Dear Susan--
You are absolutely right. It was my intention to bring both moral,
ethical, private, personal and emotional overtones in the discussion on
diversity without becoming too serious.
Thanks for pointing at gender of the God-person. I never thought about
that, probably, because maleness of the God is taken from granted from
Judaism and Christianity and also because in Russian nouns have gender (I
think, it makes the gender issue less visible). There are some funny
wordings possible in Russian. It is possible to say, for example (and some
people say that way), "Susan is a scientist. He is very famous" (the word
"scientist" has male gender in Russian and pronoun "he" refers to the word
"scientist").
Take care,
Eugene
At 11:30 AM 10/7/97 -0600, you wrote:
>Finally -- it's interesting to me how often race, gender and language
>relations, in the classroom or elsewhere, is framed entirely as politics.
>We don't often speak of it as an integral part of moral and ethical
>education, of teaching empathy, compassion, taking the role of the other,
>of the moral and ethical wrongness of racism, sexism, etc. It underlies
>much of our conversation here on xmca, but often is a silent area. I
>liked Eugene's prayer for that reason, it touched some chord about moral
>order -- even though I would say Goddess and not God! :-)
>
>L*
>