Blogwatch
Feministe asks who’s your favorite unreliable narrator?
Dappled Things on what to do if you’re not feeling spiritual.
Eve Tushnet collects email responses to her posts on ex-gay ministries, and also finds Disputed Mutability, a blog by an ex-gay woman.
prefer not to say nails it on chastity and celibacy
But I think that’s what gets under my skin the most about her method of arguing for chastity — she’s arguing from the premise that it made her happy, so everyone will be happier if they are chaste. And that doesn’t even seem scriptural to me. Where does God ever say “Hey, if you follow my commands, I’ll make you happy?” Instead, he says, yeah, come follow me and people will laugh at you and you’ll feel lonely and marginalized and probably embark on a downwardly mobile financial spiral.
Chastity can be really lonely. It’s not a neat Christian version of The Rules, a failsafe method for snagging the perfect husband by refusing to put out until you get that ring. No honest conversation about chastity or celibacy seems like it should start with promises of real happiness. It seems like it should start with the unavoidable fact that a lot of modern women committed to chastity will never find a suitable partner, not the least because they simply aren’t compatible with the sort of man who is also committed to chastity in this day and age. Mutual commitment to chastity can’t create the basis of a relationship for two otherwise incompatible people.
and on a suicide and the harm done by the stigma on mental illness
Imagine having cancer with a good rate of remission, whose cure you could not seek without people concluding “Yeah, she just couldn’t handle the job,” or even “Yeah, women just can’t handle that sort of job.” “You know how women get — when things get stressful, they always go running for cancer treatments. Put them in a position of this sort, they’ll get cancer.” And then, even the most compassionate among your advocates thinking “Well, maybe people with cancer just shouldn’t be put in a position like that. It’s too much for them, poor dears.” When all you needed was a few months of treatment before resuming a job for which you were uniquely suited.
And that’s what killed Denise Denton. Not the stress of the job, but the cultural assumptions that go with mental illness, combined with the cultural assumptions that women can only go so far in the academy. And who among us could say we would have been braver in the face of those assumptions?
Speaking of celibacy, Higher Plane encounters an amusingly wrong guess about why he’s leaving his job (real reason: to enter a new life as a novice in the Society of Jesus).
Bishop Gene Robinson gives his reaction to events at the recent General Convention.
Nick Knisely on what it’s like to have your church picketed by Fred Phelps’ people. Via Elliot.
The Salty Vicar defends Anglican fudge
Personally, I don’t know what the problem with “fudge” is. Fudge is delicious. And it is perfectly sensible for words to be vague, if only to keep people, in practice, from judging each other so they can pray together.
Karen Knapp offers the story of a martyr that Quakers can appreciate.
Nate on Positives from ECGC2006.