the mother of all non sequiturs

Well, lo and behold, out from the margins comes a blogger, about the Bible, not (yet) on the The Biblioblog Top 50's lists, neither their "290 biblioblogs" list nor their "204 Related Blogs" list ("That’s 494 blogs in all!")

Why has this 1 blogger been excluded?

Is it because she presumes to join the boys on the Merry Go Round? And because she's so adept at logic, at seeing phallacies in the reasonings of men? Does she demonstrate with a man's “classic example of ad hominem” - how his failed argument is ironically against the man, who is a woman? Is she exposing their nakedness by their “hermeneutical gymnastics”? Isn't she neutering Brother Jesus by not allowing the guys to follow “the mother of all non sequiturs”?

No, surely it has nothing to do with her gender, this gap!

So to circle around with our syllogisms, she's merely marginal, speaking mere rhetoric, mere Words of a Fether. She is to blame, this Paula Fether, for being, a woman.

(read her blog at your own risk, then. but don't make the fellas bend and blur that natural class of things called "biblioblog," please. Hoe zou iemand van ons dat vertalen, JP van de Giessen?)

What are we going to do about the blogger gender gap?

April DeConick says, "Alright, the gender gap among bibliobloggers is appalling. The gender gap has nothing to do with the internet or women being afraid to blog or publicly speak our minds since women do this in many other internet forums."

At her blog, The Forbidden Gospels, she goes on to make a proposal for what we are going to do about the blogger gender gap! Her hypothesis and proposal:

So this is my hypothesis. I think there are as many women bibliobloggers out there as men, but they are not visible. Why? Because many of us women post on subjects that are considered marginal (even heretical, especially if there is any feminist bent) to bible studies by the men who are blogging about the bible. Our blogs are easily justified as unimportant. They remain unknown or unread because they haven't been linked to by the male bibliobloggers who dominate this blog niche and the field in general, a point that Julia wisely raised in the comments to my last post on this subject. Julia wrote: "But I also wonder about the role of networking and way that many of the blogs in the top tier regularly reference one another. How do we encourage each other's success, make sure that others find the good work that's out there?"

So I say, enough of this nonsense and rationalizations. This is what I'm going to do. This weekend when I have more time, I am going to get the women bibliobloggers (all of them) into my sidebar blog roll. I am going to start with this list that Biblioblog Top 50 has so kindly put together on women's blogs (their so-called marginal blogs). And if any of my women readers have biblioblogs not in that list, or if any of my readers know of other women bibliobloggers not in that list, send that information to me and I will add it to the blog roll. Those links will be there for anyone who wishes to copy them and get them into their own blog rolls.

So feel free to join in! April links to her email address at her own blog. Read that full post, and feel free to do something about the blogger gender gap.

(To be clear, I myself am not blogging. Just relisting my old blogroll of the blogs of many of you whose blogs many men in the biblioblogosphere may have considered "marginal." It's here now both in an RSS feed form and in the sidebar (individual links) format. For those of you sifting thru, you'll find blogs by some who've stopped blogging, many who are feminists, many who are bibliobloggers, and some who are feministbibliobloggers. The point is there are many who "post on subjects that are considered marginal (even heretical, especially if there is any feminist bent) to bible studies by the men who are blogging about the bible" and there are many more to recognize.)

remembering, today

I'm not blogging but am glad others are today:

• Joel remembers Senator Ted Kennedy and his moving words
  
• Miriam remembers that American women have finally been given the right to vote