Archive for April, 2004

On doing Christian History

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 30, 2004
in Christianity
. 1 Comment

I just posted this at Cliopatria:

Debate here and elsewhere on the intersection of faith and historical method led me to this fine article from 2001 in Christianity Today. It featured this terrific quotation from Mark Noll, who says what I have been trying to say in all of these debates for some time (but without much success):

Asked about the anti-supernaturalism of history, Noll made a distinction between what he called “ordinary” and “providential” history. Ordinary history, he said, limits itself to “evidence and causes and effects that almost everyone can be convinced might have taken place.” While ordinary history might look quite secular, Noll sees it as fundamentally Christian in its presuppositions and worldview. He compared it to science. Christian scientists do their work with confidence because they believe that the world will make sense, and that God has made it possible for the human mind to understand the world.
So with the historian. “If I want to study the history of the American Revolution, I’m presupposing that something real took place, that the evidence left corresponds in some way to what really took place, that I’m intelligent enough to understand that evidence, that I’m able to put together a plausible explanation of cause and effect that might get us close to the truth,” Noll said. “All those enterprises I see as implicitly dependent on a Christian view of God.”

Noll seemed to imply that ordinary history, while it depended on God, would never have much to say about God. For as soon as someone contended that God had acted in a particular way, the subject would be too contentious to hope for general agreement.

Noll and George Marsden are perhaps the best known evangelical historians; Marsden wrote the marvelous 1997 work The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. In 2000, he wrote about Christian history for the Atlantic Monthly. After asking why Christians are not afforded the same level of intellectual respectability as Marxist or feminist historians, Marsden argues:

…persons of religious faith should be free to express that faith in responsible ways within mainstream academic institutions that are public in the sense of serving a wide spectrum of the culture. At Harvard, for instance, there ought to be room for professors who are Orthodox Jews, traditionalist Christians, Muslims, etc., to relate their religious faiths to their teaching and scholarship, so long as they do not violate any essential rules of academia or of public life. The case is similar to that of scholars who are feminists, Marxists, etc. They should be free to openly relate their faiths to their scholarship, but they must do so in a way that respects the diversity of the community and especially of the student body. My point is that if such schools were more consistent in their affirmations of the value of diversity and of open truth-seeking, they would give religious scholars the same consideration as they give scholars from the other perspectives mentioned.

UPDATE: Brian Ulrich and Anne Zook both respond; I’m having trouble loading Anne’s page. At Cliopatria, Ralph Luker points out:

Hugo’s post appears to discuss two different things: a) the claim that the doing of history is based on Christian assumptions (with which I have disagreed in part above; and b) an argument for a pluralism that willingly embraces varieties of religious commitments, as well as varieties of secular ideologies or identities. I’m not sure that it is helpful to attempt to deal with both issues in one post because both are pretty big issues.

I think I have a homework assignment. On the other hand, it’s too beautiful a day to linger in front of the computer for long… more perhaps on Monday!

A prophet to the disobedient; felinity and hell

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 30, 2004
in Animal Rights and Fun
. 6 Comments

Jenell Paris has received a message for the four-legged disobedient ones within her household; happily, she shares it with us. Read it now; here’s a chilling excerpt:

Today is the day of repentance! The Day is approaching when repentance will be no more, and I will gather my faithful into my arms, and send the faithless out into the alleys where there is no Iams, no blankets, no radiators, and the heartworm dieth not. Stop your fur-chewing today, while you still have a chance!

It is fortunate that chinchillas are not mentioned in Scripture. Chinchillas are rodents, however, and thus ought to be seen as an oppressed class. From earliest times, felines have preyed upon them, as often for sport as for food. The connection between sin, oppression, and “felinity” is nicely captured in Zephaniah:

Woe to the city of oppressors,
rebellious and defiled!
She obeys no one,
she accepts no correction.
She does not trust in the LORD ,
she does not draw near to her God.
Her officials are roaring lions…

I don’t even need to mention the big cats in Daniel, do I?

We know where sheep go, we know where goats go, and increasingly, I become certain that I know where those who prey on innocent rats and mice will go if they do not repent and turn from evil.

A Quick Clarification

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 29, 2004
in Porn
. 1 Comment

In my post below, I suggested that blogger Brian Flemming is “close” to the porn industry. In the aftermath of sharing with him the honor of being on the receiving end of a pornographer’s indignation, I revisited Brian’s site. More careful reading of his fine blog reveals that he is a local filmmaker with a conscience. He writes today about another young victim of the HIV outbreak, and notes:

I’ve been criticized for speaking out about this HIV crisis by some in the industry because I am not in the industry myself.

I also criticize the president. But I don’t work in the White House. If only people who worked in the White House were allowed to criticize the president, what kind of dialogue could we possibly have? Yet the vast majority of us cede the entire discussion about porn to either people who make it or hate it or hate the people who make it.

If you’re wondering why I keep talking about this porn crisis on my blog (hi, Mom!), that’s why. Not talking about it created this problem.

Porn producers have had it easy so far. The shame people feel about consuming porn ($10B worth or so a year) actually works to the producers’ advantage. Because people don’t want to talk about it, you don’t hear much of a discussion about the (lucrative) trend toward rough anal sex and younger and younger performers–a trend that almost certainly helped this crisis happen. “Double-anal” was not exactly common in the Boogie Nights era. That’s how Lara Roxx got infected.

