After Eden: Facing the Challenge of Gender Reconciliation

Rating:
Summary: christianity - valuable?
Review: I find interweaving of religion into every single aspect of societal thinking out-dated and without sense. Religion does not deserve justification or a voice in areas where it causes nothing but trouble - gender, race, etc. Gender "reconciliation," like race "recncilation" is nothing more than a euphemism for "teaching" the oppressed to "forgive and forget;" oh so rewarding and essential in today's society. Obviously, this book angered me.

Rating:
Summary: response to previous review
Review: Not to engage in needless meta-criticism, but I agreed with most of the first reviewers comments, but was troubled by the second. It seems more likely that this reviewer was angry to begin with, than angered by Van Leeuwen's book itself. It seems as though this reviewer would have us do nothing more than raise awareness of existing problems, rather than attempting to make real steps towards a solution. The fact that this book aproaches the problem of gender disharmony from a judeo-christian perspective, is no more or less legitimate than aproaching it from a Marxist or Foucaultian perspective. To suggest that a religious approach is illigitimate purely on the grounds that it is religious is simply intollerant and guilty of the same opressive qualities that the previous reviewer finds so distasteful.

Rating:
Summary: Worthy work done on touchy subjects
Review: The authors proceed respectfully and sensitively, and given their topic, this speaks well of their efforts. It is true, as a previous reviewer pointed out, that as part of their Christian convictions, these authors are not content with laying blame and casting denunciations in the direction of the violators of modern sexual orthodoxy. Reconciliation, not retribution is their aim. The attitudes of sexual McCarthyism, with its angry dispensations of global and irrevocable "guilty" verdicts all around, are rightly seen as harmful to constructive progress in gender relations. If you cherish your hard-earned bitterness, then indeed Christianity is not for you, and neither is this book. The rest of us may need help going forward, healing the wounds we've suffered as well as those we've inflicted. May we lament the day when learning how to treat one another justly and in accordance with the good and the best for all humans is not politically correct. The rest of us, then, might find this book worth reading (rather than illiberally dismissing the contribution of these authors as irrelevant by caricaturing their religious tradition).