Shwenkfelder Library Collection

ALAN writes:

There was no television, no rock music, and no culture of youth worship in America when my friend Barbara was born in a small town in southwestern Indiana in 1935.  The town was surrounded by farms.  Barbara used to visit her grandparents in a white frame house with a large porch on one of those farms. There was a well for water and a drinking cup.  She would help her grandmother gather eggs in the chicken house.  Her grandmother wore a long-sleeved dress, a bonnet with a big brim, and shoes with two-inch heels.  Barbara remembers playing dominoes.  The grown-ups would play card games like Euchre. Around the player piano, the family would sing along to songs like “My Darling Clementine” and “She’ll be Coming ‘Round the Mountain.” Read More »

I HAVE a number of comments I have not been able to get to yet.

BET you didn’t know that an obscure English noblewoman was the “first computer programmer,” did you?

And do you know why there aren’t millions of female computer programmers today? It’s because girls lack “role models.” But then, boys must have lacked role models once too because at some point in scientific history there had to have been no role models at all. It’s a conundrum. But it’s a conundrum that doesn’t much disturb those who refuse to acknowledge that the vast majority of women do not want to be computer programmers no matter how many gorgeous and dubious role models are thrust in their faces.

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Vo Nguyen Giap

TIBERGE at Galliawatch reports:

It has been the one of the bizarre goals of the French Fifth Republic to devalue the heroism of the French Army in various wars, and to sing the praises of the victorious enemy, whether German, North Vietnamese, Algerian, or Mohammedan. This misplaced emotional attachment for the enemy and disdain for one’s own soldiers is a mysterious quirk of the Western mind, programmed, it would seem, to feel guilt for having attempted to save itself. We suffer guilt for winning a war, repentance for even fighting a war, and shame for having caused harm to the victorious enemy.

But usually it is a quirk of the left-wing Western mind, patriots being temperamentally more inclined to feel gratitude towards those who are willing to die defending them. If you recall the return of American soldiers from Vietnam you know that the great divide in the country in the mid-seventies would continue to split us into a so-called “cultural war”, and that this cultural war, like the fall of Saigon, has also been lost.

Before Saigon there was Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when a weakened French army suffered a monumental defeat at the hands of the fierce North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, a name we heard every day on the news in the ’70’s. From Wikipedia (accents retained): Read More »

Giovanna Garzoni

RITA JANE writes: 

The problem with the assertion that women working grows the economy is that all labor done at home doesn’t count toward traditional GDP analysis. If you pay a teacher to educate your kids, that generates measurable economic growth; homeschooling doesn’t.

In fact, any time a commercial transaction is substituted for a non-commercial one, the economy grows. But that doesn’t mean we’re better off. Today I mended a sweater, cooked our lunch at home, cooked dinner at home and cleaned the bathroom. If instead I’d paid my tailor to repair the sweater ($5), bought lunch out ($15), bought dinner out ($25) and had a cleaning lady do the bathroom ($10), I could have grown the economy by $55. The tailor, waitress and cleaning lady would undeniably be better off then, but would I be? Read More »

BOB writes:

I am writing regarding your recent comments on divorce. Doubtlessly, modern divorce law has wreaked havoc on the culture, on the institution of marriage, and on the family. But you propose (and correct me if I misunderstood) entirely forbidding legal divorce. This, I think, is a step too far.

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JAMES N. writes:

I recently made a comment on an Internet discussion about “traditional” marriage. The use of the term “traditional marriage” by defenders of what actually exists now rubs me the wrong way. I wonder what you think of my comment:

Traditional marriage (aka real marriage, actual marriage, marriage by definition, etc.) has three elements: Read More »

MARK STEYN suggests, in light of the National Park Service’s actions during the government shutdown, that national park lands be returned to the states.

JULIA writes:

I have an Asian exchange student in my home for the year. Due to visa constraints, he’s going to the local Catholic school.

My, has this been a learning experience! The Mass in school is so … disappointing, full of icky Christian pop songs. No reverence; no gravitas. There’s one butch-looking nun– excuse the expression, I can think of no other way to describe her. I had to look twice to see if she was male or female. I’m talking man pants, T-shirt, overweight, with keys hanging on belt loops. The other nun dresses like a monk and tries to be “loving” from what I can see. Most of the rest of the faculty seems to be laity, which I expected. Fortunately, the theology teacher seems to be on fire for the faith.

I went to the open house last month and was shocked to learn that the school is adopting the Common Core. Read More »

ALEX writes:

The depressing effect of mass female employment and mass immigration on wages that Jeff W. writes about in this entry is absolutely tremendous. Since 1970, while worker productivity has more than doubled, real wages have remained virtually unchanged.

