Series on Attention

Earlier in the year I began a series for the Colson Center on ways that new technologies are training our brains not to be attentive in ways necessary for reading. I pointed out that the real challenges brought by the internet are easily overlooked, since it has nothing to do with what actually happens when we are engaged in activities like web-surfing, Facebook or Twitter, but what happens when we are not engaged in these activities. 

Indeed, just as the problems caused by pornography sometimes only become evident when a man tries to have a relationship with a real woman, so the problems caused by social media may only become evident when one actually tries to read a book or engage in a normal conversation.

I also suggest that in a society that values efficiency over depth and productivity over quality, it is becoming increasingly hard to let books work their slow and strange magic on us, to let them change us into richer and deeper people. Indeed, reading soul-enlarging old books becomes one of the chief casualties in this cultural shift to prioritize what is functional over what is beautiful, what is transitory over that which is permanent and what is entertaining over what is enriching. To read my articles on this subject, click on the following links:

Hollowing Out the Habits of Attention (1)

Hollowing Out the Habits of Attention (2)

Hollowing Out the Habits of Attention (3)

“voluntary elimination of gender in the human species”

“The heart of women’s oppression” Shulamith Firestone commented in 1970, “is her childbearing and child-rearing roles…To assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and seizure of control of reproduction…so the end goal of the feminist revolution must be unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself; genital differences between human beings would no longer matter.”

 

Welcome to postgenderism.

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On the Weapons of our Warfare

"We remember Wilberforce for what he achieved. Yet the most valuable lesson from his life comes not from what he accomplished, but how he accomplished it. Unlike in America, where abolitionists were willing to use violent force to achieve their ends, in England abolition remained a peaceful movement. This was no accident, for Wilberforce steadfastly refused to pursue revolutionary means for achieving his goals. This is because he recognized that the slave trade was not itself the root problem but merely a symptom of a society that had rejected God’s laws. It followed, he believed, that spiritual rather than revolutionary means were necessary in the fight for justice.” Saints and Scoundrels, page 193

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The Body and the Self

The Spirituality of Smell, Part 8

This ongoing series of posts on the spirituality of smell has morphed into a series of broader observations about the body in general. In my earlier article ‘Body Odor and Personal Identity’ I discussed the way modern life can often foster an anti-material impulse in which the realities and processes of the physical body are looked upon in a negative light. This is the topic of a fascinating book I am currently reading Lilian Calles Barger titled Eve's Revenge: Women and a Spirituality of the Body. Despite the book’s subtitle, it isn’t just about woman’s issues, but about a theology of the body that men, as well as women, would do well to heed.

Wendell Berry on Health and Beauty

The Spirituality of Smell, Part 7

The grinding uniformity of synthetic cosmetics is only one of the ways our culture continually depersonalizes both men and women. Another way we do this is through unrealistic notions of beauty. As Wendall Berry observed in his essay ‘The Body and the Earth’:

Wendell Berry argued that we need a holistic
understanding of health that attends to all
aspects of our creaturely embeddedness:

Girls are taught to want to be leggy, slender, large-breasted, curly-haired, unimposingly beautiful. Boys are instructed to be "athletic" in build, tall but not too tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, narrow-hipped, square-jawed, straight-nosed, not bald, unimposingly handsome. Both sexes should look what passes for "sexy" in a bathing suit. Neither, above all, should look old.

Part of the problem, Berry explains, is that we have bought into a wrong paradigm for health. He urges us to return to a holistic understanding of health that attends to all aspects of our creaturely embeddedness:

Smell, Love and Emotion

The Spirituality of Smell, part 6

In her book Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray, Helen Fisher shares that during Elizabethan times, it was typical for a girl to put apple pieces under her arm until it absorbed her scent. She would then offer the fruit to her boyfriend as a gift so that, when she was away from him, he could continue enjoying her unique scent.

Even today “in parts of Greece and the Balkans,” Fisher explains, “some men carry their handkerchiefs in their armpits during festivals and offer these odoriferous tokens to the women they invite to dance; they swear by the results. In fact, sweat is used around the world as an ingredient in love potions.”

