Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

ANASTASIA LIN - A TRUE BEAUTY

Jay Nordlinger writes in a short article the following about Anastasia Lin - 

Anastasia Lin is an extraordinary beauty queen. She is also an actress. And a human-rights advocate.

Last year, she was crowned Miss World Canada. But the international competition was held in China — and the dictatorship blocked her from coming. They declared her “persona non grata.”

She earned that designation from these monsters: She has spoken out against their crimes — their persecution, their killing, their organ-harvesting — and has acted in films depicting those crimes.

After she was crowned Miss World Canada, her father, who still lives in China, was subjected to terrible pressure. Evil is the regime that breaks up families, or tries to. Evil is the regime that holds a population in the grip of lies, and tries to smash any truth-teller.

At the Oslo Freedom Forum, I recorded a Q&A with Anastasia Lin. For that podcast, go here.  She has profound things to say about, among other subjects, the West’s constant appeasement of the Chinese Communist Party.

Do we have to be complicit in the CCP’s crimes? No. It’s that we choose to.

THE NARNIAN STORIES IN C.S. LEWIS' VISION OF EDUCATION

C.S. Lewis's views on education are marvelous.  Amy K. Hall, writing in the Stand to Reason blog, talks about the Minneapolis C.S. Lewis conference this weekend (which I blogged about here) and says:

       Joe Rigney, one of the speakers, has put together a book of collected essays on his topic, Live Like a Narnian: Christian Discipleship in Lewis’s Chronicles. In the introduction, he explains that good stories play a part in shaping a person’s true perception of reality by developing a proper taste in the reader for the good, the true, and the beautiful:

      But it’s not enough to simply feel something in response to the objective reality of the world. You must also feel rightly and proportionately to the way the world is….

          Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought [The Abolition of Man, p. 26].

     These three realities form the foundation of true education. They also shape the aim of education….

         The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful [p. 26-27].

     Following Plato, Lewis believed that we ought to initiate the young into these right responses, even before they are able to rationally understand or explain what they are feeling. The goal of such inculcation of right responses is that, when a child raised in this way grows up and encounters Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, he will welcome them with open arms, because he has been prepared for, and indeed, resembles them already.

    Which brings us, finally, to the function of the Narnian stories in Lewis’s vision of education. The Narnian stories display through imaginative fiction and fairy tale the way that the world really is. Here is courage and bravery in its shining glory. Here is honesty and truth-telling in its simplicity and profundity. Here is treachery in all its ugliness. Here is the face of Evil. Here also is the face of Good. A child (or adult) who lives in such stories will have developed the patterns of thought and affection that will be well-prepared to embrace the True, the Good, and the Beautiful (that is, to embrace Jesus Christ) when he finally encounters them (Him!). Like John the Baptist, Lewis and his cast of Narnians will have prepared the way.

EVER SEEN A PEACOCK IN FLIGHT?

Thanks to JS for the email:

Wow!  

VIDEO - OPENING YOUR HEART TO THE GIFTS OF THIS DAY

My thanks to Joyce for this video.  It's worth 6 minutes to view it.

 

FAKE WOMEN

John Stonestreet has produced  a badly needed corrective to the sexual illusions that imprison women and seduce men.  Both seek after that which does not exist.  Read on:  [Note:  The links in Stonestreet's commentary provide important additional reading]

Challenging Our Culture’s “Fake Women”

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The more I pay attention to our culture, the more I wonder if C. S. Lewis owned a crystal ball. Many of the works of this Oxford don who died almost fifty years ago seem more accurate today than when he wrote them. And this is especially true of “The Screwtape Letters.”

In an especially prophetic chapter, Uncle Screwtape explains to his demon nephew, Hell’s strategy for using imagery to derail human sexuality:
“We have engineered a great increase in…the apparent nude (not the real nude)… It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist.”

If there’s a more perfect summary of how our culture views women, I haven’t found it. These images women have to compete with are always the same: flawless, impossibly slim and well-endowed. This standard is crushing for women because it’s not based in reality. Women are being compared to women who don’t actually exist.

