It was a very good year . . .

With apologies to Frank Sinatra, let me just say that 2009 was a very saucy little year for Beaujolais Nouveau.

On a whim today, I stopped by the wine shop on the way home from lunch with a friend. They had some new wines sitting on the barrell at the front and I took a quick look. My wine guy said, "Those are new today." I looked a the label and they were all Beaujolais Nouveau. I looked at him and said, "Already?"

Yep, third Thursday in November.

Nice.

Kamilla

Yes, Fr. Bill, I intend to

Under the previous post, my dear friend, Fr. Bill Mouser asks if I am going to comment on any of these books.

Yes, that is the plan. I intend to add more consistent books reviews to the offerings on this blog. The first two will involved sex trafficking/women's issues. The reviews you can expect before the end of the year are on the following books:

Kristof and WuDunn, Half the Sky
Ratushinskaya, Grey is the Colour of Hope
Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction
Oddie, What Will Happen to God: Feminism and the Reconstruction of Christian Belief

Although, I am a little irritated because the book by Oddie should have arrived before I left home and it hadn't. As you can probably guess, I won't be taking any more trips this year. But I am very excited to dig into all of this - plus the good folks at Bob's Red Mill are sending me lots of goodies like French Flageleot Beans and Millet and Scottish Oatmeal, so there will be a few cooking posts the rest of this year as well.

Oh, and, along with those goodies from Bob's, tucked away in the bottom of the box is Rose Levy Berenbaum's, The Bread Bible which should provide lots and lots of therapeutic kneading time, right?

Welcome to Bibliomanes Anonymous

Hello, my name is Kamilla and this is my first meeting.

Welcome to BA, Kamilla. Everybody say hello to Kamilla . . . .

So Wednesday is the day. Many books will be browsed through, picked up, etc. Four of them are already paid for and waiting on a shelf for their new owner. Yes, it's the long-awaited trip to Portland, Oregon and Powell's City of Books.

Here is the list so far:

Steve Kellmeyer, Sex and the Sacred City (a popularization of JPIIs TOB)
Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction
Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (Penguin History of the Church)
Nicholas Krisof, Half the Sky (to be reviewed on this blog as part of the Sex Trafficking series)
J. Gresham Machen, Christanity & Liberalism
Elizabeth Loftus, The Myth of Repressed Memory

And the other contenders, which might find a new home:

Julia Child, My Life in France (NOT the movie tie-in cover, please!)
Julian Green, The Other One
Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothal
Edmund Spenser, Amoretti The Fairie Queene
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Homer/Fagles, The Odyssey

Fun, eh?

Channeling Goebbels

Elsewhere I made a recent reference to the truism, "If you tell a big enough lie often enough, it will be believed." But I couldn't initially track down the source.

Today, I found it. And no, this is not an instance of Godwin's law.

The source is Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist. I guess he knew.

Slander and lies and accountability, OH MY!

Sure as spring follows winter, sure as chocolate is one of the basic food groups and, most importantly, sure as anything on Baylyblog is seen as remotely critical of an "egalitarian" -- the religious feminists are howling with rage at the prospect that one of their number who has made claims of abuse might be asked to be accountable, to provide proof of her charges.

Never mind that we can all, if we be honest, tell a tale of false abuse claims made in the furtherance of a nicely advantageous divorce and child custody settlement. Never mind that false claims dog the victim the rest of their lives - there is *always* a whisper of suspicion on the part of some -- once the word is said, it can never be recalled. Never mind that it is *extraordinarily easy* to create false memories during "therapy". Never mind the wronged father who, once the claims of abuse were found to be ridiculously false and could never have occurred, lamented, "Where do I go to get my name back?" Never mind that religious feminists purvey their slanderous claims all over the internet - contrary to the public and repeated teach of men they claim enable abuse.

Oh, no, never mind all that. The only thing that matters is that evil patriarchalists are seen to be criticizing a poor, hurting, (allegedly) abused woman. Oh my, poor thing, how she has suffered. How DARE you question her, she used to be really, really famous and gave it all up. OK, no need to continue -- you know the drill.

