World Vision and Gender Equity

All churches who teach the unilateral submission of women to men are undermining the efforts of World Vision around the world. World Vision recommends the following,

• Create programmes and raise awareness among men and women to acknowledge and alleviate the burdens of women’s triple role in their home, workplace, and community, and promote women’s equal participation in decision-making.
• Enhance the social support system to enable women to work outside of the home by providing free/subsidised and good quality day-care centres for infants and elders.
• Governmental and international agencies, NGOs, employers, and trade unions must ensure equal rights and equal pay for all women.
• Women in leadership must be encouraged to build their capacity, confidence, assertiveness, and leadership skills while increasing the number of female staff who serve as role models. At the same time, men must be made aware of the shared benefits of gender equality, enabling them to relate to and work positively with empowered women.
• Furthermore, World Vision suggests partnership with social institutions such as churches, council of elders, community leaders and other sources of influence to remove barriers that prevent women from full participation.
• Educate men and women on shared gender roles that allow familial and social equity leading to households and societies where both genders have equal opportunities and access to resources and decision making.

You might read this paper and be glad that you don't live under the conditions described within. Yes, but considering the comparative prosperity of North America, women still suffer from a shocking amount of violence and discrimination. Since this is the same within the Christian community as outside it, it is time for the church as a whole to make a stand against the denial of equal decision-making power to women around the world.

My sense is that a patriarchal culture within some parts of the church is fighting against the goals of World Vision. Let's pull together on this and better the lives of women and children here and around the world.

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I recently read Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is famous for creating the short film Submission about the experience of women in Islam. Shortly after this film was screened in Holland the producer, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered.

Ali has lived in Somalia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Holland. This autobiography is particularly enlightening in that it traces her life through many different types of Islam - traditional and cultural, religious and committed, secularized, both politically liberal and totalitarian. Ultimately Ali commits to the path of reason and rejects religious belief. Hers is a journey of experience, faith, dialogue, intense committment and struggle.

Ali describes the family love and cultural background which she grew up in with great affection. She also does not withhold any of the details of genital mutilation, beatings, forced marriage, unemployment, war and exile. Throughout she displays amazing and singlehearted committment to challenge and change. She aspires to follow in her father's footsteps and become a political leader. This book should tear apart many false stereotypes about women and Islam. The message is clear, that Islam oppresses women and the only route out is a modern state based on reason.

It is a controversial book from many perspectives but it contains a story that demands to be heard and responded to.

Here are a couple of reviews NY Times and Boston Globe.

Last year I read Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb, a novel with a similar cultural background.

PS. Submission was available on the internet at one time, but it has been taken down. Disturbing.

Know your left from your right

It's snowing and they are heading out for a long trip to drive to his parents' place for the weekend. The toddler is buckled into the backseat in his carseat but he is restless so the mother sits in the back beside him.

The father turns around and glances over his shoulder at the child to verify that he is buckled in but he can't see the whole picture from this angle.

"Is the seatbelt over his left shoulder?" he asks.

"No, it's over his right shoulder," his wife answers.

"It should be over the left."

"I don't see how it can go over the left."

"Just do it, will you."

"Okay, but it is rubbing on his chin."

"Look I'll have to do it. You are so incompetent," the husband gets out of the car and goes around to the back seat, opens the door and adjusts the seatbelt.

"Why can't you get it right the first time. Just do as you are told, why can't you."

"It was in that position, that is where I had it before but you told me to switch it."

"No, I told you to put it over the left side, for goodness sake. You can't even obey a simple order. Why not? "

"That's where it was."

"It wasn't - I saw it. What I asked was why you can't even obey a single order. Give me an answer right now."

"I tried to do as you said, I did what I heard you say."

"That isn't good enough. What I want to know is why you didn't obey me. You had better answer now."

"I'm sorry. I tried."

"No you thought you knew better. What will happen in an emergency, I wonder. If you can't give me complete and immediate obedience the children's lives will be a stake."

He cuffs her and her glasses go flying. She scrambles around in the snow to find them - they are broken. She goes into the house for tape to cobble them together.

Finally they leave, the child cries half the way and pukes up all over the back seat, the road is icy, they drive off the road at one point. Fortunately they don't hit anything and they get back on the road and continue unharmed.

Life is shit.

Denial of Decision-making power

I read the following on SoloFeminity. It does indeed say that the denial of decision-making power along with poverty and illiteracy causes women to become infected with HIV at a faster rate than men.

Did you know that girls in impoverished countries are less likely to receive adequate medical care or food, compared to boys? Here are some grim statistics I recently received from World Vision:

- Seven out of ten of the world's hungry are women.
- Nearly half of all girls born in the 50 least developed countries will never attend school, sentencing them to a life of poverty and disease.
- Due to poverty, illiteracy, and the denial of decision-making power, women are becoming infected with HIV faster than men in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.
- Every six seconds a girl under five dies of preventable causes.
- Of the 800 million who lack basic work skills to rise out of poverty, two-thirds are female.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Another little girl has died. It's almost overwhelming to comprehend.

It seems to me that along with sending pharmaceutical drugs, North America should model an appropriate egalitarian stance on male-female relations. Christians should be ahead of the curve on this. Some are, and some aren't.

If we know to do good and don't do it, then we are contributing to the problem. We know that we should teach egalitarian values. If we don't do it, we are guilty - we become part of the problem.

