Having Two Legs

In The War Against Boys, Christina Hoff Sommers describes Camille Paglia’s “refreshing” view of men:

For Paglia, male aggressiveness and competitiveness are animating principles of creativity: ‘Masculinity is aggressive, unstable, combustible. It is also the most creative cultural force in history.’ Speaking of the ‘fashionable disdain for ‘patriarchal society’ to which nothing good is ever attributed,’ she writes, ‘But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.’ Men, writes, Paglia, ‘created the world we live in and the luxuries we enjoy.’ ‘When I cross the George Washington Bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think — men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry.’

-Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys, 63-64.

Altogether there must have been about 300 different (often competing) foreign denominations (or otherwise distinctive foreign groupings) of Christians in China when I arrived there in 1948. It was the “free enterprise” business model applied to religion…

So a major offence of the contemporary foreign missionary enterprise is that it operates on the same principles of ambition and expansionism that businesses do. The motivation is not profit but power. And the self satisfaction derived from expansion into new territories. It is of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. Independent and denominational missions in China were all setting up branches and extending their territory, just like Ford and GM or Coke and Pepsi have done all over the world. So when the Communists came on the scene with their altruistic message of “love your neighbor as yourself” (at that time – once they gained control they became just as selfish as any before them) it exposed the colonial, carnal aspects of foreign mission operations.

-Bob Finley, Reformation in Foreign Missions, 41-42.

Betsy Hart writes:

“Just as sexual pornography twists an understanding for men about real women’s bodies and sexual appetites, so romantic pornography twists the perception for women about real men and how they “ought” to behave toward women, which tends to amount to, well, behaving like a woman.”

Read the whole article here.

HT: Justin Taylor