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Here’s the key, I think: It’s because gay and lesbian people perceive Christianity as not just asking for a certain modification or a certain disciplining of their behavior but rather for a suppression or erasure of their identities. In modern Western cultures, being gay or lesbian—or bi, trans, queer, or some other parallel or related identity—is perceived as just that: an identity. It is not only a matter of performing or not performing some genital behavior; it’s rather that the behavior that Christians want to prohibit is seen as inextricably bound up with their personhood. And so, unlike Thomas Aquinas who treated homosexuality as just one particular permutation in the broader category of lust (Summa Theologiae IIa IIae Q.154, arts. 11-12), most of us in the West today think of homosexuality as a category of persons, rather than a category of actions. As Steve Holmes has commented (in a forthcoming collection of essays in honor of Stanley Grenz), “For the churches of the West, whatever formal stance they take concerning the ethics of human sexuality, there is (generally) an awareness, often acute, of the cruelty of imposing ethical norms that conflict with personal identities.”And this, in turn, explains the huge investment conservative movements like the ERLC have in getting Christians like me to stop calling ourselves “gay.” The reason that’s important is that if my identity isn’t gay—if, on the contrary, I’m just another human person just like my straight neighbors—then it becomes easier to see why and how Christianity’s traditional prohibition of same-sex sexual behavior isn’t an intolerably cruel diminishment of my personhood. If I’m just a Christian—if there’s no basic identity difference between me and my “straight” Christian friends—then the same ethical norm (don’t have sex with people of the same sex) can apply to both of us equally without unfairly infringing on the basic identity of one, but not the other, of us.
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Taking into account the state of scientific research at the time as well as of the requirements of theology, the encyclical Humani Generis considered the doctrine of “evolutionism” a serious hypothesis, worthy of investigation and in-depth study equal to that of the opposing hypothesis. Pius XII added two methodological conditions: that this opinion should not be adopted as though it were a certain, proven doctrine and as though one could totally prescind from revelation with regard to the questions it raises. He also spelled out the condition on which this opinion would be compatible with the Christian faith, a point to which I will return. Today, almost half a century after the publication of the encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.
Pope Francis, blowing everyone’s minds by accepting evolu — oh wait, this is John Paul II in 1996.
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To those who know a little of christian history probably the most moving of all the reflections it brings is not the thought of the great events and the well-remembered saints, but of those innumerable millions of entirely obscure faithful men and women, every one with his or her own individual hopes and fears and joys and sorrows and loves — and sins and temptations and prayers — once every whit as vivid and alive as mine are now. They have left no slightest trace in this world, not even a name, but have passed to God utterly forgotten by men. Yet each one of them once believed and prayed as I believe and pray, and found it hard and grew slack and sinned and repented and fell again. Each of them worshipped at the eucharist, and found their thoughts wandering and tried again, and felt heavy and unresponsive and yet knew — just as really and pathetically as I do these things. There is a little ill-spelled ill-carved rustic epitaph of the fourth century from Asia Minor: — ‘Here sleeps the blessed Chione, who has found Jerusalem for she prayed much’. Not another word is known of Chione, some peasant woman who lived in that vanished world of christian Anatolia. But how lovely if all that should survive after sixteen centuries were that one had prayed much, so that the neighbours who saw all one’s life were sure one must have found Jerusalem! What did the Sunday eucharist in her village church every week for a life-time mean to the blessed Chione — and to the millions like her then, and every year since then? The sheer stupendous quantity of the love of God which this ever-repeated action has drawn from the obscure Christian multitudes through the centuries is in itself an overwhelming thought.
Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (1945). One of my favorite paragraphs I’ve ever read. (via wesleyhill)
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Four remarkable “plantscapes” from the Austrian botanist Kerner von Marilaun’s Pflanzenleben (1887). Read more about Kerner here: http://buff.ly/1sznM08
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Any ambiguity about whether Douthat was merely predicting a schism or actively threatening one was settled with his column this past Sunday, in which he weighed in on the recently concluded Synod on Marriage and the Family. The synod was chaotic, with reformist bishops (handpicked by the pope) at first seeming to propose significant alterations in church teaching on marriage, divorce, and homosexuality, and then backing off after an outcry from more conservative prelates. After discussing these events and the history of the doctrine of papal infallibility, Douthat concluded that a time may soon come when conservative Catholics will have to decide whether or not to “protect the church from self-contradiction” by choosing to “resist” the pope.
Damon Linker. Damon has been writing one great column after another for the past year or so, but I don’t get this one. How is “resisting” the Pope — with regard to matters on which Francis himself insists he is not speaking, and will not speak, ex cathedra and therefore infallibly — tantamount to schism? Was Dante threatening schism when he denounced the corruption of the papacy in his own day? Clearly not. He was calling for reform, not separation. And what Ross is doing is far, far less dramatic than what Dante did, and a thousand other prominent internal critics of the Roman church have done. Ross isn’t within a million miles of schismatic speech or action.
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Chicago was a hotbed of music publishing during #wwi: from “peaceful strains” to saber-rattling marches. Come hear it all during a free performance at the Newberry this Thursday, Oct. 30, at 6 pm.
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Portions of this chapter are peppered with numbers. Some passages are also thick with the language of simple mathematics. Readers may well ask whether all this is necessary, merely in order to choose where some letters should sit on a piece of paper and where the paper itself should be trimmed. The answer, naturally, is no. It is not in the least necessary to understand the mathematics in order to perform the actions that the math describes. People walk and ride bicycles without mathematical analyses of these complex operations. The chambered nautilus and the snail construct perfect logarithmic spirals without any need of logarithmic tables, sliderules or the theory of infinite series. The typographer likewise can construct beautiful pages without knowing the meaning of symbols like π or φ, and indeed without ever learning to add and subtract, if he has a well-educated eye and knows which buttons to push on the calculator and keyboard.The mathematics are not here to impose drudgery upon anyone. On the contrary, they are here entirely for pleasure. They are here for the pleasure of those who like to examine what they are doing, or what they might do or have done, perhaps in the hope of doing it still better.
One of my favorite passages from Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style
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Via the Tripe Marketing Board and several other people on Twitter.
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We have made him. To actually, truly believe in the advertisements that shape our culture—to let them penetrate one’s soul—is to become Jeff Koons. He believed what was said about vacuums and, and so he puts them in hermetically sealed shrines, turning them into the hallowed products their advertisements claim them to be. Koons never stopped being an investor, he just switched to a market that could survive the crash (one of his balloon dogs went for $58.4 million last year). Archaeologists of the future will excavate these dogs and assume we worshipped them, and maybe we do. A god who can be contorted into any shape of our choosing, and once contorted, becomes stainless steel—an idol more rigid and inflexible in its demand we seek sexual fulfillment than the Decalogue ever was. Koons is a Biblical sculptor—he is Aaron, and these are our golden calves. His retroactive justifications are completely absurd. The audio guide compares his Michael Jackson and Bubbles to Michelangelo. We get the pietàs we deserve.