So then, if you know the good you ought to do and don't do it, you sin. James 4:7

Birth Rate Trends

I am not sure what this is apropos of but ... birth rates are of great interest in watching international trends in the status of women, so read this post and the comments for some fascinating insights.

Jews in Baghdad

When I read the biography of Gertrude Bell last year, I was especially impressed with her accounts of the Jewish community in Baghdad in the 1920's. She remarked in particular on the fact that of all women in Baghdad - Muslim, Christian and Jewish, the Jewish women were the most literate and had schools available to them.

This site offers a history of the Jewish community in Baghdad, remarking about the period when Bell was there,

With British entry to Baghdad on February 3, 1917 (fixed as yom nes 17th Adar) there began a period of freedom for the Jews of Baghdad and many of them were employed in the civil service. When the state became independent in 1929 there was an increase in anti-Semitism, especially after the appearance of the German ambassador A. Grobbe in Baghdad (1932).

About educational institutions and medical services one can read,

Until operation "Ezra and Nehemiah" there were 28 Jewish educational institutions in Baghdad, 16 under the supervision of the community committee and the rest privately run. The number of pupils reached 12,000 and many others learned in foreign and government schools. About 400 students studied medicine, law, economics, pharmacy, and engineering. In 1951 the Jewish school for the blind was closed; it was the only school of its type in Baghdad. The Jews of Baghdad had two hospitals in which the poor received free treatment, and several philanthropic services. Out of 60 synagogues in 1950, there remained only 7 in 1960.

This site says that,

During these centuries under Muslim rule, the Jewish Community had it's ups and downs. By World War I, they accounted for one third of Baghdad's population.

For some reason Christians often give the impression that they have an edge on matters of literacy and philanthropy, that the recognition of the sacrifice of Christ, the son of God, is a necessary condition for altruism. This is not consistent with the teaching of the Torah, or the rest of the Hebrew scriptures where I read about the ideal Jewish woman, Prov. 31.

She stretches out her hand to the poor; yea, she reaches forth her hands to the needy.

She opens her mouth with wisdom; and on her tongue is the law of kindness.

Go here to read about the last Jews in Baghdad today. HT Evangelical Text Criticism

Baghdad was once one of the great cradles of Jewish culture and wisdom, but now, according to the Christian priest who has been looking after them, there are only eight Jews left in the Iraqi capital, and their situation is "more than desperate.

Continue reading.

Snow by Pamuk

There are many excellent reviews of Pamuk's Snow, and after reading the book, I read the reviews in this order, Margaret Atwood, to see what a Canadian woman would see in Snow. She calls it the Male Labyrinth Novel, and yes, it is one of the many political novels that I have read recently by men that falls into a genre. I might call it the oppressive politics as a bitter sweet love song; but the twists and turns, the farcical thriller aspects all complicate this. Why read other books when you can read a real author?

Michael McGaha's review adds considerably information about Pamuk and the real political circumstances of his career. Definitely read this review to see how it all fits together. Then I browsed a few other reviews, also good.

It is not quite the intricate tapestry of My Name is Red, but Snow is a more immediate political novel, taking the reader across the lines of race and gender into another reality. Personally, I like Pamuk because of his absorption in books and literature and poetry and history, but in this novel the women come into their own. The plot centres around the suicide of the "head scarf girls". Only a novel with a parade of individual characters can do justice to a complex issue like this. I will keep on reading Pamuk.

Shorts from Regent

This has been my first time back in a lecture hall for many years so I have been fascinated by the ubiquity of the laptop, the soft clatter of typing, the software and the mp3 recorders of various kinds. It was also my first time looking at an interlinear New Testament. Lots of firsts. But, Waltke and Fee use the old fashioned overhead and hand out lots of paper.

I was supposed to meet with Dr. Waltke two weeks ago, but it was put off because another women about my age was setting up a camera on a tripod outside his office door when I arrived. I could see that she wanted more than a few spare moments with the great man, so I said that I would wait. I chatted with her for a few minutes and found out that she was health professional researching breastfeeding and motherhood. She said that Dr. Waltke had confided in her that his memory went back to when he was a baby and he could remember breastfeeding, so she was going to interview him on this topic. Go figure!

When I did have my interview with Dr. Waltke a week later, the coffee shop line snaked through the atrium so we retreated to the staff hideout and a private thermos. To his consternation the thermos was empty. At first, I thought - how kind this man is to insist on my having coffee, but it soon became apparent that I wouldn't get a word out of him until he had his cup firmly in front of him. He went in and out a few times, looking either for whoever made coffee or making it himself, I wasn't sure which. This took some time. Finally, he returned with a full thermos and poured me a cup. He then poured himself a half cup and drank it black. He kept the thermos beside him and would only pour in half a cup at a time, so that it was always very hot when he drank it.

When this was all settled he leaned forward on his elbows and looked at me with great concentration and said, "I have a question for you first." I could not quite imagine what. "How do my course assignments compare with Gordon Fee's?" he asked. Well, all professors think alike, I thought. But I am just auditing so I couldn't answer his question.

Actually, I did find out the next day what was going on. In Fee's class, I sat beside a young man who had also been in Waltke's class. He commented, "I really want to take Fee's class -this is so great, I love it so much, I don't know what to do, but I am going to have to quit." Apparently he figured out that if he worked 16 hours a day for 6 days a week for 6 weeks, he would be able to complete the bare minimum of assignments for Waltke's 2 week course. So he was going to ask for a refund for his fees for Fee's class. I guess this trend was not going over well in accounting. It must have gotten back to Waltke.