The bold emphasis is mine. I don’t know Brian, but I’m now a fan. And I did want to correct any prior impression that I had made that he was in any way associated with the porn business.

And you all will be pleased to hear that I think I am going to take a break from posting on porn.

Naked in the Mirror

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 29, 2004
in Body and Christianity
. 1 Comment

My friend Scott Richardson preached this fine sermon based on the “The Swan” this past Sunday in San Diego; check it out. I like his conclusion:

It seems that it is not enough to strive to be well anymore, to be healthy in spirit, mind and body. To be truly acceptable today, we’re told that we should be superbly fit, young, successful, rich, educated, witty – or, lacking that, just beautiful.

But again, that is not consistent with the witness of scripture, with Christ’s message of unconditional love for God, neighbor and self. A priest I knew years ago resisted that message in the service of her Lord and as a holy response to the insanity of vanity. She was a wise, tough woman in her mid-70’s when we met. Once, while leading a workshop on the right relationship between spirit, mind and body, she suggested that we would all do ourselves a great favor if we would stand naked in front of a mirror for just five minutes per week… and praise God that we are saved by grace. Amen.

The question I have — and I suspect I am not alone in asking this — is whether for most folks, five minutes a week naked in front of the mirror would be an increase or a decrease! For me, it might well be the latter — and offering up praise for God’s grace as I gazed at my body would indeed be new. I’m going to give it a shot.

Flaunting one’s faith and the presumption of secularism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 29, 2004
in Christianity, Faith and Politics
. 11 Comments

I hadn’t been a posting member at Cliopatria for long before I seem to have blithely (and unintentionally) stepped on a few toes. There’s been a very fine — albeit impassioned — discussion going on over at Butterflies and Wheels , especially here and here. Lots of this seems to have come in response to what I wrote earlier this week here. At B&F, the following comment was posted:

If I flaunt my atheism… then in certain contexts this is considered hostile, aggressive, bad mannered, etc. But it just doesn’t work the other way around. It doesn’t seem to occur to the religiously minded that just occasionally we’d rather not be confronted with their faith. This is not to say that we don’t welcome debate with the religiously minded. But it is to say that we expect them to respect our atheism in the same kind of way that in certain contexts we’re expected to respect their theism. And that means not flaunting articles of their faith in our faces.

There’s been a lot of fine talk about what it means to “flaunt”. I quoted Stephen Carter, who wrote:

…serious religion understands that the life lived without attention to the basic question is life not worth living. In traditional Christianity, discerning God’s will and doing it is prior to everything else.

What that means is that my Christian faith informs my scholarship as well as my politics. Many of my friends, colleagues, and students don’t share my faith. But they also deserve to know where it is that I (as they say) am “coming from.” What some have called the flaunting of faith is, to me, my attempt to explain the set of beliefs about reality that undergirds my entire worldview. My Christian faith does not prevent me from using good epistemological techniques when I am hunting around for resources in the archives, but it does mean that I will only truly understand the ultimate meaning of what I find in those archives through the lens of my faith and my church. I’ve got a feeling that annoys some of my fellow historians. (I’d like to stress what I am sure everyone already knows, that the university systems in which historians work were all modeled on what were once explicitly Christian institutions, after all. The arrival of “militant secularism” as the dominant force in the academy is a fairly recent development!)

First Things (I do like it so much) has this fine article in its May online issue: The Politics of Partisan Neutrality. Some of it is relevant to the discussion that is raging on. I post here the first three paragraphs:

Americans who want to understand conflicts between Democrats and Republicans during the election season have received precious little help from the media. While reporters usually recognize that there is some sort of problem about “values” and about “faith-based” principles, and that the Democrats and Republicans are often on opposite sides, writers and editors tend to publish news and analysis as if the situation were as follows: The Christian right, having infiltrated the Republican Party, is importing its divisive religious ideas into our public life, whereas the Democratic Party is the neutral camp of tolerant and pluralistic Americans.

This way of framing the matter predominates, not only because it reflects the personal beliefs of many journalists, but also because it draws upon a long American tradition of suspicion and fear of committed Catholics and evangelical Protestants. (In the elite newspapers and magazines, the number of journalists in either of those groups is tiny.) It is thus comfortable for journalists to conceive of religiously based political conflict in terms of an aggressive Christian right advancing upon a beleaguered neutral and pluralistic center and left.

What the journalists leave out of their accounts is the fact that the nonreligious have also become aggressive actors on the political stage and that they possess and promote, in fact, an overarching religious worldview of their own—one that can fairly be called secularism.

It’s brilliant. And I think it is high time to start using the term “secularism” more frequently, and to use it to describe one particular (and often quite aggressive) doctrine that seeks to protect and expand its dominant influence in the academy, the media, and the public sphere. It’s only fair.

I’m a sick imdividual, setting sail on a journey of ignorance in my armchair

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 28, 2004
in Porn and Vanity
. 11 Comments

I got a splendid comment on my Lara Roxx post from a self-described pornographer named DCypher this afternoon. (He — or she — has a website, but I won’t link to it, though you can find it in my comments section). Here it is, spelling errors uncorrected:

Hugo, you are obviously a sick imdividual with a world view distorted by Christian propaganda.

