A Sound of Sheer Silence

There is a lot of talk about "owning your privilege."  Allow me to make an attempt at owning mine. One of the things about my life that I am increasingly aware is very unusual for a straight man of my age is that I have a handful of very close, very deep male friendships.  There are three or four (depending on the circumstances) people that I have known for a very long time (20+ years) and with whom I feel comfortable sharing personal things--struggles, fears, losses, disappointments.  And these people have shared similar things in their lives with me. This has been an enormous blessing in my life, one of the top two or three blessings that I have received.  But it has one notable downside, and has created a notable blindspot.  Because I know these guys so well, and so intimately, they form the baseline for what I think men as a whole are like.  Or, more accurately, they form a sample set from which I extrapolate my back-of-the-envelope estimates of wha...

Lots of people have said lots of better and smarter things about #metoo, particularly in light of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings ( most recent update here , though this story is evolving at warp speed), than I can.  I have never been assaulted, so I cannot speak to the experience.  I have, however, noticed a couple of things out there in the discussion that I think are worth commenting on. 1. "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" and "Innocent Until Proven Guilty."   Lawyers, and people who like to sound like lawyers, often try to gaslight people who are concerned about an accusation against someone by saying things like "people are innocent until proven guilty!" and "where is your proof beyond a reasonable doubt?"  The idea here, of course, is that you are a bad person for "immediately assuming" that a person is guilty of whatever they are accused of, whereas the speaker is a reasoned and broad-minded and fair person.  This is nonse...

I would like to talk about Union Seminary and their Twitter feed , but first I need to talk a bit about Bizarro. Bizarro is a traditional antagonist for Superman in the comics and related media.  Comics are notorious for rebooting their backstories and continuities, so this may not be the current story behind Bizarro, but the one I am familiar with involved Superman getting shot with some sort of duplication ray.  But the ray didn't actually create a clone of Superman, but instead a kind of mirror image of Superman (so, for example, Bizarro shoots cold beams out of his eyes as opposed to heat beams, is vulnerable to the kinds of kryptonite that heals Superman while being healed by the kinds that wound Superman, etc.)  Eventually, Bizarro leaves Earth and creates Bizarro World, whose founding principle is to be precisely the opposite of everything on Earth, so everything that is considered good on Earth is bad in Bizarro World, and vice versa.  So, on Bizarro World,...

Last night, I became a novice in a brand new religious community of the Episcopal Church, the Community of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer (CMMR).  You can see some pictures of it on our Facebook page --I'm the shorter guy second from the left.  The day before that, the Founders of our community took their first vows, meaning that CMMR has been officially in existence for a grand total of two days.  Still, we have been working on this and praying about it for a while now, and so I figured it was time to talk a bit about this new thing I am a part of and how I understand what I am doing. If there is a Big Idea that shapes the project of CMMR, it comes from Psalm 137: By the rivers of Babylon—    there we sat down and there we wept    when we remembered Zion.  On the willows there    we hung up our harps.  For there our captors    asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,    ‘Sing us ...

I wish more people understood and made space for the very real grief that accompanies a crisis of faith/belief/trust. Perhaps we might give one other more grace. (Telling Catholics to “just leave already” probably isn’t the right thing to say at this moment.) https://t.co/Sk1fDjtkB6 — Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) August 27, 2018 Do I think people should leave the Roman Catholic Church?  On one level, yes, I do.  I left, and I do not regret my decision on any level.  The events of the last month or so have been public confirmation of the things that I came to believe about the structural brokenness of the Roman Catholic Church--things I have written about here , and here , and here .  I don't say this with schadenfreude, but simply a recognition that my concerns weren't simply in my own head or the product of some sort of anger or hostility.  And I am very happy and energized as a member of the Episcopal Church, optimistic about its future and its po...

A term that has recently entered The Discourse, or at least I have recently become aware of it, is "emotional labor."  Emotional labor is the work of regulating one's own feelings and emotional state in such a way as to maintain some sort of social environment.  More specifically, it is controlling or restraining one's own natural or reflexive emotional state in order to prevent someone else's emotional state from spiraling out of control.  So, if you are in a situation where you are scared of something, but you have to suppress or hide that because you know that if you show fear you will cause the person you are with to completely freak out, you are undertaking emotional labor. Emotional labor is usually brought up in the context of male/female relations, tied to the claim that women are expected to perform an undue amount of emotional labor insofar as they are presumed to have responsibility for the emotional state of their male partner.  Here we might think o...

Let's think for a moment about how we get around.  Human beings are clearly designed to walk upright.  Our spine is optimized for an upright posture, and is on a relative basis stronger than our quadruped cousins to handle the higher load at the top of the body.  Our head is set on top of the spine in a manner that has us looking forward naturally only when standing upright (and, conversely and unhelpfully, looking down when on all fours).  Our hips have a different design than most four-legged mammals, allowing for a greater range of motion but putting our legs in an awkward position relative to our torso if we are on all fours.  Our arms are shorter than our legs, forcing us either to "walk" with our knees as points of contact (which they are manifestly not designed to do), or else to arch our backs in an awkward and unstable posture.  Our hand bones are small and fragile, clearly not designed to take the repeated pounding involved in being a point of con...