A Sound of Sheer Silence

Two stories came through the pipeline in the last couple of days that caught my attention.  The first was a piece by Ross Douthat arguing for some sort of extensive ban on pornography .  The other had to do with Shane Claiborne, one of the organizers of an anti-Trump revival in Lynchburg, Virginia , who received very strong push back due to his non-affirming stance on LGBT questions ( example here , see also Bill Lindsey here ), as well as the corresponding backlash to the backlash.  The backlash to the backlash primarily took the form of "how can you shun or criticize Claiborne and claim to be a classical liberal?," an example of which can be found here .  The link between these two stories is a discussion of classical liberalism, and so it is worthwhile talking about that for a bit. We can think about classical liberalism as having two dimensions.  The first is political--a particular area of human life will not be regulated or otherwise coerced by the stat...

1. I was on a business trip Wednesday in Atlanta, Georgia, and it was raining.  I had a meeting and a walk to get to that meeting, so I went into the hotel gift shop and bought an umbrella.  I bought the smallest and least expensive (I would say cheapest, but it was not cheap) umbrella they had, without really looking at it.  After I had completed the purchase and got ready to get out into the rain, I noticed that it was a Kate Spade umbrella, one of those transparent plastic bubble-type domes.  As I made my way through the streets of Atlanta, I felt overwhelmingly, profoundly self-conscious.  I noticed I wasn't willing to make eye contact with dudes carrying their more macho black umbrellas, as if I was avoiding their judgment for my umbrella and its femininity. How dumb is that?  Here I am, in a city that I know no one, which I hadn't been to in fifteen years and probably won't be back to for another fifteen, and I am worried about what random strange...

We have discussed this before: Some people actually mean "right body" when they say "orthodox". — Broderick Greer (@BroderickGreer) April 27, 2017 Yesterday in the Twitterverse, or at least in the portion of the Twitterverse I interact with, there was a long discussion of an article by Rev. Tish Harrison Warren , a priest of the Anglican Church of North America (which is relevant to this discussion, but more on that later).  The claim of the article is that the Christian blogosphere (which, I suppose I should disclose in case it wasn't obvious, includes me, I guess) is run a muck because all sorts of people are writing things without being subject to proper authority.  And the person offered as the poster-child for this problem was Jen Hatmaker .  I will confess to not being familiar with her work prior to yesterday, but evidently Hatmaker recently come out in support of LGBT relationships in a Christian context , provoking the now-predictable backlash . ...

Last night, Fr. James Martin, S.J., well known as Stephen Colbert's "chaplain," among other jobs, gave a talk to New Ways Ministry , a group dedicated to advocating for Catholic LGBT people.   The full text of the talk is available here , and it is well worth reading.  I have some thoughts on what he said and how be approaches the problem, but first a couple of disclaimers.  Number one, Martin is without question one of the "good guys" among the prominent Catholics in the media, and he has taken a great deal of abuse for standing up for LGBT people in the Catholic Church.  So, while there are things in what he said that I am not sure I agree with or can stand behind, I don't want to seem like I am shooting the messenger or dumping on him.  He does good, important work, and this speech is part of that work. Second, I write conscious of the fact that I approach this topic indirectly.  Martin's audience, primarily, is LGBT Catholics, and I am not an LGBT...

Let's do a thought experiment, shall we?  Imagine I call you up on the phone and say, "hey, it would be great to see you.  Why don't you come by and visit?"  "Great!" you say, so you drive to where I live.  You knock on the door, and I answer the door while talking on the phone.  Without getting off the phone, I usher you into the house.  Eventually, I get off the phone, and proceed to have a long monologue about how your life is going astray, and how you are making terrible decisions and "lifestyle choices."  I then tell me that you can stay, but you can only have a meal with me if you promise to give up said "lifestyle choices." Would you say that I have been "welcoming" to you on your visit?  Probably not, right?  And if I claimed I was being welcoming insofar as I invited you to come to my house, it would be fair to object that welcoming has much more to do with the treatment once I arrived than the official posture of ...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. On his way home from Armenia, Pope Francis gave one of his now-customary impromptu press conferences, with a now-customary set of bombshells.  Maybe the most amazing statement was what Pope Francis said about Martin Luther, which was essentially "his heart was in the right place, and after all the late medieval Catholic Church really was a cesspool, but he went a little too far in the end."  But the statement that got the most play--and which is the focus of this post--is his comments about LGBT people.  Francis was asked about comments made by Cardinal Reinhardt Marx of Munich that Church should apologize to LGBT people  for its behavior toward them, and he basically endorsed Marx's position: "[Gay people] should not be discriminated against. They should be respected, accompanied pastorally. I think that the Church not only should apologise … to a gay person whom it offended but it must also apologise to the...