Of the many erroneous claims inside your blog entry, Brian Flemming being close to the porn business is the worst of all. He is nothing more than a deplorable opportunist, just as you are, using the tragedy of one woman to further thier own motivations, agendas, and egos.

By the way, in all of your arm chair philosophizing, did it ever strike you that perhaps blogs were not the best place to go looking for truly accurate information?

New evidence suggests that Lara might actually be a 30 year old prostitute instead of the naive 18 year old she has been portraying herself to be.

But that doesn’t serve your ultimate purposes to villify and demonize pornography, mostly because your parents instilled a value structure in you growing up that views a human beings natural sexuality as a shameful act, especially for women, who are supposed to be meek and pure, a tabula rasa for your sexual desires and fantasies unsoiled by other men.

I say to you, as I said to this con artist Brian, who has never been within a hundred feet of a porn set, to do your homework before you set sail on a journey of ignorance and drag your readers along with you.

Then again, what does what I say matter? I am just another hard working pornographer.

I gave him a brief and cheerful reply.

But what I really want to know is, where did this pillar of the community learn about the tabula rasa? And how does he know my parents?

Women in the pulpit, men teaching gender, and lingering discomfort

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 28, 2004
in Christianity, Feminism, Men and Masculinity and Teaching
. 9 Comments

It’s a bit cooler this morning after yesterday’s record-breaking heat. I went for an early morning run in the Arroyo, and was treated to the sunrise, the sight of a lone coyote, and a number of very happy ducklings cavorting in the water under their mother’s watchful eye. Folks who say LA has no expanses of natural habitat just don’t know LA very well at all…

A young woman whom I know well was ordained this weekend at Pasadena Mennonite Church. I’ve known Michelle and her husband for a while; she just finished up her degree at Fuller Seminary, and the two of them are off to be missionaries in China with Mennonite Mission Network. Mennonites, like Episcopalians, first began ordaining women to the pastorate in the mid-1970s. Like the wider Anglican Communion, contemporary global Anabaptism remains split over the issue of women’s ordination, though the main Mennonite bodies in North America largely support it. Still, Michelle says that some Mennonites whom she knew told her privately, with regret in their voices, that they could not support her calling, merely because of her sex. (I note with happiness that the first woman to be called to a Mennonite pastorate in Colombia was ordained this month).

I’ve been thinking about women and men in power a lot this week. (There’s a nice post about women’s ordination at Noli Irritare Leones, check it out.) I’m an exuberant supporter of women’s ordination; some of the best pastoral care I have ever received has been from women. I like the fact that my particular church is committed to a gender balance in all leadership offices. I don’t doubt for a second that my church is stronger because we are able to enjoy such a diversity of leadership styles.

But in my self-centered little way, thinking about Michelle’s ordination led me to think about my own role as a man teaching women’s studies. I have three female colleagues who teach women’s history courses here at the college; since I first taught the course in 1995, I have been the only man to do so. In the early years, my female colleagues were quite candid with me about their disapproval. They didn’t want me teaching women’s studies for several reasons, ranging from the fear that I might be a lecher to the conviction that my incarnate maleness would render me unable to empathize with women’s struggles to the same degree that a female instructor could. I didn’t buy into those arguments then, and I don’t now.

The one argument they made that troubled me then and still troubles me is this one: a professor in an “activist” field (gender studies and ethnic studies in particular) is not merely a lecturer and a facilitator of discussion. He or she ought to also be a role model. My women’s studies class this semester has ONE man enrolled; boys have never constituted more than 15% of the enrollment of any given section I have taught in the past decade. For these largely female student bodies, a woman teacher can be a role model of a successful, intellectually gifted feminist in a way that I can never be. My classes are largely composed of women from working-class backgrounds; only a quarter of the students are “white”, many are first or second-generation immigrants from Armenia, Vietnam, El Salvador, and other places in which strong female leaders are a darn sight rarer than they are here. Having a man in a position of authority is familiar to them. What, I wonder, are they missing by not having a woman teach them this particular subject?

Many of my students say, and I don’t take this as a compliment, that they would rather take women’s studies from a man because they assume that a man would be “less biased.” I hear that over and over and over again. It’s a stunning conclusion to draw, isn’t it? It’s a perfect example of the unearned privilege I have as a man. When I deliver one of my (if I may be immodest) stirring lectures on the growth of early American feminism, and I rail against the injustices of laws of coverture and the like, none of my students accuses me of “having an axe to grind.” When I talk about the myriad and often unnoticed ways in which our culture still privileges men, none of my students assume that I am “bitter”, or “angry” at having been personally jilted by a man. Where my enthusiasm is seen as passionate righteousness, my colleagues’ enthusiasm is seen as “feminist ranting and raving”. It isn’t fair.

I know countless strong, dynamic women who would rather be taught by, coached by, and supervised by men. (Some attribute the recent success of Geno Auriemma, the great Connecticut women’s basketball coach, to the fact that his recruiting openly plays on the desire of so many girls not to be led by another woman. That’s another post altogether.) It seems undeniable that for some young women, the relationship with female authority figures is an uncomfortably complex one. It just seems simpler and easier and infinitely more familiar to relate to a man in a position of power.

