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Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them): The Gospels say a number of things about Jesus; some of them are contradictory, either logically or theologically, though we don’t often notice this. This wasn’t as interesting to me as Misquoting Jesus, which was about how copying and translation led to or invited sometimes critical alterations in biblical texts as they were passed down; I just like reading about copying and interpretation more. But this book could be a worthwhile companion to any study of the New Testament, if you wanted to know what to look for in comparing the Gospels. Ehrman spends too much time being defensive about the evangelical reaction to that earlier book and reiterating how not surprising or controversial his conclusions are among dedicated Bible scholars.
Mary-Beth Raddon, Community and Money: Men and Women Making Change: Community money is local currency, exchangable only for goods and services produced within the community. Raddon argues that such monies, while founded on utopian ideals of escaping the worst excesses of capitalism and encouraging localism and community, still face major challenges bound up in the gendered relationships women and men have to gifts and money. Community monies straddle the money/gift divide, so women face problems charging “what they’re worth”; men remain more willing to haggle to get better prices, while expecting women just to be happy to be making other people happy; men get more credit for being generous yhan women because it’s nonstandard for men and because men have more material resources with which to be generous. Interesting, and kind of depressing, though Raddon did conclude that community monies could be sources of new flexibility in gender roles, with some struggle.
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman: Philosopher writes about how doing things with one’s hands is important to thinking. I ordered this because I’m interested in things like the art v. craft dichotomy, but I ended up uninterested, and the nods to gender and race dynamics did not correct the universalization of the Western white male experience. A parenthetical from the prologue: “Man does not, clearly, mean just men. … I’ll try to make clear when man refers generically to human beings and when it applies only to males.” Yeah, not so much: that “clearly” (and its placement) is telling. Later, Sennett posits a distinction between replicants and robots, the former of which substitute for humans and the latter of which are better than us at something. Now watch: “The perfect women created in Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives are also replicants. … All these artifices mirror us by mimicking us.” Hmm—I thought the point of the Stepford Wives was that real women were irritatingly not “perfect” from the male perspective. The false universalization leads his analysis to be confused about what counts as “mimicking” and what counts as human attributes.
Mary-Beth Raddon, Community and Money: Men and Women Making Change: Community money is local currency, exchangable only for goods and services produced within the community. Raddon argues that such monies, while founded on utopian ideals of escaping the worst excesses of capitalism and encouraging localism and community, still face major challenges bound up in the gendered relationships women and men have to gifts and money. Community monies straddle the money/gift divide, so women face problems charging “what they’re worth”; men remain more willing to haggle to get better prices, while expecting women just to be happy to be making other people happy; men get more credit for being generous yhan women because it’s nonstandard for men and because men have more material resources with which to be generous. Interesting, and kind of depressing, though Raddon did conclude that community monies could be sources of new flexibility in gender roles, with some struggle.
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman: Philosopher writes about how doing things with one’s hands is important to thinking. I ordered this because I’m interested in things like the art v. craft dichotomy, but I ended up uninterested, and the nods to gender and race dynamics did not correct the universalization of the Western white male experience. A parenthetical from the prologue: “Man does not, clearly, mean just men. … I’ll try to make clear when man refers generically to human beings and when it applies only to males.” Yeah, not so much: that “clearly” (and its placement) is telling. Later, Sennett posits a distinction between replicants and robots, the former of which substitute for humans and the latter of which are better than us at something. Now watch: “The perfect women created in Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives are also replicants. … All these artifices mirror us by mimicking us.” Hmm—I thought the point of the Stepford Wives was that real women were irritatingly not “perfect” from the male perspective. The false universalization leads his analysis to be confused about what counts as “mimicking” and what counts as human attributes.
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