Body Odor and Personal Identity

The Spirituality of Smell, part 5

 

Our modern world is pervaded with a materialism that denies all non-physical realities. Yet it is a great paradox of modern life that, despite this materialism, we are also constantly pressured to detach ourselves from our material bodies, as if our bodies are a prison.

This irony was articulated by Kurt Schnaubelt in his 1999 book Medical Aromatherapy: Healing With Essential Oils.

“Our age is materialistic, yet ironically it begets spiritualist teachings that describe the human body as a burden with no intrinsic value, as if our bodies have no relationship to who we really are.”

We see this anti-material impulse in the pervasive assumption that we need not be bound by the fixities of our material bodies and physical processes. Our physical appearance, aging processes and even our gender need not be constrained by the limits of our physicality, or so we are told in a myriad of different ways.

Expunging Gender from Toy Stores

Earlier this year when I read that London’s most popular toy store, Hamleys, was undergoing a complete overhaul. In a monumental move that was full of symbolic significant, the shop did away with separate girls and boys sections. From then on, there would be no such thing as separate categories for “girls toys” and “boys toys.”

Keep reading...

What is a 'Spiritual Body'?

Paul opened chapter 15 with a defence of our blessed Lord’s resurrection against those who were denying it (1 Cor. 15:1-19; 29-34). But Paul’s mind moved naturally from Christ’s resurrection to the resurrection of all believers (15:20-28; 50-58). Thus, the chapter ends with the famous promise that we will be changed in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet (15:52).

In the middle of this discussion about resurrection, the apostle applied himself to a question that some people had apparently been asking, namely, what will the resurrection body be like? His answer to this question occupies the middle section of the chapter from verses 35-49. The tricky words occur in verse 44 when Paul is contrasting our present bodies with our future resurrection bodies. Paul writes, “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.”

Given the associations we have with the term “spiritual”, it has been easy for many people to assume that the antithesis Paul is talking about here is between a physical body and a non-physical body. For example, in their book "Heaven: A History," McDannel and Lang contend that

“The resurrected bodies of Pauline thought are not material but ‘spiritual.’ The bodies of those Christians who happen to be alive at the time of the resurrection will be changed ‘in a twinkling of an eye’ into spiritual beings that are immortal....The physical body (in contrast to the resurrected body) may be compared to a tent or garment where the ego, the soul, lives. According to Paul, God will prepare another home or garment for the soul after the death of the body.”

Many of our translations of 1 Corinthians 15 do make it seem that Paul is contrasting a natural physical body with an incorporeal spiritual body. For example, the Revised Standard Version even makes this assumption explicit when it translates verse 44 to read: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.” However, this is to completely misunderstand the Greek.

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Scent and Spirit

The Spirituality of Smell, part 4

We live in a culture that has drunk deeply from materialistic notion that the visible world is all there is. According to this narrative, human beings are simply collections of matter and energy.

Aromatherapy, which acknowledges the importance of the human soul, goes against this reductionistic view of the world. As Kurt Schnaubelt writes in Medical Aromatherapy: Healing With Essential Oils:

“Modalities such as aromatherapy, which acknowledge the phenomena of the soul, will be vastly more successful in treating the real problems of our times than conventional medicine….Fragrance has always transcended the material planes of consciousness (science) and communicated directly with those of the soul (the psycho-social plane).” (Schnaubelt, pp 15-16)

Recovering the Spirituality of Scent

The Spirituality of Smell, part 3

In our previous posts, ‘A whiff from which to benefit’ and ‘Scent and the Christian Church’, we began to explore the important role that fragrance plays in spirituality in general and the Christian church in particular. I ended the last post by suggesting that some of these truths have been lost in contemporary religious experience.

It is true that the Christian church has never ceased to use smell in its liturgical piety. In the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions, incense made from Frankincense and other odor-producing plants forms an important part of their worship. Nevertheless, it is still safe to say that the spiritual importance of scent has been largely eclipsed in the Western world, especially among evangelical Protestant.

Scent and the Christian Church

The Spirituality of Smell, part 2

In the first post in this series, I cited the 4th century Saint, Ephrem the Syrian, who taught that God conveys His love to us through the smells of our world, which he referred to as “A vast censer exhaling fragrance.”

