Last week, I went to Mass with my boyfriend on the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The officiating priest had lucked out, as the parents whose child was being baptized at the Mass had named their child Mary, providing him with ample material for a homily. Happily, he still returned to the matter at hand, telling the story of the Assumption, talking about the reasons it wasn’t in the readings or the Bible and explaining how... Read more
I was baffled by the New York Times‘s article on vegan weddings that revealed many vegans opted to serve meat at their wedding receptions. The article dwelt on the question of whether the vegans and vegitarians ought to serve meat despite their own preferences. Guests who were not placated with meat tended to be quite upset. When Patrick Moore, a salesman from Attleboro, Mass., arrived at an old friend’s wedding in 1999 to discover nothing but vegetarian options, he made an... Read more
–1– Sorry to go AWOL this past week. I’ve been upstate at Lake Champlain with my family as part of my father’s 75th birthday celebration, and my internet access was limited to a half hour a day. So, of course, when I arrived home Thursday night, I found over 1000 items in my Google Reader feed. I’m nearly done working my way through the list, so I’m letting you tag along on the whirlwind tour of Things that Leah Found... Read more
My family and I are on vacation with only limited access to internet, so blogging will be only sporadic this week. I’ll definitely be back for Friday’s Quick Takes, but I cannot guarantee posts before then. Read more
This post is the last in a series on gay marriage. Check out all posts in this series at the gay marriage index. Senior year is a time of grad school applications, final papers, and secret betting pools on what couples will split up. Senior year is a minefield for pairs, since most seniors in relationships are carefully trying to avoid too much discussion of where they’ll be next year. Friends are quick to speculate about whether he’ll regret it... Read more
–1– One slight redesign this week. You’ll notice at the top of the blog a new tab marked ‘Featured Series.’ You can use this page to browse through special sequences of linked posts on this blog. Check out my math and morality series or my sequence on gay marriage, the final post of which (“Do we care about marriage too much?” is now up). –2– Over at the Huffington Post, I have a column up in response to the kerfuffle about... Read more
This post is part of a series about gay marriage. You can browse all posts in this series at its index I’m not a quite a language prescriptivist, but I share with my conservative friends a certain propensity to get short-tempered with radical redefinitions (a word to the wise: once you hear the phrase “Words have meaning!” escape my lips, you have about 30 seconds to detonation). So perhaps the couples in the articles below should consider themselves on notice.... Read more
This is part of a series of posts on gay marriage. You can see all posts in the series at the index. Yesterday, I wrote about the need for religious opponents of same sex marriage to base their objections in facts that are accessible in the secular sphere. Some Catholics maintain that most Christian morality, and sexual morality in particular, are manifestly correct and accessible to all people, whatever their religious background. In a profile in the New York Times,... Read more
This post is part of a series on the politics and philosophy that underlie the fight over gay marriage. You can see all the posts in this series at the gay marriage index. As the fight over the proposed Cordoba House mosque near Ground Zero has heated up, conservative Christians across the county are using this story to gin up support to block construction of mosques across the nation, regardless of their proximity to NYC. Anti-mosque activists, struggling to explain... Read more
I was looking through my notes for future posts, and it turns out I have a wide range of gay marriage/generic marriage ideas in the pipeline. Therefore, I am retroactively declaring today’s post part of a gay marriage series that will run every day from Mon-Thurs this week. All the posts in this series will be indexed on the new gay marriage page, just as the math and morality ones were. Read more
Unequally Yoked
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