---------------

One afternoon I joined in a small discussion with John Stackhouse, author of Finally Feminist. Most of his books are on other topics, but this one did come up briefly. John described his upbringing in the Plymouth Brethren. He explained what it was like to listen to the ministry of all men, but only men. The Brethren used to depend on only one verse for the silence of women - 1 Cor. 14: 35. "It is a shame for women to speak in the church." In the assembly a woman's voice was never heard, not in testimony, singing or even as a Sunday School teacher. Women were silent. However, every single male had to participate in leading or ministering from the age of 18 on, regardless of gifts, inclination or training. John just rolled his eyes, trying to describe what it was like.

After the discussion with John, a pastor from the south came up to me and asked for a ride back to his car. He had arrived too late for the designated parking and had left his car on the side of a road about one mile away. He asked if I was driving east from the campus. Since I wasn't driving to Japan, I said yes, I was definitely heading east.

I got a little lost in a new campus suburb on the way out, driving around an endless crescent. Finally we emerged, a little disoriented, onto the road where he had left his car and I drove along it a little. He was explaining how he had rented a zippy Japanese vehicle but, for some reason, had had to exchange it for an small American model of mediocre performance just that morning. We drove along chatting when suddenly he looked around startled and started to moan that his car had been stolen. It was not where he had left it!

I quickly calculated the likelihood of a car of the make he had mentioned being picked out by a joyriding teenager - not very high, and had an inspiration. "No worries," I said, "All my girlfriends have had their cars stolen too. But, every time it has turned out that they simply forgot where they had parked. So we will drive around the block and find your car right where you left it." We did, and he was very grateful - as if I had made his car materialize out of thin air."Thank you, sister," he said.

P 46 Index

This is taken directly off the blog of Brandon Wason, Novum Testamentum Blog . He has moved his blog and I can't access this page any more by the usual method, so I have pulled this out of cache and reposted it so it doesn't get lost. I hope that's okay. Thanks for all your work, Brandon.

-----------------------

A New Way to Access Michigan's P46 Images

P⁴⁶ is without question one of the most important manuscripts for New Testament studies, and arguably the most important text of the Pauline Corpus. The manuscript itself was comprised of 104 leaves strung together into a codex. Today 86 of those original 104 leaves are extant and housed in both Michigan and Dublin. The reason for its importance is that it is the earliest extant collection of Paul's letters. The usual date ascribed to it is 200 C.E., though Aland notes that there is leeway on either side (Text 87). The order of the contents of P⁴⁶ is as follows: Romans, Hebrews, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, and 2 Thessalonians. The Pastoral Epistles, in their present form, were not contained in P⁴⁶ as there was not enough space on the remanding leaves for them to have been included. Most scholars claim that 2 Thessalonians was counted, despite the fact that it has not been preserved over the centuries. Parts of Romans and 1 Thessalonians are also missing. 1 Thessalonians, if I recall correctly, does not contain an alpha in the title, thus some have argued that 2 Thessalonians was never included because the collater of P⁴⁶ only knew 1 Thessalonians as Paul's only letter to that group. Another issue with P⁴⁶ is how it handles the doxology in Romans by placing it after Romans 15:33 and before chapter 16. P⁴⁶ is generally categorized as belonging to (or preceding) the Alexandrian text-type, though there are some Western qualities about it.

As I mentioned above, part of P⁴⁶ resides in Michigan at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. They possess thirty of the 86 leaves, which they have made availabe on their website (which I blogged about in August). I often refer to the APIS (The Advanced Papyrological Information System at U Michigan) website to look at the very detailed images of P⁴⁶, yet their system is often very difficult to navigate. I finally took the time to list the contents of each of the leaves (front and back, thus sixty images) and link to them individually, which is what I have below:

• 3553 • Rom 11.36—12.8
• 3554 • Rom 12.10—13.1
• 3555 • Rom 13.2-11
• 3556 • Rom 13.12—14.8
• 3557 • Rom 15.11-19
• 3558 • Rom 15.20-28
• 3559 • Rom 15.29—16.3
• 3560 • Rom 16.4-13
• 3561 • Heb 1.7—2.3
• 3562 • Heb 2.11—3.3
• 3564 • Heb 2.3-11
• 3565 • Heb 3.3-13
• 3569 • Rom 16.14-23
• 3570 • Rom 16.23—Heb 1.7
• 3571 • Heb 3.13—4.4
• 3572 • Heb 4.4-14
• 3573 • Heb 4.14—5.7
• 3574 • Heb 5.8—6.4
• 3575 • Heb 6.4-13
• 3576 • Heb 6.13—7.2
• 3577 • Heb 7.2-11
• 3578 • Heb 7.11-20
• 3579 • Heb 7.20-28
• 3580 • Heb 7.28—8.8
• 3581 • Heb 9.10-16
• 3582 • Heb 9.18-26
• 3583 • 1 Cor 2.3-11
• 3584 • 1 Cor 2.11—3.5
• 3585 • 2 Cor 9.7—10.1
• 3586 • 2 Cor 10.1-11
• 3587 • 2 Cor 10.11—11.2
• 3588 • 2 Cor 11.3-10
• 3589 • 2 Cor 11.12-22
• 3590 • 2 Cor 11.23-33
• 3591 • 2 Cor 11.33—12.9
• 3592 • 2 Cor 12.10-18 (typo on APIS)
• 3593 • 2 Cor 12.18—13.5
• 3594 • 2 Cor 13.5-13
• 3595 • Eph 1.1-11
• 3599 • Eph 1.12-20
• 3600 • Eph 1.21—2.7
• 3601 • Eph 2.10-20
• 3602 • Eph 2.21—3.10
• 3603 • Eph 3.11—4.1
• 3604 • Eph 4.2-14
• 3606 • Eph 4.15-25
• 3607 • Eph 4.26—5.6 (typo on APIS)
• 3608 • Eph 5.8-25
• 3609 • Eph 5.26—6.6
• 3610 • Eph 6.8-18
• 3611 • Eph 6.20—Gal 1.8
• 3612 • Gal 1.10-22
• 3613 • Gal 1.23—2.9
• 3614 • Gal 2.9-21
• 3615 • Gal 3.2-15
• 3616 • Gal 3.16-29
• 3617 • Gal 4.2-17
• 3618 • Gal 4.20—5.1
• 3619 • Gal 5.2-17
• 3620 • Gal 5.20—6.8

