Philosophy is making a big comeback in universities, even though some parents and educators lement that philosophy will not get students anywhere in life. 

The article makes some crucial points about the necessity of thought, morality, and ethics as a foundation for a healthy and rewarding career.  The higher education system in the US has increasingly become infatuated with specialization and technique instead of grounding students in critical thinking, research, and scholarship.  

What disappoints me about the article though is that in our secularized age philosophy has usurped theology's rightful role as "the queen of the sciences." ... more

This is the final installment in my Meditations on Rousseau series. 

''The mind has its needs as does the body.  The needs of the body are the foundation of society, those of the mind make it pleasant.''

A few years ago, one of my college professors recommended the book Dominion and Dynasty: A theology of the Hebrew Bible by Stephen G. Dempster. I bought it a while back, but hadn't gotten around to reading it until this summer.

Addition 12/14/07---This article has been cross-posted on Jesus Manifesto under the same title. 

The world we live in is run by the economic market the United States and the European Union has endorsed to provide luxury and comfort for the West.  Outside the mainstream media, the grassroots of the Western world is convinced that the free-market capitalist system we live in is causing the determent of thousands of people in the developing world that work for slave wages in order to assure us that we have electric iced tea makers at Wal-Mart for below $25.  When we read about the laborers having pesticides sprayed on workers so the fields are more efficient, or the children near steel mills who have lead poisoning, or the needle-pricked hands of poor children sewing soccer balls we should heed the warning God gave to the Jews through Jeremiah:

Only if you clean up your act (the way you live, the things you do), only if you do a total spring cleaning on the way you live and treat your neighbors, only if you quit exploiting the street people and orphans and widows, no longer taking advantage of innocent people on this very site and no longer destroying your souls by using this Temple as a front for other gods---only then will I move into your neighborhood. (Jeremiah 7)

The world is decaying because we take advantage of the poor, whether intentionally or indirectly through buying and selling, many of us our caught in the daydream of consumption.  We love things, and desire new things instead of the old and less fashionable.  The daydream of consumption has lead us to lead lives saturated with the sweat and blood of the poor and the fruit of this earth. 

It has been over a year since the Presbyterian Church USA decided that ''Mother, Child, and Womb'' was acceptable as a synonym for the relationship of the ''Father, Son, and Holy Spirit'' (Weblog , Christianity Today June 30, 2006).

Gender neutrality is a dubious topic amongst biblical scholars and laity that divides pretty evenly along political party lines, mostly because gender is political (thanks Foucault!). Many people that belong to the Church see the patriarchal metaphors to be the last marks of a society that, less than a hundred and fifty years ago, still did not give women the right to vote or own property. Those of us in the land of the living take the relative equality amongst the sexes for granted these days. But with such a notorious history being only five generations away, the issue of gender and sexuality is an important one to debate in the Body of Christ. Father and Son (with the Holy Spirit) are patriarchal terms and combine to create one of the motifs of the entire Bible. It is important to recognizes that these are such, though for the gender-neutral camp the very logical and pragmatic answer is: ''they are only metaphors, educate your parishoners and deal with it.''

That might be a solution for some people, but for others the metaphor is patriarchal because language is patriarchal (see Sedgewick, Butler, and your local Marxist critic). If men control the language then it is in their power to subvert women, hence the man writing part of the Bible choosing masculine terminology and metaphors. This is not some conspiracy theory, it is a simple, benign act---would John, a fisherman, choose fishing or sewing as a metaphor, or attempt to use the metaphor of Mother and Daughter when he is neither?

There are times when the obvious answer is just there.

People feel dull for saying such obvious things, but a lot of the time, when we are talking about something life-altering, eschatological, cosmological, incarnational, miraculous, or theological, the answer is . . . Jesus.

Right now I am drowning in psychoanalytic and gender theory reading for my Henry James class. I feel God is somehow pointing out the fact that this is one of those things I would have never had to encounter if I had chosen to pursue theology in graduate school: the boring novel. Henry James, to make points in his boring novels, is infatuated with italics. Really, quite the shock when you read it for the first time (sorry, I could not locate the sarcastic emoticon).

Please welcome Janelle Milazzo, our newest contributor here at Everyday Liturgy. Her first post acts as an apt biographical introduction to her vocation and thought.

I interact with a lot of the psycho-analyst types. . . which is probably rational given that I work in a program that is under the Cross-Cultural Counseling Center at IINJ. Currently, most of our counseling grad-student interns are leaving as their semesters are coming to a close, and thus they have to say goodbye to their clients that they have been see for therapy for the past several months.

Last week, I had a conversation with one of those interns who has been counseling the same (survivor of torture) client for almost 2 years. She shared with me how hard it is for both her and her client that she now must make a clean break in ties with him. She also told me about the next phase of her program and how she has a different internship as a clinician at a mental institution, working with patients with severe mental disturbance. I asked her (so far) which has been more challenging for her; working with asylee survivors of torture or working with mentally ill patients.

She paused and acknowledged that both groups of people are severely marginalized, making neither job easy to emotionally shoulder. However, she said that it has been a lot easier for her to find and give meaning to working with asylum seekers, who, if they can heal from their past trauma and get through the asylum process, will have a shot at achieving ''The American Dream'' and building a new and potentially fulfilling life for themselves. Working with patients with incurable mental disorders however, doesn't give the therapist a lot to assign meaning to. She went on to tell me about one of her current patients who spends most of his days locked in a padded room because in the past he has hurt both himself and has harmed his caretakers. He is suffering from advanced schizophrenia. Many of those patients in that institution need to be monitored carefully when they are out of their rooms so they literally do not escape and attempt to jump off the Staten Island Bridge. She said that in situations like that, it is difficult to assign meaning to the relationship or to the purpose of the therapy. ''Assign Meaning'' . . . I have heard that phrase many times this year. Usually, this has been in the context of the grad-student intern meetings that I sat in on with the supervisor of the counseling department. It has come up in conversation over working with clients to get ready for court, working with clients to sift through past trauma, working with clients as they try to literally start their lives over here, working through our own ''issues'' of how we try to assign our own personal meanings to the client's experience, realizing that to mentally cope we have private ways of assigning meaning to what we do and acknowledging that each culture and each religion has it's own way of ''assigning meaning'' to life's events and life's problems and then learning to listen to and accept others' ''assigned meaning'' of life. In other words, humans have this drive, no matter what their background or culture, to ''assign meaning'' to the events of life . . . especially to the hard events. Each time I hear ''assign meaning'', something inside me cringes slightly. Somehow, it seems that this rhetoric of ''assigning meaning'' is one nicely labeled semantic game of what humanity has been playing since the beginning of history. Or, perhaps it's more of a dilemma.