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GRATEFUL Reader writes:

At The Public Discourse, Morgan Bennett’s article The New Narcotic discusses the effects on a person’s brain of internet pornography (the internet being the modern method of “drug” delivery) and the consequent effects of having so many “brain-damaged” people in society. Bennett writes:

In sum, brain research confirms the critical fact that pornography is a drug delivery system that has a distinct and powerful effect upon the human brain and nervous system. Read More »

Narcissus; detail from Narcissus and Echo by John William Waterhouse

JANE S. writes:

Reading the article by Janet Benton made me think about the explosive popularity of homemaking blogs in recent years. It took me by surprise. I never would have guessed that there are millions of women out there who love cooking and handicrafts, and blog about sewing aprons out of vintage handkerchiefs or making rugelach. Sites like Pinterest and Foodgawker give you an idea of the magnitude of this phenomenon. The software tutorial site lynda.com even has a tutorial showing you how to set up your own food blog.

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CHRISTINE LAGARDE, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, says such shocking things and yet no one challenges them. In this recent Wall Street Journal article, she is quoted as saying that women make the majority of consumer decisions and yet the world economy would be better off if many more women worked. Low birthrates prevail throughout the Western world. Old people are not great consumers. Economies run on people. But to Lagarde, the world economy is a competition between men and women. And she is willing to risk the whole thing so that women can win.

She also noted the key role of women in bringing Iceland out of its recession. When its economy crashed, “the banks, the funds, the government—everything was taken over by women,” she said. “So when it’s messy, you get the women in. But when the mess is sorted, keep the women,” she added, chuckling.

You see, if women can run Iceland, they can run anything. This woman is one of the most powerful financial figures in the world. She lobs insults against men. She has said that too much testosterone interferes with the ability of men to make responsible financial decisions. And no one raises the slightest objection. Read More »

From Inside Student Blogs (http://blogs.iesabroad.org/jasmine-hunter/a-moveable-feast-paris/)

MANY people are drawn to atheism not because of the philosophical arguments for it but because they are egalitarians suspicious of any form of hierarchy. They are not just suspicious of hierarchy, they are downright uncomfortable with it. This suspicion and discomfort make prayer almost impossible. After all, prayer is the act of addressing an infinitely higher being.

The egalitarian who attempts to pray is similar to a man dressed in a T-shirt, jeans and baseball cap appearing in the court of a king. To the man in the baseball cap, the regalia of the court is absurd and embarrassing. He may approach it with the interest of an antiquarian visiting a museum, but not as something real. The trappings and ceremony are so unnecessary. But more than that, the authority of the king makes the egalitarian intensely uncomfortable. He can either ridicule the ceremony that surrounds him or feel how primitive his own position is, which would be a shattering discovery.

The egalitarian finds it difficult, if not impossible, to pray. (I am referring to serious praying of course, not the squishy, self-centered emoting, in which God is a guy in a baseball cap too, that often substitutes for it today.) The problem with this is that God often does not communicate with a person until the person communicates with him first. This puts the egalitarian in a bind. He cannot discover God because he cannot speak to him.

For the egalitarian who truly wants to pray but feels that to do so is alien and foreign to him, there is a solution.

He must present himself in the court and say nothing. Even with his baseball cap on.

He should, as St. Francis de Sales once wisely advised, stand in this magnificent court like a statue and simply offer his presence. That is the first step for the person steeped all his life in equality to learn how to pray.

“In the palaces of kings there are statues arranged, which serve only to recreate the royal vision. Be content, then, as one of the these in the presence of God. He will animate this statue when he pleases.” [Consoling Thoughts, On Trials of an Interior Life, St. Francis de Sales; Tan Books]

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“Nuns must not be too spiritual, and must endeavour to be experts in humanity in order that convent life is not purgatory.”

—-    Pope Francis, Oct. 4th, to the nuns at the Santa Chiara cloistered convent in Assisi

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WHY NOT? 

JANET BENTON in The New York Times, of all places, writes a moving account of the maternal neglect she suffered when her mother became a feminist. Benton doesn’t disavow feminism — she points out that her homemaking grandmother “flew into rages” — but she recognizes the great misery feminism causes and nicely describes why the presence of a woman in the kitchen goes beyond mere food. She writes:

For my mother, the kitchen felt like a trap. When the women’s movement blossomed in the late 1960s, she was ready. She vanquished the spirit of homemaking the way Virginia Woolf had killed her “Angel in the House.”

And then a tidal wave of rage, disappointment and raw desire overtook her. I saw it in her vehemence toward my father and in the raucous consciousness-raising groups that met in our living room. I saw it in the changed contents of our dinner plates: a dried-out chicken leg, a potato collapsed inward from overbaking.

When my mother banged out work correspondence on an electric typewriter way past bedtime, my needs had no standing. On other nights I would lie awake for hours, unable to sleep until she came home at midnight.

Complaining got me nowhere. My mother was an unstoppable force, powerful, beautiful and finally happy. As her days and nights expanded to include solo shows, romance and the founding of feminist organizations, I could see in her radiant face and laughter that she was fulfilling her potential. Her red hair grew ever upward, a hood of curls that shouted out her freedom.

This is a good description of the energizing nature of feminism. It’s a raw and dazzling form of energy, as is all revolutionary fervor. It shoots across the sky of a woman’s life and falls to the ground. Compare it to the “boredom” of homemaking, which is an invisible anchor that holds all in place.

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