Does the Church Play Tennis, Can Prayer Save School and

. . .are you my mother? My sister, my daughter?

Or my competitor and erstwhile enemy . . .

Whatever irritation is building in my view of young feminism and its view of me as thorn in their gender equity side, it doesn’t taint my love and admiration for young feminists I know IRL. We are different yet seamlessly compatible within the larger whole, connected with very blurred boundaries between our lives and concerns, our thoughts and feelings and power of story.

Favorite Daughter you know. But here’s another young feminist I can’t wait to see take the world by the tail:
Does the Church Play Tennis?

This essay touched on everything in play for our summer games, I think. School, church, groupthink and pressure to conform to the congregation, mystic memes versus science, regimentation and standardization, fine print and literalism versus organic performance from love and passion, change and fear of change, ignorance. Women and girls thinking for themselves and expressing it as it has meaning in their own lives, never mind the conventional controls of society . . .

Education is the biggest fear of the church, or at least secular education. Why do you think there are so many Christian schools? Why do you think that small children are sent to Sunday School from the time they are old enough to be away from their parents? Because the Church believes that if they can get to these children at a young age, they can brainwash them into believing whatever they put in front of them. Unfortunately, this is true.

See how you’d comment, what connections you see. Here are mine:

I’ve done both, tennis and protestant church stuff.

In my lifetime the rackets for tennis got better and better, through research and science. The rules changed to accommodate the new possibilities.

The rackets for church have gotten much worse. I don’t play anymore.

Have you read about this new superstitious ritualism of smearing holy oil all over government courthouses and capitol hearing rooms? And in Florida last year we had schoolfolk secretly “anointing” all the little kids’ desks, the night before the Big Test.
Spiritual warfare they call it.
Any god that would fall for that deserves the decay and decline that must surely follow, as human understanding of reality recedes.

Keep up the good blogging!
Doctor J

Then I kept thinking about it and added:

. . .did you know tennis used to be played by monks using human flesh as their rackets??

Google racket history and you’ll see. I wrote about this once at Culture Kitchen . . . tennis power of story and how tennis and school/church treat individuals as interchangeable parts, to ill effect.

 

Monk or tennis player? Yes.