The miracle of the loaves and fishes is one of the ones that I’d heard before I ever considered becoming Catholic. But I’d always heard about it in isolation, as just one in a series of extraordinary (but interchangeable) events. This past Sunday, the story came up in the Gospel reading, but, this time, the story started a little earlier than I expected, which gave me some additional context: When Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist, he... Read more
The NYT‘s Ethicist has taken a very strange approach to wrongdoing in this weekend’s column. A student wrote in to say that ze saw a friend take someone’s car keys and throw them into a lake. The friend offered the letterwriter $50 as an implicit bribe in order to stay quiet. The bribe worked. Later, someone came by looking for his keys, and the letterwriter kept mum. But ze felt queasy about zer choice, and asked the Ethicist for his advice.... Read more
In 2014, I’m reading and blogging through Pope Francis/Cardinal Bergoglio’s Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus. Every Monday, I’ll be writing about the next meditation in the book, so you’re welcome to peruse them all and/or read along. In his chapter on the city of Sardis, which kept up a pretense of their faith, Pope Francis turns to parental and grandparental relationships which, in his opinion, best reveal how we are handling spiritual tumult. It is easy to fool others regarding the... Read more
This time, when I went to Jen Fulwiler’s Saint Generator, the man I pulled turned out to be a veritable Jean Valjean. Here’s what happened in the life of Saint Conrad of Piacenza. One day while hunting, Conrad ordered attendants to set fire to some brush in order to flush out the game. A strong wind carried the flames to nearby fields, forests, towns and villages, and Conrad fled in panic. An innocent peasant was imprisoned, tortured into a confession and... Read more
— 1 — In the course of promoting his new book, Full Fathom Five, Max Gladstone recently did an AMA on reddit, in which someone asked him why he decided to write his necromancers as lawyerly types. His reply: [N]ecromancy and bankruptcy law in specific have a lot in common: take something that’s dead, surround it with a circle of protection, carve it up, argue with other people about what parts of the dead thing work and what don’t, remove the... Read more
Greta Christina thinks Lydia Bennett has been given short shrift. Although Lizzie Bennett has a certain amount of fire and spunk within the constraints of her life in Pride and Prejudice, Greta admires Lydia for daring to transgress completely and act autonomously, come what may. She is a woman who thinks of her body, and her life, as hers. She’s a woman who — in defiance of the powerful social pressures of 19th century England — decides that who she marries,... Read more
In 2014, I’m reading and blogging through Pope Francis/Cardinal Bergoglio’s Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus. Every Monday, I’ll be writing about the next meditation in the book, so you’re welcome to peruse them all and/or read along. Just a small note from this week’s chapter. In this selection, Pope Francis contrasts the dream of Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel with the vision of God granted to John in Revelation. Francis writes: The burnished bronze feet of the Son of... Read more
In a coda to my series on Lewis, Sondheim, and friendship, I’m back at The American Conservative today to respond to a feature from The Atlantic on polyamory. Here’s a teaser, and you can read the full post at AmCon. Marital Completionism: A Bad Model for Thruples and Couples Alike Why assume you need to make compromises to achieve connubial bliss? In an article for The Atlantic, Olga Khazan profiles several polyamorous couplesand wonders whether more families should consider open (non-monogamous) marriages. Khazan argues that... Read more
In the summer of 2014, I reprised my successful Sondheim Symposium birthday party of two years prior. In 2012, we watched Company and Passion and argued about romantic love. This year, we paired Merrily We Roll Along (Sondheim’s musical that tracks the collapse of a friendship) with the “Philia/Friendship” chapter from C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. (For extra credit, party attendees could also read Spiritual Friendship by Aelred of Rievaulx). We ate thematically appropriate cake (see above) and settled down for discussion. I’ve collected my thoughts in the... Read more
This post is one in a series on friendship, explored through the lenses of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. To close out this week’s series on friendship, I’d like to recommend three articles on people building intentional communities that make it easier to bring friends to the center of our lives — a space conventionally reserved for family and lovers. Looking for a Housemate, Not a Mate, in Later Life – The New York Times... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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