Is the male-only priesthood a discipline or essential to the nature of being a priest? Sr. Vassa (again unflinchingly taking up a contentious topic by climbing up the ladder to the highest platform and then jumping into the deep end head first) dives right in and says there is no reason beyond personal preference to not have female clergy. You know, when people ask me about women in priesthood, they say, 'Sister, why can't women be priests?' And I say, 'Women CAN be priests. We don't WANT them to be priests.' Because you see, God can do anything, and the Church, by divine authority, uh, can do anything, but, the Church doesn't want to - and that's a legitimate reason. What I don't like is when we TRY to pretend that there are other reasons for this, because it's legitimate not to want something, and there are reasons not to want this - right? - but, we shouldn't pretent that there's some... reason, that, for example, the maleness...
Thanks for posting this. Very interesting, as many points on his list are "outside the box". Some are better than others. For example, there were not "a whole bunch of alternative conservative colleges started". However most of the points are really good, like how conservatives are not good at political/institutional warfare within academia, a too easy complacency with a "classical liberalism" and the environment it creates, etc. Perhaps my favorite is his last about how conservatives too easily tolerate libertarianism within their own ranks and how they don't cultivate an effective nurturing subculture for their own. I have seen it argued that conservatives simply are constitutionally not as good at tribalism as progressives, but I don't think that holds up historically.
ReplyDelete7) A lot of the conservatives were pompous but actually not that well read. I saw this a lot. People who blabbered about Aristotle but didn't know Greek, etc. So they annoyed everyone with their pompous airs but then got destroyed in actual arguments with people.
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