I’m making speaking appearances in New Haven today and tomorrow, so here’s a heads up for students in the area. Effective Altruism and Caritas Yale Effective Altruists Monday, Feb 16, 5pm JE Dining Hall When looking for high-impact opportunities to give, how should we weight the effect that different ways of giving have on the giver? If you get the most bang for your charity buck abroad, how will you stay engaged with the needs of the people around you and... Read more
You can listen to “Fights in Good Faith,” my weekly radio program, streaming today at 5pm ET and tomorrow (Sun) at 1pm. The episode is now available to download and stream. This week’s program is about the systems we build to administer justice, and the ways that these systems lose our trust Every week, I put up a “Radio Readings” post, so you can track down the books, articles, and, (this week) documentaries that I cite on the show. So, without further ado,... Read more
I’m a little too busy to do Quick Takes today; among other things, I’m hosting about 20 people at my place tonight to watch The Last 5 Years, and I promised to make dinner for all of them. (When I offered to cook, only 7 people had RSVP’d so far). The movie is in very limited release, but, luckily, it’s available to rent or buy from iTunes, so that’s what we’re doing. I hope some of you will join me (though probably... Read more
I’ll be sending the monthly update on my book Arriving At Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Offer next week, and if you get the email, you can enter a lottery to get an early copy. After I wrote a post on practical questions to ask about consent and coercion (and the way making a habit of these questions can develop your care and compassion), one of my commenters was concerned that telling people how to have sex more... Read more
A friend of mine shared an excellent essay with me on ways to understand consent. Everyone is pretty familiar with “No means no” (even if the applications of sometimes remind me of what law school friends have sometimes told me about police executing unwarranted searches — in one case, asking if they could search, removing the resident from the premises when he said no and cuffing him, and then asking the open door of the house, not hearing an objection, and... Read more
In the last week, I’ve run into two great pieces on how to offer hospitality, both by creating and supporting “third places” (a third place, apart from the home or the office for fellowship) or in one-to-one encounters. Both these pieces don’t just make actionable, concrete suggestions, they fill in lacuna in my own way of thinking about hospitality, blind spots created both by the way I prefer to socialize and my socioeconomic status. First up, Richard Beck of Expermental... Read more
In 2015, I’m reading and blogging through Ronald Knox’s collection of sermons on Christian exemplars, Captive Flames: On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes. Every Monday, I’ll be writing about the next portrait in the book, so you’re welcome to peruse them all and/or read along. In his sermon on St. George, Knox focuses primarily on why England would choose this saint as its patron, and what this reflects about England itself. It makes sense that Knox looks past the saint at what the... Read more
You can listen to “Fights in Good Faith,” my weekly radio program, streaming today at 5pm ET and tomorrow (Sun) at 1pm. And the episode is now available to stream (and download!) This week’s program is adapted from a talk I gave at St. Dominic’s in San Francisco on “Cultivating Openness to Truth.” Thanks so much to the parish for hosting me and to the parishioners and guests for asking such good questions — those questions are what informed the last segment of... Read more
If you’re sorry to have missed my talk in San Francisco on “Cultivating Openness to Truth” this week, tune into my radio show tomorrow at 5pm ET — I’ll be covering the highlights. And, for those of you who can’t catch the livestream, my program is beta-testing Real Life Radio’s downloadable podcasts, specifically because several of you wrote in to ask for that feature. — 1 — In three weeks, I’m really looking forward to attending Mary Stuart at the Folger... Read more
There are two reasons why I recommended that friends who want to cultivate deeper relationships with each other move into apartment buildings yesterday. The first reason is simply that they’re convenient. When a building is large enough, it’s relatively easy to find an open unit in your friend’s building to move into (especially if you live in a high turnover town, like I do). Plus, apartment buildings let you be neighbors (in terms of a 5 minute door-to-door distance) without actually having... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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