item #2: Sex abuse is another front. An exception came with an Aug. 24 piece in The New York Times about former Polish Archbishop Joseph Wesolowski, a onetime papal envoy in the Dominican Republic accused of molesting minors. He was recalled in late 2013 and laicized, meaning kicked out of the priesthood, in June. The Times asked whether bringing the former prelate to Rome was a way of evading civil prosecution, forcing the Vatican to clarify that because he’s been... Read more
makes an important contribution to national comity: Alabama Lane cake Also known as Alabama Lane cake, Lane cake is one of those boozy, eggy, dried-fruit-filled confections we don’t eat enough of these days. Invented by Emma Rylander Lane in the 1890s, a Lane cake is a sponge cake layered with a raisin-bourbon filling and frosted with a marshmallow-y “boiled white frosting.” Lane cake is also to Harper Lee what the madeleine is to Marcel Proust: The baked good makes several... Read more
(Preorder the book!) In my post on celibate partnerships I noted that “the more unusual your vocation, the more actively you should seek out spiritual guidance from an outside party.” But of course there’s a catch-22 here: The weirder your vocation, the more you need spiritual direction; and the weirder your vocation, the harder good direction is to find. In both my book and the partnerships post I spoke mostly to the person seeking direction. In this post I’ll try... Read more
Can we tell what God is trying to tell us with events in our lives? Does God use events in our lives that way? I used to be more confident than I am now that this was a spiritually-fruitful way of thinking. That was basically because I’d asked myself what purpose various things in my own life had served–my birth defects, that was the main thing–and I felt like I had a good sense of some plausible answers. E.g. by... Read more
The Anniversary: Bette Davis as hell-matriarch in red eyepatch shaped like a teardrop. Swings wildly from ultracamp to the sort of thing you’ll instantly recognize if you or a friend had a narcissistic parent. An example of my thing* about how “‘Realism’ only works for people whose worldviews are already accepted as realistic. The rest of us must make do with genre”–the parent’s narcissism distorts the whole family’s sense of what is real, so the most outrageous acts and statements... Read more
At the end of the book I point out that we can’t predict all the ways that welcoming gay/queer/same-sex attracted Christians will change our churches. In both the book and “Coming Out Christian” I talk about some of the ways I hope the increasing visibility and inclusion of gay Christians will change the churches–and our whole culture–but this is not something you or I control. I doubt that the nascent g/q/ssa Christian communities will agree on all these changes; I... Read more
Hi all! I’m starting to put together my schedule for the fall, so now is the perfect time to book me at your local university, Catholic school, bookstore, soapbox in dog park, etc etc. Email me at [email protected] and let’s see what we can do. Reasonable rates, some mod cons. Here’s what I said in Denver at Theology on Tap; here are some pieces giving you my basic approach to Gay Catholic Whatnot: one, two, three, four. My book drops... Read more
good food for thought all the way through: …Heresy therefore always poses a tricky double challenge for orthodoxy: a heresy that affirms a thing that orthodoxy also affirms (albeit to the exclusion of other necessary truths, or drawing false consequences from it), by definition, cannot be wholly evil, and orthodoxy must affirm the good things in it; and there is always a temptation to face the overemphasis on one pole by overemphasizing the other pole and falling into the other heresy (whether formally... Read more
in my great big gay Catholic book. (Preorder it here or here!) First of all, a caveat. I didn’t include a chapter on celibate partnerships (i.e. people who conceive of their vocations together in those terms, rather than in terms of devoted or spiritual friendship–I have a bunch of chapters on friendships which go beyond the modern “just friends” model) partly because I didn’t think I understood it very well. I still don’t! I’d appreciate your thoughts on all of... Read more
Hey it’s my birthday, let’s have some fun! This is a very, very scattershot link round-up. Mostly snagged from people I follow on Twitter and you should too. Walter Olson, “Petty Offenses and Police-Community Relations in Ferguson”: It seems so random and meaningless that a legal offense as minor as walking on the roadway would set in motion what was to prove the fatal confrontation between officer Darren Wilson and Michael Brown. But in the wider scheme of how Ferguson came... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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