Saint, Ephrem the Syrian was not alone in his high view of fragrance. When the Church Father Origen (182-254) needed a metaphor for Christ’s love, he turned naturally to the world of smell and perfume:

A Whiff from Which to Benefit

The Spirituality of Smell, part 1


Earlier this year when I wasn't as busy, I took a few days to read about the interface between spirituality and smell. What follows is the first installment in a series of posts drawn from the notes I took during this reading.

A vast censer

St. Ephrem the Syrian

     exhaling fragrance
impregnates the air
     with its odoriferous smoke,
imparting to all who are near it
     a whiff from which to benefit.
How much the more so
     with Paradise the glorious:
even its fence assists us,
     modifying somewhat
that curse upon the earth
     by the scent of its aromas

St. Ephrem the Syrian
Hymns on Paradise, 11:13

Georg Lukacs

In my Salvo article on the sexualization of children, I talked about Wilhelm Reich, an early pioneer of the sex education movement. But I might equally have mentioned Georg Lukacs. In Linda Kimball's article for the American Thinker titled "Cultural Marxism", she notes that

In 1919, Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary.  He immediately set plans in motion to de-Christianize Hungary.  Reasoning that if Christian sexual ethics could be undermined among children, then both the hated patriarchal family and the Church would be dealt a crippling blow. Lukacs launched a radical sex education program in the schools.  Sex lectures were organized and literature handed out which graphically instructed youth in free love (promiscuity) and sexual intercourse while simultaneously encouraging them to deride and reject Christian moral ethics, monogamy, and parental and church authority.  All of this was accompanied by a reign of cultural terror perpetrated against parents, priests, and dissenters. 

Hungary's youth, having been fed a steady diet of values-neutral (atheism) and radical sex education while simultaneously encouraged to rebel against all authority, easily turned into delinquents ranging from bullies and petty thieves to sex predators, murderers, and sociopaths.

The educators of today are more subtle, yet their objectives remain the same.

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Debt Limit Explained

Gay 'Marriage' and the Revenge of the Gnostics

Following the 2003 publication of Dan Brown’s publishing phenomenon, The Da Vinci Code, there has been a renaissance of interest in the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. This ancient heresy has exerted its tentacles deep into the fabric of contemporary life, even influencing the church in many unhelpful ways. (To read about some of the ways that Gnostic ideas have infiltrated the church, see my article, ‘Eight Gnostic Myths You May Have Imbibed’.)

 

At the heart of the Gnostic heresy was the notion that the material world is bad. If the fundamental antithesis for Christianity was between good and evil, for the Gnostics the fundamental antithesis was between the physical and the spiritual. The material world is bad, they argued, precisely because it is physical. True spirituality involves escape from this world. Whereas the Christian tradition taught that redemption history culminates in the resurrection of the body, Gnostics believed that the goal of salvation was eternal disembodiment.

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Unrealistic Ideas of Beauty

In her article ‘Beauty and Body Modification’, Martin Donohoe gives numerous examples throughout history of unrealistic ideas of beauty. These include the following:
 

• In ancient China, the 4-inch "lotus foot" was considered a sign of perfect beauty, leading to the barbaric practice of foot-binding.
   
• Women in ancient Egypt, Rome and Persia used applied the heavy metal to make their eyes sparkle since this was considered attractive.
   
• In Elizabethan times a woman with a high forehead was considered beautiful and so women plucked or shaved their frontal hairs to achieve this look.
   
• During the 18th century, vermilion rouge, concocted of sulphur and mercury, was popular for improving a woman’s appearance. Women knowingly embraced this even though they knew it resulted in lost teeth and gingivitis.
   
• From the 14th to 19th centuries, corseting was a popular practice. It involved compressing the bosom and constricting the waist with tightly wound whalebone on a steel frame. This led to difficulty in breathing which caused many women to faint.

Unrealistic ideals of female beauty are seen today in the novel idea that an attractive woman must be thin, and the war against the body that this breeds in such things as unhealthy dieting.

