Well the next installment of What Have You is up over at NSA. Click here if you feel moved to follow along and listen to our coffee date podcast in the car. We chat about policing our emotions and our various forays into some of the more obscure domestic arts.
Meanwhile – here are a couple pics.
So here’s a thing that happened. Rachel and I started a podcast! It is nothing if not professional and glamorous. We basically get ourselves a coffee, drive somewhere and park (generally behind Goodwill, just to keep it classy) and then we chat in the car for a bit. Often we talk over the top of each other, sometimes we forget to turn off our phones and Mom calls us in the middle. Sometimes we’re more tired and slap-happy than other times – for instance we’ve noticed that if we do this after dinner then we are 200% more likely to invent words. But. Nonetheless. We are posting them.
Today, as we all know, the feminists are being silly again. In a sort of “that’ll learn ‘em” move, the feminists are urging women to refrain from doing any work today. A day without women working will apparently land us all in a huge mess which will teach us a lesson of some sort. There are so many levels of funny about this that it’s difficult to know where to begin.
But the thing that’s shocking is the rest of the nation which puts up with this. Don’t we all know the basic rules that you should never negotiate with terrorists? Granted, compared to real terrorists these women are just gesturing menacingly with their parasols, but the principle is the same. If you give in to that behavior then you have guaranteed you’ll get more of what you just subsidized.
So anyways, I wrote a book! What?!
(Is it unseemly to mention it? Possibly, possibly.) On the other hand, if I don’t mention it, how would you know that you could pre-order it and get the sale price? In fact, if you pre-order now I hear that it’s possible you may even receive your copy before the official release date of September 27. So there you go!
Oh. Did you want to know what it’s about? It’s about the whole, “What does it mean to be a faithful Christian woman” question. Does it mean we have to look and act like 1950s housewives? (Please no.) Does it mean we should fling ourselves into the corporate world and hope we get to witness to someone along the way? (That’s a pretty limp aspiration.) Should we care about the feminists? Should we agree with the feminists? Should we look at whatever the feminists are doing and then do the opposite? What is the chief end of woman? Do denim skirts turn out to be the key to all godliness and holiness? (You don’t have to buy the book – I’ll just tell you the answer to that one. The answer is no.) I tried to work through those kinds of questions in the book – in an attempt to offer a vision of what feminine faithfulness could look like right now, in the twenty-first century, as we look at the ever-quickening swirl of cultural chaos around us. How can we not merely stand against the crazy but actually use our uniquely feminine strengths to push back against the tide?
I’ve been thinking about different kinds of temptation lately – and something just struck me about the whole category of “mental” sins. When I say mental sins I am distinguishing them from those obvious and tangible sins like murder, rape, theft, adultery . . . although of course we do know that those things launched their careers as the purely mental sins of hatred, lust, or greed. Right now I’m talking about the sins that come to roost in your head like discontent, moping, anger, self-pity, or the inability to forgive – basically those sins that, one way or another, interfere with joy. You can look into Virtualtreatmentcenter.com and get virtual counseling with a therapist who can help you solve your problem.
They seem to always be provoked by an external trial of some sort – and that trial can be big or small, real or imagined. Maybe your house is too small, or your husband isn’t a spiritual leader, you don’t have a husband and wish you did, your best friend turned sour on you, your kids colored on the couch, you don’t have money to pay the bills, you were abused, or you are struggling with a crippling illness. Whatever it is, whether it is a genuine trial or just an imagined trial that could be filed under the category of first world problems (you don’t have very many followers on Instagram but you can see how the experts uses Instagram Likes kaufen to make this possible), the point is that this is the moment at which the temptation sprouts.
But here’s what I’ve noticed – there are always two things in play. The objective trial is one thing – the temptation to sin about it is another. But temptation is a master of disguise, and what it usually does is pretend to be the trial itself. I think that falling for this little ruse can often be why we struggle with something that just seems unconquerable – we’re looking at and fighting against the wrong thing and that’s why we don’t get the victory. Read More
Jory Micah had another response to my last blog post, and once again she proved herself able to handle a disagreement in a mature fashion. Kudos on going to an exegetical argument – that’s the place where this discussion can actually get some traction.
One possible confusion, however, is that I think Jory may be interacting with what she thinks is my view on gender roles, but which I myself would never claim. She seems to think that the fact that I disagree with feminism tells her all she needs to know about my position. But I grew up in Moscow, and Doug Wilson is my dad, and to be honest that’s like saying I grew up in Sherwood Forest. Lines are drawn a bit differently here and we don’t fit neatly into categories. People can shout all they want about Doug the Great Misogynist Oppressor, but he started the schools which his daughters attended, and he made sure that we had years of Latin and years of Greek and Physics and Logic and Classical History and Classical Lit and Church History and Philosophy and Apologetics and Doctrine and Rhetoric and Poetry. He raised his girls (who are now raising his grand-daughters) to argue and scrap and think for themselves and study and own businesses and write books and, yes, submit to their own husbands as to the Lord. But he also made dang sure that those husbands were worth submitting to. (I can hear the internet yelling already! Aagh! Courtship model! The injustice! Where are my smelling salts!?!) Read More