This is the post about “possibilities for publicly honoring nonmarital sacrificial love,” and there are a lot of directions I could go with it. I could jump into the ongoing conversation about vowed friendships, except that a) I delve into those questions extensively in the book and b) I don’t tbh really grok the CS Lewis, friendship is about gazing outward not at one another, friendship is a realm of pure freedom, stuff. You all already know I don’t like... Read more
continues to tell hidden stories: We all love food, because it’s delicious and without it we’d all die horribly. We also love the fact that we really don’t have to worry where said food came from beyond “the store” or, if you think about it a little harder, “the ground.” So what if we were to tell you our favorite foodstuffs are being harvested by tens of thousands of exploited children? This isn’t some shady underground child labor ring run... Read more
rounds up some links. Comments also worth reading; I’m most sympathetic to the first comment, but others raise important points, including the stuff I talked about in that “Captive Virgins” post: As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I wrote an article for Christianity Today on friendship, basically making the case that we ought to be able to think of our Christian friendships as more significant, committed, public, and permanent than we usually do. Well, since then, Matthew Lee Anderson... Read more
Exec. Director [of Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (sic)] Pat M. is due in at 0900 and has application interviews with three people, 2F and 1M, who better be showing up soon, and Gately will answer the door when they don’t know enough to just come in and will say Welcome and get them a cup of coffee if he judges them able to hold it. He’ll get them aside and tip them off to be sure to... Read more
I don’t love the insistence on re-terming this relationship a “friendship”–like, give people some breathing room to figure out how they want to talk about their own difficulties and loves!–and I would emphasize more the need to minimize disruption for your children. But overall this is compassionate advice, from a trio of (openly!) same-sex attracted Christian ministers/speakers in England: We recently received an email from a member of a same-sex couple who have both just committed their lives to Christ.... Read more
I’ve been to two Orthodox Christian weddings so far, and my favorite part of them is the crowns. Both bride and groom are crowned during the ceremony. As with the breaking of the glass in a Jewish wedding (probably also my favorite part, though the chair-bouncing which terrified my father at my sister’s wedding may take first place there) I’m guessing there are multiple meanings to this symbol, but the one I’ve heard most often is that these are the... Read more
when the nation stops needing them… …There are some obvious questions here about police training, most importantly why they fired so quickly and made no attempt at de-escalation. If they had, it seems pretty clear that Crawford would have dropped the gun and would still be alive today. It’s hard to believe that a father of two knowingly provoked police with a pellet rifle. That Crawford was black and the police officers who shot him are white (as is Ritchie)... Read more
for AmCon: Love Is Our Mission: The Family Fully Alive is a slim volume, more of an overgrown pamphlet, prepared for the 2015 World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia. It’s meant to lay out Catholic beliefs about vocation, sex, and family life in a way that acknowledges and responds creatively to contemporary challenges. It contains discussion questions to make it easy to use in ministries, book clubs etc. This is what outspoken Archbishop Charles J. Chaput and his team think... Read more
via Matt Frost. TMN: You’ve said the novel trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter was an inspiration for this latest series. Are you depicting scenes from the books, or something else? Carson Ellis: I read Kristin Lavransdatter for a long time. I took breaks between the three books to read other things, but I was sort of plodding through it on and off for nearly a year. For people who don’t know: It’s set in medieval Norway, written by Sigrid Undset in the... Read more
The ‘base [freebase cocaine] frees and condenses, compresses the whole experience to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the graph, an afflated orgasm of the heart that makes her feel, truly, attractive, sheltered by limits, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an instant by God. Read more
Eve Tushnet
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