A recent political bellowing was that 92% of those persons who lost their jobs in the recent recession were women; with great blaming, of course, and without further explanation. It is the season, and not particularly jolly.
Today there seems to be a surge against the female, a world wide one. About forty years ago the tide started running in for that half of the specie, and now the tide goes out.
A generation ago a congressional hearing on sexual issues would have lined up five women to pound the table; now the group being photographed were five highly Religious Males. Piety giving a shove to a passing issue, expressed in certainty of its traditional…
In Morocco, a fifteen year old suicided after she was raped, then quickly forced towards a legalizing union. You can imagine the flashbacks, having escaped stoning and now comes an impending…You name it.
In Indianapolis an ex-nun, who had left her order to protest against the prohibition of women being ordained, was able to achieve her lifelong goal in a Protestant celebration.
In Afghanistan girls in schools were again the targets of religiously conservative militias.
In Mississippi, it now appears, a woman will no longer be able to even explore professionally her need for an abortion. (Personal financial circumstances, as always, not to be mentioned.)
Everyone can go on and on; maybe it even gives “cynical” a good name.
We had a funny experience with the co-authorship of our book – well, not amusing, you understand. With the publisher it was a back and forth, “do you really want that?” “why not use ‘with’?” Then on Amazon, first it was with Annelie’s name alone, at one point I think I remember seeing it as “and,” but now it seems settled on Robert as author. I haven’t checked the Kindle.
All those tries at being proper were well taken. What scholarly study would go under a husband and wife’s yoking? How to alphabetize dual authorship, even if such a thing were the reality? We represented a problem in insisting on equality. That is just how it is, and is, and is.
In Church circles, the Apostle Paul gets either the blame or the credit for setting women in an inferior relationship. One thought is that Paul, as a man, just went with the cultural given, or perhaps fell into step with some part of his religious upbringing. What we suggested in our exploration of his traumatized situation, was that he suffered from a difficulty with intimacy, a gender problem often associated with a post-traumatic dynamic.
On Paul’s theology, we often hear the phrase, “the just shall live by faith.” It seems to us a pathway for the overwhelmed out of an emotional quagmire. It is so very, very personal. And freeing. For an individual.
“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” That is an intellection proposition fit for a Church rather than an individual’s emotional escape route; it is a core affirmation for those lifted up by a larger sense of the Real.
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