I have no intention of giving up my role as a gender studies prof. I think I bring something important to the classroom, and I can be a role model of another sort to boot. But as I rejoiced this weekend in Michelle’s ordination, I was reminded that we don’t just need more women pastors and professors (though we do) we need to work hard to change the attitudes of both men AND women towards women in positions of authority. Too many of us who call ourselves enlightened still like to be in work or classroom or pastoral settings where ultimate authority is in a man’s hands; too many of us are still flummoxed by strong women leaders. And I’ll be darned if I know what I can do about it.

Faith and disclosure in the classroom

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 27, 2004
in Abortion, Christianity, Faith and Teaching
. 1 Comment

It’s too hot to run today; I’ll be taking a rare Tuesday off. (I also have a nasty cough that won’t let up; rumbling through the canyons in this heat and smog will surely exacerbate the problem). Taking the day away from running will give me more time to grade journals from my women’s studies class. Some of them are beautifully written; some make me sigh in frustration.

The ongoing discussions about faith and liberalism here, at Cliopatria, and elsewhere have me thinking about the ways in which my faith manifests itself in my work as a professor at a community college. This won’t be an eloquent or organized post, just some ruminations:

Any visitor to my office will catch the Christian references. I’ve got a variety of quotations posted on my bulletin board:

“Christians have never dealt well with the inner darkness of the redeemed” — Walter Wink
“When Jesus said ‘love your enemies’, I think he probably meant don’t kill them” — Anabaptist bumpersticker
“Our Lamb has conquered, him let us follow” — the last line in JH Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus, a book that changed my life.

None of it is particularly aggressive, but these slogans offer those who walk in the door some sense of with whom it is with they may be dealing. It’s fairly well known that I advise Campus Crusade for Christ, though I haven’t been good about making it to their noon meetings lately. My office mate, a passionate progressive Latino agnostic, is quite aware of my faith — he and I have some rip-roaring (but very friendly) debates on the rare occasions when we find the time to do so.

I go back and forth on whether to disclose to my students that I am Christian. Some semesters I do, some I don’t. On the one hand, I think that intellectual honesty demands that I disclose my own orientation and potential biases. (I long ago abandoned the idea that absolute objectivity in the classroom was either possible or desirable). I have a colleague who teaches from a thoroughly Marxist perspective; he shares this on the first day and invites his students to challenge him. He’s successful at what he does, and is loved because he never allows his own beliefs to impact his grading, even while his beliefs form the framework of his entire syllabus. I often wonder whether it isn’t a bit unfair to pretend to be perfectly neutral, when in fact one has deeply held convictions that without fail will spill over into one’s classroom.

On the other hand, I sense that disclosing my own faith allows certain students to simply shut out whatever it is that will be said during the semester. All of the lectures on religion, no matter how rooted in fact they are, will be either accepted or dismissed as a result. I also worry that some students who have come from what my secular liberal friends call “religiously abusive households” may feel unsafe having an openly Christian professor. But above all, the main reason I haven’t been disclosing my faith lately is I get very tired of having to act like a role model. On a campus where the number of evangelical profs is tiny, I realize that the more public I am about my faith, the more my behavior will come to be seen as reflecting upon my faith and my church. For someone who is an adult convert, that is a heavy burden indeed. Frankly, I am not sure I am strong enough to carry it.

Last year, I turned down a request to advise a new campus group that was being vetted as “Lancers for Life”. (PCC’s mascot is the Lancer). I am indeed pro-life, though my politics on many other issues diverge from those of the traditional pro-life movement. I am willing to advise Campus Crusade. But I felt that taking so public a stance on abortion would be dangerous for a man who teaches gender studies. Statistically, I know that many of my students have had or will have abortions. I am concerned that my taking a public role as an adviser of a pro-life club on campus could indeed leave them feeling unwelcome in my women’s studies classes. I worry that what little credibility I have when I teach the history of birth control would evaporate. But I grieve the fact that Lancers for Life never got off the ground as a result. No one else stepped up to be an adviser, and the club was never chartered. I wonder today whether I did the right thing.

“Sisterhood is easier in winter”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 26, 2004
in Body, Favorite Posts, 2004-2006, Feminism and Sexuality
. 22 Comments

Some very kind and erudite commenters are at work below my Pat Tillman post. Do have a look.

Between classes today, I found myself in the faculty men’s room, doing my duty in close proximity to a senior colleague of whom I am fond. “Hey Hugo”, he said with a grin, “don’t you just love this weather?” I said it was a bit warm for my taste (we hit triple digits in Pasadena this afternoon). “Well”, my colleague enthused, “you can’t beat what the girls wear!” I kept my mouth shut, thinking about the ancient history class that I had just finished teaching.

