Tried With Fire

This quote is from Dorothy L. Sayer's essay Are Women Human? "When the pioneers of university training for women demanded that women should be admitted to the universities, the cry went up at once: "Why should women want to know about Aristotle?" The answer is NOT that all women would be the better for knowing about Aristotle… but simply: "What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him - but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him."" 1 Academia isn't what it used to be in Sayers' day, but it's taken time for women to overcome this sort of prejudice. In The Disappearing Spoon , Sam Kean tells the story of Maria Goeppert-Mayer who won the Nobel Priz...

The Romantic period is typified by an uncontested embrace of personal experience, not merely as self-expression or self-representation, but also as epistemology and personal identity (who I am, ontologically)... Romanticism claimed that you know truth through the lens of your personal experience, and that no overriding or objective opposition can challenge the primal wisdom of someones subjective frame of intelligibility. In romanticism, this knowing and being known is identity-rooted and identity-expressive. Romanticism went beyond a solipsistic, me-centered understanding of selfhood. Solipsism is the belief that only one's own mind and its properties are sure to exist. Romanticism took this one step further to declare personal feelings and experience the most reliable measure and means of discerning truth. 1 This quote from Rosaria Butterfield's Openness Unhindered  makes the case that sexual orientation as identity is a byproduct of romanticism. I agree with her complet...

Dorothy Sayers clearly describes what happens when we forget that people are individual human beings made in the image of God. We are not clones. We are not the Borg . We are not data points to be placed on a bell curve and judged accordingly. God is not a statistician or a manufacturer who churns out copies of a limited set of models over and over again. He is Creator, God, and Father who has fashioned mankind out of His infinite creativity. I think her words are applicable, not just to my country but to the church as well. What have we lost because we have forgotten what it means to be human and to treat others as human beings too? What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. A certain amount of classification is, of course, necessary for practical purposes…What is unreasonable and irritating is to assume all one's tastes and preferences have to be conditioned by the class to which one belongs... To o...

To jump start Monday morning, here are a few quotes on work: I do not know that women, as women, want anything particular, but as human beings they want, my good men, exactly what you want yourselves: interesting occupation, reasonable freedom for their pleasures, and a sufficient emotional outlet. What form the occupation, the pleasures and emotion may take, depends entirely upon the individual. 1 No longer must we be relentlessly driven to find identity in our work. No longer must we use our work to one-up each other. No longer must we work out of obligation and duty. By  His  work on the cross, Jesus makes us people who can finally work as we are meant to. Because of Him, our labor is no longer in vain. 2 We can thank Genesis 3 for the toil, but we can thank Genesis 2 for the privilege of tending God's creation. Yes, our work is tainted because of sin, but as His image-bearers, we can glorify God in whatever He gives us to do. 3 1. Are Women Human? , Dorothy L....

[V]olumes of angry controversy have been poured out about the Christian creeds, under the impression that they represent, not statements of fact, but arbitrary edicts. The conditions of salvation, for instance, are discussed as though they were conditions for membership of some fantastic club like the Red-Headed League. They do not purport to be anything of the kind. Rightly or wrongly, they purport to be necessary conditions based on the facts of human nature. We are accustomed to find conditions attached to human undertakings, some of which are arbitrary and some not. A regulation that allowed a cook to make omelettes only on condition of first putting on a top hat might conceivably be given the force of law, and penalties might be inflicted for disobedience; but the condition would remain arbitrary and irrational. The law that omelettes can only be made on condition that there shall be a preliminary breaking of eggs is one with which we are sadly familiar. The efforts of ideali...

I've been on a Dorothy Sayers kick thanks to these lectures by Jerram Barrs. Here is a list of recent Sayers' reads: Are Women Human?  - Two short but brilliant essays on how women are perceived and treated. Even though these were written in the 1930s, Sayers' questions are relevant today. Are women human? Or are they sort-of human but not fully human? Busman's Honeymoon - The last of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels and my favorite. Lots of depth in the relationship between Peter and Harriet. The friendly quotation quizzing between Peter and Chief Superintendent Kirk is quite fun. Clouds of Witness - 2nd mystery in the series where Peter's brother Gerald is accused of murder. Sayers makes a small allusion to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey . Gaudy Night  -  Trouble at a woman's college at Oxford and final resolution of Peter's courtship of Harriet Vane. Strong Poison  - Introducing Harriet Vane in the dock for a murder she did not commit. Tw...

Something worth pondering especially on a Monday morning: I have already, on a previous occasion, spoken at some length on the subject of Work and Vocation. What I urged then was a thoroughgoing revolution in our whole attitude to work. I asked that it should be looked upon, not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing... The habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it instead in terms of the work done. To do so would mean taking the attitude o...

"Are Women Human?" is the title of an address given by Dorothy L. Sayers in 1938 to the Women's Society. If this essay was in the public domain, I would reproduce it on the spot and let you read it for yourself. But alas it is not, so I will try to distill some of Sayers' insights. Sayers believed that an aspect of humanity is being an individual and being respected as such. We have tastes and preferences, strengths and weaknesses. The danger arises when categories dictate who we must be, leaving no room for our individuality. Consequently she felt that men and the feminists of her era fell into this error. On the one side, all girls must like dolls. On the opposite side, all girls can be mechanical geniuses if they are properly trained. Neither idea is sound because all humans are not the same, and if girls allowed to be human, they are not the same either. 1 In addition, the idea of women copying men for that sake alone was simply absurd to Sayers. "Is it ...

I was a fan of Dorothy L. Sayers ever since PBS broadcasted the Lord Peter Wimsey series starring Ian Carmichael back in the 70's. I've read and reread her mystery novels, but little did I know that she was also a writer of theology.  Here are a few stellar quotes from A Matter of Eternity , a collection of Sayers' writings: To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick. A loose and sentimental theology begets loose and sentimental art forms. We cannot after all, have it both ways. If all truths are period products, then our own standards offer no secure basis for passing judgement on those of former ages; if any truths have claims on universality, then every claim, old or new, requires to be examined on its merits.  The proper question to be asked about any creed is not, "Is it pleasant?" but, "Is it true?" What is repugnant to every huma...