Adam Omelianchuk argues that my defense of the distinction between woman’s equality in being and subordinate role fails. I respond that his case misses the point of certain aspects of my argument, that it begs the main question, and that it depends upon an unclear notion of metaphysical equality/inferiority.

Unfortunately, we are heirs to a history which has conditioned us to a remarkable extent. In every time and place, this conditioning has been an obstacle to the progress of women. Women’s dignity has often been unacknowledged and their prerogatives misrepresented; they have often been relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude. This has prevented women from truly being themselves and it has resulted in a spiritual impoverishment of humanity.

Development ethicists see reducing intrahousehold gender inequality as an important policy aim. However, it is unclear that a minimalist cross-cultural consensus can be formed around this goal. Inequality on its own may not bring women beneath a minimal welfare threshold. Further, adherents of complementarian metaphysical doctrines may view attempts to reduce intrahousehold inequality as attacks on their worldviews. Complicating the justificatory task is the fact that familiar arguments against intrahousehold inequality, including those from agency and self-esteem, depart from premises that (...) complementarians reject—premises about the value of independence or the moral irrelevance of gender. I propose that development ethicists should offer complementarianism-compatible arguments against the norms and practices constitutive of intrahousehold inequality. I develop arguments against two intrahousehold inequality-supportive practices that depart from complementarian premises. Specifically, I argue that patriarchal risk and gender schemas that devalue women's labor prevent men from discharging complementarian duties to promote women's welfare. (shrink)

With the active involvement of women in the church and home, there is a need to study God’s design for the relationship between men and women. In reaffirming the divine order of this relationship, discussing the biblical gendered roles has been one of the major contending issues. So emerging ecclesiologies in Africa are beginning to challenge the traditional understanding of male headship in the church. Therefore, the article argues that the ontology of men and women’s relationship provides a better framework (...) for understanding the nature of authority and submission in the church. This article states fairly the biblical foundation for the ontology of male and female relationship in the church from both the complementarian and egalitarian views. Also, this article presents the male and female relationship in contemporary African ecclesiology. Furthermore, the article contends that the application of the biblical foundation for the relationship between men and women provides a strong framework for authority and submission in the church, which reaffirms the male headship. The goal of the article is to use the biblical framework for the ontology of the relationships between men and women to propose a theology of authority and submission in the church without undermining the nature and worth of men and women, who are both created in the image and likeness of God. A qualitative methodology was used for this article, which integrates both primary and secondary sources to delineate the thesis of the study. Contribution: This article contributes to the area of ecclesiology in Africa, which shows that the theology of the church is relevant for engaging cutting-edge issues, such as gender studies, human relations and personhood. It explains the influence and implications of the ontology of gender relationship on authority and submission in the church to affirm human dignity and equality in the church. (shrink)

In a recent article Steven Cowan defended the claim that female subordination and male authority are merely functional differences. Drawing insights from Natural Law, I argue that complementarianism typically speaks of these as proper functions of male and female designs, thus making men and women metaphysically unequal in being. Furthermore, I maintain that the function "serving as a means to an end" is less valuable than the function "having the authority to direct the end." Hence, Cowan fails to defeat (...) the objection that the claim that women are equal to men in being, but subordinate in role is incoherent. (shrink)

