“I go to visit a local family,” writes the journalist Tuvia Tenenbom. “It is Friday Night and the family sits at the table. The husband makes the Kiddush, the wife shares the challahs with everybody, some people sing some songs and everybody gets busy eating the Sabbath food: fish, chicken, meat, followed by Coke Zero and Johnnie Walker Black Label.” He is in Israel, near Gaza. A conversation follows about beautiful sights in distant lands and then, just before the... Read more
In My Church Loyalties, the Methodist philosopher and Marquette professor D. Stephen Long explains why he has not become a Catholic, though he has started the process twice. It is an honest and helpful essay, and a gracious one toward his Protestant brethren on the one side and his Catholic friends on the other, though also one that proves his wisdom in remaining a Methodist. I think that Long, like many would-be converts, is attracted to aspects of the Catholic Church but not exactly... Read more
From the New York Times‘ report of the corruption trial of former governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell and his wife Maureen, accused of giving political favors to a businessman who gave them a lot of money, a lot more money than friendship would seem to explain: Another time, after thanking Mr. Williams for funds to help cover expenses for some real estate investments, Mr. McDonnell sent an email to his policy director just six minutes later telling him to meet to... Read more
“A survey commissioned by USA Network of 18-34 year olds in four cities (Austin, Omaha, Nashville, and Phoenix) found that 10 percent of respondents endorsed multiple partners within a marriage, ‘each of whom fulfills a need in your life,'” reports Leah Lebresco in her reflection on the failures of “polyamory” I commended this morning. I’m relieved that the percentage is only 10. I would have thought it would be higher and it might well have been had the study included more cities on the east... Read more
“Even many devout monogamists admit that it can be hard for one partner to supply the full smorgasbord of the other’s sexual and emotional needs,” writes Olga Khazan in The Atlantic, in a kind of apologia for “polyamory” delivered with the magazine’s considerable cultural authority, and Leah Libresco responds: There’s an enormous assumption tucked into that first sentence. Monogamy isn’t premised on the idea that one person can ever be everything to a partner. When a marriage fails to fulfill “the full smorgasbord”... Read more
Signs from (and of) the past, on the confessionals in St. Peter Church in the Northside neighborhood of Pittsburgh. (A few blocks from the Heinz Field and PNC Park, for those of you who care about such things.) Beautiful confessionals, too. Read more
“Really? Should our standard of moral action be that we’re not as bad as the criminals in our midst?” asks Dale S. Recinella, the Florida bishops’ chaplain to prisoners on death row and in solitary confinement, interviewed in America. The chaplain’s major concern, he had explained, is the horrible conditions in the prison — they don’t, for example, have air conditioning, in Florida — while some people defend the conditions by saying ““It’s not as bad as what the criminals did.” He... Read more
In Don’t Eat Dogs, published last night, I quoted Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s defense of eating dogs if you are in a culture in which dogs are eaten. In making the argument, he wrote “all of God’s good Creation bears his image, and is therefore worthy of respect. And this is particularly true of the higher animals who, by virtue of man-fellowship, have acquired man-like qualities.” That’s a line I quoted. After that he says, This is not an incidental point, by the way. Lots... Read more
First, my friend and then-colleague Barbara McClay explained Why You Shouldn’t Eat Dogs. We accord dogs “a place we do not grant to the other animals,” she wrote. That respect isn’t irrational, because it is founded in the uniqueness of the relationship. You could say the relationship itself could have been formed just as easily with some other animal — pigs, for instance. That might be true, but it’s irrelevant. Denying the existence of the relationship would be the irrational thing... Read more
Catholic neo-conservatives, explains Patrick Deneen in an interview on Ethika Politika (on whose board both of us serve) “have tended . . . to read the Church’s teachings on sexual ethics to be inviolable, but Catholic social teachings regarding economics to be a set of broad and even vague guidelines.” . . . [M]any Catholics of the stripe we are discussing are strenuous in their insistence that, on the one hand, the public square should not be stripped of religion and morality, but... Read more
David Mills
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In