I’m not going to use the word “misogyny” after this line right here. Other people have called him stronger things: sexist, homophobic, even racist. For a lot of people those terms have a tinge of intention to them (you can’t be, say, a sexist, without intentionally trying to push women down), and I’m honestly not sure that’s what’s going on here. ( Read more... )

It's not often that I follow books coming out. I wait with baited breath for movies (Hobbit! Twilight! Catching Fire! *goes splodey*), and I'm always on the lookout for new music that's to my rather eclectic tastes. But books --fun books, popular press-- for whatever reason I don't read them as much as I used to. Chalk it up to reading so much for ( Read more... )

Rachel Held Evans, a well-known Christian author and blogger, hosts a "ask a...." interview series on her blog. This week she interviewed a stay-at-home dad.

http://rachelheldevans.com/ask-a-stay-at-home-dad-response

My own comment over at the post:

I love ( Read more... )

Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has not made me a Gentile.
Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has not made me a slave.
Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has not made me a woman.
As an undergrad student, I had a friend, Ruth, who prayed these words every morning. Well, not ( Read more... )

My university sends out security alert emails whenever there's a security concern involving a student, even if it doesn't happen on-campus. They're good for the obvious practical issues, but they also tell you a lot about university culture. I've received them from four different schools over the years, and the difference in university expectations ( Read more... )

(This post is part of the August synchroblog.)

A few weeks ago Jared Wilson entered my world for the first and what I hope will be the last time with a sexist screed that rocked the blogosphere, or at least my corner of it. His original post has been deleted, and I don’t exactly want to give his words any more air-time than they already received by ( Read more... )

I took a huge bag of books down to the Fordham library today - last day of the semester, and we'd gotten to the "we won't renew these anymore, so get them back to us NOW" stage of library communications. I ended up taking a bus to campus on account of the weight. Definitely the right call, though it was a lovely day and normally I'd walk ( Read more... )

(Written for the March 2012 synchroblog; links TBA.)

I have a secret: for years now, I've wished I was eligible for the selective service.

In my country, at the age of eighteen all the guys have to register for the military draft. They don't actually have to serve, and chances are negligible that they'll be called up, since (for all our wars) America ( Read more... )

I actually saw this one coming a mile away:

What the 'After-Birth Abortion' and 'Personhood' Debates Have in Common

A few weeks back I wrote about a journal article proposing that infanticides just after birth should have the same legal status as abortions just before. Meaning that they should be legal if the mother's welfare was at risk, and not ( Read more... )

Whatever else the recent blowup over the ACA contraception mandate might have shown, it's that Americans need a better epistemology. The news story has interested me on many levels and will probably pop up in blog posts from time to time. But one philosophical idea kept seeming to float to the forefront, at least in my mind as I read the different ( Read more... )