A Sound of Sheer Silence

In The Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , Karl Marx said, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."  In the early 17th Century, the Roman Catholic Church committed an enormous, wholly unnecessary own goal when it condemned Galileo's astronomical findings that demonstrated that the solar system revolves around the sun rather than the Earth.  It's important to understand that Galileo was not breaking any new ground with what he was saying, as pretty much every scientifically literate person at the time had a heliocentric view of the universe.  Indeed, that's why it was so damaging--no one  at the time  who knew anything about the topic could take what the Church was saying seriously.  From that, the intellectual world concluded that there was no reason to take anything the Church had to say about the natural world...

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...

In a previous post, I mentioned that inclusive (or rather, in what is apparently the preferred form, "expansive") language was in the hopper at the Episcopal Church's General Convention, as part of the proposal for beginning the process of revising the Book of Common Prayer.  The proposal to revise the BCP, with explicit instructions to include expansive language, passed the House of Delegates, and was awaiting consideration by the House of Bishops.  This has provoked great discussion online, much of it good and some of it less so. To that end, a memorial was offered , with an impressive number of signatories.  I agree with most of what is stated in the memorial.  But I stop short at this paragraph, which is likely seen by the authors as the lynchpin of the whole project: We affirm that the Trinitarian language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not simply metaphorical but is an important part of the inheritance of the catholic faith grounded in the revelation o...

There is a conservative line of argument that goes something like this: "Sure, I get it, you hate religion and think it is bad and retrograde.  But, you haven't thought about what will replace it--that's going to be much worse!"  Now, I happen to think there is merit to this line of inquiry.  I think that people are religious on a fundamental level, and so will find some sort of religious cause or content, no matter what label that content is given. The problem, and this is where the conservatives get sideways, is in the examples of what that would look like.  In the conservative narrative, the nightmare scenario is something like gay couples living in the suburbs and going to the PTA meetings of their adopted kids, or women flying airliners and having economic autonomy.  Oh, the humanity!  No, the real danger is replacing the (flawed and often not consistent with their own principles though they may be) account of human dignity and the inalienable rights...

This summer, the Episcopal Church will be having its triennial General Convention, in Austin, Texas (a strange choice in my book, as Texas in July might as well be the surface of the sun).  Among the topics to be voted on is the initiation of the process to rewrite or revise the Book of Common Prayer, last done so in 1979.  Revisions to the Book of Common Prayer are truly a "third rail" and an inevitable source of controversy.  In fact, the Standing Committee on Liturgy and Music, the group that would be in charge of the mechanics of a revision, seems to be less than completely enthusiastic about the project, offering an alternative that would delay a revision for a least a decade .  And my sense, based on reading stuff on the Interwebs, is that it is likely that folks will take the out and kick the can down the road. The rector of my parish, who will be heading to Austin as a delegate, is resolutely against opening up the Prayer Book to wholesale revisions.  ...

One of the core claims advanced by advocates of the Theology of the Body is that our biology, by which they mean our sexual biology, discloses God's moral and ethical vision for sexual activity.  In doing so, they are working out an application of "natural law"--facts about the natural world reflect the plan of God.  The job, on this reading, is to interpret facts about the natural world in order to discern God's purposes encoded in the design of the natural world and extrapolate that into our concrete circumstances. There are a number of directions from which one might object to this from a methodological point of view, and I understand and agree with those objections .  But, I think there is something valuable to be learned from the design of our sexual biology which can provide clues as to the proper way to think about developing norms and rules for our sexual activity.  My objections to the conclusions drawn from the Theology of the Body not just about method b...

The Liturgists released a podcast about a week ago entitled "The Ethics of F***ing."  It was a excellent episode, and wisely featured Rev. Bromleigh McCleneghan and her book Good Christian Sex , which I did a deep-dive into a while back .  But for me the most impactful interview, in a different sort of way, was the interview with Christopher West.  West, for those who are not familiar, is a kind of celebrity proponent of the Theology of the Body, the complex philosophical and hermaneutical program to explain traditional Catholic sexual teachings in a modern form.  Theology of the Body relies primarily on a reading of Genesis 1 through 3, and "Science Mike" of the Liturgist honed in on a core problem that resides at the heart of the Theology of the Body.  Listening to West has inspired me to circle back to looking more closely at the problems inherent in the Theology of the Body (a project I worked on in a somewhat scattershot form a number of years ago), becaus...

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...