbly to the ambiguous epigraphs above. I’m listening by writing out the next six paragraphs in some correspondence with the epi-graphs. This is not yet translation, although I do “translate” some of the Greek here. Please don’t even start think that these zany para-graphs are some sort of glimpse into what that kind of translation will look like. I don’t. The glimpses are at http://rhetoricofaristotle.wetpaint.com. In posting these crazy playful notes, I’m going to stop blogging for a while. I will be reading and might be commenting on your blogs. Those of you who’ve been commenting with me, and at me, and from me here or at other blogs may recognize yourselves, or me, in my silliness here. Apologies again. I really do want to step up my work on translating Aristotle’s Rhetoric, with a translation theory. Did I already say Aristotle lacks one? As you see from the other Greek here, I’m co-opting the practical, rhetorical, feministical translation theory of Jesus Christ. And I’m converting again in a different way this week: from PC desktop to Mac book pro. So I’m stepping forward, again, admitting a certain powerlessness and lack of manageability.)

A good translation theory insists first on the greatest teacher’s original lessons not being “in the original” if ever original at all. It initially gets off its high horse – as we say here in Texas – by leaving what has been in the mother tongue of a barbarian – as they called it there in Greece – and by leaving it finally in the collaborative hands of unskilled students of barbaric Greek. This does not begin to account for all the other barbarisms, the truly dirty languages, that the original stories get found in. (I’m talking now about Jesus Christ and his disciples, and what “they” did in rhetoric, in translation. They admitted powerlessness, and yielded manageability, and began recovery work for the underdogs, for the marginalized, for themselves. Okay. Yes, I know I’m punning “recovery” as something feminist historians of rhetoric and literature and philosophy and the Jewish and Christian scriptures also do in the academy.)

A good translation theory begins before Aristotle’s teachings on “Pneuma,” which is in 6 letters how we transliterate 1 word for His full and vital inspiration, His spiritual authority, which is what we today appropriate as the plenary inspiration of the text with certain necessarily-mysterious Divine-only locked-up-in-His-heaven categories of mistakes. A translation theory worth its salt starts at the point of utter poverty of breath. (I’m referring to the first “blessed” in the beatitudes. These inspired words must find their way back into un-recorded Hebrew Aramaic speech, and recovered into translated Greek that mirrors earlier collaborative translations of Hebrew into Greek by 70 some Jewish men commissioned by a polytheistic Egyptian king in a city established by a polytheistic Greek conqueror, the man who is none other than Aristotle’s very own student. Now, if that last sentence takes your breath away, then “it’s all good,” as my children would translate it. I might translate this whole paragraph on inspiration in translation theory with this whole English-Greek word: “hyperbole.”)

A translation theory that yields some light is one that speaks sometimes-shadowy “parables.” We could re-translate our Greek word parables ambiguously and humbly as this: as someone else’s stories thrown along side our own. But if I get on both sides, then I might come to the end of myself, moving in and out of the stories, until I move beyond that first step.

(I’m writing here about prodigals. One prodigal son, C. S. Lewis, writes the story of his own personal conversion out of atheism, in which God is the great chess-master who, late in the game, approaches checkmate by getting the literary critic, in his consciousness, to move out of simple “contemplation” [and shall we call such “contemplation” “Aristotelian,” with it’s cold detached singular arrogant objectivism?]. God moves Lewis into another side of consciousness: into robust and vibrant “enjoyment.” And Lewis begins to yield power and management to the translation, perhaps the interlation [as Mikhail Epstein theorizes it], between conscious contemplation and conscious enjoyment. So for more on that parable, find Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, but beware: it’s a life changer. Beware even more if you’re not a fan of literature or literary translation theory.)

A good translation theory starts back(wards) by re-thinking everything. (Here, you may recognize that I’ve translated μετανοεῖτε as [or by] “re-thinking everything.” We could have “translated” it “metanoia” by transliteration, the way Aristotelian rhetoricians and Christian preachers do with “hyperbole” and “parable.”)

A good translation theory with what Hélène Cixous also might advise from the get go is: avec l'écriture féminine. (Of course, pardon my French, or hers in my italics; but I do find it amazing that Jesus would speak to women, in their own goyim ethnic mother tongues – even in Greek on occasion, although most Jewish men and many ethnic Greeks under Aristotle wouldn’t bring themselves to think of letting these botched humans – especially the foreign females – speak. At first, Jesus himself appears to struggle with the powerlessness and unmanageably of their pleas, but, in interlation or translation or translingualization, their womanly rhetoric amazes and humbles him instantly, genuinely, and with great effect. The Greek deities in the daughters always over-hear and flee.)

A good translation theory seems not safe at first. But it starts to admit that none of us is safe especially by oneself or even from oneself. There are dangers from which we need safe retreat with the closest of others so as neither to be abused nor to abuse, so as to face pain and abandonment and death. Most of us have to start earlier, with our fears and resentments and needs and imperfections with interactive boundaries in place. (And if Aristotle’s safe place is being on top of the world without needing to translate into or out of the barbarian’s mother tongue, then for most of the rest of us, a safe place must be altogether different. Jesus models this difference. He invites interaction – translations and interlations and “monolingual demonstrations” between men and women of extreme difference and imperfection – but he attends to his very personal needs in safe places. That’s all until “pain” and “abandonment” yield to their sister, “death.” Then, the “seed falls into the ground – good ground is another translation – and dies”: how else would he translate and how else could we learn without such a first step?)

update, cross-ref link: Feminist Binary: Eleventh Step