Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
Is feminism heresy?
Leithart offers no definition of how he uses the word “feminism” and he doesn’t even offer any clues to help us. There is no accounting for the diversity of feminist thought. There is just “feminists”, a conceptual unity, who apparently “reject the Genesis account of creation as misogynist.” I think I could find feminists who would reject this account of feminists. I would raise my hand but I am too busy angrily typing. Wife-unit would raise her hand but she is too busy burning her bra.
The truth behind the gluten taboo:
I have no problem with religious diets. What I have a problem with is religious diets masquerading as scientifically sound dietary advice. It’s one thing to say, “Hey, I just think it is immoral to genetically alter plants, and therefore I don’t eat them because they represent modern evil.” That’s fine, as long as you stop there.
What to do about free-ranging kids:
Free-range advocate Lenore Skenazy painted the Meitivs’ neighbors as “busybodies,” and in the Washington Post, Petula Dvorak held up the Meitivs’ ordeal as proof that “we’ve morphed from being a village that helps raise children to a parenting police state,” speculating that whoever called the police on the Meitivs “wanted to get back at them” for their free-range advocacy.
The various stories of Easter illustrating God’s vindication:
The story, told in detail only an amateur butcher could love, is found in 2 Maccabees 7. In it, Antiochus IV Epiphanes is the most recent occupying thug oppressing the Jews. His occupying Greek regime attempts to pacify the Jews by stamping out what makes them Jews, their fidelity to Torah. In this charming little ‘Easter’ vignette Antiochus tries to force seven Israelite brothers and their mother, by suffering severe torture, to eat pork.
A guide to identifying baseball fights:
I’m never quite sure, as a fan, how to feel when a fight breaks out in a game I’m watching. On one hand, it’s a breakdown of civilized society, a disintegration of the basic fundamental guidelines of human interaction that separate us from the beasts. On the other hand: FIGHT!!!!
The Atlantic analyzes the worst Spider-Man stories:
But when the “event” era hit Marvel—huge crossover, multi-issue epics—awfulness mixed with hype. Nothing, then, was forgettable. And then there’s the Internet generation—many of us remember The Clone Saga in a way that we don’t remember, say, the earlier escapades of the Jackal and Gwen Stacy (always a bad idea), so the awfulness of the 90s and the aughts resonates in a way that awfulness of the 60s, 70s and early 80s doesn’t.
Providence, Sorrow, and Joy in Robinson’s Lila:
So then it is part of the providence of God, as I see it, that blessing or happiness can have very different meanings from one time to another. ‘This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is.
References to the New Testament in Bob Dylan song titles:
• Matthew: “Narrow Way”
• Mark: “Marchin’ to the City”
• Luke: “Man of Peace”
• John: “Born in Time”
• Acts: “Hurricane”
The Privilege of Charlie Hebdo:
First, while power flows from pre-existing privilege, it also grows from the barrel of a gun, and the willingness to deal out violence changes power dynamics, even when it doesn’t have a truly revolutionary outcome.
How we’ve all misread Lewis’s The Great Divorce:
In particular, as I read it, I thought of how often I have heard The Great Divorce trotted out as evidence that Lewis believed in things like purgatory and the possibility of post-mortem salvation. From where I stand, it seems to me that the book often becomes a champion of a sort of weak-willed, half-hearted, half-committed universalism where we’re permitted to hold a vague belief that everyone is somehow magically alright in the end (a tolerant and loving position, no doubt).