Lewis was not, and is not, very popular in the academy. I think there are three reasons.First, he did not stick to his subject, which was medieval and Renaissance literature. He wrote highly successful children's books, theological works, and articles accessible to nonspecialists, and was an acclaimed broadcaster. All this allowed his critics to suggest that he was not a proper academic, because proper academics do not throw their nets so wide.Second, he was good at everything he did (except perhaps (...) some areas of philosophy: he was famously bested by Elizabeth Anscombe when he ventured onto her home ground). This was perhaps the most infuriating thing about him. The justification for academic superspecialization is that one cannot do more than one thing really well. But Lewis did. He was a better Renaissance scholar than those who criticized him, moaned about him in the Oxford cloisters, and blackballed him for appointments. He is relentlessly readable; therefore (said his detractors) his scholarship must be shoddy.Lewis infuriates me too. Often, when I think I have had an original thought in some domain a million miles from Renaissance literature, I discover not only that Lewis had had that thought already, but had explicated it, seeing angles I never noticed, and more often than not he had exploded it, using a tenth of the words I used, and all in devastatingly simple prose that would entertain and illuminate the most uninterested plumber.And third, of course, he was a Christian, which was then becoming an unforgivable sin, as it remains now in the humanities (though not the physical sciences or mathematics). The usual (stated) objection to academic Christians is that their theological commitment precludes objectivity, but Lewis's academic writing (notably his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama [1954]) was so good that that indictment could not stick, and his opponents descended into incoherent fulmination about superannuated paradigms.These reasons help to explain the chilly reception (or, more often, nonreception) by self-billed “serious thinkers” of Lewis's “space trilogy”: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength (hereafter THS). In relation to THS there is another reason: the novel is about them. No, about us. Lewis's view of us is just too keen, his diagnosis too alarming.The main concerns of THS are dehumanization, the role of institutions in that dehumanization, and the desire of individuals to be part of an esoteric circle. More broadly, it concerns the nature of evil. Its debt to the Divine Comedy and to Charles Williams, Lewis's fellow Inkling, are clear.The central character is a young academic, Mark Studdock. We all know him. His education had been “neither scientific nor classical—merely ‘Modern.’ That left him pathetically manipulable. The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour.” Studdock was “a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge.” He stood for nothing; he weighed nothing.Humans are not supposed to be weightless. We will do anything to convince ourselves that we have mass. Many of our strategies are counterproductive. Some are disastrous and lead to dissolution. Studdock's strategy is one of the commonest and most catastrophic: he tries to get to the center of things—to the “Inner Ring” whose geography is described by Lewis in his 1944 lecture (and later essay) of that name. At some level, at least occasionally, Studdock knows the stupidity of this ambition, but he closes his eyes and his mind. And he begins to be used by forces far greater than any he had dreamed of.The book opens with a merciless (and horribly entertaining) account of academic politics. Read it and cringe in recognition: the mechanics of toadyism; the devices for getting your own way with a committee (put the real business in coded form at the end of an agenda, to be dealt with on a hot day after lunch); infuse everything with an appeal to self-interest, but never put it quite like that, for fear of awakening long-dormant altruism. Obfuscate: do not call the sale of an ancient woodland in which Merlin's body lies “the sale of Bragdon Wood” but the sale of “the area coloured pink on the plan.” Learn to talk like the bursar of Studdock's college, for each of his sentences was “a model of lucidity: and if his hearers found the gist of his whole statement less clear than the parts, that may have been their fault.” As a manual for getting your own way in institutions, The Prince is artless and benign beside THS.Studdock becomes a pawn in a big and diabolical game. A vast organization, the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, known, of course, as “NICE” (never underestimate the importance of an acronym), which turns out to be the instrument of dark supernatural forces, is becoming a state within a state. It is unaccountable. That is its tagline, indeed: it will be free of the red tape that inhibits the research of more conventional institutions. And who can define with sufficient exactitude the difference in principle between tedious administrative red tape and moral stricture? If you are in with the NICE, anything goes.The NICE's project is the unmaking of everything that is quintessentially human and, eventually, everything that is biological. Life itself is just too unhygienic. Beauty is a joke. Sentiment a delusion. Love merely a result of chemical interactions in the brain. Nothing signifies.The NICE has a handful of opponents—a raggedy bunch (including a bear) under the direction of Ransom, who has traveled outside planet Earth in the previous two books in the trilogy. The company, it turns out, is the remnant of the old Arthurian kingdom of Logres, which has always been in tension, if not war, with the modern kingdom of Britain: “Haven't you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers: the home of Sidney—and of Cecil Rhodes.” They recruit Studdock's wife, Jane, who can spy clairvoyantly on the NICE, and then a revived Merlin comes from his tomb to their aid.THS is strong meat. Many will balk at its supernaturalism, and perhaps in particular its complementarian view of the relationship between the sexes. But hear Lewis out: you might not agree with him, but he is always interesting. When I read THS thirty years ago, I thought it a ripping yarn. It still is. But now I see it as prescient, prophetic, and profoundly important. It should be on every university reading list, for every subject, and no one should be allowed to hold any kind of public office until they have shown that they have assimilated its lessons. (shrink)