A young woman had arrived quite late. She walked into my class in a tiny miniskirt, flip-flops, and what I believe is called a bandeau top. She walked across the room (in front of me and the class) and sat down in the one available seat in the first row. Immediately, the classroom dynamic shifted. We had been talking about Tiberius Gracchus and his brother, but listening to me recount (in detail, thank you) the murders of those two fine Roman tribunes seemed far less interesting to my students than scrutinizing our late arrival. The boys who sat immediately behind her and one seat to her right were absolutely entranced. Two girls in the back row began to whisper furiously, passing a note back and forth with great alacrity, all the while staring with undisguised hostility at the object of all of this attention. Of course, many others were carefully observing me, trying to see if I was “checking out” my scantily-clad student. It was distracting for everyone.

The whole thing left me annoyed. It always does this time of year. What saddens me most is not the fact that my students tend to pay less attention to me in a situation like this one (though I confess that does bother me, naturally), it is that so many people - especially my female students - are left feeling uncomfortable. I’m fond of saying to my women’s studies classes that “sisterhood is easier in winter”. They laugh, and they get it. When everyone sits in jeans and sweatshirts, when no one’s body is on display, all of my students seem more comfortable in their own skin. When the warmer weather comes, and exposed flesh begins to appear in larger splashes and patches, the anxiety level can be palpable! Here at my immensely diverse community college, it is not uncommon for some women to snarl sotto voce “who does she think she is” when they see a fellow student on display. Meanwhile, many of my male students can barely focus on the work before them.

From a feminist perspective, the issue of dress raises (yet again) the old problem of the rights of the community versus the individual’s right to self-expression. As with pornography, the neo-liberal argument is rooted in the language of “Freedoms To”. From this standpoint, a young woman’s freedom to wear what she wants should trump the community’s desire to be free from the discomfort to which her near-naked body gives rise. I have no desire to see a dress code imposed in a public community college (trying to design one that would be universally culturally sensitive around this place would be exhausting). But I do recognize that in our culture, rightly or wrongly, revealing dress, sexuality, and self-esteem are inextricably linked. I recognize as well that revealing dress fosters a culture of competition, even among college-aged women, and that competitiveness does irreparable damage to the already fragile bonds of gender solidarity that those of us in this field are working so hard to foster.

I have a colleague who teaches gender studies at a private college; she had her women’s studies students design a voluntary dress code for both sexes. It was “processed” and adopted by consensus. I love the idea, but doubt it would work in this far more diverse environment. Still, the idea intrigues me. Both my faith and my feminism teach me that individual desires must always be tempered with a respect for the health of the larger community. It is perhaps important that students be allowed some degree of self-expression in their dress. It is also important that that dress not undermine the cohesiveness and solidarity of the larger community. As feminists, we simultaneously must hold in tension a desire not to shame the female body with a desire not to foster a culture of competitiveness and objectification. We must hold in tension the importance of individual rights of self-expression with the community’s right not to be offended. (Too many scoundrels hide behind the old lie that “There is no right not to be offended.”) I don’t have a perfect solution, but I do think it’s worth a good discussion, one without finger-pointing, inflammatory language, or blame.

I know some of my readers are saying right now, “Come off it, Schwyzer, you know danged well you like to look as much as anyone!” It’s hard as a man to have any legitimacy on a subject as touchy as this. I’ve worked damned hard to make certain that I don’t ever objectify my students, and I am proud of that work. My credibility in my field, frankly, hinges on it. I am a man, and prone to all that men are prone to. But I can say with complete and utter sincerity that I long for my college to be a place where my students can escape, if only for a little while, the hyper-sexualized, body-obsessed culture of the outside world. Women and men alike deserve that respite.

Bottom line: when winter is here, my classrooms feel like safer places. For everyone.

“…once religion gets involved in politics I have no need to be tolerant or nice about it.”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 26, 2004
in Christianity, Faith and Politics
. 14 Comments

Ralph at Cliopatria alerts me to this post from Atrios. The title of my post is lifted from his larger piece, which includes this:

I’m tired of liberalish Christians telling me it’s my job to reach out to Christian moderates who feel that “the Left” is hostile to them. Screw that. It’s time for liberalish Christians to tell their slightly more right-leaning brethren that those of us who fight to maintain the separation between Church and State do it to protect freedom of religion - not destroy it.

Lots of discussion seems to have ensued; check out the coverage at The Village Gate (what used to be The Right Christians). It’s good, albeit heated stuff.

I’ll just throw in a few of my own thoughts:

My politics are derived from my faith, not the other way around. When I was younger, and a secular liberal, my politics were the only faith I had! Since coming to Christ (and yes, I do call myself “born again” without embarrassment), I have had to rebuild my politics from the ground up. When I consider political questions, I am forced to ask myself what position I believe Christ calls me to. This isn’t easy, for any number of obvious reasons, starting with the fact that the New Testament is not a modern political manual. This is why I can’t merely allow myself to hunt and peck through Scripture, finding passages that support my already-in-place suppositions about justice. (Many liberal and conservative Christians alike do this; it’s an understandable habit, but a bad one). Rather, I have to be open to what the Holy Spirit, the Bible, and my church community are telling me about right, wrong, peace and war and so forth.