Carl Friedan knew. For 30 years his ex-wife's false accusations of abuse dogged him -- for the rest of his life. Even then, he still lauded her for what she had accomplished on behalf of women. She was a raging dynamo, he said, but then lamented how she never realized that didn't work at home. Turns out that, when the crockery went flying in the Friedan household, it wasn't usually Carl tossing it at Betty.

Deuteronomy 19:17-19, NAS:

17 then both the men who have the dispute shall stand before the LORD, before the priests and the judges who will be in office in those days.

18 "The judges shall investigate thoroughly, and if the witness is a false witness and he has accused his brother falsely,

19 then you shall do to him just as he had intended to do to his brother. Thus you shall purge the evil from among you.

Temporal Pragmatism, Or the Futility of Utility

"Our marriage works. I'm happy, my husband is happy, we submit to each other and our two children are well-behaved. What could possibly be wrong with that?"

The temporal pragmatism of Contemporary Evangelical Egalitarianism is a comforting picture, is it not? It conjures up the beautiful image of . . .no. On second thought, it conjures up a world of greys. A world of partners, equal partners with no distinctions outside of mere biology and individual personality. There is no eternal drama of man and woman, no blending of melody and harmony. No recognition of the titanic impact of two sexes, coming together in the one flesh relationship of marriage. It's vanilla. And not even the good kind of vanilla with real flecks of vanilla bean throughout.

But, they say, we have a great marriage that works.

Oddly, even when I was an Egalitarian, I recognized something of the flatness of it all. Even though I was (mostly) convinced that this was how God wanted it, I recognized there was a sort of boring sameness, a workmanlike stewardship of individuals as mere individuals. And I really didn't have much desire for marriage. Why had I any need of a husband? I could walk forward on my own.

But what seems to work in the here and now, the everyday world is not always to our eternal advantage. This was one of the problems I struggled with, having been directed towards Utilitarianism and John Stuart Mill by my advisor when I was a student at Denver Seminary. For some years I tried to push a square peg into a round hole. I nudged this, adjusted that, try to shave off that corner, etc. But I could never, ever manage to make Utilitarianism and Christianity meet for anything other than a glancing blow.

The problem with both Utilitarianism and Egalitarianism's temporal pragmatism is that they don't go far enough. The sort of happiness each has as its goal is only temporal, temporary, at best it lasts the length of their sojourn on this earth -- but it will never carry them into eternal happiness. If they make it there, it isn't because of their Egalitarianism, it is in spite of it.

Light and Fire

A friend recently posted this to our email group:

There is a strong thread in Orthodox thought that heaven and hell are, in fact, the same place, and that the fires of hell and the Uncreated Light are the same thing, perceived in different ways. For the righteous, the Light is warmth and comfort and illumination; for the wicked, it is blinding and burning and torment, in the same way that someone who has spent a long time in darkness flinches from the light of the Sun. God neither condemns us nor punishes us--we do that to ourselves by our response to God.

I think this is a tremendous illustration of what passes for dialogue, conversation, debate between religious feminists and orthodox believers. To us who have embraced orthodox sexuality, we experience the teaching of Holy Scripture as warmth, light and illumination. For the religious feminist, the same teaching is experienced as a torment, something they flinch away from.

It is hard to understand what you experience as burning. You can't really comprehend something that is blinding, or paraphrase accurately something which is tormenting. How can you possibly have a sensible conversation with something that causes you such pain? And it isn't any easier when you do, if you are still able, turn into the light. You know how much it hurts when someone shines a flashlight in your eyes. Or when you flip on the bathroom light during a middle of the night visit. This is the experience of the religious feminist who does begin to turn to the light and embrace its illumination. I think this is why so few make the journey -- the first steps are too painful. Better to stay with the pain you know than to walk through a new pain, not knowing what you will find on the other side of it.

The Wisdom of God, I Corinthians 18ff:

18 For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

19 For it is written, "I WILL DESTROY THE WISDOM OF THE WISE, AND THE CLEVERNESS OF THE CLEVER I WILL SET ASIDE."

20 Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.

22 For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom;

23 but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness,

24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

26 For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble;

27 but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong,

28 and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are,

29 so that no man may boast before God.

30 But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption,

31 so that, just as it is written, "LET HIM WHO BOASTS, BOAST IN THE LORD."