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etsy update 10/14

October 14, 2012

links & things

October 14, 2012October 14, 2012

home tour: The Kitchen

October 12, 2012

autumn light

October 12, 2012October 12, 2012

live/wear

October 11, 2012

water lily thrift: new arrivals

October 8, 2012October 8, 2012

DC + Fredericksburg

October 7, 2012

meditation on fear

October 2, 2012December 28, 2015

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Here’s the groovy dress. Here are some of my groovy seminary friends.
Same
Not my finest eyeliner work, but the teal matched the floor-length 1970s dress I wore to tonight’s Advent party perfectly.
“Death is the radical other for Western society in general and Medicine in particular, and as such it is our god.” - The Anticipatory Corpse
Good morning, snow. ❄️
From the conclusion of my #purityculture paper: Putting sexual purity aside for just a moment, I wonder what it would mean for contemporary practitioners of Christianity to take seriously a concept of chastity in service of cultivating virtues. Jerome, for instance, advises Eustochium to cultivate against certain behaviors, describing a woman who hoards fine things for herself “while Christ lies at the door naked and dying” and another who attempts to appear more religious by giving an inconsequential amount of her wealth to the poor. When virginity is paired with virtue, it becomes the outward sign of a life lived in service to God, and not an end in itself. This is what Purity Culture often misses, and indeed what the church fathers may have themselves missed. The church fathers inherited and reinforced a rigid and unimaginative view of women’s roles, as do today’s Purity Culture advocates. Yet to throw it out altogether comes at a cost. As a feminist and a Christian raised in Purity Culture, what would it look like for me to “reclaim” chastity as a cultivation of those values Mary embodies, namely humility, self-control, wisdom, careful speech, care for the poor, and dedication to “doing the work” of Christ? Certainly, to do so would require a denial of certain luxuries in favor of asceticism, like Eustochium. It would require a life spent in prayer like Macrina, and a cultivation of courage like St. Agnes. It might even require the firm resolve of the martyred Virgin at Antioch, and a determination to shed societal and self-made “constraints of fear.” While views have changed on human sexual ethics in the last two thousand years, the value of Mary’s virtues endures. We, like the church fathers, inherit a set of cultural assumptions regarding women’s bodies and women’s roles. But, like them, we have the power to subvert them. (This is for an early Christian history class so is not a straightforward critique, but if folks would like to read the whole thing, I can send it along once it’s graded later in the month)

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