May 29, 2007 @ 5:06 pm | Category: Pop Culture, family/relationships
The wedding season will soon be upon us. I enjoy weddings. I really do, but with no consensus on its meaning, I am questioning exactly what we are doing and why. The “personalization” that is so much the fashion makes every wedding I attend a puzzle as I wonder what this particular couple means by it. Yet, whether in a church, a park, or at an exotic destination, weddings are bigger than ever. You can enter this lucrative industry by getting a degree in wedding consulting. No kidding! Here is an excerpt from a book by Rebecca Mead, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. In a radio interview, Ms. Mead noted that what we have come to regard as the traditional wedding with all the trimmings is a relative new invention. For most of western history weddings have been small, informal, family affairs without the intervention of church or state. Most took place in homes, modestly, without all the fanfare we have come to expect. The Puritans didn’t even allow church weddings. A wedding was witnessing a simple vow demonstrating the consent of both parties followed by sexual consummation. Those were the basic ingredients.
Today, there is no fundamental consensus on weddings or marriage. Rather, in The New York Times’ Wedding and Celebrations section we have a lesbian couple exchanging vows and a very pregnant bride in white. Bridal magazines overflow with opportunities to buy the dream wedding as seen on The Bachelor. You can even have a Disney wedding and wear a princess gown. In Japan, which has no Christian history to speak of, the western church wedding is all the rage. This all goes to show that the form and significance of a wedding is highly adaptable and changeable to social trends. What does this mean for those who take the nuptial ritual seriously as marking the beginning of a God ordained institution? Does the lack of social consensus demand we consider marking the event in a simple unadorned way? The counter-cultural wedding may now be the un-wedding - a small home-based exchange of vows. It’s obvious that a grand and expensive to-your-taste wedding does not assure marital happiness. I think it might actual set us up for failure. Maybe we should try a more modest approach that would allow room for the actual marriage to blossom over time and develop it’s own cadence. That might lead to marking anniversaries in grander style as the marriage matures. With simpler weddings we couldn’t hide our current ambivalence about marriage under all that tulle and too much champagne. Simple unadorned vows could shed light on our intentions in a startling way and remind the culture about the meaning of marriage.
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May 23, 2007 @ 10:58 am | Category: social justice, Pop Culture
Here is a concert for another hot cause and questioned by rocker Roger Daltry. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of all the tokenism we’ve taken to. Every cause, every tragic event, is marked with a candle light vigil, a celebrity concert, or a colored ribbon. Sometimes the symbol contradicts the cause, like this global warming celebrity concert. Raising consciousness has become another media event and a form of contemporary entertainment. Not to mention another corporate way to sell us more products. Please don’t ask me to place a meaningless bumper sticker on my car, or observe an empty moment of silence. Tell me something real I can do. Save the money, natural resources, and time by not having the big event. The problem is not that there are not any worthy causes, but rather that we have confused symbols with real action. Seldom have vigils, chants, and mass togetherness solved the world’s problems. Most social change has occurred because people slugged it out over decades in lonely work. I think of William Wilberforce, Susan B. Anthony, and Dorothy Day. Yes, it’s better to light a candle and than curse the darkness, but the candle better be made out of something other than wax because it will soon go out.
The May-June 2007 issue of Utne Reader has several articles that examine the meaning and effectiveness of slogans, placards, and marches. It’s asking some provocative questions worth pondering. Let’s not be deluded by tokenism that make us feel like we are doing something and be distracted from doing the small (or so they seem) concrete actions that are closer to our everyday lives.
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May 20, 2007 @ 4:27 pm | Category: family/relationships
Listen to the radio program on this week’s To the Best of Our Knowledge entitled “To Breed or not to Breed” from Wisconsin Public Radio. Whether delayed or forgone, how women see their relationship to motherhood is changing. In the mist of fertility treatments and careers, what I noticed was that how women define a good mother hasn’t changed, and that may be tripping us up more than anything else. Do we have unrealistic expectations of what motherhood means or should be? Do these expectations cause some women to forgo children altogether for fear of not meeting the demands of the model? Why does it seem that motherhood is so complex while fathering appears so simple? Listen and think about all the multiple issues wrapped up in this topic.
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May 16, 2007 @ 1:36 pm | Category: community, global issues
China continues to prove itself as a dangerous place to grow up female. Here is a story from the Washington Post about the high suicide rate among young rural women. Uneducated, poor, and with little status in or out of marriage, many find themselves hopeless with no way of escape.