I am told the average woman today devote around 19 minutes per day altering her face. And let’s not forget the whole body modification and tattoo industry.

Huckleberry Picking in the Northern Idaho Mountains

 

Susanna discovered that huckleberry juice makes a good face paint

Should Robots Have Rights?

By 2056, robots may be given the same rights as humans, a government-funded report claimed in 2006.

 

The report was conducted by the British Government’s chief scientist, Sir David King, and was written in conjunction with Outsights, a management consultancy group, and Ipos Mori, an opinion research organization.

If the report is correct, then in less than half a century from now, robots may even be able to vote, pay taxes and be called upon for compulsory military service.

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Neuroplasticity and the Sexualization of Children

The news in Britain has been peppered with stories about the scandal of our youth, who are being sexualized at increasingly younger and younger ages. Blame is being laid at the foot of products and entertainment which is targeted towards the youth and which encourage children to become sexually conscious at alarmingly young ages. The issue has created so much concern that the UK government has got involved to investigate the issue.

 

In an article I wrote for Salvo, I suggested that the government's investigations ought to avail themselves of recent developments in brain science. Without understanding the dynamics of how the human brain works, we will not be able to fully appreciate just how damaging is the environment in which the children of Britain are growing up.

  

I pointed out that recent discoveries have proved that the human brain is in a constant state of flux, a condition known as neuroplasticity. Put simply, the human brain is remarkably adaptable, constantly adjusting itself to the demands of one’s environment.

 

This neurological fluidity is good because it enables people to learn new skills, for stroke victims to recover function and for blind people to compensate for their loss by strengthening a part of the brain associated with other senses.

Salvo 25 and the Problem of Solider Women

My contribution to Salvo 25 was an article titled, 'Mixed Companies: Women in Combat, Feminism and Misogyny.'

Reflecting on the Pentagon's announcement last January that it would be rescinding its longstanding policy preventing women from serving in direct ground combat positions, I point out that we haven't adequately thought through the full implications of this policy change.

The main problem I draw attention to (which surprisingly, was completely overlooked in all the public discussion of the policy change) is the implications this could have if there were another draft. In other words, given the egalitarian logic behind the recent decision to officially move females into ground-combat positions, how could the government legitimately defend a military draft that exempted half its citizens (that is, all American females) from  compulsory military service (including service to combat roles) in the event of another draft?

The question seems bizarrely hypothetical since the US military discontinued the draft in 1973, moving to an all-volunteer military force. Nevertheless, a law signed by President Carter requires every man to register with the Selective Service System when he turns eighteen. This enables the government to know who will be available should a draft ever be needed. If the United States were to find it necessary to call a draft in the future (and given our escalating involvement in the Middle East, that is not as unlikely a contingency as it might seem), it would likely differ from all previous drafts in that the military might not merely be seeking man-power, but also woman-power. 

In fact Tommy Sears, executive director at the Center for Military Readiness, told Fox News that the changes announced last January could obligate the U.S. government to draft females into combat roles, should the draft ever be reactivated. "Once you allow women into combat, you are then essentially ordering all women to fight," he said. 

Now perhaps the United States will never need to call another draft, and this will be a moot point. But if (God forbid) the country ever does find itself in the position of needing to conscript citizens into military service, the philosophical and political framework for drafting girls as young as 18 into combat roles will already be in place. 

But is this really a legitimate concern? And what might be the implications, both at home and on the battle field, of drafted females serving our country? These are some of the many questions that my article seeks to address. To read my article, click on the following link:

'Mixed Companies: Women in Combat, Feminism and Misogyny'

In 1973 the United States discontinued the draft, moving to an all-volunteer military force. Nevertheless, a law signed by President Carter requires every man to register with the Selective Service System when he turns eighteen. This enables the government to know who will be available should a draft ever be needed. If the United States were to find it necessary to call a draft in the future, it would likely differ from all previous drafts in that the military might not merely be seeking man-power, but also woman-power. - See more at: http://salvomag.com/new/articles/salvo25/mixed-company.php#sthash.RZt5USJJ.dpuf

Overcoming Pregnancy: gender egalitarianism's last frontier

In order for men and women to be truly equal, all women
must hand their reproductive potential over to science and
technology, leading academics now claim.

