Roles, Reversals & Remembering

I opened the paper today and read a interesting article (Southern Baptist Seminary to offer ABCs of Homemaking) that got me thinking. OK didn't take much as I've been offline for 2 weeks. Why is it that we have such a reversal remembrance of the past? Why in particular do we so often seem to only review the past through rose-colored glasses, remembering how good, pure, easier, and cheaper things were? It seems like it's more of a denial sort of reversal of our memories in order to either make ourselves feel better about our current worldviews that struggle to grasp what's happening around and within us, or a way to flee our current fears to some golden-aged past that is locked away like a horocrux in our memories.

In particular this creative memory reversal seems to be some sort of maladie that plagues in particular portions of the Christian Community here in our Country. Ironic, since Christ calls us to live fully present - not in the past, but here, now, today.... I fail to understand how offering a BA in Homemaking will re-instill the "family values" that these folks are aiming to resurrect, reincarnate or reinvent. Were we really so much better off when we forced women to "stay home" in order to have meaning in life? Was it more effective when we denied the roles or women outside of the home in such a way that we made women, such as French writer Georges Sand, take pseudonmyns and quasi-identities of men in order to not only be appreciated and recognized but to be actual participants.

On vacation I began working through a new book, The Jesus Way by Eugene Peterson, in which the last chapter I read talked about the urgent need for us as Christians to find our identity and to root it not in our consumeristic choices and/or the passive roles that modern media and captilalism fosters upon us. We need to remember that we're called to find our indentity in our baptisms....that we are new creations in Christ - neither female nor male, greek nor jew, slave nor free - that we are first and foremost the children of God. I fail to see how making sure that we maintain "traditional" gender roles (of course whose tradition is it?) is the most true form of being Christian? We seem to so often mistake Christ's call for us to know Jesus as the way in which we live our life for some sort of "truth" that we must enforce and legislate upon others through force, political power of a homemaking degree? Plus - how come men aren't allowed to enroll in this program? I'm not against one of the partners in a family being the principal homemaker...but how is that decided?

So often the Christian Community is uber-concerned with reaching out to those outside of the church, to 'save' them from the lost-ness of our current culture...yet how is reinforcing old stereotypes like women as homemakers going to do that?