The Girls

The Girls is the only novel I have read recently about abundant and fulfilling love. The two girls, twins conjoined on the side of the head, not only negotiate an equitable and loving relationship, in which the stronger one does not dominate or make decisions for the other; but their relationship also serves as a metaphor for successful conjugal love. Romance and tenderness erupt in the most unlikely places and it is an important plot device that no character goes unkissed. Sad and funny but very satisfying. I loved it.

My Name is Red, War Trash, Kite Runner, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress are books written by men about cultural and political themes. Swallows of Kabul and Half of Man is Woman are novels in which failed conjugal love serves as a metaphor for male impotence under a repressive political regime. They are satisfying to read simply because the authors, writing in a very different cultural and linguistic environment, are able to successfully communicate a universal message using the theme of conjugal love.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a story of failed love and the kindness and tenderness of family and community. Memory Keeper's Daughter and Glass Castle are novels of triumph in a dysfunctional family.

At least that's my take.

Reading Habits

Kite Runner - 2005, US 1912 reviews, 4 1/2 stars; UK 236 reviews, 4 1/2 stars
Swallows of Kabul 2005, US 42 reviews 4 1/2 stars; UK 3 reviews 5 stars
Memory Keeper's Daughter 2006, US 588 reviews 3 1/2 stars; UK 36 reviews 3 1/2 stars
Glass Castle 2006, US 707 reviews 4 1/2 stars; UK 3 reviews 5 stars
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan 2006, US 339 customer reviews 4 1/2 stars; UK 20 reviews 5 stars
Suite Française 2006, US 203 reviews 4 1/2 stars; UK 21 reviews, 5 stars
Half of Man is Woman 1991, US 1 review 5 stars; UK no reviews
My Name is Red 2002, US 105 reviews 4 1/2 stars, UK 24 reviews, 3 1/2 stars
The Girls 2007 US 72 reviews 4 1/2 stars, UK 42 reviews 3 1/2 stars
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, 2002, US, 208 reviews, 4 stars; UK 13 reviews, 4 stars
Snow 2005, US 106 reviews, 3 1/2 stars; UK 22 reviews, 3 1/2 stars
Reading Lolita in Tehran 2003, US 317 reviews, 3 1/2 stars; UK 18 reviews , 4 1/2 stars
The Places in Between 2006, US 115 reviews, 4 stars; UK 17 reviews, 4 1/2 stars
Bookseller of Kabul 2004, US 113 reviews, 4 stars; UK 39 reviews, 3 1/2 stars
War Trash 2006, US no reviews; UK 2 reviews, 4 1/2 stars

I have decided to analyse my reading habits. First, novels represent about half of my reading time. I like it that way and I really don't know what to say to people who claim they have eliminated novels from their reading schedule. Some of these same people haven't eliminated watching sports on TV, of course. Oh well. Each to their own.

My favourite books are in this order, My Name is Red, a little long and difficult but if you love books and the history of books, it is wonderful. Next, War Trash, Balzac, Snow Flower, Half of Man is Woman, Swallows of Kabul, Places in Between. And so on.

I found Kite Runner just plain irritating with its formula plot and predictable ending, and the Glass Castle was very enjoyable but surely overrated. There are many books which I am extemely happy to read, and discuss but wouldn't rate as top literature. Memory Keeper's Daughter and The Girls, for example. I wouldn't miss them for anything but they probably will not be enduring tales. I would still recommend all of these books as a good read.

So how did I choose these books? The best books I have read recently, Swallows of Kabul and Snow Flower, were selling for a few bucks in a bin at Safeway. I hadn't heard of them but just from reading the back cover I was able to decide that these were books for me and I wasn't disappointed. Three cheers for Safeway. My Name is Red and War Trash were from the library. The Glass Castle and The Girls were recommended by a sister. I like the variety these books represent. I don't feel that I wasted any time on poorly written books.

So far this seems to me to be an appropriate way to chose books. Notice how poorly Snow, the Nobel prizewinner, fared in the Amazon reviews. I am reading it right now and won't comment yet.

