Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Addresses Humanum Conference – UPDATED

The Humanum conference has ended, and I am very interested in reading more about it, particularly based on this tweet by Austen Ivereigh:

Can't help feeling this is something tectonic: the creation of an ecological narrative about marriage. This could fly. #Humanum

— Austen Ivereigh (@austeni) November 19, 2014

Here is an excellent — thoughtful and wonderfully accessible — talk by Rabbi Sacks. It is full of truth. Watch the whole thing, because it ends with a bang.

“Turning the prose of biology into the poetry of the human spirit, and redeeming the darkness of the world by the radiance of love.”

Also check out the “New Affirmation on Marriage:

It is hard now to speak of such obvious and beautiful things, but they are there. All the witnesses know it. It is the music of man and of woman. Man with woman brings out the finest in him, directing his blood and his mind toward what makes life possible; and woman with man brings out the finest in her, directing her love and her care toward what makes life sweet.

Today, however, the homes that marriage makes are exposed to an army of distractions, and to the thief and the enemy who comes to steal and destroy. Weddings are rarer and children fewer. Where poverty erodes, marriage feels out of reach. Where war afflicts, families are crushed. Anywhere marriage recedes, we lose the transcendent and material goods that all human beings should enjoy.

And we too are at fault, for when marriages are exposed to the wind and the rain, we have paid little attention. When the needs of children succumb to the wishes of adults, we have often remained silent. Love is reduced to a consumer item, an airbrushed image, or a slogan to export. It will not work. We will not flourish.

For marriage is no mere symbol of achievement, but the very foundation—a base from which to build a family and from there a community. For on earth marriage binds us across the ages in the flesh, across families in the flesh, and across the fearful and wonderful divide of man and woman, in the flesh. This is not ours to alter. It is ours, however, to encourage and celebrate.

And so it is that we rejoice at weddings.

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Rod Dreher has much more, go check him out.