Discovering a blog and discussing the self

Wow.

I have just discovered this:

http://janotec.typepad.com/terrace/2007/05/why_i_am_not_a_.html

And the blog it is from - http://janotec.typepad.com/terrace/

What should I say? I am relieved to find a blog that not only acknowledges literature and the importance of words (I was an English major) but that speaks to the concerns I am seeing. Concerns that are only growing in me; I have been wondering how to explain my thoughts on why social justice is NOT enough and is NOT to be the main focus of a Christian’s life but is to be a normal part of it.

I have studied a lot of things over the years. I find myself still thinking of it. I have gone, in the last 13 years from diving into liberal thought (through feminism), back to a more conservative stance, only to dive back into it, but not to the same extreme, and then: I read Kathleen Norris’ Cloister Walk. Though this, and the prayers of my roommate-at-the-time I started journeying out of feminism and into a deeper understanding of the world, of tradition, of what it is like to live as a free person. I have a lot of hope now, because of Norris’ struggle and study; I was introduced to many saints and began to understand the greater complexity and depth of the past and of tradition. At the same time I began realizing how feminist theory was way too simple and failed to do what it thought it was setting out to accomplish.

Now I can see – feminist and other gender theory was and is destroying the understanding of a human person, not to mention destroying the understanding of what it is to be a man or to be a woman. Some theory, from what I remember of it, even doubted the ability to communicate at all, using language. Ironic, isn’t it, that they could use language to say this. Hmmm. OF COURSE I would need to re-study this to remember exactly what was going on. However my memory is not fully faulty!

There is a lot, within what is called gender theory, that says that there is no human self, that all of gender and self-understanding and personhood is constructed, has not essentialness, no grounding in reality. They doubt the conception of reality and saying that all of reality, as we see it, is from a constructed framework, put on us instead of being within us.

This denies so many things. It denies:

*the Holy Spirit
*the soul
*God as the Creator
*the world being inside of the Church, not the other way around
*Christ as in the Incarnation – Human and Divine – Christ did not become a person that was constructed by His surroundings! He was Himself all the way through, consistently, faithfully, without wavering
*the resurrection of the dead and the final judgement
*human agency and responsibility (and it denies that it denies this point)

It denies this:

24 "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27 God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28' For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.’

Acts 17: 24-28 NKJV