After young adulthood, he says, the reasons that friends stop being friends are usually circumstantial—due to things outside the relationship itself. One of the findings from Langan’s ‘friendship rules’ study was that 'adults feel the need to be more polite in their friendships,’ she says. 'We don’t feel like, in adulthood, we can demand very much of our friends. It’s unfair, they’ve got other stuff going on. So we stop expecting as much, which to me is kind of a sad thing, that we walk away from that.’ For the sake of being polite.
How Friendships Change Over Time - The Atlantic. That’s my former colleague Emily Langan talking, and I think she’s right. Doesn’t make things especially easy for someone like me, who in his mid-fifties leaves a bunch of old and strong friends behind for a new job in a far-away state. (Not that those people aren’t still friends, but like all relationships, friendship thrives on proximity.) People have been wonderful to me here at Baylor, but the “rules of friendship” for people my age influence us all — even when we try to ignore or bypass them. One of the recurrent themes in the rich writings on friendship by (my friend!) Wesley Hill is the fear of being, or being perceived as, “needy.” As long as that fear is in play, deep friendships will be hard to cultivate and sustain.
Frontispiece to Charles Howard Hinton’s The Fourth Dimension (1904), a book all about the “tesseract” – a four-dimensional analog of the cube, the tesseract being to the cube as the cube is to the square. Find out more in our latest essay “Notes on the Fourth Dimension” - [bit.ly/1Revr2B](http://bit.ly/1Revr2B)
Metalpoint was a major part of artistic
practice across northern Europe by about 1400. The fame of Netherlandish
artists such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden and Gerard David spread
quickly, and many young German artists travelled down the Rhine to learn in
their workshops. Metalpoint was used for recording facial types, figure
compositions and ornament designs until the mid-16th century. Albrecht Dürer’s
delicate silverpoints, made when he travelled in the Netherlands from 1520 to
1521, are among the most sensational ever produced.
The ultimate draughtsman of the German
Renaissance, Dürer experimented throughout his career with every type of
technique. His earliest recorded drawing is in metalpoint – a self-portrait
made at the age of 13 (now in the Albertina,
Vienna). Inspired by the Italian ideal of classical beauty from his visit
to Italy between 1505 and 1507, this sheet demonstrates a highly colouristic
use of the technique, achieved with white bodycolour brushed over silverpoint
to emphasise the sculptural quality of the face. The strong tone of the
prepared paper is reminiscent of the Florentine artist Filippino Lippi. In
later life, Dürer employed the sensitive restraint of metalpoint to make
portrait drawings, especially of his brothers Hanns and Endres, his wife Agnes,
and his close friend Willibald Pirckheimer.
This article reports the results of a nationwide audit study testing how Christian churches welcome potential newcomers to their churches as a function of newcomers’ race and ethnicity. We sent email inquiries to 3,120 churches across the United States. The emails were ostensibly from someone moving to the area and looking for a new church to attend. That person’s name was randomly varied to convey different racial and ethnic associations. In response to these inquiries, representatives from mainline Protestant churches—who generally embrace liberal, egalitarian attitudes toward race relations—actually demonstrated the most discriminatory behavior. They responded most frequently to emails with white-sounding names, somewhat less frequently to black- or Hispanic-sounding names, and much less to Asian-sounding names. They also sent shorter, less welcoming responses to nonwhite names. In contrast, evangelical Protestant and Catholic churches showed little variation across treatment groups in their responses. These findings underscore the role of homophily, organizational homogeneity, and the costs of racial integration in perpetuating the racial segregation of American religious life.
Worse, calling people names is disgraceful. Especially in the name of religion. These ad hominem attacks—an attack not on the argument but on the person–has no place in theology. It doesn’t matter if you’re attacking Pope Francis, Antonio Spadaro, Massimo Faggioli, John O’Malley, me, or anyone else. It’s completely unchristian. Feel free to disagree with us, but questioning our fidelity is out of bounds. Speaking of doctrine, one of Jesus’s lesser known teachings, and completely ignored because it’s so hard to adhere to, is his admonition against calling people names. “If you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.” (Mt. 5:22)
Theology and Hate | James Martin, SJ. Fr. Martin then goes on to explain that the people who disagree with him are guilty of “mean-spirited invective,” “malicious slandering that passes itself off as thoughtful theology,” “mean-spirited personal attacks that pass themselves off as Christian discourse,” “hate being passed off as charity,” “ad hominem comments, thinly veiled attacks on people’s fidelity to the faith, snide insinuations and malicious twisting of words.” Did I mention “hate”? “Hate piled on hate piled on hate… And hate. An endless river of hate…. You are reading hate.“
I am gateful for this post by Fr. Martin, because it shows me so clearly what respectful disagreement unsullied by mean-spirited invective and ad hominem comments looks like. Verily, a model for us all.
My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey on Christian higher education and the problem of “diversity” — to which we need (ahem) a diversity of responses.
That is the moral-ideological core of conservatism today. It presumes that life is a competition or race, that people are unequal in talent, drive, and ambition, and that those who end up on top deserve their victory and rewards — and those who come out on the bottom deserve their failure and hardships. Any attempt to overturn or even mitigate this moral order — whether through government regulation or changes in habits or assumptions in school or on the playground — amounts to an offense against justice itself.
Damon Linker. If so, I’m definitely not a conservative. That looks to me like a description of a free-market libertarian, but what do I know?
“Secular, but Feeling a Call to Divinity School,” by Samuel G. Freedman (On Religion column, Oct. 10), identifies an important trend at major seminaries throughout the country. Here at Union Theological Seminary, we see incoming classes that are a third unaffiliated, mirroring national trends.
At Union, however, we have noticed that in addition to our unaffiliated students who are agnostic or atheist, many believe in God but don’t belong to a specific religious organization. They come to ask questions about the meaning of life and to change the world.
Maybe what we see emerging is not a lack of religion but a different kind of religion. Is it perhaps a second reformation?
SERENE JONES
President
Union Theological Seminary
New York
