Please, please pray for me as I cry and eat Nutella and promise myself finals will be over soon.
I am writing two papers right now. Both are due Thursday. The same day as my Hebrew final. And my Mannheim paper. One paper is 10 pages long, and is (involuntarily) titled: "What is Christianity?" Um. A modest topic, to be sure. And the other, which I like better and wish I had more time for is: "The Inside of her Mouth: Proverbs 1-9, Competitive Discourse, and Gender." If you're in the Judeo-Christian tradition, you should go back and reread Proverbs 1-9. Pretty fascinating. "The strange woman" vs. the female personification of Wisdom. So, we're happy, as good feminists, about Wisdom being figured female, right? Except. Except the text is an instructional one, father to son, about only coloring within the lines, socially and politically and religiously. And for a female reader, what's to be done? Judith Fetterly writes, "What is essentially a simple act of identification when the reader of the story is male becomes a tangle of contradictions when the reader is female. In such fictions the female reader is co-opted into participation in an experience from which she is explicitly excluded; she is asked to identify with a selfhood that defines itself in opposition to her; she is required to identify against herself." Yeah. How do we do something redemptive with that?
Prayers. Comments. Easing of the deep homesickness. Please?
Also, if you have anything to offer on the topic of "What is Christianity?", please feel free to chime in. You can even write and say "Christianity is a bunch of wacko losers who placate themselves by believing in some kind of stup-o heaven." That's helpful feedback for me. You can write and say, "I would be dead without Christianity." You can say anything. But say something. Help my paper!
I would not be able to do this without your prayers and love. Thank you.
9 comments:
So, at one point in my life I would have been dead without Christianity. But then they thought I was a Satanist, which was highly offensive at the time. And, they also kept telling me that as a woman, my purpose in life was to serve men (including God and Jesus because they are both men), and I thought that just wasn't right. My God, is a woman, because I am a woman and I need that kind of positive renforcement in my life (but my God is also a Cat). I'm also not a Christian anymore because everything that I saw the Christians trying to teach me, they would not do themselves, and I knew that wasn't right. So, why do I say this to you right now? I think Christianity is much more personal than the majority of Christians want anyone to think, however that doesn't fly well when someone is quoting passages from the Bible, hmmm. Christianity helped me to think critically about everything in life, otherwise I would be a mindless drone with tons of Americans that don't think about anything other than their own butts. I am thankful that people like you, Ms. Manly, help me to see that not all Christians are bad scary people like I used to think when I was young and angry! I hope this helps, but I am also in the middle of paper writing so I'm having trouble thinking about anything other than Anthropology!
OMG. I'm totally wanting to lay your papers down by the fire and make sweet sweet romance to them.
Christianity- It's the pursuit of God, with the understanding that he's purused us- that's really the nut of it all, I think- people will say that Christianity is about Jesus dying, and while that's the central part of the *story* of Christianity, and the thing that makes a relationship possible between us and Him, but it's against the backdrop of the larger story, the daily one we exist in- God's pursuit of us and our pursuit of God- the relationship. That's what it's about- if Adam & Eve hadn't sinned would the Relationship still exist? Of course it would, and perfectly- Christianity is That God Loves Us, and through Jesus that he witholds nothing of Himself for the sake of that love.
okay, so you don't know me, but i came across your blog and wanted to give you my input. i don't know what faith you are, but i'm a Latter-day Saint. Many people do not believe that we are Christians, but we are. so, from my perspective, i like to look at the word...CHRISTians. being a Christian does not mean that someone has to belong to a certain faith, however it does mean that you believe in Christ, His teachings, His mercy, His grace, and His love. Not only must a true Christian believe all those things, but also they must live them. Not everyone is perfect and can follow them all the time, but that is why Christ suffered for all of our sins in Gethsemane (however you spell it), and died on the cross and rose from the tomb the third day, so that we could have a chance to repent when we don't follow his teachings and example. Christianity is putting all of your trust in Jesus Christ because you know that it is only through Him that you can be saved to return to live with Him and the Father. There is so much more to Christianity, such as the history of it and how it has changed through time. But, what i said above is a small picture of what i believe Christianity is.
As far as I can tell, my comment has vanished into the ether. It said something about balance and light and dark and love and others and stuff.
christianity is...
primarily an untenable political position in the continued struggle against colonization.
important, i know, on the day-to-day for many folks, but mostly i think that xianity and its role in producing and codifying most of the oppression that structures life in the modern world means that lots of xians feel a lot of permission to be tremendous jackasses in the name of jesus.
Hmm... This takes some thinking about. Unfortunately I feel like the word "Christianity" has been turned into something that I don't really want to be associated with. It has represented a lot of evils and most lately it seems to have become a very simple formula for who's going to heaven and who is not. A group of smug insiders. I wish I could use a different word to describe myself. Jesusist, maybe? But maybe instead we should try to hijack the term back. Christianity should represent a group of disciples of a man from Galilee who is, was and will be the Son of God. People who love their neighbors as themselves. People who love the Lord, their God with all their heart, with all their soul, with all their mind. People who are willing to sell everything to follow Him. People who strive to live as radically in their time as He did in His. People who, in spite of almost constant failure, recognize that these are worthy goals that cannot be dismissed as unreasonable. People who are so busy doing these things that they have no time to think about who is "in" and who is "out".
So, I guess I’ll try to answer the question of what Christianity is right now, at least in my very small part of the developed world. I would not extrapolate this opinion to anything outside of that. Just FYI.
I would say that Christianity right now is approaching the limits of what has been working for the previous few centuries. My simplistic notion is that the amount of information that is constantly bombarding us all the time now (especially in the last 15 years or so) is overriding the methods of “Systematic” theologies. Now don’t take this to mean that I think systematic theologies are bad, they most certainly are not. However, when taken alone it forces you to try to fit everything you hear and learn into a specific box. When you have as much input as is now available, this becomes a Sisyphian task; just when you think you’ve got it all down, something new happens. So the situation leaves two (at least) choices. One is to start ignoring anything that doesn’t fit in and make Christianity a codified list of acceptable behaviors, legislate such behaviors and act as Holiness-judger. This is a very tempting response since it doesn’t necessarily subvert the Church’s current status as powerbroker over the lives of many. A lot of churches seem to be choosing this route, maintaining the same top-down leader-led-leadership that hasn’t seen a heyday of power since just before the Reformation. There’s lots of ways to package this, but they are all fundamentally the same, in my opinion, from Fundamentalist Southern Baptists all the way to Saddleback and Willow Creek.
The other option will be illustrated with a cheesy analogy. The other option, I think, responds much the same way that the internet itself, the distribution system of such vast amounts of information, is reacting. There’s all this buzz about “web 2.0” that allows the users to generate/decide the content of sites (I’m sure you all know this already). This new kind of site allows things to bubble up from below, to act as a sort of information filter maybe. It’s a way that allows information to be processed across a wide horizontal society instead of forcing all of it to flow down, fully processed, from a single spigot.
So that’s the choice Christianity has. To stop trying to process everything at once and to dive to the heart of Jesus’ teachings. To allow things to bubble up from the base of the building, to accept that there really is a priesthood of all believers and that trust between them is essential. I think some churches are embracing this form of church/leadership that abdicates a lot of, I don’t want to say responsibility, but kind of, from the “church leaders” and puts it into the hands of the people.
I’m not entirely sure this makes any sense. If it doesn’t, let me know.
Thanks everyone! That is super helpful! (And hi, Maggie, hi, Maggie, hi!)
Also, St. Mark's and assorted other church people: it's OK to leave comments too, even more traditional Anglican ones.
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