I belong to a church that embraces pacifism as the fullest understanding of the Gospel. I belong to a church that opposes the death penalty and abortion, seeing them both as fundamental evils even while recognizing that the latter takes far more lives than the former in this country. Some Mennonites are Republicans, largely because (while pacifist by doctrine) they see abortion as the number one social evil of our age. Most Mennonites lean to the left, building coalitions with pro-choice secular liberals on issues ranging from capital punishment to Iraq to immigration to poverty, all the while willing to gently but firmly diverge from our non-believing friends on issues like abortion and therapeutic cloning.

I have to say that most secular liberals whom I meet impose a double standard on me. When I quote Scripture on the subject of war and justice, ala Martin Luther King, they applaud. When I quote Scripture to explain my position on abortion, they are enraged at my effort to “impose my personal beliefs on them.” Obviously, I am as guilty of “proof-texting” as the next person, but I am tired of the double standard.

I’ve often recommended this First Things article by Stephen Carter, Liberalism’s Religion Problem. It’s a brilliant piece, I agree with virtually every word, and I love his summation:

Liberal theory continues to be unwilling to accommodate itself to the systems of meaning preferred by the most religiously committed citizens of the nation. Instead, liberalism has grown ever more muscular, pressing theories about education and the public square that few religious citizens will ever support. That is a flaw in liberal theory, not a flaw in religion. For serious religion understands that the life lived without attention to the basic question is life not worth living. In traditional Christianity, discerning God’s will and doing it is prior to everything else. If God’s will is that we suffer, the Christian must suffer. If God’s will is that we change, the Christian must change. If God’s will is that we fight, the Christian must fight. Even when, in secular terms, the battle the Christian is fighting seems to be an appealing one, the Christian’s motive for the struggle must always be to glorify God—and the Christian must never be afraid to say so.

There will be times when this leads us into coalition with liberals. But there will be times when we are far, far apart. The Christian left must be faithful to Christ first, not secular dogma. Where our agendas and our understandings coincide, so much the better. But at times, we will stand with our Christian brethren on the right of the political spectrum, not out of sectarian loyalty but out of a sense that, as Carter said, “discerning God’s will and doing it is prior to everything else.”

It is no easy thing to claim to have discerned God’s will. No wise Christian tries to do it alone. We do it in the light of (thanks Wesley) Scripture, Reason, Tradition, and Experience; above all we do it prayerfully, humbly, and together.

Trail running, Chinchillas, Pat Tillman, and country music theology

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 24, 2004
in Athletics and Fitness, Chinchillas, Christianity, Music, Pacifism, People and War
. 56 Comments

The weather in Southern California has been breathtaking the last two days. This morning, we did a thirteen-miler run up in the hills behind Monrovia, just east of Pasadena. My body is now well-recovered from the near-disaster of April 3’s 50K. No big races ahead on the schedule, just some easy running.

The fact that it is hot means the central air conditioner must be on full blast all day. Chinchillas do not do well when the temperature gets over 75, and can die rapidly once it climbs over 80. It will be a very expensive next few months, making certain that my little 1.5 pound Matilde is kept cool in the swelter of a Pasadena late spring and summer!

I passed 20,000 hits sometime early this morning; I know that doesn’t mean 20,000 unique visitors, but it still is a lot of folks coming here since mid-January. Thanks. I’ve decided to add a sidebar of a few of my most popular posts.

Okay, here’s Saturday’s rant which will no doubt infuriate one or two folks:

Annika had a touching post yesterday about the death of Pat Tillman (the NFL player killed in Afghanistan). I disagree with Annika’s politics, but I confess I was quite moved by what she wrote. But then, alas, the little pacifist theologian who lives in my head got mad. Annika quoted the song “American Soldier” by country singer Toby Keith, which included these lines:

Oh, and I don’t want to die for you,
But if dyin’s asked of me,
I’ll bear that cross with honor,
‘Cause freedom don’t come free.

One of the things that many Christians who believe in the efficacy of war have a tendency to do is to confuse “dying” with “killing”. This goes all the way back to Julia Ward Howe’s ringing final lines of the Battle Hymn of the Republic: “As He died to make men holy, we shall die to make men free.” Stirring it may be (I love that hymn, I weep whenever I sing it) but it’s poor theology.

Jesus himself died for us on a cross; last time I made my way through the Gospels, he didn’t kill for us. Soldiers have but one life to give for their country, but their real usefulness, alas, lies in their willingness to kill for their country. American forces, everyone agrees, have done most of the killing and relatively little of the dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have no desire to see American lives lost. I am sorry that Pat Tillman died; he seemed to be an unusually intelligent and thoughtful man. But it is troubling to me that those who grieve his death compare the sacrifice of an armed soldier to the non-violent sacrifice prescribed in the New Testament.

We are all called to the cross. Jesus says “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” The Christian life is not always one of joy and happiness; it can be and perhaps even should be one of pain and sacrifice. If suffering was all that soldiers did in war, then a Toby Keith could claim that they were truly taking up the cross. For those of us within the pacifist Anabaptist tradition, inflicting suffering — even upon one’s enemies — is antithetical to the spirit of the cross. Our soldiers may be good men engaged in a noble cause, but their methods are not those that Jesus or his disciples used. Jesus, Stephen, Peter, Paul; they and others after them went to their deaths willingly. But they darned sure never took anyone else’s life along the way. Though it may serve the songwriters to do so, connecting the martyrdom of the doves with the sacrifice of the hawks is bad history, bad politics, and bad theology.

