This is the second of Chris Ridgeway's reviews of Don Everts' new series from IVP.
Everts, Don. The Fingerless Lady Living in My Head
Don Everts is chilling in the mountains and giving tours of his head. InterVarsity Press’s One Guy’s Head series records Everts’ mental living room, where ideas lounge, hug, and make argumentative conversation.
The fourth of the series is Evert’s portrait of The Fingerless Lady, the smiley kindergarten teacher who represents tolerance (no finger-pointing, get it?). She tells the classic story of everyone’s path up the mountain (in this case Seattle’s Mt. Rainier) being about the same, and personified ideas like Conflict is Always Horrible and The Wisdom of That Which Is Poetic nod their heads vigorously.
Like the others in the series, the strength of Everts’ approach is its promotion of self-awareness – his naming scheme encourages us to know what schools of thought are influencing our mental process. But labeling as a habit usually endangers the conversation via over-simplification and this is precisely where Everts’ falls short. Roadblocks thrown up by “Existentialism” (“rocks are rocks… and why should reality about God be different?”) only make Lady Tolerance sullen and repeat her point louder. Subsequent arguments about pedophiles being in the wrong stop her cold. She can’t seem to conjure up even simplified retorts using Berger’s social constructionism or Saussure’s linguistic suspicion. In the end, she winds up being a straw woman, easily trampled by the genial Old Man who reads passages from scripture explaining Jesus’.
I’d give Everts more credit had he given The Fingerless Lady a bit more. Where is the necessary discussion of power or a chastened epistemology that acknowledges perspective even in special revelation? At the end of the day, it’s clear Everts had kicked the Lady out of the living room before she arrived and is not much the wiser for it.
~ Chris Ridgeway
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I am just an ordinary working stiff. I am not an intellectual. I come to this web site because I do want to engage myself, and my world intellectually, however, that being said, I often do find you intellectual types (many of whom comment on this site) come across as a tad …well arrogant is the word that pops to mind. I don’t think you mean too. But that is how some comments make me feel.
Now when a book comes along that is intellectual but speaks the common man’s language that is the book that will catch my attention and be readable. That is why CS Lewis is still readable to this day.
To me it appears that Everts is trying to create a series of books that will engage the common man and help the average guy think through common culturally prevalent ideas about tolerance or truth (as in the previous post about this series).
Now I agree that it is not healthy to set up a straw man, or woman as the case may be but when you say…”She can’t seem to conjure up even simplified retorts using Berger’s social constructionism or Saussure’s linguistic suspicion.”, it leaves me totally baffled. I have no idea what you are talking about, and I wonder if you are not wanting, or expecting these books to engage you, as an intellectual academic, as opposed to me, the average working guy.
Are you being fair, as to who the intended audience is for this book? Just asking.
Greg -
great points - thanks. I'm hardly this erudite figure... :) I'm really pretty normal - probably with just enough theology and post-modern philosophy to make me dangerous (and not much else).
What I hoped to say was precisely what you got: I think Everts winds up dealing in straw-man arguments.
I'm all for clear communication - in fact, storytelling is my favorite kind (ps - The Great Divorce is my fav from Lewis). But I'm decently sure that some of my undergrad students at the University of Illinois might sorta roll their eyes and move on with parts of this - it's too easy to poke holes at some points.
They might not reference a school of thought by name, but they'd get it. You'd get much better explanations from someone smarter than me, but I can take quick hacks. For instance, Saussure is sorta your early 20th century philosopher that is famous for language being a "system of signs." If I recall, Everts is really advocating this idea of one-to-one correspondence of language. You see a Camaro parked on the curb and you call it a car because that's what it *is*. Saussure starts the domino effect that says, "no, language is more arbitrary than that." I guess it gets a lot more complicated, but honestly, I think this idea naturally flows in pop culture now - it's not just confined to philosophy.
And amateur definition #2: social constructionism would sort of assert that even though some absolutes feel universal, they're not - they're a product of being immersed in a set of assumed cultural standards.
I don't think the trajectory of both ideas gives us at the end of the day a place we can stand as Christians. But I think the ideas are common enough that they've gotta at least get talked about (not necessarily solved).
Anyway, meant to be a quick response, but kept typing. :)
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