A Sound of Sheer Silence

The word "analysis" derives from the Greek roots "ana" meaning "up" and "luein" meaning "loosen."  To analyze something then, in a sense, is to loosen up the parts that make it up in order to see how they work.  If you don't pull the pieces apart, it becomes hard to see how the thing you are looking at works.  Something that looks like a single, unbroken thing may be made of up components, and those components are may be different, but you won't know that until you "loosen up" the connections between the components.  That's what analysis is. There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times last weekend from a writer with whom I had not been previously familiar, Katelyn Beaty.  As Beaty recounts it, she was raised deep in American conservative Protestantism's "purity culture" of the 1990s, with its hyper (and, perhaps, monomaniacal) emphasis on women and girls refraining from sex until marriage, and ...

Three weeks or so ago, author James Carroll lobbed a grenade into the collective lobby of the Roman Catholic Church with a piece in the Atlantic .  It's title, "Abolish the Priesthood,"  while not an inaccurate description of Carroll's argument, fails to capture the totality and nuance of what he is saying (and it's worth noting that authors generally don't write the headlines or titles of their pieces, and so to the extent your beef is with the title, it's a beef with the Atlantic and not Carroll).  But Carroll is no stranger to chucking incendiaries into Catholic spaces--this is the author of Constantine's Sword , which, among other claims, challenged the narrative that Pope Pius XII was a protector of Jews during the Holocaust.  And he was clearly trying to similarly stir things up with his wide-ranging critique of the Roman Catholic priesthood. And stir things up he did.  Reaction to the piece was wide-ranging and loud.  And it is in this reactio...