In the countless talks and arguments I have with non-pacifist Christians, I am always keenly aware that there are indeed good men and women of sound theology who defend the compatibility of war and faith. I respect the “just war” tradition, even as the historian in me is convinced it is a 4th century construct designed to placate the Roman Empire. I need to say yet again that I grieve all of those who die in war, including those who die in combat. But I cannot equate the profession of soldiering with Jesus’ command to take up His cross, and even in a time of sadness, I am troubled — and angered — by the appropriation of that sacred image to honor men who die with blood on their hands.

Brief thoughts on a feminist classroom

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 23, 2004
in Feminism and Teaching
. 20 Comments

The hits keep on coming. I have had as many folks visit my blog in the past six days as I have had in the previous three months. Over 2600 now within the past day. That certainly says something about the prevalence of porn in cyberspace! All presumably still looking for this.

In the comments at History News Network on my post immediately below, Ophelia Benson wrote:

I’m a grizzled ol’ feminist myself, but I’ve grown increasingly dubious about that ‘the personal is political’ mantra in the last ten years or so - partly because I know all too many women who take it all too literally and apply it all too extensively - who, in short, seem to be completely incapable of talking or thinking about anything that’s not personal. That is unbelievably limiting, obviously. In many ways Second Wave Feminism seems to have pushed us back into a cage as well as letting us out.

So, in short, is the historical always the personal? Is that a sine qua non of gender studies? If so, why? And does that seem to result in a narrow, parochial view of what history is in students who buy into it?

And as for therapy - that’s the first thing I thought when starting to read the post. Frankly the whole subject sounds perilously close to therapy. And…I have a lot of problems with that. It seems so infantilizing, for one thing. And so (again) parochial, for another. I mean - it is an important subject (I’ve read the Brumberg book) but is it an academic one?

Ophelia asks some super questions, and I tried to answer them briefly at HNN. I’ve taught a series of courses that apply this brand of “feminist personal history”, including one last semester on Men and Masculinity. My pedagogy is one that proudly (perhaps blatantly) seeks to integrate personal experience with whatever subject matter we happen to be dealing with. Kathleen Weiler puts it nicely:

In terms of feminist pedagogy, the authority of the feminist teacher as intellectual and theorist finds expression in the goal of making students themselves theorists of their own lives by interrogating and analyzing their own experience.

With every fiber of my being as a teacher, I believe that one of my highest responsibilities is to make my students “theorists of their own lives”! To some degree, that is of course going to be therapeutic in both practice and intent. I am not a trained therapist (though in doing gender studies work, one is naturally exposed to a great deal of psychology!) But I also know that for most of my working-class community college students, long-term therapy is simply never going to be an option in their lives. It is cruel and unreasonable to assume that they should have any other forum for wrestling with and analyzing their own experiences! A feminist classroom should be a safe place for students to share these experiences. It should also be a challenging place, where students’ traditional assumptions about themselves (and in the case of my course, their bodies) are called into question.

Now what it means to have a male teacher try and employ feminist pedagogy, that’s another discussion altogether.

Teaching Anorexia

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 22, 2004
in Body and Eating disorders
. 5 Comments

I’m still getting 1000-1400 hits a day looking for Lara Roxx; the article is still here.

Part of this was also posted at HNN:

I’m teaching a class this semester on “Beauty, the Body, and the Euro-American Tradition”. It’s a brand new course, and it’s coming along well (we’re heading into the home stretch). One of our many topics is the history of disordered eating and anorexia, and we’re using Joan Brumberg’s magisterial Fasting Girls as our main text. We’ve been having some thoughtful, lively discussions around it.

The class of thirty students is largely female. At least half a dozen of the women have shared some of their own experiences with food and anxiety; as they do so, most of their peers nod their heads in vigorous agreement. Two women have told me (separately, and during my office hours) that they are currently struggling with fairly serious eating disorders. Both are in treatment of one form or another; both took the class because they were intensely curious about the historical and cultural roots of their affliction. The problem (and I had been warned about this) is that an intense focus on food and the body — even in an academic setting — seems to be fueling rather than diminishing the problem for at least these two students! Brumberg’s book is filled with descriptions of various extreme food-refusal techniques employed by women, past and present. One young woman told me recently that it “made (her) feel bad that (she) didn’t have the willpower that some of these girls had… but now (she’s) got some new ideas! She half-heartedly assured me that she was joking, but it has left me concerned.

Research has shown that attempts to discuss eating disorders (and other self-destructive behaviors, like cutting) often leads to an increase in the very behavior that the discussion was trying to prevent. In a body-obsessed culture, many students clearly find it liberating to hear about the historical origins of our contemporary body obsession. As part of that journey, it is natural and appropriate that they also share their own experiences and feelings. In gender studies, individual narratives, no matter how subjective, are intensely important! But for some of my students, I sense that there is a genuine danger in focusing so intently on the body. I am beginning to consider the possibility that the discussions that we are having and the texts that we are reading are “fueling the disease” for at least a few of my kids (yup, that’s what I call ‘em). I might well be “teaching anorexia” in more ways than one!

