Marriage and Patriarchy

In this post, from Mercy A. Oduyoye’s Daughters of Anowa (1995), I want to discuss Chapter 6 entitled “Marriage and Patriarchy,” particularly in light of my previous post’s discussion of Chapter 4’s concept of “culture’s bondswoman.” As I asserted in this previous post, there is a dialectical relationship between culture and African women, as expressed in …

Culture’s Bondswoman

From Mercy A. Oduyoye’s Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy (1995), I want to focus on Chapter 4 entitled “Culture’s Bondswoman.” What struck me as particularly interesting about this chapter is the sense that African women share a relationship with culture, a relationship where they become, in effect, culture’s bondswoman. More importantly, if following Oduyoye’s …

Spiritual Appropriation as Sexual Violence

In Chapter 6 of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005), which is entitled “Spiritual Appropriation as Sexual Violence,” Smith makes the following assertion: “sexual violence…suggests that the violation of [physical and psychic] boundaries operates not on the physical but on the spiritual and psychic levels as well.” Here, this becomes very important to …

Sexual Violence as a Tool of Genocide

In Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005), Andrea Smith’s offers the notion of “sexual violence as a tool of genocide.” What seems pivotal to this notion, as Smith argues it, is the role of the body as a hegemonic object –the body as a tool for coercion, domination, and oppression. As such, the …

Deception and Truth

In light of continuing to discuss Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (1996), I wanted to focus particularly on Chapter 6’s discussion on “deception” and “truth.” In my previous post, I made an important connection between Chapter 4-6 and the syllabus’s title of “Problematik of Otherness: An Unwanted Relative?” …

The Problematik of Otherness

In reading chapters 4-6 of Mirsolav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (1996), I wanted to make a particularly important connection to what can be described as “the problematik of Otherness." In my view, the “problematik” of otherness is that otherness cannot always be quantified, or even objectified. In …

The Cross, the Self, and the Other as Distancing and Belonging

There are two concepts from Miroslaw Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (1996) that I found particularly interesting, inextricably linked, and worthy of nuance: (1.) the cross, the self, and the other, and (2.) distancing and belonging. What runs beneath the two concepts is existence, or “being” –what it means …

More than Dialectics

  Betty Friedan’s approach to writing The Feminine Mystique (1963) is overwhelmingly influenced by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). In this way, The Feminine Mystique is a response to The Second Sex, where the main purpose of Friedan’s text is to fill in the ideological gaps left behind by de Beauvoir. These gaps, as I …

“Beauty Myth” as a Belief System

In The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (2002), in Naomi Wolf’s chapter entitled “Religion,” she puts forth the notion that the beauty myth is “the gospel of a new religion.”[1] Essentially, what I find that Wolf is arguing is not only that beauty requires the creation of a belief system, but …

Reinhold Niebuhr: On Democratic Civilization

From Chapter 4 of Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944), I want to focus particularly on Niebuhr’s discussion of a democratic civilization, and what “democratic” means. For Niebuhr, the task of a civilization that is decidedly “democratic” should be: [...] to integrate the life of its various subordinate, ethnic, religious …