The only way to truly solve the problem of “gender apartheid”, according to some of the more extreme gender neutralizers, is to do away with pregnancy completely.

I'm not making this up. In January 2012, Lifesite news quoted from Dr. Anna Smajdor in an article she had recently written for the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. In the article Dr. Smajdor argued that in order for men and women to be equal, all women would have to stop being pregnant and hand their reproductive potential over to science and technology. “Pregnancy is a condition that causes pain and suffering, and that affects only women” Dr Smajdor was quoted as saying. “…women are disadvantaged”.

In other words, commented Lifesite news journalist Peter Baklinski, “to be a woman, for Smajdor, simply means to become biologically more like a man. To do this, a woman’s innate and natural potential to procreate, nurture, and bear a new human life must be stripped away and handed over to science and technology. Only when all human beings do not bear children will a genuine equality be more closely approached, she proposes.”

Although this sounds bizarre, it is part of the widespread unisex trend. Given the pervasive assumption that being equal means being the same, and combining this with the premise that being equal is always a good thing (a point I dispute here), many in our society are now wanting to eradicate all gender distinctions. 

Dr Smajdor's comments remind us that, however far we may have advanced towards gender egalitarianism, pregnancy remains a final barrier towards achieving the gender-free utopia. You see, pregnancy constantly reminds us of the one thing that the new social architects would like us to forget: that men and women are different, and have different lived experiences in the world.

You just have to read the newspapers to see that it isn't extremists like Dr Smajdor who have a deep seated angst about pregnancy. Even mainstream writers see pregnancy as posing a problematic barrier to the project of a unisex utopia. In April 2009, the Telegraph ran an article titled, “Telling pregnant women not to drink is ‘sexist’.” The story cited medical legal expert, Dr Colin Gavaghan, who asked, “Is singling out one sex for particular monitoring and lecturing from healthcare professionals a legitimate cause for concern?” and called current the recommendations of abstinence that healthcare professionals offer to pregnant women “a straightforward sexist policy.”

Let’s face it: when it comes to having a responsible pregnancy, women are singled out from the human race. What Dr Gavaghan’s remarks failed to acknowledge is that there is a very good reason for singling women out. You see, although it may sound trivial, the fact remains that only women can become pregnant. However ‘equal’ our society strives to be, assistance for pregnancy will always necessarily be targeted towards the female sex.

Or will it?

In 2006 the British Department of Health published a new edition of their The Pregnancy Book. Just so men don’t feel left out, they have a chapter for them in which they say that men can experience nausea as a symptom of pregnancy too. Moreover, according to a 2010 report in The Daily Mail, men in the UK are being given government-funded breastfeeding lessons. I guess that in a world where pregnancy hasn't yet been eradicated, the next best thing is to pretend that pregnancy isn't gender-specific.

Further Reading

• ‘Gender Benders  Is My Sexual Identity an Accident Just Waiting to Happen?'
  
•  'Baby Freeze: is Population Control the New Solution to Global Warming?'
  
• 'Are All People Created Equal?'
  
• 'Human Engineering: The New Frontier for Climate Change'

Among some of the more extreme gender neutralizers, the only way to truly solve the problem of “gender apartheid” is to do away with pregnancy completely. In January 2012, Lifesite news quoted from Dr. Anna Smajdor in an article she had recently written for the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. In the article Dr. Smajdor argued that in order for men and women to be equal, all women would have to stop being pregnant and hand their reproductive potential over to science and technology. “Pregnancy is a condition that causes pain and suffering, and that affects only women” Dr Smajdor was quoted as saying. “…women are disadvantaged”.
In other words, commented Lifesite news journalist Peter Baklinski, “to be a woman, for Smajdor, simply means to become biologically more like a man. To do this, a woman’s innate and natural potential to procreate, nurture, and bear a new human life must be stripped away and handed over to science and technology. Only when all human beings do not bear children will a genuine equality be more closely approached, she proposes.”
- See more at: http://salvomag.com/blog/2012/03/gender-neutralizers-attack-pregnancy/#sthash.POqwwePK.dpuf