“The Body & Society” Notes Pt 1: Damned to Pixar Heaven

Last updated on: January 19, 2018 at 12:50 pm By Eve Tushnet

Okay, I thought I could write a coherent series of posts relating the concerns of contemporary gay Christians to Peter Brown’s terrific study of “sexual renunciation in early Christianity,” but coherence proves elusive as always, so you’ll just get my notes. Christian sexual renunciates–vowed virgins, the first monastics, even married people who gave up sex with their spouse–intruded into the pagan world like strange, stripped dancing skeletons, part memento mori and part jester. Let me begin by painting a picture... Read more

Only Loved at Night: Short movie reviews + one book

Last updated on: January 17, 2018 at 9:56 pm By Eve Tushnet

Scarface: Slinky, sleazy Paul Muni. I guess it’s ok to totally glamorize murder if you slap on a few beginning titles and then make it end with the guy pathetic. Believe me, we won’t forget what he was like when he was cool. Loved Muni and also his character’s sad relationship with his sister. The Roaring Twenties: This is the noir gangster film I hadn’t heard of, and honestly, I liked it a lot better than Scarface (although I also... Read more

Off-Key in the Canticle: Some scattered notes on “post-liberal” order

Last updated on: January 12, 2018 at 2:44 pm By Eve Tushnet

On Wednesday I went to a discussion at the Catholic Information Center here in DC, hosted by Fare Forward (I’m in the magazine! reviewing a Czech genocide-tourism novel, it’s fantastic, I think the review is pretty good too), on “Christianity, Liberalism, And the Challenges of Our Day.” You can watch the discussion here. Before I plunge in, I will say that I have not read any of the authors’ pieces in FF, because this is my blog and I am... Read more

“Slapstick Tragedy”: I review “I, Tonya”

Last updated on: January 9, 2018 at 12:19 pm By Eve Tushnet

at First Things. And I did an extended twitter thread of notes, outtakes, and skating videos which I think is a good companion to the piece. There seem to be two directions in which a movie with this knowing, winking attitude can go. If we’re lucky, it will be pure camp, in which the grotesque, disgraced female is an audience-identification figure, a pitied monster. If we’re unlucky, it will be a comedy of contempt, inviting us to laugh at lowlife... Read more

That Great Drowned Atlantis, The ’90s

Last updated on: January 7, 2018 at 7:32 pm By Eve Tushnet

I’ve been doing a thing where I bring various periods of my life, and the people who were with me then, to prayer. So I’ll say a decade of the day’s rosary for them, and offer up for them whatever is there to be offered in the day; and I’ve also made this more fun for myself by revisiting art (/pop) that is in some way connected with that time and those people. So like, this current week will be... Read more

Rockin’ with the King of Babylon: 2017 Best-Of

Last updated on: January 27, 2018 at 6:19 pm By Eve Tushnet

As always I shall switch from “best” to “favorite” and back as my whimsy takes me. Books (nonfiction). Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, And Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. A classic (I think?) study of the many varied practices and meanings of continence (aka no sex having from now on) in the early Church. Fantastic, fun to read, and I’m really looking forward to writing something inspired by this, on the varied practices and meanings of specifically... Read more

Seeking to Interview Gay/Same-sex Attracted/You Know What I Mean People About Learning to Experience God’s Tenderness

Last updated on: December 18, 2017 at 11:35 am By Eve Tushnet

OK so I’m writing this book, supposedly, about why it is so hard for so many gay people growing up in the Church to experience God as a tender father or lover who cherishes them, what it’s like to start experiencing that divine tenderness for the first time, and practices which can help people know God in this way. And I’d like to include a lot of other people’s voices, since it was talking to other gay Christians which convinced... Read more

The Searchers: I revisit “ElfQuest”

Last updated on: December 15, 2017 at 12:41 pm By Eve Tushnet

This winter I’ve had the true pleasure of revisiting a comics series I adored in childhood, Wendy and Richard Pini’s ElfQuest. It is about elves on a quest (more than one quest! so many quests!) and although it is marked in some bad ways by its late ’70s – early ’80s origin, it is an artistic triumph and a genuine delight. It’s also, it turns out, full of themes which would continue to shape my life up through my conversion... Read more

“How the Eucharist Helps the Lonely and the Desperate”: I’m in the Catholic Herald

Last updated on: December 15, 2017 at 10:45 am By Eve Tushnet

running my mouth: In 2015, a blog called Spiritual Friendship, which publishes theological and personal reflections of interest to gay people who accept the Christian sexual ethic, interviewed Kelley Cutler about her work with LGBT homeless youth. Cutler said: “One question I’ve asked most LGBT Catholics I’ve met is, ‘Why do you stay in the Church?’ Think about it: they could go right down the street to another faith community that has different teachings. So why do they stay? I have... Read more

Sisters and Survivors: Yaa Gyasi, “Homegoing”

Last updated on: December 13, 2017 at 11:07 pm By Eve Tushnet

Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, is the uneven execution of a brilliant and haunting premise. Homegoing starts with two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, in colonial Ghana. The sisters never meet–we slowly learn the circumstances which led their mother to flee her first home for her second. One sister becomes the wife/mistress of the British governor of the Cape Coast Castle. The other sister becomes a slave, sent from the castle’s dungeon across the Middle Passage to America. Homegoing follows the... Read more