As a gender historian deeply concerned with the well-being of my students, I am convinced that a good course in body history needs to walk a fine line between the therapeutic and the academic. Too much of the former, and the class can degenerate into a talk-show. Too little of the former, and I am flagrantly disregarding the sine qua non of gender studies: that the historical is always personal.

UPDATE: Two historians at HNN take issue with my contention that “the historical is always personal” ought to be “the sine qua non of gender studies.” If there’s an issue I am willing to (as they say) “go to the mat for”, it is precisely that one. But that’s another post.

Photos and true confessions of a narcissist

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 21, 2004
in Athletics and Fitness, Body, Modesty, Photos, Teaching and Vanity
. 9 Comments

I’ve changed the photo on the right side of the blog for the first time in months. This was what was once there: view image.

Since lately I have been in the habit of making confessions and reflecting on accountability, I realize that an image of me running shirtless does not belong front and center in this space. Both professionally within my academic work and in casual blogging, I’ve been quite critical of our culture’s obsession with beauty, thinness, and athleticism. (Here and here, for example). I’d like to think most of those criticisms are valid, and if nothing else, they’ve started some good cyberconversations, for which I am immensely grateful.

It is difficult to separate my academic work on the body, gender, and beauty from my own recreational habits. I run almost daily; I lift weights several times a week. I do marathons and 50Ks with some regularity. Mostly, I love to run because it releases stress and tension; it takes me into the hills that I love and gives me a chance to see pieces of God’s wild creation that I would not otherwise ever get the chance to see. It’s given me a precious community of friends with whom I can sweat and eat and laugh and swap stories. But it has also made my body harder, leaner, and stronger. While far from possessing our culture’s idealized male frame, I am not ashamed to confess that I have come to take inordinate pride both in my body’s capabilities and in its appearance. I work with college students and high schoolers who are profoundly anxious about their bodies, and on one hand, I recognize that my own self-consciousness about my flesh enables me to empathize with their struggles. On the other hand, I realize that in order for me to teach effectively about the body, I have to make certain that my own body does not become a distraction! If my vanity (and of course, as most would suspect, vanity had a lot to do with that photo being on this blog) is so flagrantly obvious, it will inevitably undercut the positive work I am trying to do.

When I was a newer teacher, in my late 20s and early 30s, I spent a great deal of time and money on my clothing. I wore fashionable tight-fitting outfits (I was especially fond of Donna Karan and anything from French Connection); I had many folks convinced I was gay. It got me plenty of attention, most (but by no means all) of it quite positive. But though my body hasn’t changed much in the last few years, my need to gain validation from it has — at long last — begun to diminish. Let me assure you that that is a process, not an event!

I am at my best in the classroom and in my work when I present myself humbly. When neither my clothes nor my bearing are distractions to me or to those around me, then I can focus most completely on what it is that I am called to do. Even here in the blogosphere, I admit that I liked presenting one version of Hugo (the pic is from a 2003 half-marathon in Orange County) of which I was particularly proud. I’ve thought better of it, the pic is now down, and now, whether you wanted to or not, you know why.

Abortion, Humility, and the search for Common Ground

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 21, 2004
in Abortion
. 6 Comments

In response to my post on the March for Women’s Lives, Jonathan Dresner (of HNN) wrote:

It has always struck me that the dominant image of pro-life held by pro-choice and the image of pro-choice held by pro-life is that of a single-issue essentializing position. Neither is really correct, but the rhetoric has so distorted communication and understanding that groups which agree on at least 80% of the problems and 50% of the solutions (The Foster quote which you highlighted could have come from either side, at least the either sides I know) can’t work together on them.

There have been fledgling attempts to work together. In the 1990s, the Common Ground Network for Life and Choice (I loved the name) flourished in many cities. In 1996, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the successful cooperation of pro-life and pro-choice activists in the battle-ground city of Buffalo. And in 1999, Naomi Wolf and Frederica Mathewes-Green (two women whose work I have assigned my students), shared this brief dialogue in Sojourners.

I like what Naomi Wolf wrote about her own experiences in dialogue with pro-lifers:

When you open yourself to the kinds of change that common ground creates, you lose aspects of your identity that you have been clinging to. I had parts of my ego stripped away from me. It’s very humbling. I had to face the fact that I might have been wrong all of this time, and that people I felt united with in solidarity might be wrong. The other painful thing I had to face was that I owed an apology. I needed to ask forgiveness of the wrong I had done.

This is where one more principle about common ground thinking can work. I don’t agree with Frederica about policy, but I’ll remember for the rest of my life what happened when I apologized to the pro-life people in the room at a common ground conference. I thought I would lose everything by asking forgiveness and, of course—no surprise to you, big surprise to me—I gained a sense of freedom. I felt truly liberated in a way that all that rigid us-them liberationist rhetoric I had labored under all my life had never freed me.

Naomi is still on the “other side”. But bless her heart, she gets it. She really gets it. As a pro-lifer in the overwhelmingly pro-choice academy, I have to remember to try and practice exactly the kind of humility and openness that Wolf talks about here. It’s danged hard. But if we all started by apologizing to the other side for the ways in which we stereotype them (and I am as guilty as anyone else, even though I have been on both sides), we’d be well on our way to common — and higher — ground.