Sacred Witness 1

Author: Susanne Scholz
Title: Sacred Witness: Rape in the Hebrew Bible
Publisher: Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 2010
Details: 279 pages; solid notes for the most part; no bibliography but index of authors, index of bible and other ancient texts and index of subjects. Nonetheless, a bibliography of cited sources would have been helpful.

I am going to do a number of blogs on this book over the next few weeks. It is an important book and in many ways, I can appreciate what she was trying to do. However, it epitomizes many of the issues that I have dealt with in one way or another in this blog. For example, the Bible is normative and "sacred", thus limiting the available options in her analysis - but more of that later. Already it is clear that there are serious methodological issues coming out of the introduction.

I often start academic books on contentious issues by reading the conclusion, and various parts of different chapters. Of all things, my first gut reaction was: "well, this woman was never raped." I wasn't exactly sure why that was my first thought but a few weeks later when I started the book from the beginning, it turns out that I was right. When I finish the book for the second time, I will reflect on this once more and come up an answer.

"The personal is still political". As a survivor, I come to this issue from a wholly different place than those who only know about it secondhand. It is going to be an interesting exercise.

A curiosity of typos

I always love looking at my typos - particularly the ones that I miss no matter how many times I reread what I have written.

In the review of The Bishop's Man blog, I wrote:

"The book barely scratches the surface of the problem. Could we call it a whitewash? I don't think that Linden MacIntyre did that on purpose. I think that he just doesn't get it. He creates a world where everyone is idolated. In the end, everyone is a victim so you don't have to feel really, really, really angry at the poor priests who are just trying to do their job."

As best I can figure out, this should have been "violated". I still think that there must be a use for such an interesting word: "idolated".

He's just such a nice guy

This morning on The Sunday Edition, Michael Enright spent half an hour talking with Cardinal Thomas Collins of the Toronto diocese. The purpose was to talk about the legacy of Vatican 2. It was a very pleasant interview and I applaud Enright for understanding that he wasn't going to get any real discussion from the Cardinal - so why waste the time. I am sure many listeners will have something to say about the interview. You can hear it at: http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/shows/2012/10/14/cardinal-thomas-collins-archbishop-of-toronto/.

It was interesting because it is in Collins' responses to Enright's questions that we can see the response that will be coming consistently out of the Vatican to those who question the Church in the midst of the child sexual abuse scandal. You got the impression that it really is under control and now the Church is preparing the mop-up procedures. He did say that we needed an updated version of From Pain to Hope. No kidding; not only is it 20 years old, but I can't even find a completed version of the 2002 review anywhere.

His interpretation of Vatican 2 would be questioned by many academic scholars. (see my review of Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning). And he managed to blame the "liberals" for all the misunderstandings that have occurred in the misinterpretation of Vatican 2. Among other things, he also said that celibacy wasn't mandatory (?) - there are married priests in the church after all, and of course, they were following Christ's wishes. Etc., etc., etc.

Years and years of scholarship down the drain. Why did we even bother?

Completely disingenuous, it was my morning smile - can't laugh about it, it is too serious.

I'll be looking forward to the revised edition of From Pain to Hope! I'll get a blog or two out it, I suspect.

The Redmond Women

Just came across this & thought what the hell, why not put it up!

This is a picture taken 4 years ago. Just thought I'd put it up on the blog. Just to put a face to the blog's owner, I'm the one in the turquoise. My youngest sister is in black, and the middle sister wears a beige shirt. This was at my mother's 90th birthday party Needless to say, she is the one in the middle!!. 

Enjoy the "Parables of the Not-So-Social Gospel"

By the Rev. James Martin, S.J.

Catholic priest and author, 'The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything

Parables of the Not-So-Social Gospel

This was today's wonderful read.

if only the people who really need to read this, would read it!

I am trying - I facebooked it and now am posting the link here.

Enjoy, I certainly did!

Clicking on the link of his name, brings you to his Huffington post blog. Seems to be well worth reading for the insight & satirical comment.

Then again, there are Roman Catholics in the hierarchy who actually "get it".

