A Sound of Sheer Silence

Friend of the blog Liz Bruenig directed my attention to this article by Geoffrey Miller, discussing polyamory.   I've been thinking about this topic for a while, and this was the spur to put thoughts to electronic paper.  One thing about the article is, I think, inarguable--this topic is going to be with us for a long time to come, and is going to be more and more prominent in time.  Dr. Miller's article is a serious and thoughtful piece, and it deserves to be taking seriously and thoughtfully, which I hope to do here. Before getting into my views--and I know this is obnoxious, but please bear with me--I want to lay down a few markers.  First, my position is that marriage is fundamentally a human institution.  I recognize that this is a controversial position, especially among Christians of a moderate to conservative orientation (of which I consider myself, whether or not others would consider me so).  But I think that if you look at the concrete "facts o...

"After all . . . I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her." - Anna Scott [played by Julia Roberts], Notting Hill 1. There is a story out there, widely believed by many folks, that goes something like this.  Once we had a society (either broader political society, church society, or both) that had a very clear set of rules about how men and women were supposed to interact.  These rules were good, because sexuality is powerful and dangerous and at least a little bit evil and shameful, and the rules worked to control those instincts in socially constructive ways.  We need clear structures, defined rules, a rather rigid superstructure to contain all of this stuff.  And, if you add in the religious dimension, this structure is ordained by God, so there is really no reason to question or even think too hard about any of it.  Yes, sure, isolated people violated these norms from time to time, but there were wise (if, perhaps, harsh) mea...

Twitter is mostly terrible, but there are a few bright spots, and one of them is Nicole Cliffe.  Moreso than anyone else I have found, she is able to tell consistently compelling stories in the weird and artificial format that Twitter provides.  She also has this incredibly ability to build community around her writing on Twitter, which sounds strange when you say it but is 100% true. Yesterday, Cliffe dropped a particularly amazing story, the beginning of which is: OKAY: I am going to tell the story of my bigamous grandmother at the current time. Please mute me if you heard it two years ago. Please do not steal it for an Elite Daily story (happened last time.) — Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) March 25, 2018 Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.  Beyond being a cracker of a tale, her story got me thinking about a question that I think is at the heart of so much what is going on in America right now.  Everyone, I think, recognizes that things have chan...

{I wrote this about a month ago, when the Bruenig piece was current, and then decided not to post it.  After thinking about what I wrote today , I changed my mind.  This is basically unedited from that original draft, except for a few typo fixes.} Friend-of-the-blog Elizabeth Bruenig, who is now a columnist for the Washington Post (yay!), wrote an excellent and thoughtful piece about the recent Aziz Ansari  incident/revelations.  Bruenig's position, if I might summarize it, is that the Sexual Revolution brought with it the notion that sexual interactions should be treated in essentially the same way as any other sort of social interaction.  And, in the context of other, normal social interactions, it is considered to be appropriate and praiseworthy to try to meet the needs and wants of other people.  So, as an example, if I am in a group that wants to go out and eat sushi, but I don't really care for sushi all that much, I might keep my objections to myse...

There is a dimension to the mass shootings in the United States,  most recently the horror yesterday in Florida , that cannot be reduced simply to the lack of meaningful gun control.  It is certainly the case that, absent access to the guns, the destruction caused by incidents such as this would be dramatically reduced.  To be clear, this is absolutely reason enough to justify such moves--I am in favor of the complete ban and confiscation of all firearms in private hands in the United States, along the lines accomplished in Australia and the UK .  If accomplishing this goal is in conflict with the Second Amendment, then I am in favor of repealing the Second Amendment.  I am a gun control absolutist, and I believe that any and all efforts toward that end are good and salutary.  If such measures were in place yesterday, these kids would be alive today. But. There is something going on that causes all of these people to take advantage of the opportuni...

I know a guy who would consider himself an evangelical Christian.  At the end of the day, he is a good guy.  While conservative, he's not a flame-thrower. But, here's the thing about this guy, this evangelical Christian.  He lives his life on the basis of the principle that the goal of this life is to make as much money as one possibly can.  He has said so on numerous occasions, in both private and quasi-public settings.  Sure, he cares about his family and about his religion, but the primary,day-to-day objective of his life is maximizing his personal wealth.  He spends a great deal of time thinking and strategizing about how to make the most money in his current situation. More specifically, he recognizes that the best way to make money is to put yourself in the same environment as other people that have money and/or are in a position to make money come your way.  So, he makes a point of being around those people, openly sucking up to them and try...

Over the course of the last week, the Take-O-Sphere has been awash with reactions to Rod Dreher's long promised book on the Benedict Option, titled, well, The Benedict Option.   Elizabeth Bruenig had a good review , that I talked about briefly here .  Rachel Held Evans had some reasonable reactions on Twitter, provoking Dreher's now reflexive response of accusing her of preparing to become informant for some hypothetical anti-Christian Gestapo , a charge we recall he leveled on David Gushee some time ago .   Damon Linker and the New York Times's David Brooks  also wrote thoughtful responses, and it is those two pieces that I want to talk about for a bit. I have stated my objections to the entire enterprise of the Benedict Option in the past , and I stand by those objections .  But what I think gets the least amount of attention in thinking about Dreher's project is how monomanically focused his vision of Christianity is.  Linker's piece hits on the key fa...

Less than a month ago, I said I would stop talking about Roman Catholicism , and I had every intention of sticking to that.  But I am going to break that promise to talk about the release of the report of the Royal Commission in Australia about clerical sexual abuse.  The results are shocking--if the reports are correct, the scope of the problem in Australia was even worse than in the United States or in the UK/Ireland.  To give an example, there was a reference to a Benedictine monastery in Western Australia in which 17.6% of the monks had an abuse allegation lodged against them at some point in the 1950s.  Think about being in a room with a group of monks in which one out of every six of them had someone in the 1950s  accuse them of committing a sexual violation on a minor.  Think of how many complaints were not made  in the culture of the 1950s.  One in six.  My God. I had a twitter exchange last night with Maureen Clarke about the rep...

I'm working on some posts reviewing the rest of the chapters of the book, and I will be getting those out in the next week or so, but I wanted to pause for a second and go on a bit of a tangent.  This last week and half or so has been a bit of a perfect storm--I've been reading and thinking about Rev. McCleneghan's book, I have been talking to friends of mine about the book and about their own situations, and of course I have . . . experienced? endured? . . . the latest from Donald Trump and his campaign and the reaction thereof, alongside the rest of the U.S. population. At the intersection of all of this has been a bit of a Eureka moment for me.   As I mentioned in a previous post , I've always known I existed in a bit of the in-between space between the broader, secular culture and the more conservative Christian (in my case Catholic) culture. And, while there is no question that I have been moving in many ways away from that more traditionalist thinking, I still ...