In his “Writer’s Almanac” for today, Garrison Keillor talks about Betty Friedan who wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Keillor says:
Friedan wrote about what she called ‘the problem that has no name,’ found particularly among educated suburban women in the years after the end of World War II, women who were leading ostensibly idyllic domestic lives as busy housewives and mothers and yet who felt inexplicably unfulfilled, unhappy, and restless.
She wrote:
‘The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — ‘Is this all?’
I’m sure it’s true that many wives and mothers then and now felt unfulfilled or suffocated at home. I would attribute this more to America’s affluence at the time – whereas in previous generations most women didn’t have the luxury of thinking about much beyond survival and the daily routine, in the post-WW II generation, the horizons expanded due to prosperity and the possibility of office work.
With that said, guess what: the secret is that men feel the exact same sense of ennui, despair and boredom at work that Friedan seems to locate in the home! Do you think it is somehow inherently exciting to get up at the same time five days a week, get in a car, commute to work listening to the same garbage on the radio, sit down at a desk and become a cog in the faceless corporate machine for 50 years? Or better yet, to mop floors, drive trucks, lay concrete, or whatever? Is this a life of dazzling fulfillment that men are conspiring to deny to women?
Far from it. And I think most women who get beyond college-age idealism find out the hard way that this is the case. I say the hard way, because by the time they realize this, it is often too late. They are hemmed in by college debts that need to be repaid, a kid or two at home and the built-in financial demands of a two-income lifestyle. Some find that when they have children they actually WANT to be at home with the kids, but now they can’t because of those same financial reasons. The expectation of college and career contributes to the delay in marriage. Women and men get married older and by the time they get around to having kids, it becomes more of a strain to bear them and raise them. Guess what? You don’t have as much energy to deal with screaming toddlers when you are 35 as opposed to 20 or 18. That might be one reason why God designed us for maximum reproductive potential at those younger ages!
With widespread abortion, birth control, and the expectation of wealthy, comfortable lives, I don’t expect the pattern of women working rather than mothering to change except in small pockets of resistance. At bottom, the idea that fulfillment is found in a sphere other than where we are is the classic “grass is greener” myth. Some jobs are inherently fulfilling, but not many in the big picture. The Christian ideal is that we find contentment in whatever role we are given, and sanctify the same. The Apostles tell us again and again to be content. This is not easy, it is the knife edge of sanctification, because jobs are tedious, hard, demanding and draining. Telling women that moving into corporate slavery is somehow a big advantage over raising kids and sitting at home is a lie. Unfortunately, it is a lie that we are now completely bought in to. Thanks, Betty Friedan.
James Jordan says:
The gospel is the announcement that Jesus is now king of the entire world, and that all nations are to be discipled. Israel was the model discipled nation, and now all nations are to be discipled. Israel’s history relates typologically to all the world now, as we are put into the olive tree. Everything God told Israel, including the Law, is typologically normative for all the world, for all nations. I call this “Biblical theocracy.”
The gospel is not theology or ideas. It is not experiences. It it not even the church considered merely as some kind of annabaptist worshiping community in the midst of a world that will never be changed. The gospel is a new creation, a new world. It is Christendom. It is theocracy. This is not “theonomy” as Bahnsen defined it, but it is close enough that it looks like it to many people. And the practical implications of Biblical Theocracy are often quit similar to “theonomy” as regards the discipleship of nations, because typological application is still application. And just as the early church directly challenged Caesar’s purported lordship, there is a need today for the prophetic people of God to directly challenge modern ideas of law and democracy and insist on the crown rights of King Jesus.
James Jordan says:
Second, by no means are all pastors, teachers, and preachers gifted as exegetes or expositors. Pastors are curates of souls primarily. Teachers often are called to pass on the heritage of the faith, not rework it for modern times. One of the errors I encountered in seminary was the notion that all pastors should develop their sermons out of an in-depth exegesis from the original Hebrew and Greek. Virtually nobody ever does this, of course, but it was held out as an ideal. There is nothing ideal about it, however. Preachers need to pass on the heritage of the church to their people, with a pastoral eye to their psychological and spiritual situation. If they get their homilies by borrowing from Spurgeon, or from other people’s outlines — what’s wrong with that?
I wrote about Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki. At that time no one seemed to know much about who he was. Well, now we do. The NY Times has a story on his background here.
Watching the unveiling of the iPad today spurred me to reflect on some possible problems that may occur in future years of our digital age. For example, movies, books and software that I have purchased do not reside with me physically, but are located in the cloud (on a server somewhere in the ether). Assuming that Apple still exists when I die, can my descendants continue to use my Apple ID and password to access all of the accumulated music, books and software I have purchased? Will the government charge an inheritance tax on all the music I pass down via my Apple account? Can someone keep my Gmail account active so that my lifetime of correspondence can be accessed by a future family historian?
