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Name: Becky
State: Louisiana
Gender: Female
Interests: Hmmm... let's see. I like people. All kinds. My husband, reading, my family, coffee, learning, God's word, talking with friends online on a board, getting to know internationals, sitting around after a meal and discussing ideas. Did I mention reading?
Expertise: Not much expertise. I love to read. I like teaching. And somehow I've been able to combine the two in the best teaching environment ever: a homeschool co-op!
We also frequently have college students and internationals in our home. I am becoming adept at that.
Occupation: Other
Industry: Other
Message: message me
Member Since:
11/16/2005
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| "Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained." "The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary colour in the spectrum..." "The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike...Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish." "You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humour while roaring with laughter." "Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful." "There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes." "Joy is the serious business of Heaven." "The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ." "Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self..." "Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..." | | |
| Friday night close friends (a couple) who live about 45 mins away came to spend the night. Our children went to their house! So it was just us. We went to an Indian restaurant, then came home and talked and played a couple of games. Saturday morning we got up early and had coffee and talked some more and then went to the downtown farmer's market and art market which is thriving and just wonderful. It's like going to a market in Europe! After that we went to a little hole-in-the wall restaurant near the university for brunch. Wall-to-wall people around here right now as this is the first football game of the season and the game is sold out! Football fans never cease to amaze me. Grown men walk around wearing items they'd never ordinarily wear. Then Saturday afternoon the Chinese girl we're host family for came over. She's a junior this year and just got back from China. She's very bright... a math whiz, but apparently also likes to write. She'd told me last year that she was writing a book and that it would be published, but somehow it didn't penetrate far into my mind. So she shows up with this copy for us and I find out it's about the experiences of a Chinese student in America! We evidently figure prominently in the book. Our picture is in it and she tells about us and weekends with us and the play we did a couple of years ago. I asked her today who the audience is for the book (Since it's in Chinese I can't read anything except a few phrases translated in English - not sure why those are translated!!) and she says that many parents want their children to go to university in America and this is to help them understand what it's like. So far the books has sold 10,000 copies. It's pretty disconcerting to thumb through the book and read a translation of a tile that hangs in our kitchen. The tile says "This house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy." Somehow the meaning got a bit muddled in the translation, I think, because there's an English translation in parentheses next to her Chinese and the version in the bookssays, "We keep our house clean to be happy; we make our house dirty to keep warm." LOL... Since I'm not sure how the Chinese reads I'm not sure where the translation got messed up. I'm hoping in the translation back to English, otherwise the Chinese will wonder about those crazy American host families! I think it may be the case since the American translation of the book reads "A Chinese Girl on the Bankside of Mississippi." She looked at me when I read that and said, "I think maybe that's not so good a translation. Is there such a word as bankside?" Sunday after church a couple of families who drive in from out of town came to our house. We had a community youth/family group that evening for the whole families of the kids in jr.high and high school and the families planned to stay in town and hang out together. When I overheard them talking about that after church the previous Sunday I asked them if they'd like to hang out here. So I made spaghetti and they brought bread, salad, and dessert. Made it easy! We had a relaxing time together during the afternoon and then headed over to the community group for more fellowship. Monday Jerry took me out for the 30th anniversary of our first weekend together after we met in early August thirty years ago. He gave me money to spend, took me out for breakfast and supper, and we shopped! He's really wringing all the celebration he can out of our 30th anniversary! I am getting a big kick out of the fact that after all this time the man can still surprise me. Nothing really exciting, but fun. We lived in the moment and relaxed. So that was our weekend and why I'm tardy posting. :o | | |
| I did come up with a list of names for our Chinese friends' baby boy. Here's the list:
Nathan = gift of God
Evan = young warrior, well born
David = beloved one
Ethan = strong, firm, constant
Isaac = laughing one, he will laugh
Daniel = my judge is the Lord
They chose Nathan (which was my first choice)!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The sky is blue
So now I say
That all I want to do
Is play!
I wonder why
At fifty-one
I often sigh
And wish for fun.
My life is good.
I know no needs.
I’m tired of “should;”
I want to read!
So now I sit
And make up rhyme;
I’ve still not hit
On why I whine! 
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| More on "Why Women Started the Culture War," a chapter in Total Truth. I found this whole chapter fascinating.