Update: Here are some sites with book reviews.

Booklist online - features a book by Ha Jin
New York Times - Shadow of the Silk Road

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

I consider this book by Lisa See to be one of the more powerful and memorable books that I have read this year. This is the intertwined history of footbinding and nu shu, the 'secret' women's writing of China.

It is an emotionally realistic story of a female friendship, with a strong plotline, details of the men's work and study along with intricate descriptions of embroidery and cooking.

The strength of this story is that the author does not tell you what to think about footbinding. You are left to make up your own mind what you would have done in the situations described.

In a tragic reversal of fortune, the young girl from a higher class is fated for a life of poverty and sorrow. In the last few pages we learn of how she has concealed a lifetime of suffering from abuse and violence from her closest friend. The other girl experiences increasing fortune and attributes her own eventual security and dominance to her own moral strength rather than to an indifferent fate. The abuse is not only the physical damage the heroine suffers but the increasing isolation and depression she experiences from the misunderstanding and judgment of her close female friend.

Fortunately we are not left entirely bereft. Each character experiences in others mitigating tenderness and kindness if not love.

Love and Oppression

I have just finished reading The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra,

Khadra is the nom de plume for Algerian army officer Mohamed Moulessehoul (In the Name of God; Wolf Dreams), who illustrates the effects of repression on a pair of Kabul couples in this slim, harrowing novel of life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. Gloomy prison guard Atiq Shaukat is tired of his grim duties, keeping watch over prisoners slated for public execution. Life at home, where his wife, Musarrat, is slowly dying of a chronic illness, is no better. Mohsen Ramat, meanwhile, clings to the remains of his middle-class life together with his beautiful, progressive wife, Zunaira, after the Taliban strip them of their livelihood and dignity. Khadra's storytelling style recalls that of Naguib Mahfouz in the early chapters, in which the tense dissatisfaction of both couples is revealed. The pivotal event occurs when Ramat discharges his frustrations by participating in the brutal stoning of a female Taliban prisoner.

This story reminds me of Half of Man is Woman by Zhang Xianliang,

This more or less autobiographical novel excels by its emotional depth. It shows us the 'human' side of re-education camps and state firms.

The main character is an intellectual democrat, who sees and knows that the Chinese common man has been terrorized, deceived and used as guinea pigs by the powerful. They were / are the (dead or alive) victims of the power struggle at the top of the Communist Party with all its expulsions and rehabilitations. As the author states coldly: 'The Cultural Revolution established a new world record of criminals'. When the inmates of the camps hear about another round of liquidations, they are happy that they already know their own punishment (at that moment, their work camp is a paradise).

This book is also an impressive tale about the battle of the sexes with candid treatment of sexual and marital problems. The author is a master in the description of emotional scenes, sometimes as a violent participant and at times as a cold observer. But he always finds the passionate human touch. The dream scenes are equally impressive, while the use of humanized animals is highly original.

This novel is not less than a masterpiece. Not to be missed.

Both books use tender but sad love stories as a metaphor for political oppression. One is written by an intellectual in a Chinese labour camp and the other written by an Algerian army officer. These deeply emotionally works of fiction deserve to be widely read. I note with despair that reading fiction has gone out of style with some people. They feel they do not have time to spend listening to the artistic expression of the human spirit under oppression.

I would also put in this class of fiction, Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky, a Jewish woman who lived and died in France during WWII.

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls' memoir is lightly written tale of a childhood lived below the poverty line, surviving on barely enough calories, with unwashed clothes in a makeshift shack. The parents are educated and pass on a love of learning and books, but intermittently unemployed and irresponsible, they do not provide the basic necessities for their children. From the Jacket,

What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts and tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.

Similar memoirs include Frank McCourts Angela's Ashes, and Helen Forrester's series, beginning with Twopence to Cross the Mersey . All of Forrester's books make excellent reading.

A Definition of a Memoir

A memoir is a piece of autobiographical writing which is often shorter than a comprehensive autobiography. The span of time covered in the memoir is often brief compared to the person's complete life span. The memoir often tries to capture certain highlights or meaningful events in one's past. Included in the memoir is a contemplation of the meaning of that event at the time of the writing. The memoir may be more emotional and descriptive, and concerned with capturing the feelings of the event, rather than documenting every fact and detail of a person's life. A memoir usually has a particular focus of attention, focusing on the selected events from a perspective that may not include other facts and details from the person's life. In other words, the memoir is highly focused and selective in the memories it includes.

John Buchan

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the incipient racism of John Buchan, a much admired British statesman and author. I often find that the inner dialogue of the fiction writer displays subconsciously the social context of his period in intriguing ways. In my first post I showed how Buchan, writing in 1940, characterized the First Nations as fungi, the halfbreeds as grassy filaments, the American as a shrub with deeper roots, and the British as a solid oak.

While this is of particular significance in Canada, it is representative of the racism of the 1930's elsewhere. I cannot help but find Buchan's views so pervasive as to be unremarkable in his time.

Here is what Grumpy Old Bookman has to say about Buchan and his attitudes. He rightly points out Buchan's about face on Jews. However, I shall not be so forgiving because of his attitudes, expressed in 1940, towards the Native people of North America.

But one cannot, I suppose – and I say this with a deep sigh – one cannot leave Buchan without touching, briefly, upon his alleged ‘anti-semitism’ and racism.

