Tag: women
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Shakespeare’s Sister
The concluding paragraph of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own kinda gives me chills sometimes: For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a…
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Should there be a place for disdain in our emotional lives?
In this post, I want to argue that disdain, contempt, and scorn have no moral place in our emotional lives. In short, my claim is that these emotions are immoral because they target persons and not actions, and they violate the principle of equality of persons. One can feel shame, anger, hatred, or envy in…
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Critique in the Age of Hope
I listened to Obama’s first presidential radio address yesterday. The presidential radio address hasn’t changed much since Roosevelt’s fireside chats, but as I sat listening to it, I felt like many of Roosevelt’s listeners must have done: though many things are out of my control, my role as a citizen has been exhausted in electing the…
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What’s Right with Kansas: Kathleen Sebelius
Back in June, the Washington Post did a two-part series on Kathleen Sebelius as potential VP: The Case For and The Case Against. The case for Sebelius is pretty strong: she comes from the famous state that demographically “ought” to vote differently than it does, she’s managed to appeal to Republicans and independent voters during…
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Wendell Berry on Faustian Economics
Wendell Berry’s article in the May Harper’s is out from behind the paywall. It’s a really interesting attempt to take moderns to task for their conflation of freedom with limitlessness and infinite progress. (My Metafilter post on Wendell Berry is the most popular thing I’ve ever done there, so go check it out if you…
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Incrementalists win?
Incrementalists win. That’s the take-away message from today’s NYTimes article on the aftermath of Gonzales v. Carhart, where the Supreme Court upheld a ban on partial birth abortions: The court did not talk about big concepts and issues like privacy, but about the small, gripping details of how abortion works, said Professor Hendershott, author of…
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Advice for Romantics: Stay in School, Get a Job
The Boston Globe has a long story about the shift in marriage rates for educated women. It looks like: 1. “The median age for a first marriage nationally is now 25.5 for women and 27 for men. It is even higher for those with graduate degrees. In Massachusetts, the median age at first marriage is…
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Gender-Sex Wars and Civil Society
The controversy over John Aravosis’s “big girl” comment reminds me of this book, by Didier Eribon. Aravosis argues that, amongst metropolitan gay men, these effeminate putdowns have no misogynistic overtones, and that, anyway, we should be worried about macropolitical action rather than the nuances of our insults. After all, it’s this sort of infighting that…
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When Fortune Does Not Want Men to Oppose Her Plans, She Blinds Their Minds
In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli wrote, “In order to make Rome greater and bring it to the greatness it attained, she [fortuna] judged it necessary to defeat it…. In ordaining this she prepared everything for its recovery [manipulating events] to form a great vanguard under a commander untainted by any shame of defeat and…
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Sex and Judgment
So in the last post, I showed how the initial versions of Christian judgment were remarkably modest and fallibilist with regard to other people. This makes a certain amount of sense, since Augustine was attached to a fairly rationalist theology, and always gave both doctrinal and basically ethical reasons for his judgments. (For instance, with…