There’s always been more fiction than explicit philosophy on this blog and, in C.S. Lewis’s Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, he puts his finger on why I like sidling up on meaning of life questions in this way. Lewis is discussing various subtypes of science fiction — starting with the ones where plot and character take a back seat to the author showing you a clever engineering problem and ending up here: In all these the impossibility is, as I... Read more
As you’ve noticed, Disqus is now the commenting system here at Unequally Yoked and across all of Patheos. The higher ups have migrated nearly all old comments through, but anything you posted here over about the last two days is still being transferred in the mop up import. New comments will stay up. As we’re all adjusting, please use this post for three kinds of comments: Bug Reports – things that are wrong with the new Disqus set-up (can’t post, comments... Read more
— 1 — E.L. Konigsburg passed away this week, so this whole sequence of Takes is going to be an appreciation of her books, especially my four favorites: The View from Saturday, About the B’nai Bagels, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. And here’s how that last one opens: Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in... Read more
In the Patheos Hindu channel, Ambaa gives her perspective on Jedis and gnosticism, inspired by the same essay by Brother Humbert that prompted me to write “Emotional Weapons for a More Indifferent Age.” Ambaa explains that there’s a middle road between abandoning emotions and abandoning yourself to them. Quoth she: I don’t think Hinduism calls for anyone, even ascetics, to not have emotions. But a practiced monk can see the emotions playing out over his psyche and know that they... Read more
In The Guardian, Keli Goff has some harsh words for women in my demographic who become stay at home mothers. In “Female Ivy League graduates have a duty to stay in the workforce” she writes: But in the long run, degrees from competitive institutions should serve as more than modern day charm school or debutante diplomas. Sadly, it appears some women and men see them as such, simply a piece of paper to affirm that a woman is good spouse material... Read more
I’d like to highlight a couple comments from the quite long thread on Babies on a Plane! My original intent wasn’t to shame people for being bothered by screaming babies. There are few people who enjoy the sound of a human in distress (of any age), and we would be a little concerned about someone who was unmoved or pleased to hear someone cry. My objection wasn’t to the NYT letter writer being uncomfortable, but the tone of entitlement in... Read more
In yesterday’s post, I talked about the unenviable invulnerability of indifference, and, it so happened that the play I saw this weekend (Tom Stoppard’s Rock and Roll at the Actors Ensemble of Berkeley) touched on similar themes. The play is structured around (among other things) resistance to Soviet-dominated Communism in Czechoslovakia. At one point in the play, Jan gets into an argument with his friend Ferdinand (recently released from prison) about who represents a larger threat to the government: Ferdinand and... Read more
Over at the Dominicana blog, Br. Humbert pulls an interesting lesson out of a schoolboy’s startled question to the Dominican friars, “Are you guys Jedis?” After running down a few of the more obvious distinctions (rosaries vs lightsabers), he gets to one of the starkest philosophical differences between the two orders: [T]here is another way in which both Stoics and Jedi find themselves at odds with Christianity—in their idea that bodily emotions, or passions, are disturbances of the soul, and thus always... Read more
In The Washington Post, Elsa Walsh takes issue with Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. Walsh thinks Sandburg’s tactics are pretty good instrumentally, but she’s a bit sickened by the kind of success Sandberg is using them for: I have to wonder if Sandberg does not realize that she is going to die someday. There is so little life and pleasure in her book outside of work. Even sex is framed as something that men will get more of if they pitch in... Read more
— 1 — Dove has another clever ad campaign that does a nice attack on some of the terrible images of women in most other ad campaigns in their niche: I’ve seen some complaints that the ad is still subtly reinforcing that beauty is one of a woman’s most important characteristics, but the video does include people’s non-physical impressions of beauty (akin to Darcy’s comment about ‘fine eyes’). — 2 — And speaking of unexpectedly beautiful things, scientists have found a better... Read more
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