It is perfectly true that the 2005 reader, who has had an awareness of political correctness injected into his veins, will wince a bit at some of Buchan’s throwaway remarks. There are references, for example, to a ‘nigger band’ playing in a nightclub. And there are indeed derogatory references to Jews, as in the description of the same nightclub’s clientele: ‘the usual rastaquouère crowd of men and women… mixed with fat Jews and blue-black dagos.’

Before we get too excited about this, we do have to remember that we are talking about the English (a term which in this instance includes Scottish) upper classes here. Buchan married into the aristocracy, and he mixed with the greatest in the land. It is undeniable that, in the 1920s and 1930s, such people were typically arrogant, and were dismissive of almost everyone on earth apart from those few who came from their own select background. See the film Gosford Park if you want to know how they treated their servants.

Furthermore, we need to bear in mind that words such as Frog (for Frenchman), and Wog (for an Arab) were in frequent use well into my lifetime. Indeed, when I was a boy we were sometimes cautioned that ‘Wogs begin at Calais’. In other words, you can’t trust anyone but an Englishman; and you can only trust him if he went to the right sort of school.

With the benefit of hindsight such attitudes are unattractive; but in their day they were commonplace, and it is a little hard to abuse Buchan for being a man of his time.

Once anti-semitism, in its virulent form, appeared in Nazi Germany, Buchan was quick to condemn it publicly; so much so that Hitler promptly added him to the list of men who, after the proposed German invasion of England, were to be imprisoned for ‘Pro-Jewish activity’. In due course Buchan realised the sensitivity of some of his earlier (and entirely trivial) references to Jews, and eliminated them from his later work. If you wish to know more, the issue has been dealt with in Roger Kimball’s valuable essay on Buchan.

It would be unfortunate, to say the least, if such a remarkable body of work, by such a remarkably far-sighted man, were to be ignored, or, worse, condemned, on the strength of a few lines here and there.

My intent is to move next to an examination of Archibald Flemings experiences with the First Nations of Canada.

Jesus H. Christ

Is it Jesus H. Christ or Jesus J. Christ, I wonder? Iyov has blogged about a case of litigation in which Jesus is mentioned as Jesus J. Christ. I am puzzled. Earlier this year I blogged about the anagram JHS or IHS. This has possibly lead to the name Jesus H. Christ, but I don't know where the J. could have come from.

The IHS monogram is an abbreviation or shortening of Jesus' name in Greek to the first three letters. Thus ΙΗΣΟΥΣ, ιησυς (iēsus, "Jesus"), is shortened to ΙΗΣ (iota-eta-sigma), sometimes transliterated into Latin or English characters as IHS or ΙΗC.

The symbol is said to appear rarely in the catacombs, only in the catacomb of Priscilla and the atrium of the Capella Græca (Greek Chapel).1 It was popularized in the fifteenth century, however, by Franciscan disciple Bernadine of Sienna as a symbol of peace. In 1541 St. Ignatius Loyola adopted the symbol with three nails below and surrounded by the sun as the seal of the Jesuit order.

Contrary to some authors, the monogram originally stood for either for Iesus Hominum Salvator ("Jesus Savior of Men") nor for "In His Service." Some attribute its origin to Constantine's vision, where he saw a cross with the inscription "In hoc signo vinces" ("in this sign you shall conquer,"2 which is abbreviated, according to them, as IHS. However, this seems to require a stretch, as do claims that it is really a pagan symbol.3 The simplest explanation, as an abbreviation of Jesus' name, is best.

Now for the fun stuff. This symbol is the centre of much discussion in Silas Marner by George Eliot, chapter 10,

Dolly sighed gently as she held out the cakes to Silas, who thanked her kindly and looked very close at them, absently, being accustomed to look so at everything he took into his hand -- eyed all the while by the wondering bright orbs of the small Aaron, who had made an outwork of his mother's chair, and was peeping round from behind it.

"There's letters pricked on 'em," said Dolly. "I can't read 'em myself, and there's nobody, not Mr. Macey himself, rightly knows what they mean; but they've a good meaning, for they're the same as is on the pulpit-cloth at church. What are they, Aaron, my dear?"

Aaron retreated completely behind his outwork.

"Oh, go, that's naughty," said his mother, mildly. "Well, whativer the letters are, they've a good meaning; and it's a stamp as has been in our house, Ben says, ever since he was a little un, and his mother used to put it on the cakes, and I've allays put it on too; for if there's any good, we've need of it i' this world."

"It's I. H. S.," said Silas, at which proof of learning Aaron peeped round the chair again.

"Well, to be sure, you can read 'em off," said Dolly. "Ben's read 'em to me many and many a time, but they slip out o' my mind again; the more's the pity, for they're good letters, else they wouldn't be in the church; and so I prick 'em on all the loaves and all the cakes, though sometimes they won't hold, because o' the rising -- for, as I said, if there's any good to be got we've need of it i' this world -- that we have; and I hope they'll bring good to you, Master Marner, for it's wi' that will I brought you the cakes; and you see the letters have held better nor common."

Silas was as unable to interpret the letters as Dolly, but there was no possibility of misunderstanding the desire to give comfort that made itself heard in her quiet tones. He said, with more feeling than before -- "Thank you -- thank you kindly." But he laid down the cakes and seated himself absently -- drearily unconscious of any distinct benefit towards which the cakes and the letters, or even Dolly's kindness, could tend for him.

