Priests vs. Philosophers

[_Aristotle Smith]

[_Blixa]

Not directly on the topic of religion, but Teddie has a few thoughts which might be usefully juxtaposed with recent Proclamations:

The feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modeled, are products of masculine society. The image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite. Where it claims to be humane, masculine society imperiously breeds in woman its own corrective, and shows itself through this limitation implacably the master. The feminine character is a negative imprint of domination. But therefore equally bad. Whatever is in the context of bourgeois delusion called nature, is merely the scar of social mutilation. If the psychoanalytic theory is correct that women experience their physical constitution as a consequence of castration, their neurosis gives them an inking of the truth. The woman who feels herself a wound when she bleeds knows more about herself than the one who imagines herself a flower because that suits her husband....Glorification of the feminine character implies the humiliation of all who bear it.

(my emphasis)

And then there's this almost Benjaminian ending to Minima Moralia:

The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.