What saddens me about this is that As far as Christian academics in the academy go, she might be the best we've got. And the best she caN do during a time of war is to snark conservatives about masculinity.
Christianity will lose in the academy, and it deserves to lose....
We will lose because we lack talent, we have no originality, and we can't say anything meaningful or relevant.
Whag our academic think is meaningful, beautiful, deep and important, makes no impact outside a small slice of upper middle class evangelical faux Aesthetes...
We have no vision to offer the world. Most of our writers have been reduced to writing Christian knock offs of secular books.
Like when Rachel Held Evans wrote 'A year of Biblical Womanhood' (in 2012), which is a knock off of 'The Year of Living Biblically' (written 2007)
Our authors produce social justice with a side of Jesus, Nadia Bolz-Weber has rebellious profanity laden biker chic with a side of Jesus. We have music with a side of Jesus and literary criticism with a side of Jesus. We don't even have any comedians (except maybe Brad Stein)...
Our humanities departments have produced no to tier painters, no top tier artists, no top tier poets, no top tier anything at all...and they are the most caustic, sarcastic, snarky, snide, passive aggresive, nitpicky, cynical people on the planet.
And they make nothing good...
We have produced few if any great up young philosophers. At best our young philosophers regurgitate and rehash Alvin Plantinga or William Lane Craig, at worst they revurgitate James Smith and John Caputo. They show no imagination, they offer nothing new, they have no fresh ideas.
We have no great cultural producers coming out of the humanities.
We have some good art coming from people who never studied art at a Christian College and thus avoided having their spark of creativity snuffed out by sub par Christian humanities education. Some, but not much...
All our humanities have to offer is stale, boring, Christianized knock offs of secular culture.
This is why we can't make anyhing that anyone cares about.
"I serve the Church!" they say.
No, you don't. Almost nobody in the church is blessed by anything you do.
Because we suck
I know one guy who is under 40, is a Christian, and has made music that has actually had an impact in the culture (He knows who he is).
It's one guy. God bless him though cause he's actually really good (no Christian Humanities education to snuff out that creative spark)
And, while I'm at it, there is one Young, very talented Christian Philosopher: @DavidDecosimo.
That guys is a machine. Creative and rigorous. He's very good. But again, he's just one guy, and he has little help.
See the problem?
We are going to lose the battle in the academy, and we deserve to lose.
That's it. We will lose, we deserve to lose.
Maybe in a generstion we will have some renewal, but right now we lack originality, creativity, vision, and talent. Our top tier people are few and far between.
So, yeah.
That was depressing to write. But it's true.
(If you make art and it doesn't suck drop it in the comments below so we can have hope for future generations. Please. I'm begging you. I really would like some hope)
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
2/ on racist resentment against white people and racialist identity politics, complete with the racist stereotyping.
This shows a continuity of thinking over a period of a decade, and there has been no take back, or explanation for the disgustingly racist tweets she made.
3/ Chris said he didn't care if she was fired, the point was to use her posts to force the New Yorker to choose between equal enforcement of bans on hiring racists who make racist content, or to be explicit that racism against Jews and whites is allowed...
The game being played by the "sex is a spectrum" people is to engage in a sleight of hand between the ontological question (what makes this thing what it is), epistemological question (how do we know this thing when we see it), and linguistic question (how do we define the word)
The tactic is to attack the definition by blurring the lines between the primary features that make the object what it is and define its function and the secondary features we use as proxy's for identifying the object when we encounter it "in the wild".
For example, the primary features of a pencil are the fact that it has a graphite tip that can be used to write erasable and that it is sized correctly for handwriting.
The secondary features are that it is yellow (on the shaft) and pink (on the eraser)
1/ Leftist activism uses exactly this dynamic as a strategy. The goal is to create hot-takes that generate enormous outrage (IE: Syndey Sweeney ads are fascist) which bait people into reacting by writing response pieces or by dunking on it
2/ By using the negative engagement and dunking as free advertising, the leftists is able to provoke more outrage.
They repeat this process until people have outrage fatigue, and the hot take no longer provokes strong reactions, and stating the hot-take no longer causes outrage.
3/ Once the hot-take no longer causes outrage, leftists repeat it until people are sick of it and it becomes background noise. At this point the hot-take becomes banal, and people begrudgingly accept that the hot take is now just another part of the landscape of public opinion
If you hang around leftist circles enough you'll hear the "nazi bar" parable, and this explains how they think about everything.
They don't see themselves as part of being a social movement based on highly controversial and hotly disputed ideas...
...Leftists think their moral values, and social views are just uncontroversial expressions of what is morally right, and leftism is just what you get when everyone is "being kind" and "being a good person."
In their heads, they are the regular crowd at the bar.
They see leftism as the natural, normal, and healthy state of affairs that occurs when everyone is "being kind," they don't realize that leftism is a worldview and political ideology that is hotly contested, and that's built on a set of social values that are highly controversial
The claim that it is an undue burder to ask women to put any effort at all into their relationships with men is a load bearing pillar of woke feminism.
This paper claims that asking women to interpret what men say is a form of "hermeneutic labor" which harms women.
The paper argues that hermeneutic labor is the emotionally taxing requirement that women should interpreting what men say and how they feel. It also argues that women act as men's therapists by telling men how they feel, and that women do all the relationship maintenance.
The premise of the paper is that women do all the work of interpreting how both people in the relationship feel, and then expressing that so they can both understand. The author basically says that women have been acting as mens' therapists for centuries.