En principio, la poesía considerada como génesis del arte árabe, y, más tarde, la prosa de adab surgieron con la idea de ciencia que destacaba el dominio de la belleza, idea que se proyectaría después sobre la música. Por otra parte, la aportación griega al legado filosófico y científico árabe clásico, cuya sombra aparece reflejada sobre los primeros tratados de los filósofos y teóricos musicales, entre los que se encuentran al-Kindi (s. IX)y al-Farabi (s. X), germinó en la concepción de (...) un nuevo sentido sobre la "belleza". De esta forma, y desde un observatorio que tiene como punto de referencia el mundo clásico griego, los nuevos parámetros surgirían como consecuencia de su propia identidad e idiosincrasia, en los que el patrimonio poético y musical, unido al pensamiento religioso y filosófico, complementarían la taracea de un nuevo concepto, "estética musical". El estudio de la música medieval árabe revela que la armonía entre el contenido poético, lingüístico, rítmico y melódico caminaron en paralelo, produciéndose un equilibrio, una relación armónica, y, en definitiva cósmica que les llevó a acuñar un cierto ideal estético basado en la belleza y la emoción artística que despertaba como reflejo de una armonía entre cuerpo y alma, y que facilitaría la unión con lo infinito y la divinidad. (shrink)

In 1 Timothy 2:11-15 women are forbidden to teach and have authority over men in the church. The ground for this instruction is the creation account in Genesis 2 that asserts the priority of Adam over Eve in the order of creation. The second reason for the instruction is the deception of Eve according to the account of the Fall in Genesis 3. This pericope has elicited arguments between advocates of egalitarianism and complementarianism revolving over the issues of grammar, (...) the context of the Ephesian church with regard to false teachings and the comparison of this text with the other writings of Paul, for those that subscribe to the authorship of Paul. The contention of this article is that verse 15 provides a major clue as to how this text should be understood. In addition, the author's rhetoric in this text is interrogated with regard to the text's own internal literary and theological logic. In this regard, the author is found to be inconsistent in his outlook, for the grace that was poured out abundantly on him: a blasphemer, a persecutor and a violent man and on account of his ignorance and unbelief is apparently, being denied women on account of Eve's deception. (shrink)

This paper clarifies and reflects on the four values that Serene Khader argues feminism can do without in Decolonizing Universalism: independence individualism, personhood individualism, Enlightenment freedom, and gender‐role eliminativism. Persuaded by her condemnation of the view Khader calls “headship complementarianism” and her defense of a different form of gender complementarianism, the paper leaves the question of gender role eliminativism aside. It starts by presenting some concerns about her treatment of Enlightenment freedom, independence individualism, and personhood individualism. It agrees (...) that Enlightenment freedom and independence individualism have no place in feminism. Contrary to Khader, however, it maintains that personhood individualism is necessarily a feminist value. It then shows why the value of women’s autonomy is more central to non‐imperialist feminism than Khader acknowledges. Ultimately, it agrees with Khader that feminism can be both universalist and non‐imperialist provided that these qualifications are adopted. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Serene Khader's recent book Decolonizing Universalism is an important contribution to a number of strands of thought, activism, and scholarship. It is also an ambitious one: the book sets out a tall order for itself. On the one hand, it is an intellectual contribution to the thought and practice of transnational feminism, specifically. This paper aims to draw out lessons from the book by focusing on two of the secondary points Khader makes. The first is her response to gender (...) complementarianism, the second critically responds to her discussion of social progress towards justice. The latter inspires a critical question for Khader and her readers: how can we square the criticism of the lack of attention to cultural context exhibited by ‘missionary feminists’ with critical attention to the context that produced their inattention? The essay concludes with a call for Khader's overarching project of ‘nonideal universalism’. (shrink)