#ThanksforTyping

This article by Kira Schlesinger appeared a bit ago at Ministry Matters, a site dedicated to resourcing church leaders:

Over the weekend, a hashtag started popping up in my social media feeds: #ThanksForTyping. It had started with a few tweets by Bruce Holsinger, a literary scholar at the University of Virginia, noting that the acknowledgments in older academic work often included the author’s wife for her work in typing the manuscript. In some acknowledgments, the unnamed wife did much more — transcriptions, edits, even Chinese calligraphy — in addition to caring for children and pursuing her own profession.. . Much of the unspoken expectations of both clergy and professors rely on someone else at home providing most of the unpaid labor. [Read more]

It’s not just limited to clergy and academia, although, as a member of both of those professions (though I do consider myself post-ac now) it’s very true of both those professions. I even wrote on the topic for the American Society of Church History once, and will quote myself:

Perhaps the vocation of a historian was never really one of being slightly absent-minded professors with pipes and tweedy jackets walking tree-lined campuses and thinking about (in my case, at least) the peculiarities of Victorian eating habits. (Or, if and when it was, there were no women wearing the jackets and smoking the pipes.) Perhaps it has always presented the sharp choice between professional success and personal happiness that seems to be particularly acute in our present age, solved only by making sacrifices neither of us have been willing to make. [Read more]

At any rate, we sure haven’t solved the problem. Schlesinger wants the clergy to model a better way:

Ideally, clergy could model a better way for a culture caught in a rat race — a life marked by prayer and worship, meaningful time with family and friends, and the joyful parts of pastoring a church.. . . The church might not be dying, but if the cultural norms around work keep infiltrating the church, its clergy surely will. [Read more]

One of my great questions about the faith and work movement, since I became a part of it, is whether we’re still perpetuating those norms.

As you were.