This story reminds me of a work of fiction by Chinese-American Maxine Hong Kingston, entitled “No Name Woman” in her book The Woman Warrior:Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. The narrative set in rural China instructs us on the power of community to shape or destroy us. The ability to just get up and leave, or to determine the course of their lives, is one few women in the world know. Both the daily news and the work of a fiction writer, reminds me yet of another story in Luke 7. Cultural oppression is something that Jesus understood very well and he demonstrated it when he forgave a “no name woman.” A low-status outcast, the woman with the alabaster jar, broke through social niceties to find transgressive freedom at the feet of Jesus. I highly recommend you read these three stories together. It really captures the timelessness of the theme and of Jesus.
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May 15, 2007 @ 7:54 am | Category: spirituality/religion
Salon.com has an interview with developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert, whose science tells him that God is a figment of our imagination. After reading it, I was left to wonder how Wolpert is so sure of his own existence and that he is not just another grand illusion.
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May 14, 2007 @ 11:24 am | Category: gender/feminism, body
Here is the cover story “(Rethinking) Gender” from this week’s Newsweek magazine. The story about transgender people illustrates the cultural belief that your true self is something other than your body. It also reflects a belief in some innate masculine or feminine nature that is beyond the body. Something on the order of a female soul that causes you to like pink, make-up, and frilly clothes. When those desires are trapped in a male body, then the body must go. Vice versa included. There in nothing here that re-thinks our assumptions about gender. What the new questioning of gender does is allow a deep loathing of our embodied humanity. Does this not sound completely retro in some perverse way? I thought we were trying to allow women and men to be free individuals, not demand that they change themselves (under the knife and through chemical assault) to fit some idea of what each gender means. Like I said before, it’s a topsy-turvy world. It has theological implications that are begging to be engaged.
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May 13, 2007 @ 7:19 pm | Category: family/relationships
Adrienne Rich, feminist poet and author of, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution has a way of naming what many women would not dare say about the experience of motherhood in this society of sugar-coated hallmark sentimentality.
“My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.”
It’s this raw sentiment that once acknowledged can be redeemed by God’s own maternal acts towards us. Only then can we say, happy mother’s day.
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May 9, 2007 @ 11:16 am | Category: gender/feminism, theology/church
See this video by Jennifer Roach about the sad history of women in Christianity. A history that betrays the message and work of Jesus. One tragic response to the youtube post of the video was:
“Sometimes I wish God had made me a man. I feel that He cursed me by making me a woman sometimes.”
It would be one thing if we could look at our history and say we are beyond this. Then we could see these men as products of their time and leave it at that. However, negative ideas about women remain and are alive and well. Not only in the hearts of men but of women. The spiritual implications are immense.
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May 8, 2007 @ 4:14 pm | Category: community
Today, I am inspired by a post on Rob Dreher’s blog about faith, families, and cities. There is, I think, a romantic notion about returning to the land, and small town life as a way to secure values that seem to be fading. Many people want a place were everybody shares their values. The fundamental reason given is children. As parents try to raise children to be decent human beings the city seems threatening. Cities allow people to live autonomous and monotonous lives cut off from others and nature. What kind of human being does that produce? Is it sustainable?
Wendell Berry has done much to makes us think about the land, and humanity’s relationship to it. His writings have inspired many to head off to a farm to till the soil and bake bread, at least in their imagination. I love Berry’s writing. Nevertheless, cities are here to stay and what we need is a Wendell Berry of cities. It’s curious that the bible narrative starts in a garden and ends in a city. Maybe there is some lesson for us here. Cities are easy to bash and rural life easy to idealize. It’s not easy to articulate a redemptive vision of the city. How might we organize our lives in the city in a way that make us more human? Next on my re-reading list is The Meaning of the City, by 20th century French sociologist, Jacques Ellul. Who knows I might even re-read Augustine’s City of God.
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May 4, 2007 @ 11:03 am | Category: gender/feminism, social justice, global issues
Another story of an honor killing is in the news. Seventeen year old Du’a Khalil Aswad was stoned to death by male relatives and tribal leaders for a romantic relationship with a boy of the wrong religion.
“An Amnesty International spokesman in London said they receive frequent reports of honour crimes from Iraq – particularly in the predominantly Kurdish north.
Most victims are women and girls who are considered by male relatives to have shamed their families by immoral behaviour. “
Women’s bodies carry and absorb the moral dysfunctions of a society. Women serve as tokens and symbols for the community instead of human beings with dignity. We in the develop countries are kidding ourselves if we think we are safe. We are an anomaly in women’s history. This story is more in line with the reality of history. Our freedom and privilege is fragile, and we continue to suffer from our own versions of “honor” sacrifices made in the name of beauty and sexual freedom. Sometimes with stories like this, I think where are the old-fashioned feminist when you need them?
More about this killing caught on videotape — a horror! I refuse to watch it. Read the story it’s enough.
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