Month: June 2012

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Book Blurbs

By Amy Spiegel

Well, I don’t know what y’all are up to this time of year, but for me, ‘tis the season for sitting lake side watching my kids play, trying not to get skin cancer and reading lots of books. Like most people, the summer isn’t a time when I say “Gee, I would really like to read a deep, metaphysical tome right now.” (That’s what Jim does over summer break.) So here are a few of the books I am reading (have read) this summer.

Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: To shed any pretensions of intellectualism, I will admit that I became interested in reading the Grimm’s Tales after reading a review of Snow White and the Huntsman, which claimed that this movie version was truer to the original than Walt Disney’s version. This seems a bit like saying Veggie Tales is more like the Bible than is Prince of Egypt, but nevertheless I was curious to read some of the stories I thought I knew. I have enjoyed reading these here and there. One of the things that has struck me is the lack of religious references in any of them. It’s summer so I will wait until fall to think too hard about that one, but it was interesting nonetheless.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak: I have only started this one and will definitely finish it at some point though it might not qualify as a beach read, but since Taylor Lake doesn’t really qualify as a beach maybe that’s okay. I love it’s originality though stories that jump around on the timeline often frustrate me.

Boy by Roald Dahl: Here is summer reading at it’s best. Entertaining yet informative. If you have ever wondered what kind of childhood could produce the mind that gave us Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or, my children’s favorite, The Twits, this is a must read.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee: Again, not exactly light reading but it was the June selection for my book club, the book club I never go to because I am too busy roasting in the sun but like to pretend I am a part of. I read it in high school, which I pretty much think qualifies as never having read it or having read the back cover and maybe some random pages in the middle. Either way, I had forgotten (or never realized) what an amazing book this is. I will truly miss Scout the rest of the summer.

I Am Half Sick of Shadows by Alan Bradley: The only downside to this book was that it was set at Christmas and as we are roasting in July heat that someone mistakenly placed in June, I had some difficulties imagining blizzards and plots to trap Santa Claus. Still, Bradley managed to deliver another amusing mystery starring the intrepid Flavia de Luce. I think she and Scout would be friends, if they didn’t live decades apart, in different countries, and weren’t imaginary characters.

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Spiegel’s Extremely Excellent List of All-Time Greatest Redundancies of All-Time

By Jim Spiegel

One of my pet peeves as a reader, writer, and conversationalist is redundant expressions.  Over the years I’ve accumulated a mental list of some of the more annoying redundancies.  When I realized my list had grown to about ten I knew it was time to post a top-ten list, so here it is.  Some are very common, while others are not.  If you are guilty of using any of these, please know that, yes, I am judging you.  But I am not rejecting you as a person.  I simply want to call you to linguistic repentance.  And, of course, this also constitutes an invitation for you to alert me to any such transgressions in my own writing or speaking.

10. “Component parts” — All parts are components.

9. “Rise up” / “Raise up” — To rise is to move up.

8. “ATM Machine” — Unpack the abbreviation and you get “automatic teller machine machine.”  U2 uses this phrase in their song “Moment of Surrender,” and the line spoils the mood for me every time I hear it.

7. “Answer back” / “Respond back” — To answer or respond is to communicate “back” to someone.

6. “Completely annihilate” — Its hard to imagine anything more “complete” than annihilation.  When I hear someone use this phrase, its tempting to suggest that the event to which they refer was only a “partial annihilation.”

5. “Please R.S.V.P.” — The French phrase for which “R.S.V.P.” stands is répondez s’il vous plaît, which means “please reply.”  I suppose one could claim that their use of the phrase is not a redundancy so much as a double emphasis, as in “please, please reply.”  Nice try.

4. “I remembered in my mind” — It amazes me how often I hear this.  I want to say, “Where else could one remember something?”

3. “Past history” — The appalling thing about this one is how frequently it is uttered by academics.  Shame, shame, shame.

2. “Don’t be unnecessarily redundant” — This is not a common redundancy.  In fact, it appears to be unique to a particular occasion, according to a friend of mine.  What puts it so high on this list is the context in which it was used:  A high school teacher said it when correcting one of her students.

1. “Added bonus” — If I hear this one more time, I think my head might explode…thus spreading the component parts of my head all over my living room…or perhaps completely annihilating me altogether.

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Recent Work on the Virtue of Open-mindedness

By Jim Spiegel

One of my current research projects concerns the virtue of open-mindedness, and recently two of my articles on the subject were published in scholarly journals.  One of these, which appears in the March issue of Theory and Research in Education, discusses several accounts of open-mindedness and defends William Hare’s account against some prominent alternatives, including those of Peter Gardner and Jonathan Adler.  In the essay I also compare and contrast open-mindedness with the related virtue of intellectual humility.

My other article, published in the April issue of Sophia, discusses what I call the paradox of open-mindedness and religious devotion.  To be religiously devout is presumably to be firmly committed to believing in and following God, and this includes behaving virtuously in all respects.  But such commitment seems to rule out openness to changing one’s mind about certain beliefs and values that are entailed in that religious devotion.  Now assuming (as nearly all virtue ethicists and epistemologists do) that open-mindedness is a virtue, this creates a paradox, where it appears to be virtuous to display an intellectual vice, namely closed-mindedness.  In my essay I explore a variety of potential ways of resolving this paradox.  The route that I think succeeds appeals to the possibility of personal knowledge of God via direct experience.

My work on open-mindedness is ongoing, and my long-term goal is to do a book on the subject.  More immediately, I am working on a paper entitled “Open-mindedness and Christian Flourishing” which I am slated to present at a Society for Christian Psychology conference this fall dealing with the theme “Towards a Christian Positive Psychology.”  I’ll say more about this conference in a later post.

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Gendercide

By Jim Spiegel

The issue of “gendercide” has been in the news lately, as the U. S. House of Representatives failed to pass a bill that would ban abortions motivated by the preference for having a baby boy.  Opponents of the bill insist that it was just a conservative ploy to limit women’s reproductive freedom.

One sad irony in all of this is that the term “gendercide” was coined by Mary Ann Warren in her 1985 book Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection.  Warren decried this most brutal form of sexism, yet her influential philosophical defenses of abortion, such as her landmark article “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion”[1] in the early 70s, reinforced the very pro-choice culture that has made gendercide so rampant in the United States.

There are some lessons here.  For one thing, this further reveals the incoherence of the notion that the pro-choice position is pro-women.  For years we have known just how devastating abortions are for the women who have them, both psychologically and physically.  Now we’re seeing how the abortion culture is especially deadly for women, even before they leave the womb.

Secondly, as Sidney Callahan has brilliantly pointed out,[2] the pro-choice culture is actually a disguised form of patriarchy in the sense that it ultimately gives more power to men, not women.  The abortion culture does so by: (a) encouraging women to think of childbearing as a burden rather than as a source of life-giving power and (b) further enabling men to engage in sex with women without any concerns about long-term commitment or support.

So as bad as gendercide is, it is but one more symptom of the fact that abortion rights are anything but pro-women.

[1] Mary Ann Warren, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” The Monist (January, 1973): 43-51.

[2] Sidney Callahan, “Abortion and the Sexual Agenda,” Commonweal (April, 1986): 232-238.