I am moving. Again. Counting college, this will be my twelfth move in eight years. And the truth of the matter is, I hate moving. I’m also not alone in this, I expect. An informal survey of friends ages 18-35(ish) on Twitter and Facebook revealed that even in my own digital circles, my twelve moves since entering college weren’t exactly anomalous. The majority have moved at least 5 times since college. For some, the experience has been one which has... Read more
It’s no secret I’m a fan of David Foster Wallace. The first thing I remember reading by him, shortly before graduating high school, was his Kenyon College commencement speech, commonly known as This is Water. The title is taken from a short parable he tells at the beginning of the speech: There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s... Read more
Sin. It’s strangely akin to our love for crappy television: we don’t talk about it until we know we are in company that understands why we do it. Sin is our flaw; sin is a failure to align with the perfection of our nature in the cosmic order. It’s something that we hide and work on until we can someday get rid of it, and talk about it with the zeal of the one who was bad but is now good,... Read more
So, marriage has been a rather hot topic of late in the Church, what with Amoris Laetitia and Pope Francis’s recent comments that “a portion of our sacramental marriages are null.” So, rather than attack the question of nullity head on, I’d like to step out of the particulars and simply tell you a story and talk about ignorance, intention, and Grace. I’m a convert, if I hadn’t mentioned it before. I converted the fall semester of my freshman year... Read more
“Grace is, as it were, a participation in the divine nature. That is the definition always quoted by theologians,” wrote Cardinal Charles Journet. When participating in the Divine science as when participating in the Divine life, not falling prey to the contempt of familiarity can pose a significant challenge. It is all very well to love God, but if we don’t know Him at least in some way by means of infused or natural knowledge (given revelation, of course), then... Read more
***This obviously deals with a sensitive topic, and includes some of the victim’s own, validly graphic, words about the attack. So you can choose not to read this, if that could upset, enrage, or trigger you*** Let’s talk about the Stanford rape, Brock Turner, and men. In my life I have had the pleasure of knowing more than a few good men. This group includes my father and other men I am related too. It also includes men I have... Read more
So, intellectual blind spots exist in all of us, largely due to intellectual custom, as we were talking about earlier. Dr. Ron McArthur, whose exploration of intellectual custom has been the foundational to my exploration of this, offered the following definition of intellectual custom in his post-humanus article Intellectual Custom and the Study of St. Thomas. He defines intellectual custom as: A natural or quasi-natural inclination of the intellect, of which the will is the principle, in dependence upon the time... Read more
Nicholas Kristof’s The Liberal Blind Spot in the New York Times is a fascinating follow up to his earlier article calling out his liberal colleagues for welcoming “people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.” Now, while the prevalence of ideological homogeneity favors the left in academia , a trend often supported with the derisively nonfactual claim that “truth skews left,” it’s reasonable to note that “blind spots” are not simply a problem leftists/progressive face—it’s a problem humans face. Rather... Read more
Recently, I was chatting with a few of the female youths of my classroom about up-and-coming pop artist Daya’s song Sit Still Look Pretty. As it wasn’t requests for Drake’s One Dance, I was more than happy to hear it. The song was catchy in the way bubblegum pop songs aspire to be—another instance, along with bubble gum-girl power pop queen Meghan Trainor, of what Spencer Kornhaber describes over at The Atlantic as “this cultural moment when social causes meant to reform mass media are becoming... Read more
Eating Peaches
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