Virginia Lieson Brereton praises Susan Hill Lindley’s work “You Have Stept Out of Your Place”: A History of Women and Religion in America-rightly, I think-for “comprehensiveness, . . . sophistication, care, and clarity”
[Nov./Dec.]. But I am puzzled at the shortchanging of the story of Mary Baker Eddy, both in Lindley’s book and Brereton’s review. In the book, Eddy and Christian Science rate only three pages in a work of well over 400-surprisingly light treatment given her life and legacy.
I’ll confess up front that I’m a Christian Scientist, but I don’t think that disqualifies my comments. Eddy is one of only two or three founders of lasting religious movements indigenous to America.
Many have disagreed-and fairly so-with her methods and conclusions, but at least she deserves to be heard. Scholars who follow the lead of Lindley and Brereton should challenge themselves to explore more deeply, and thoroughly, what Eddy has left behind.
Clifton Neil Irby
Stone Mountain, Ga.
Philip Gleason’s excellent review of David Hollinger’s Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism [Nov/Dec.] inspires me to hope that, contrary to what is usually heard from writers and pundits, we may be approaching a time of heightened civility in the public debate over “multiculturalism.” While Gleason seems overly sanguine in assuming that “the crusading aura has definitely faded,” a voice like Hollinger’s introduces some welcome sanity in the midst of the so-called culture wars-a burdensome designation that has become little more than a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The three issues Gleason highlights at the end of his essay as needing further systematic reflection in future treatments of multiculturalism-the role of women’s studies and gender theory in the academy, the problems with Hollinger’s concept of “cosmopolitanism,” and the increasing dilemmas of affirmative action-are strikingly on target. It is interesting to observe that Gleason elaborates the second and third of these while taking a hands-off approach to the first, merely tossing it in like a hot potato and moving immediately away to what may seem safer ground. Of course, given the current political climate around “gender” in academic circles, Christian and otherwise, his evasiveness is understandable, especially since he happens to be a white male. But the issue he raises deserves, at the very least, the same sustained description he gave to his other points and, I hope, more thorough analysis in a future issue of your journal.
White males are not the only party in danger of battery by some gender theorists, of course; the uncivil bashing of Christina Hoff Sommers and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in recent years is a case in point of the wretchedly low level of discussion of these matters even or especially among self-proclaimed feminists. (That Sommers and Fox-Genovese have been ill-mannered in turn exacerbates the problem but does not negate the larger point. All sides are guilty here, rare exceptions being marvelous reviews of Sommers by Jean Bethke Elshtain in the New Republic [July 11, 1994] and by Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen in Christianity Today [Oct. 24, 1994].)
The battle lines that have been drawn purport to divide the “liberal feminists” (in the Lockean sense) from the “postmodernist feminists,” although the women who fit neatly on one side or the other of these abstractions seem to me to be outnumbered by those who take, like Hollinger’s view on multiculturalism, a rather more concrete and nuanced stand on the complexities and ambiguities of modern American feminism.
An obvious quandary that I imagine many of your female readers (I among them) face is where, as Christian women in the academy, to stand on these questions of women’s studies and gender theory. What’s a Christian feminist to do, when “feminism,” even of the “liberal” or “equity” variety so scorned by its opponents, has become a more disputed notion than ever? If Gleason cannot address this issue, I hope that someone else will.
R. Marie Griffith
Northwestern University
Evanston, Ill.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture
Magazine.
Mar/Apr, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 6
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