Cardinal says Catholic church '200 years behind' 'It's tired. Why doesn't it rouse itself? Is it afraid?'

If only Cardinal Martini had become Pope, what a difference it would have made.

May he rest in peace.

Just what is the colour of the sky in their world, part 4

Sexual abuse by clergy a 'mystery,' Pope says: Video statement may spark new anger among Irish Catholics

"How are we to explain the fact that people who regularly received the Lord's body and confessed their sins in the sacrament of Penance have offended in this way?" the Pope said, referring to church staff who abused children.

"It remains a mystery," he said. "Yet evidently their Christianity was no longer nourished by joyful encounter with Jesus Christ. It had become merely a matter of habit."

...

"Your forebears in the church in Ireland knew how to strive for holiness and constancy in their personal lives," Benedict said in his message.

Somehow I missed this particular story last June. Probably doing something else :-)

This is the sort of story that should make most Roman Catholics understand that they will get no true change from the Papacy and Curia. I understand the rationale behind Ratzinger's (PB16) comments. He is a true believer in the efficacy of the sacraments. He believes that when someone receives the blood and body in the sacrament of mass, it will have a magical edifying effect on the person who participates in the mass. This is especially true for priests who take both the wine & host. 

Now we come to the restatement of my original article's title (It can't be true, and if it is, it's not our fault). The latest paper will read "Well I guess it's true, but it's still not our fault" (will upload to the website after it is edited). It you read BP16's remarks closely, it is clear that this problem must be the fault of the priests, the people involved have actively refused the nourishment offered by the mass. This, of course, would go further than just the abusing priests. It must be, therefore, that the bishops, cardinals, etc. who didn't "do the right thing" also refused to be nourished by the mass.

Honestly I don't really expect the Pope et al to actually start questioning the theology and validity of the Roman Catholic sacramental theology but that is exactly what is in question here.

The second thing that is in question is the assumption that in the past, the priests were better & didn't sexually abuse children - were really nourished by the mass. How in heaven's name does he make that assumption? Hasn't he been integrating the understanding that we now have about the intergenerational nature of pedophilia? Obviously not. And if you read the 2004 report that came out of the Vatican*, which I will review on the website at a later date, you will understand why. However, even that document has a whole section (pp. 13-17, if I remember correctly) detailing how the church has been decrying this issue since the later part of the first century C.E. Clearly, another case of those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it - especially if they are locked into an ideological position from which they are afraid to depart.

*Hanson, R. Karl, Friedmann Pfafflin and Manfred Lutz, eds., Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church:Scientific and Legal Perspectives. Proceedings of the Conference “Abuse ofChildren and Young People by Catholic Priests and Religious” (Vatican City, April 2-5, 2003). Vatican City: Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 2004.

I'll bet this was a surprise

I tend to check my stats on blogger. So yesterday, I was looking at the search keywords used to get to my blog and I found the following search words:

"kids girls xxx 11 years old".

So I had creepy pedophile looking at the blog. I wonder which post he (maybe I'm being sexist but ...) got to - "This is not a kids book. Rating XXX"?

I can only assume that it was a 5 second look and a move on.

This was a propos of nothing really.

Bedazzled Crone speaks!!

The following is a post that I made on another website (rayharvey.org) in response to a commenter on a post that would have had something to do with education or health care and economics. The site belongs to a friend who is a libertarian [I have all kinds of friends :-)].  I can no longer quickly find the original web page, so I am reposting this because it is about a different part of my childhood/formative years & does explain some of the other figures, who were influential on developing my life philosophy [besides Babylon 5 :-)]

Note: BC stands for Bedazzled Crone - a name that I sometimes use on the net (& linked to this website address); POG is who knows??

BC: I will address some of the issues that you have brought up in your post over a number of comments. Don’t want to make them too long. This is the first response to something that was a little ad hominem, n’est-ce pas? So to clarify:

POG: The problem is that you continue to view “capitalism” and “competition” through your lens of Marxist critique, I am guessing it was ingrained in you in the 60’s by some professors who were apologists for Stalinism and you haven’t been able to shake it since.