And think of the intense amounts of work that will be required by future historians. We think of the Civil War as the most documented conflict due to thousands of diaries and letters that historians must consult in addition to official accounts and government documents. But can you imagine what a future writer on anything will have to wade through in terms of e-communication to get a complete account of something? Millions of web pages, blog posts, e-mails, documents and videos. It staggers the mind to contemplate it. Perhaps they will simply give up and selectively cull the information to try and stay sane. Or perhaps our records now are less permanent unless they are printed. Take away electricity and all of it vanishes, whereas scrolls and books lasted a few centuries in the past. So maybe the staggering amounts of data generated right now will all be gone. But just think of the future historian trying to write a history of the 2008 Presidential election. How did the people see it? How did the media see it? What did the candidates think? Imagine poring through millions of e-mail with some sort of search algorithm or index. Reading texts from Barrack Obama’s Blackberry, posts from millions of common-man blogs, news articles from sites all over the world and on and on.The task seems daunting.
I am reading a book called Bright Days, Dark Nights on depression which deals with depression from the point of view of the life and writings of Charles Spurgeon. I have only started reading it and have already been impressed with the insights of the author, Elizabeth Skoglund.
Spurgeon struggled mightily with depression. He said:
I am the subject of depressions of spirit so fearful that I hope none of you ever get to such extremes of wretchedness as I go to, but I always get back again by this–I know I trust Christ. I have no reliance but in him, and if he falls I shall fall with him, but if he does not, I shall not. Because he lives, I shall live also, and I spring to my legs again and fight with my depressions of spirit and my downcastings, and get the victory through it; and so may you do, and so you must, for there is no other way of escaping from it. In your most depressed seasons you are to get joy and peace through believing…Do stick to this, dear friends, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.’
I find the simple fact that Christians can admit to depression to be encouraging. As I mentioned in my post on joy, the ‘right up, right downright happy all the time’ type of Christianity sickens me. The veneer that everything is alright when things are really a grind and a bore is not helping anyone. I thank God for honest Christians and for the Psalms.
…For a Schism is only a breach of Charity and Peace of the Church, the Doctrine remaining entire. If there were a separation by reason of Doctrine Heretical (as here he thought there was) it was not to be called a Schism.
It took a couple years, but Edwards finally owned up to the truth that he cheated on his wife and fathered a child with his mistress. The only thing I want to point out is that the National Enquirer broke this story, and when they did a lot of the reaction was, “You’re going to believe a story from the National Enquirer?!! You can’t be serious!”
Well, yes, I am. The Enquirer also broke the Gary Hart story in 1987. And if not for them, we might never have found out about Edwards. Do you think CNN or the New York Times was going to stake out his hotel and chase him down the hall like the Enquirer did? They did the hard and dirty work that our prestigious outlets can’t stoop to in the case of a leading Democratic figure. I am thankful that the Enquirer is out there.
I’d also add that if anyone wants to know why no one trusts (or should trust) elected officials of either party, this is a great example. Yet another bald-faced liar who lies on TV interviews, in indignant press releases, and so on until the week before a book comes out nailing him to the wall. Just like Bill Clinton, just like Gary Hart, just like many others. Not only do they cheat on their spouses (Republicans too), but they lie and lie and lie until FORCED to tell the truth. So is there any reason to think they aren’t lying about all kinds of other things where they will never be forced to tell the truth? The presumption is that the always lie, unless forced to tell the truth.
So the Times is thinking about charging for content again. The point at which they do that will be the point at which I stop reading it online. The Wall Street Journal went to a pay system a couple months ago and I promptly yanked it off my iPhone and stopped reading it online. I believe that readers will flow to free sites and ignore paid ones. I will read the BBC, other British papers, or the Moscow Times before I will pay to read any paper online. There will always be a free stream of news out there in our age, and that’s where readers will go. This is just another error from the Times, one that they will probably undo (again) in a year or so.
Like a flock of birds we tend to follow whatever events the culture spews out at us. Somehow, various central powers of observation decide that an event is what we should be thinking about – it might be Pat Robertson this week for example – and when they have determined this, the entire food chain of media pivots and fixates on that event.
Newspapers write articles, bloggers on all sides chip in their take, talk radio rants about it, and TV covers it 24/7. The sources of information that actually follow the beat of their own drum and talk about something else (such as the writing of Borges for example) are few. Most websites and other media, down to Facebook user’s status updates are ALL ABOUT THE SAME STUFF. I tune it out and ignore it. If everyone is talking about Pat Robertson it makes me want to avoid the topic. Why is it like this? Who decided that everything that happens in Washington D.C. needs to be in the news on a daily basis? I could care less at this point. The implicit message of this focus on DC and Hollywood is that they are the places which matter to the exclusion of others. The similar lack of any meaningful coverage of church affairs, for example, implies that what happens in the church is of no import to the broader society, unless of course a Sodomite gets ordained.
Anyway, let’s talk about something other than what the tag cloud of the culture says is important.
