The Totaled Woman Is Alive and Well at SWBTS

The latest edition of the Latest News from Southwestern is just full of fun(dy) stuff.  It may take me awhile to comment on all of it, so check back for updates.

First, an update on the happy homemaker program at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. My first post on this subject came back in 2007 when the program was announced.

http://sepherim.blogspot.com/2007/08/two-pictures-are-worth.html

Now the seminary is proudly showcasing the new home on seminary hill for the happy homemaker home.  You can see the proud parents in the press release,
 "Southwestern Seminary dedicates Horner Homemaking House"

Acccording to the press release, the building, named the Sarah Horner Homemaking House, will serve as an educational building but will look more like a house than a classroom, complete with kitchen and textile lab, as well as a large library, full of resources for classroom lectures. Upstairs, two rooms will house students in the homemaking concentration and another room will be available for guest housing.

Next, just in case you are wondering if they do still allow women to teach about children's ministry at Fort Fundamentalist, "Trustees elected Karen Kennemur as assistant professor of children’s ministry in the School of Educational Ministries."  I do wonder how they justify having a wife and mother of three children work outside the home like this.  What kind of example is that setting for all of the future happy homemakers?

Paige has done it again!

I don't know how I missed this because I try to keep up with the really stupid things Paige Patterson says and does. I guess I was distracted by the end of school activities. According to PP educated women are a serious threat to the family, the country and the world.

At the fourth World Congress of Families in Warsaw, he said, "families need to be concerned that in America, 60% of college students are female." He predicts that in a few years, men will be increasingly underrepresented among "the intelligentsia" and will gradually cede leadership in many areas to women."

As a result women will increasingly forsake their God-ordained place of being barefoot and pregnant, and usurp the authority that God gave to men. (Not his words but definitely his thoughts.)

(What can I say? I know she's not barefoot, but it is Natalie Portman)


I am grateful that after reading the story on a "Christian" news source, several Southern Baptist women responded showing just how myopic this view of the place of women in society is. I have quoted one of the best of the responses.

As a life-long Southern Baptist who is also a single mother and an attorney who has to work in order to support myself and my young daughter, I wish the Southern Baptist Convention would find alternative ways to convey the need to strengthen the family unit without denigrating women who work outside the home or dare to educate themselves. The fact that 60% of college enrollees are women is not a tragedy. Why not focus on the failings of men as the primary cause of the disintegration of the family instead of villifying women (the old Adam and Eve story, with a modern twist). As a Christian and, specifically a Southern Baptist, I often combat negative stereotypes about my religious affiliation. The Southern Baptists lose credibility when they staunchly oppose abortion (as do I) but then saddle single mothers who bravely raise their children alone with guilt because they have to work. If we want to stem the tide of broken families, the Southern Baptists would do well to employ methods other than decrying the education of women and resorting to 1950s imagery about "mom and apple pie."