I’m not what you might call a fan of Lauren Winner’s quarter-life-crisis whinging. (I’m a lesbian! No, I’m celibate! I’m Buddhist! A Buddhist Jew! A fundamentalist! Somebody look at me, please!) Look no further than “Girl Meets God” to get the measure of the woman; she flits between religions like some people change outfits, but she takes the decision less seriously than the fashionista. But in what has got to be a prime example of this self-styled born-again virgin’s often stunningly bad logic comes this graf in her Christianity Today article about chastity and the church:
I wanted to get a sense of how the struggles of single Christians to stay chaste were playing out in my neighborhood, so I spoke to Greg Thompson, a campus pastor with Reformed University Fellowship at the University of Virginia. Charlottesville is, in many ways, a pretty conservative place. I thought if any corner of the church would exemplify chastity, it might be here. It seems I was wrong.
When I think Charlottesville, I think “pretty conservative.” Don’t you?
Waldo- you really should consider a move to Lynchburg, as the conservative leanings of those right wing Charlottesvillians (sic) might might rub off on you!
Does she live in an alternate reality?
When I think Charlottesville, I think “pretty chaste”… NOT!!
I suspect that she knows full well that her description of Charlottesville is completely incorrect, but that it makes for a better story. If she’d written that it’s the most politically-liberal municipality in the state (second only to Petersburg), the rest of that paragraph wouldn’t be quite as interesting. So she figured she could fudge it and nobody would know the difference, in the name of a better story.
What a ninny.
The “Pretty Conservative” is my favorite nightclub in Charlottesville!
Waldo,
You know I used to think that Charlottesville was conservative too, but then I realized that it was because I was just hanging around lots of conservative people. I now think a truer statement is that we are an extremely diverse community. We seem to be a paradoxical place, where liberals and conservatives coexist with a minimum of conflict (mainly they ignore each other).
I also think that somehow we’ve allowed the word liberal to be coopted. While there are certainly flaky liberals out there, I don’t think that necessarily defines the movement. That’d be like saying that because some hippies shop at Whole Foods that everyone that goes there is one too. I think anytime you let other people define your words, then you give them a measure of control over you.
Likewise, I think the word conservative has become corrupted. I believe in conserving lots of things, including my values, local history, the environment, Democracy, and money. Most of the time, I fail to see what self-proclaimed conservatives are actually conserving…
>>When I think Charlottesville, I think “pretty conservative.” Don’t you?
Compared to Arlington, yes.
“>>When I think Charlottesville, I think “pretty conservative.” Don’t you?
Compared to Arlington, yes.”
Bob Brink… Not to start a “my city is more liberal than yours” debate but that’s not the best example. Like Waldo pointed out we typically come second to only Petersburg in terms of Democratic voting and last year we had the highest percent of “no” voters on the “marriage amendment” in the state.
This Arlingtonian was pretty surprised that we didn’t take that (percentage of no voters) spot.
MB if its any consolation Arlington was the COUNTY with the highest percentage of no voters. It was followed by Albemarle, the only county outside of NOVA to vote “no,” of course.
I’ve read most of Ms. Winner’s writings, and don’t recall her ever claiming to be a Buddhist or trying out lesbianism. When did that happen?
It’s a joke, JB. Though I was thinking of her comment to The Hook in which she felt compelled to point out that “I don’t think I’m going to convert to Buddhism next week,” and in one of her books when a pastor suspects she’s a lesbian.