You spin me right round, baby, right round,

Like a blogwatch, baby, right round round round…

 

After Abortion: Annie reflects on her experiences as a sidewalk counselor. Both heartening and heartbreaking, as is typical of such accounts. She also links to Sursum Corda’s excellent post on being an abortion escort, and how he ultimately came to change his mind about abortion.

 

Ditch the Raft: Fellow Yalien life form Andi offers an interesting Buddhist response to my post on sublimation. Not being a Buddhist, I don’t share her view of suffering: All sublime experiences and acts require some suffering; avoidance of suffering is not a worthy human goal; we should move through suffering rather than away from it; great suffering and great joy can often coexist, and great joy often has embedded within it a necessary edge of pain. This is the romantic, desiring aspect of Christianity, where the soul longs for God as the deer longs for the running stream. Or, as Maggie Gallagher put it in The Abolition of Marriage, “[Marriage] is the Song of Songs, and the Crucifixion.”

 

I also may disagree or wish to add something to Andi’s discussion of love, virtue, and selfishness. I’m not sure, since I’m not sure whether Andi is using “selfishness” here in the ordinary everyday sense. Selfishness in love is wrong; but it isn’t the only way love goes wrong. Women, especially, but men too, are often tempted by a kind of self-immolating romance that is much closer to idolatry than to real love. Then, too, there are the women Frederica Mathewes-Green interviewed for her excellent Real Choices: Listening to Women, Looking for Alternatives to Abortion. Many of these women aborted not to please themselves, but to preserve relationships: with their mothers, with their families in general, with their boyfriends. This isn’t anything we’d ordinarily call selfishness–but neither is it, obviously, the fullness of love.

 

Anyway!–Andi’s post brings up all kinds of fascinating stuff, and you should go read it. Also, anyone interested in these issues would probably find Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World an engrossing read. I certainly did.

 

“Downloading for Democracy“: “While legislators in Washington work to outlaw peer-to-peer networks, one website is turning the peer-to-peer technology back on Washington to expose its inner, secretive workings.” Must-read, via Hit and Run.

 

“Charity Should Begin in Congress“: Ignore the lame title. This George F. Will column is divided between a description of an amazing San Diego ministry, and a wonkish look at a bill that would make it much more difficult to donate your car to charity. Both halves are very much worth your time.