I thought the piece Rod Dreher linked to about a gay Mormon man happily married to a woman very engaging. It behooves all of us – on whatever side of the various debates about marriage currently raging – to recognize the great variety of ways humans can make lives for themselves that work.that regard, I’d just like to point out that, inasmuch as what distinguishes this fellow is, primarily, that he is married to a woman to whom he is not sexually attracted, and that he is sexually attracted to other people (he doesn’t lack a libido), this doesn’t really distinguish him terribly much from the norm through human history. Most marriages in human history were arranged ones, in which neither party had the freedom to choose their partner. While I’m sure in many such marriages some degree of sexual compatibility is achieved, it’s very hard for me to believe that any significant number of such marriages were characterized by what we would recognize as “falling in love with” or even “having a crush on” or “having the hots for” somebody. That doesn’t mean such emotions were unknown, just that they weren’t particularly associated with marriage. The radicalism of modern Western marriage is the assertion that these feelings should have something to do with marriage – indeed, should have primacy over the far more traditional bases of marriage, namely property and eugenics.
Noah Millman. I tried to post a comment on Noah’s post, but it didn’t seem to work, so I’ll add it here:
Noah, you write, “The radicalism of modern Western marriage is the assertion that these feelings [of passion] should have something to do with marriage – indeed, should have primacy over the far more traditional bases of marriage, namely property and eugenics.” I think you’re leaving out the other possibilities that are key to the story. It’s not just passion on the one side and property and eugenics on the other. What this story is pointing to is the possibility of personally chosen, not arranged, marriages built around a kind of regard for one another that is not primarily erotic, in the narrower sense. Here the key word is “intimacy.” These people married each other because they loved each other and wanted to share deep intimacy, but that intimacy was not characterized primarily by sexual passion. And yet the couple insists that they have a strong sexual relationship. The really interesting thing about the story has nothing to do with homosexuality, but with the possibility that our society has the logic of attraction all backwards: we start with sexual desire and hope to generate other forms of intimacy from that, but this model suggests that it could make more sense to start with the kind of intimacy that is more like friendship than anything else, and to trust that sexual satisfaction will arise from that.
I don’t think this is a new idea, but it feels new. When we read Jane Austen novels we think that the attraction between the protagonist and her beau had to have been primarily sexual but the topic just couldn’t be broached in those prudish days, but what if that’s just our narrowly sexual cultural formation talking? Maybe we need to think more seriously about the Weed family as a model for others — and not just for people who, as we Christians often say, “struggle with same-sex attraction.”
La Gorge du Dragon sur la rivière Daning, avant de rejoindre le Yangzi. Août 1998.
Beginning in the 1930s and ’40s, Christian teenagers and youth leaders staged a quiet revolution in American church life that led to what can properly be called the juvenilization of American Christianity. Juvenilization is the process by which the religious beliefs, practices, and developmental characteristics of adolescents become accepted as appropriate for adults. It began with the praiseworthy goal of adapting the faith to appeal to the young, which in fact revitalized American Christianity. But it has sometimes ended with both youth and adults embracing immature versions of the faith. In any case, white evangelicals led the way.
What is implied in the conventional wisdom that religion is prone to violence is that Christianity, Islam, and other faiths are more inclined toward violence than ideologies and institutions that are identified as “secular.” It is this story that I will challenge here. I will do so in two steps. First, I will show that the division of ideologies and institutions into the categories “religious” and “secular” is an arbitrary and incoherent division. When we examine academic arguments that religion causes violence, we find that what does or does not count as religion is based on subjective and indefensible assumptions. As a result certain kinds of violence are condemned, and others are ignored. Second, I ask, “If the idea that there is something called ‘religion’ that is more violent than so-called ‘secular’ phenomena is so incoherent, why is the idea so pervasive?” The answer, I think, is that we in the West find it comforting and ideologically useful.The myth of religious violence helps create a blind spot about the violence of the putatively secular nation-state. We like to believe that the liberal state arose to make peace between warring religious factions. Today, the Western liberal state is charged with the burden of creating peace in the face of the cruel religious fanaticism of the Muslim world. The myth of religious violence promotes a dichotomy between us in the secular West who are rational and peacemaking, and them, the hordes of violent religious fanatics in the Muslim world. Their violence is religious, and therefore irrational and divisive. Our violence, on the other hand, is rational, peacemaking, and necessary. Regrettably, we find ourselves forced to bomb them into the higher rationality.
Frank Reader of the Trashcan Sinatras, performing at Schuba’s in 2009. If there were any justice in the world, which there obviously isn’t, TCS would have been an enduringly high-selling, in-demand act for the past twenty years. They make some very sweet pop songs. Photo by Colin Davis.
A thoughtful little essay about Caravaggio’s “Denial of St. Peter.” What I find especially interesting about this painting is the way the left side of the painting runs temporally ahead of the right side. On the left side Peter is being accused; on the right side he is responding to the accusation. They are like two adjacent panels of a comic strip.
Rene Fijten’s illustration of China Miéville’s remarkable novel The City and The City
“Why have we not been reliably able to improve on C?” Rabkin asks. Part of the problem, he says, is that language designers don’t always have practical objectives. “There’s a tendency in academics of trying to solve a problem when no one actually ever had that problem,” said Rabkin, who recently received his computer science PhD at Berkeley and is now at Princeton working on a post-doc.He says that academics are so often determined to build a language that stands out from the crowd, without thinking about what’s needed to actually make it useful. In some cases, he says, they fail with the simplest of things, like documentation for their language. In other cases, he says, designers will keep adding new features to a language and effectively overload the engineers who are trying to use it.
“Maybe the solution isn’t entirely technical,” Meyerov says. “We need to start building more ‘socially aware’ languages.”
Richard Wilbur, "She"
What was her beauty in our first estate
When Adam’s will was whole, and the least thing
Appeared the gift and creature of his king,
How should we guess? Resemblance had to wait
For separation, and in such a place
She so partook of water, light, and trees
As not to look like any of these.
He woke and gazed into her naked face.
But then she changed, and coming down amid
The flocks of Abel and the fields of Cain,
Clothed in their wish, her Eden graces hid,
A shape of plenty with a mop of grain,
She broke upon the world, in time took on
The look of every labor and its fruits.
Columnar in a robe of pleated lawn
She cupped her patient hand for attributes,
Was radiant captive of the farthest tower
And shed her honor on the fields of war,
Walked in her garden at the evening hour,
Her shadow like a dark ogival door,
Breasted the seas for all the westward ships
And, come to virgin country, changed again—
A moonlike being truest in eclipse
And subject goddess of the dreams of men.
Tree, temple, valley, prow, gazelle, machine,
More named and nameless than the morning star,
Lovely in every shape, in all unseen,
We dare not wish to find you as you are,
Whose apparition, biding time until
Desire decay and bring the latter age,
Shall flourish in the ruins of our will
And deck the broken stones like saxifrage.
I find it almost impossible to read Faulkner now, except for a handful of things, chief among them “The Old People” — one of the best short stories ever written. Yet reading Absalom, Absalom! as an undergraduate was one of the transcendent reading experiences of my life. I am almost certain that if I read Absalom, Absalom! for the first time now, I wouldn’t like it very much. I would think it absurdly overwrought. I might not even be able to finish it. But I don’t think that’s necessarily because I’m a smarter or better or more sophisticated reader than I was thirty years ago. Maybe I knew some things then that I don’t know any more. Maybe I was open to experiences then that — for whatever reason — I’m no longer open to.