Alice C. Lindsey has most graciously started a dialog over at my blog. You’re all welcome. Remember your home training, please, if you decide to drop by for some conversation.

Best,
J.K. Gayle

I would suspect this may have as much to do with how you blog than the intrinsic tolerance of feminists vs. Christians. — Stentor

Now we’re getting to rhetoric, to balance of message and awareness of audience. And in all that, to Christlikeness.

Hugo, like Jesus, you use what James K. A. Smith calls the “Hermeneutic of Charity.” And as I study the life of Jesus in the gospels, I don’t see him hiding his feminism! No it’s front and center: he meets in private with a loose half-breed woman letting her discover that he’s the One sent to her (to us) by God; he even let’s this “woman at the well,” a mere female who Jewish men are not to talk to in public let alone private–he lets her be his first evangelist: the first evangelist to the men who’ve had their way with her sexually back in half-breed (bastard) town. She knows so much better how to speak to their heart issues to get them listening, then, to Jesus. And, likewise, Jesus blasts the religious men on their home turf, as they try to trap an adulteress (where’s the adulterer) and to trap Jesus into agreeing to a public humiliation and execution. Isn’t Jesus out of balance when he refuses to engage theology at that point? Why his feminist emphasis on egalitarianism? Why his making these men reflect on what’s inside them? Let each one without sin cast the first stone. Woman, where are your accusers? You’re free to go and Go sinning no more. Family? Jesus on family? The hermeneutic of love all over again. It’s the one who do God’s will who are his family he says publicly. And don’t abuse a single little child. And, his last dying words are care for his mother. His first resurrected words are to a formerly loose woman, a former Greek-deity infected women, who’s touched him publicly stroking his hair and wiping his feet with hers: you don’t need to touch me now, go tell the men. Jesus gets her to be his first apostle. What love! What toned down Christian proclaimation. What feminism.

I disagree strongly with your hermeneutics here. This passage is addressed to a specific audience who had been given a specific and very iomportant task. It is a great example of one of Jesus’ favorite teaching methods, the use of strong hyperbole to make a simplke point. I also don’t believe that traditional family structures inevitably turn the family into an idol, although it is possible.

Well, in fact it is, when you have people who see their traditions as entwined with eternal truth, that the institution of “The Church” is merely that of being a custodian of the body of belief, doctine, and traditions, and not authorized to modify or change them in the name of “relevance” to a later age; that God is not going to issue a “Decalogue 2.1.1.2 because “society” has decided adultery is no longer that big a deal.

Or instead of dealing with their actual concerns, I suppose you can continue to dismiss them as merely -wrong and stupid.-

No, it’s not the same thing.

If you say someone is putting politics ahead of faith, that’s putting the temporal in front of the eternal.

If you say someone is putting morality ahead of tradition, that’s putting the eternal in front of the temporal.

So, they’re different, and the latter is more accurate–people can have faith in tradition and human authority, or they could have faith in higher-order principles of right and wrong.

I would suspect this may have as much to do with how you blog than the intrinsic tolerance of feminists vs. Christians. You blog frequently and in great detail about feminism, but rarely get into the nitty-gritty of your faith or make an argument that depends heavily on spiritual premises. You evangelize quite earnestly for feminism, but treat your religion as something personal that you’re not asking anyone else to share if they don’t want to. I’m not saying this balance is wrong (I do, after all, align much more with the secular feminist side than the traditionalist Christian side), but I can understand why feminists would have an easier time accepting your faith than vice-versa.

Same thing, Consumatopia. You may put it any way you wish - not the point.

The point is, the view of his Orthodox Christian friends is most likely that they perceive, rightly or wrongly, that his politics is more important to him than his Christianity. His Feminist friends might very well perceive the same thing, and thus feel unthreatened by his Christian beliefs.

The point being is that it is by far much more common to look on the left side of the aisle and find people describing themselves in terms of “Recovering Christian” and who have indeed - no matter how thick you trowel the lipstick on that pig - chosen their politics over their faith. Yes, a lot have abandoned Conservative Denominations for liberal ones, but it is far more common nonetheless.

I am sure Hugo would want to accurately characterize this, and not erect strawmen, nor accuse his dear conservative Christian friends of base motives, no?

Another way of putting this would be that they put their morality before their tradition.