A Sound of Sheer Silence

There was a piece in Commonweal  magazine  that I read a week or so ago that I wanted to write about, but it took me a while to put together my thoughts.  It's about, in broad terms, a Christian (or, in this case, explicitly Roman Catholic) approach or response to the transgender questions that have become very prominent and contentious in the U.S.  It's worth reading, even though I don't really agree with either of the authors. Let's start first with David Cloutier's article.  As I see it, he raises three basic points--two of which I basically agree with, if not in the way he means it, and one that I disagree with very strongly.  Cloutier's first move is to point out the core conundrum of at least some presentations of this issue.  On the one hand, gender identity is presented as being so sacrosanct and central to one's core nature that forcing someone to live in a manner inconsistent with that identity is to do violence to the person; on the other ...

I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. “Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.” James Baldwin. One of the real tragedies of the whole brouhaha over Creationism is that it turns the first chapter of the Book of Genesis from something beautiful and profound into something boring and meaningless.  It is not so much that interpreting Genesis 1 to mean that the world was created in six 24-hour units is wrong (though, I do think it is wrong) as it is missing the point.  Genesis 1 is a beautiful poem that is packed with profound theological ideas, ideas that get lost completely in the shuffle of arguing over the timing of the various events. We should start in the beginning.  The first word of Genesis is "bereishit," which literally means "at the head of," but is usually translated as "in the beginning."  The very notion that there was a beginning or a he...