And that’s where the real damage happens — and not only to young women, but to men. As Timothy Dalrymple argues in a recent blog post at Patheos.com, pornography is devastating the next generation’s sexuality not only because it’s addictive, but because it’s wildly inaccurate. Just like Screwtape, porn directs young men’s desires toward things and people that don’t really exist. It alters guys’ expectations of women. Where nature offers real women, porn offers edited actresses.  Where God creates daughters in His image, porn creates fantasies in our image — free pleasure without any requirements.

Meanwhile under all that paint, porn stars are still broken, little girls. “Someone rocked them to sleep,” writes Dalrymple. “Someone comforted them when they were afraid of the monster or the spider or the thunder. They have histories, dreams, they have souls.”

Mark Regnerus makes this even clearer in a groundbreaking piece from last year in “Slate” magazine. In it, he describes today’s “sexual economics” where the availability of fake women who look perfect and are interested only in sex has created a sort of market competition that distorts both genders’ ideas of what real women are actually like. In order to live up, many women start to act like their fake competitors. Meanwhile, men, says Regnerus, are only too happy to oblige. Thus, the vicious cycle of illusion keeps producing more brokenness.

So how do we break this cycle?

Well, for starters, we could imitate Julia Bluhm. Julia, a 14-year-old ballet dancer from Waterville, Maine, recently started a campaign that’s already changing the way her generation views women. Partnering with media activist organization SPARK Summit, Julia started a petition to “Seventeen” magazine to drop the heavily-doctored images of young women, and instead use real photographs. "Seventeen" agreed, and now, thanks to Julia and the 84,000 signees who joined her effort, the nation’s most influential teen magazine is promoting true beauty, without the airbrush.

We can learn volumes from Julia’s victory in our culture’s very real “war on women.” She’s making a difference because she rejects the illusions — and we’ve got to do the same.

On tomorrow’s "Two Minute Warning," I talk more about how sexual brokenness victimizes people, but especially women. This is part 2 of 4 in a series on sexual brokenness you can view at ColsonCenter.org. If you missed part one, it created quite a stir on YouTube — over 5000 views and dozens of comments. And I hope this one stirs comments, too — we’ve got to confront this confusion for the sake of our girls.

Further Reading and Information

Naked Women, Naked Girls
Timothy Dalrymple | Patheos.com | June 18, 2012

Sex Is Cheap
Mark Regnerus | Slate | February 25, 2011

Seventeen agrees to promote realistic beauty
Laura Murphy | World | July 10, 2012

When Sex Got a Divorce
John Stonestreet | ColsonCenter.org | July 12, 2012

The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis | HarperOne | 2002

MUSIC BEATS COUNSELING IN TREATING MILD DEPRESSION

At least a certain type of music.  As for example, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  In Eric Felten's article, "Why Dictators Hate to See Us Moved by Music," there appears this extraordinary paragraph:

There's no doubt that music affects us—perhaps in surprising ways. A new study published in a journal called The Arts in Psychotherapy tested which was more effective in treating mild depression, reclining on a sofa talking to a psychiatrist or simply listening to Bach, Corelli and Mozart. Few of the patients involved (who were drawn from a clinic in Oaxaca, Mexico) were initially interested in spending any time with old Wolfgang Amadeus, but in the end they not only came to enjoy the experience, but benefited from it. The overwhelming majority of the patients listening to classical music reported feeling better two months into the therapy. Not even half of those getting traditional tell-me-about-that psychotherapy saw any improvement.

He says further:

SARAH PALIN AT THE "RESTORING HONOR RALLY" IN WASHINGTON, DC

 

 

HOLLYWOOD STARS WITH AND WITHOUT MAKEUP

I think you'll want to see these photos.  The "beautiful people" look pretty ordinary (to say the least).  There's a lesson here somewhere.  Photo to the right: Katie Holmes