Dear Dolly, I assume from this that she couldn't read but maybe she understood well the meaning of the gospel, to love your neighbour.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Here are excerpts from two different reviews of The Memory Keeper's Daughter which I just finished reading.

From The Washington Post

My first daughter was born lifeless and gray-blue. "Like a seal," I remember thinking as the room went bright white and the doctor started suctioning her mouth. I pushed my wife's head back onto the pillow so she wouldn't be able to see the slick form down below. The oxygen tank hissed angrily. In the minutes that followed, as we waited and waited for my daughter to cry, all the hopes we'd stored up were suffocated under the weight of our new future that filled the room with fear.

Mercifully, few parents experience the shattering birth moment we did, and it may be that memories of my daughter's birth magnified the emotional impact of Kim Edwards's debut novel. But I think anyone would be struck by the extraordinary power and sympathy of The Memory Keeper's Daughter.

-------------------------------------

I don't read a lot of fiction and I most especially do not read romances. I'm not sure how this book is categorized but it is the most compulsively readable, emotional, and memorable book I've read since "Gone With the Wind" over 40 years ago. This is an epic story of a doctor who, in an emotional moment and with all his medical knowledge telling him to protect those he loves, makes a decision that affects him and everyone around him forever.

On a blizzardly night in 1964, David Henry helps his wife give birth to twins, one a perfect boy and the other a girl with Downs Syndrome. At that time, imperfect children were "put away" in institutions where they died young and families and friends spoke of them in shame-filled whispers, if at all. David grew up with a very sickly sister whose death at age 12 ended all meaningful life for his parents. With all good intentions of sparing his wife and new son the pain he and his parents endured, he made a fateful decision and told his wife the little girl had died at birth. It was a decision that, once made, could not be redeemed nor remedied.

This is a book about the family of a Down's syndrome child and examines the disasterous effect of maintaining silence about her existance and not accepting this child into the family. It is poignant in that it deals with a very real dilemma. It is beautifully written with delicately developed imagery and well drawn emotional and psychological character sketches. The author writes as a Christian although we only get glimpses of this through a few lines of Bible quotations, in the KJV, and other brief references.

The book is easy to read and provides numerous characters to identify with. I would highly recommend it for those with handicapped children or those who know someone with a handicapped child. However, I find the treatment of the Down's syndrome child herself to be disappointingly undeveloped. The book is more about her birth family. It is still an important book about a very important topic and I'm glad that I took time out to read this book. It is a good read for anyone. Lots of romance, family drama, strong visual imagery and exquisite language. Okay, there were a few improbable events in the storyline but I managed to enjoy it just the same.

Sick Heart River

Going through my books recently I happened on Sick Heart River, John Buchan's final book, written shortly before he died in 1940. This book is available to buy or read online.

John Buchan is best known as the author of the spy thriller Richard Hannay series. He also wrote Prester John, many biographies and other books. Buchan was a British politician and the Governor General of Canada from 1936 to 1940. He had been a correspondant and speech writer in WWI and it was with great reluctance that he signed the papers which entered Canada in WWII.

Buchan was the son of a Scottish minister and was himself later twice Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. He was influential as a writer, politican and Christian and was greatly loved by those who knew him.

Sick Heart River is a dying man's last conversations with God. In this story Buchan's familiar hero, Leithen, undertakes a journey to northern Canada in search of an American businessman who has disappeared into the wilderness. After many adventures, worthy of such an author, Leithen finds the American. He realizes that this is not the end of the journey, but turns his attention to reflecting on the will to live. A nearby group of Hare Indians are dying of an epidemic. Leithen aids their village, saves lives, loses his own through ill health and overwork, but in the process experiences redemption. Buchan himself died shortly after writing this book.

Although there is much to admire in this book it is also fraught with conflict and rebellion against human frailty and mortality. Buchan contemplates Job,

As he lay wakeful, scarcely conscious of the dull pain in his chestor of the spasms in his breathing, but desperately aware of hisweakness, he felt the shadow of eternity deepening over him. Like Job, the last calamities had come on him. Thank Heaven he was free from loquacious friends. Like Job he bowed his head and had no impulse to rebel. The majesty of God filled his universe. He was coming face to face with his religion.

Like Job, he was abashed by the divine majesty and could put his face in the dust. It was the temper in which he wished to pass out of life. He asked for nothing--"nut in the husk, nor dawn in the dusk, nor life beyond death." He had already much more than his deserts! and what Omnipotence proposed to do with him was the business of Omnipotence; he was too sick and weary to dream or hope. He lay passive in all-potent hands.

and then rejects the lesson of Job.

There had been a sense of his littleness and the omnipotence of God, and a resignation like Job's to the divine purpose. And then there had come a nobler mood, when he had been conscious not only of the greatness but of the mercy of God, and had realised the vein of tenderness in the hard rock of fate.

He will not submit to his circumstances but must triumph. He believes that God has given this to him. Leithen is empowered to reach out to his fellow man and give himself to them. The writing is powerful and comes directly from the heart of a man who knows that he himself is dying.