Pearcey says that before the Industrial Revolution, families lived and worked together. A weaver worked at home and had apprentices, and his wife and children were with him and learned aspects of his trade. If the weaver died, his widow was able to take over the business and had a way of supporting the family. (I think this is true. It meshes with what I’ve read of medieval literature. In Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath is an example of a widow who took over her husband’s business.) The Industrial Revolution changed all that; less and less was the home the center of life. People left home to make a living and work became separate from home. There became a public sphere (work) and a private sphere (home). The husband was removed from the home and his interaction and influence there was greatly reduced. His life was mostly lived in the public sphere. The wife’s world shrank into the private world of children and housekeeping.
The effect of this dichotomy between work and home was huge. Words changed meaning… virtue, which previously was associated with courage and right community living, took on a feminine and private meaning, with the prime meaning being that of sexual purity. Women were looked at as the repository of morals and goodness, while men were viewed as tough and competitive. The word “competition” didn’t exist in the English language until after the Industrial Revolution.
“The Industrial Revolution caused both men’s and women’s work to contract and become more specialized; the work of both sexes lost range and variety, and became more intensely focused. Men lost their traditional integration into the life of the household and family (no more of those cookbooks written for men!). They lost the close contact they once enjoyed with their children throughout the day, and as a result were unable to function as their children’s primary parent and teacher.
For their part, women at home lost their former participation in economic production, along with the wide range of skills and activities that once involved. The loss of women’s traditional productive role placed them in a new economic dependence. Whereas the preindustrial household was maintained by an interplay of mutual services, now women’s unpaid service stood out as unique, feeding into a sterotype of women’s character as selfless and giving – or more negatively, as dependent and helpless. Women also became more isolated: They lost their easy contact with the adult world, while at the same time their responsibility for childrearing actually increased, since it was no longer shared by fathers and other adults in the household.
It might be asked why, since both sexes lost much of the integration of life and labor characteristic of the preindustrial household, only women protested. Why has there been a women’s movement but no men’s movement (at least, not until recently)? The answer is that the contraction of women’s sphere was more onerous because they were confined to the private sphere – which means they suffered from the general devaluation of the private sphere. The home was cut off from the “real” work of society, isolated from intellectual, economic, and political life, at the same time that the church was. I suggest that jusat as it is not good for religion to be compartmentalized in the private realm, it is not good for women either.” pp. 342-343
More later... | | |
| I’ve read three mind-stimulating and (dare I say?) comforting books lately. The books are Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis by Alan Jacobs, and Simply Christian by N.T. Wright (which I’m halfway through).
I’m sure that those of the postmodern persuasion could have a heyday in deconstructing each of these books (or texts, as they’d call them). Actually, I believe they’d say that the texts deconstruct themselves. But it strikes me just now that it’s much easier to deconstruct than to construct. It’s easier to be against something than for it, to tear something apart than to build something. (I knew a toddler who was a master deconstructionist!) And it’s effective to tear arguments down to their words, to redefine words, to set up a distinctions and hierarchies, to say how this couldn’t mean this and that doesn’t prove that… It is easy to create doubt. At least it’s easier for awhile. I’d think it would be hard to live there… to live where everything is being deconstructed.
Which makes me wonder…. what do deconstructionists accept? For instance, when a child tells her postmodern mother that she loves her… does the mom take the statement and break it down, challenge the assumptions … does she deconstruct it? If not, why not? Why accept anything at all?
Because… because we can’t live in deconstruction for long.
But back to the books. I’d like to spend some time interacting with each one here. I'll try to get to them all in the next few weeks.
I’ll begin with Total Truth. (Now there’s a title to raise postmodern hackles!)
Actually, I had a bit of a problem with the title, so maybe there’s a bit of postmodern in me.  And I’m not going to talk about the first half or more of the book; I want to jump right into the last part, titled “How We Lost Our Minds.” The book is worth buying for these last five chapters. Pearcey summarizes what has happened within American Christianity since the founding of our country. She does a great job of analyzing how we got where we are today. This part of the book contains few answers for the future; it simply presents an analysis.
I’m going to concentrate here on one chapter: “How Women Started the Culture War.” (Btw, according to Pearcey there were some good reasons for women to start the culture war, to be dissatisfied.) A flashlight went on for me as I read this chapter. I now “get,” at least to some degree, what my feminist leaning friends are saying.
More later... | | |
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