I like Matt Feeney–at least if this Matt Feeney is the same one I’m thinking of–but I thought it was an odd post, too. It’s a very peculiar reading of Spruiell to take him to have been denying “that we in the West might have something to learn about the care of children from people whose traditions are rooted elsewhere.” Feeney also says that we should not mock “the occasional act of political imagination by which we give the norms, even the imagined norms, of traditional societies their due. . .” (emphasis added). So we should respect these traditional societies, but not enough to get an accurate picture of them?