On a more disturbing level, one must consider the role which Leithen takes as he steps in to organize and rehabilitate the demoralized Indian village. Instead of writing of the white man as the cause of the epidemic, Buchan paints Leithen as saviour, although at the same time experiencing his own redemption. Buchan writes,

And yet . . . As Leithen brooded in the flicker of the firelight before he fell asleep he came to have a different picture. He saw the Indians as tenuous growths, fungi which had no hold on the soil. They existed in sufferance; the North had only to tighten its grip and they would disappear. Lew and Johnny, too. They were not mushrooms, for they had roots and they had the power to yield under strain and spring back again, but were they any better than grassy filaments which swayed in the wind but might any day be pinched out of existence? Johnny was steadfast enough, but only because he had a formal and sluggish mind; the quicker, abler Lew could be unsettled by his dreams. They, too, lived on sufferance. . . . And Galliard? He had deeper roots, but they were not healthy enough to permit transplanting. Compared to his companions Leithen suddenly saw himself founded solidly like an oak. He was drawing life from deep sources. Death, if it came, was no blind trick of fate, but a thing accepted and therefore mastered. He fell asleep in a new mood of confidence.

So in this one book we can celebrate both the human opening himself up to God, and at the same time, the hero Leithen offering his superior British cultural heritage as a remedy for the disease and misfortune of others. It is significant as it represents the dying thoughts of a leading and influential British statesman going into WWII. The war has begun as Buchan writes and he reflects on the news in this novel.

Buchan is revered as a great man and I don't intend to tear that down. In fact, I don't find Buchan's attitudes out of line with the way others were writing in the 1930's. But we must also look into our heritage and be willing to see the vein of self-worship and incipient racism, and be critical of the ways that we defend our own traditions.

I recommend this book as a representative conversation with God. However, I intend to write next about another man who encountered Buchan in the north, a man who actually lived his life among the native people of northern Canada and left us his autobiography.

Archibald Fleming, a contemporary of Buchan, was able to reflect on and reject the racism of his own era. His book represents the flip side of the racism of the 1930's, the thoughtful reaction of a sensitive and honest Christian leader. If Buchan's book presents the problem of racism within oneself, then Fleming's book reminds us that there is another way to live.

Simone Weil

I am reading a biography of Simone Weil, a French philosopher of the early twentieth century. Weil was a women from a privileged secular Jewish family who had extraordinary intellectual gifts and devoted her short life to understanding poverty and affliction. She worked as a teacher and volunteered her time in the evening to giving lectures to workers and promoting trade unions. She spent several years on and off in hard physical labour, something for which she was particularly unsuited. She had immense difficulty with fine motor control, and only acquired legible handwriting as a child through prolonged effort. She also suffered paralysing migraines.

Weil was driven by her desire for social justice. She moved from a position of strict pacifism to action, and participated in the Spanish civil war and the French resistance. She converted to Christianity and in her later writing expressed the plight of the worker as "affliction" rather than "oppression". She died of tuberculosis in 1942 at the age of 34. She had restricted her food intake out of sympathy for those in occupied France.

Oppression and Liberty , her first significant work, made a tremendous impact on me when I read it years ago; more recently I read The Need for Roots, her last work. Notes from her lectures on philosophy were later published and are still used today as a university philosophy text.

In Waiting for God she wrote about human relationships,

He who treats as equals those who are far below him in strength really makes them a gift of the quality of human beings ... As far as it is possible for a creature, he reproduces the original generosity of the Creator. ... The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship.

And on faith and religion,

We must have given all our attention, all our faith, all our love to a particular religion in order to think of any other religion with the high degree of attention, faith and love that is proper to it.

She said,

when from the depth
of our being,
we need, we seek a sound

which does mean
something: when we cry out
for an answer

and it is not granted, then,
we touch the silence of God---

Some begin to talk,
to themselves, as do the mad;
some give

their hearts to silence.

from Stephanie Strickland. The Red Virgin.

Russ Moore and Rosie the Riveter

Sometimes, too often, I sneak a peak at the conservative blogs, the patriarchal blogs, and sometimes I just do a double take. I blink, I wrinkle my forehead and I ask why I am struck with profound dissonance. Take this. Here is a post by Russ Moore on Evangelical Same-Sex Marriages. Apparently he has taken it into his head that egalitarian marriages are "same sex" marriages. Bizarre. Why are these guys out to throw scorn on an egalitarian relationship? As if a man should be ashamed to treat a woman as an equal.


But even more bizarre is the fact that this illustration was posted with his post. This image was in the original post, here, scroll down to May 1, 2007, but does not show up in the link to the full post here . However, there she is, Rosie the Riveter, who more appropriately serves as an icon on this site , which has the following goal.

To recognize and preserve
the history and legacy of working women,
including volunteer women, during World War II;
to promote cooperation and fellowship
among such members and their descendants;
and to further the advancement of patriotic ideals,
excellence in the work place,
and loyalty to the United States of America.

Is there something here that Russ Moore is against - patriotism, volunteerism, excellence in the workplace? Probably not. It is just the image of a strong woman that these men - Stinson, Dever, Mahaney, and Moore, cannot abide. They don't want women who can stand on their own, and provide for and protect, and particpate and support others with their strength. God help us.

Oh right, I forgot, they don't want women in the workplace, because, you know, if there is a war, women should just stay home - in the house and not participate, not build weapons, not test fly airplanes, not keep industry moving. Especially a widow like Rosie the Riveter has no business in the workplace.

I am uneasy knowing that there is another image conference this weekend.