BC: My intro PoliSci prof. in 1968/69 was Polish and hardly a Marxist.  He taught at Conrad Grebel College (attached to the U of Waterloo where I was a computer science/math major). If I were anything, I was first and foremost an existentialist in my late teens (when I read Sartre, Nietzsche & others) and my 20s. I was an ardent supporter of human rights, and already, seriously critical of “systems”. The main influences on my philosophical thinking were Erich Fromm (Escape From Freedom, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness), A. S. Neill (Summerhill), John Holt (Escape From Childhood) but probably, one of the most important was Ivan Illich (Medical Nemesis, and Deschooling Society). These writers do not a “Marxist” make!  If I have "socialist roots", they are derived from two basic areas.

The first is the reality of being the daughter of a steel mill ladleliner. The owner of the "means of production" always needs to be forced to do right by the very people that allow the owner to make his/its profits & he/it sure as hell didn't/doesn’t want to share it around. My father led sit-down strikes, my Dad was laid off. I doubt very much that he gave a damn about socialism, Marxism or anything else along that line. What he did care about were his and his fellow steel workers human rights; - the right to work in a safe environment and the right to a fair wage for a day's work. The labour movement wasn’t about "socialism/Marxism" as far as I can see - it was about individual human rights. And, sometimes, you needed/need to come together collectively to assert those rights. It is those "capitalists" and their government cronies that labelled the labour movement as "socialist" as it became a corrupted "big business" itself, particularly in the United States. This eventually led to the McCarthy hearings in the US – talk about moral panic creators). What is wrong with people wanting to collectively better themselves? Why is it there a need to "break the unions" within government agenda? Shouldn't the goal be to bring everyone up to the economic levels achieved by some of the unions so that people get "fair wage for a fair day's work"? Instead what we see is the attempts to break the unions through government legislation; the branding of unions as "socialist" or "marxist". Break the unions so that everyone can slowly find their economic status devolving to that of the level of the people who work at Walmart or McDonald's. Breaking the unions abrogates my individual right to act collectively should I want to.

The second comes clearly from my social gospel United Church of Canada Christian roots. Jesus as the Dude! The worldview that I inherited there and still maintain to a large extent would argue that human beings are interdependent. We are indeed our brothers’ and our sisters’ keepers. We always need to care about those who have less than we do. We need to care about those who are injured, who are treated unjustly. Empathy is the thing that differentiates us from most other animals. The ability to care about other human beings should matter as much as “systems”. Sometimes, I think that that is the core of the problem with most “systems” – no matter what they are: the tendency to forget that we are talking about individual human beings who get hurt by these systems. Altruism may have its roots in TheSelfish Gene, but it is a fact that humans seem to be as willing to support one another as they are to kill one another - in the evolutionary context. No matter what is in our genetic inheritance, we are thinking beings; we can envision a future different from the one we live in. Historically speaking, human beings are constantly finding ways to overcome their genetic inheritance through creating alternative scenarios, different religions, different societies, different childrearing methods, and different hierarchical or non-hierarchical forms of governance – all for the sole purpose of finding out how we can live interdependently. I doubt very much that that is “socialism” or “Marxism”. 

FYI: If you got this far, here is a link to a few more of my thoughts (more philosophical and political) at one of Ray's blog posts Political Theory of Government.

Canon Within the Canon / Inclusive Bible?

These are two of the ideas that have floated around among feminist biblical scholars & in feminist hermeneutics by those who wish to stay within the Christian belief system. I have problems with both of these attempted solutions to the patriarchal construction of the biblical texts. As I see it, some of the major problems with both solutions are that:

1. The texts were all written from within patriarchal societies by people who were socialized within those cultures. No matter how hard you try, you cannot avoid this fact. We cannot escape our past, we can only be aware of how it shaped us.
2. Both solutions contain within them the assumption that there is something authoritative and "divinely inspired" about (some of) the biblical texts. They are thus privileged and contain ethical and instructive material that cannot be found elsewhere.
3. There will be no consensus on what should be the "good" canon as opposed to what is the "bad" canon. This is not necessarily a negative thing, but believers often have the idea that everyone should somehow see things the same way. Some decisions might be easy, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", for example [but that is contained in just about every ethical system in existence]. 
4. Incipient Christianity was an apocalyptic Jewish sectarian movement. A text such as Paul's comment that there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, etc., one of those "good" texts, derives from the apocalyptic assumptions of the early beliefs of the proto-Christian belief system. You can only accept it if you remove the verse itself from everything around it. This is a major problem for the entire Christian "New Testament" corpus, its apocrypha and cognate writings.
5. The big one. How do you deal with the atonement? Jesus' death on the cross and then his resurrection are central to the structure of Christianity. Even if one focuses on the resurrection, you can't have a resurrection without a death. So do you leave it in? If yes, then how to deal with all of the theologies that were built around this from the earliest days? If no, then what are you really left with? I happened to believe that there was a real person, Jesus who was an itinerant preacher and who was sent to his death. However, why, what happened afterwards, are all open to interpretation - right from the beginning. What we have is the hero myth, writ large and it appealed to the world in which it was created. Short of Dr. Who's Tardis, we will never know what happened.
6. Inclusive language is almost a mythical attempt to reshape the bible. What difference does it really make if Jesus died for humanity, rather than for mankind? The problem is not language but the entire construct that implies that humanity (or mankind) is in need a scapegoat - that we are guilty of something more than just living life.

Why I do this

During the question period after my presentation at the SBL International conference in Amsterdam (entitled "The Personal is Still Political: What else did you expect, or have we forgotten just how radical feminist exegesis can be?"), I was asked a question by a very upset and angry participant. In essence, the questions were: "Why did I waste my time on something that I didn't believe in; didn't I have better things to do than rip apart the bible; why didn't I go and spend my time doing something else?" 

So, how to answer? There is the obvious, academic answer: The bible and Christianity are the foundations of western culture in all its good and its bad. Therefore, we have to understand where the structures of our societies' ethical systems, presuppositions about the nature of human interaction, etc. come from. And to do this, we have to look at the bible as the foundational document of Western society. 

That is how I would have answered the question 10 years ago. Two weeks ago, today, I answered quite differently. I just laid it all on the line. A short version: I was sexually abused when I was 8 years old by a Roman Catholic priest, became hyper-religious, spent years in therapy dealing with the biblical god. AND I DON'T WANT ANYONE TO EVER HAVE TO GO THROUGH WHAT I HAVE GONE THROUGH. 

Now I know that that is not going to happen. I don't control the world. The bible is still out there, and that biblical god is still holding sway over people's lives (for one example, just watch Jesus Camp!!) However, by writing what I do, by saying what I say, I make a difference in the lives of a few people. And they have expressed this to me. A whispered "thank you" from a conference participant years ago; a "I never believed anybody else felt like that" from a very distressed woman who came to talk to me (after I gave her the Psalm of Anger to read);  a secondhand thank you from the friend of an incest victim who said that reading "Christian Virtues and Recovery from Child Sexual Abuse" had helped her more than 2 year of therapy. And what I write sometimes forces other academic theologians to think differently about the Christian religious system - see Atonement, Cycles of Abuse, and Virtue, a classroom blog from Duke University. It is discussions like this one that give me hope for a better future.

I won't change the world. However, I have nothing to lose in taking the "extreme" position. The personal is political - my life experience is my life experience - but I am not alone and I am not the only one who has ever felt like this. I am not the only one who has ever suffered from a Christian worldview that blamed me, and not the perpetrator(s) of the crimes committed against me.

If what I say and write makes even one other person's life easier, it is enough.

I will end this blog with yet another quote from Babylon 5: year 1, episode 16:

Mollari: Of course, we do. There's a natural law. Physics tells us that for every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction. They hate us, we hate them, they hate us back. And so here we are - victims of mathematics.
Sinclair: He never listens.
Delenn: He will, sooner or later.
Sinclair: How can you be sure?
Delenn: Because the alternative is too terrible to consider. Without the hope that things will get better; that our inheritors will know a world that is fuller and richer than our own, life is pointless and evolution is vastly overrated.