Author: joshsabey

Making Sense of Shooters: a Self Reflection

| joshsabey

High profile shootings have surrounded my hometown. I grew up in Colorado ten minutes from Columbine, fifteen minutes from the Aurora theatre shooting, and then two years ago my little brother was at Arapahoe high school when Karl Pierson attempted another Columbine.

The first article I ever published on this blog dealt with the Arapahoe shooting. In that article I discussed these shootings as a metaphor for a more common problem our society suffers from at large: certitude. But now I believe these shootings may be more than a metaphor but an actual exhibition of this unhealthy mentality prevalent in our society. This certitude is a mental illness but not the kind of issue that can be dismissed by the words “crazy” or “insane.” Rather, it is very familiar and most of us suffer from the same or similar ailments. Continue reading →

A two sided look at abortion

| joshsabey

Jessen-Ohden

In light of the congressional testimonies concerning abortion, and because abortion has been a popular topic on our blog, I thought I would try and look at the issue from both sides. As with all debates there is a lot of complexity and I don’t see an easy answer. To me, the differences between the pill, the day after pill, and an early abortion seem tenuous and somewhat arbitrary—the location of a few cells. No matter how you do it, birth control is unnatural and stops somethings natural. And yes, I am including abstinence in the list of unnatural acts, particularly among a married couple. But there are many unnatural things that have improved the world, and I think birth control is one of them. And here I can sympathize with some of the pro-choice arguments.

Woman’s liberation has been more than a political movement; it has also been a technological feat. Continue reading →

Mistaking Love: what is not love

| joshsabey

what-is-love2

In my last article I wrote about how marriage ought to be painful because it means that two separate wills are trying to function together. If there is no strife in a marriage one might assume the couple is quite lonely:

The loneliness is straightforward. A child who has captured the imagination of other children soon seems to be playing a game with himself—his own imagination reflected back at him from the other children. Likewise, when the one I love becomes a means to fulfilling my own desires, they take on the image of a mirror. And there is loneliness: a lack of the other person—a lack of another’s will and desire that stands against my own.

I would like now to elaborate on this concept Continue reading →

Why a Marriage Ought to be Painful

| joshsabey

marriage-breakdown-544741

Over the last week my wife Sarah and I have moved to a new state, got an apartment, began to wage a war against cockroaches, went thrift store shopping to any number of places to try and find decent furniture that won’t give us lice, bought a new mattress, carried many heavy objects through ridiculous humidity, built a bed frame to save a few dollars, etcetera. Stress levels have been high and my wife and I were more than a few times upset with each other, which only makes everything more miserable, which only makes me more upset that we’re upset because things are bad enough as it is, which makes me more miserable, which makes me more upset, and so forth. At moments of resentment, for whatever silly reason, rather than a helpmeet, Sarah has felt like an inconvenience, and I know Continue reading →

What do George Lucas, Peter Jackson, and Steve Jobs have in common?

| joshsabey

starwars

After seeing the final iteration of The Hobbit saga, my wife joked with me that Peter Jackson must have called George Lucas for advice—think about it. Who else would you ask about how to make a second trilogy that was actually a prequel to the first trilogy but had a younger audience demographic in mind? I mean, imagine the conversation:

“The first thing you have to realize, Peter, is that your fan base in finicky and won’t want more of the same. To keep their interest you’ll have to add more spectacle, less plot, a few cartoony characters, and a contrived love story with horrendous dialogue developed between action sequences. Continue reading →

How Should we Study the Bible?

| joshsabey

moby

I have recently been working on creating an interfaith and interdisciplinary study Bible with the goal of broadening our approach to the good book. The project would allow readers to gather any relevant video, literature, art, music, et cetera, around passages of scriptures—anything from graffiti to Talmudic commentary. I began the project because I believed and still believe it could be an important step in interfaith dialogue as well as a way to revitalize the Bible from what I believe may be a tragedy of our time: the division of the spiritual and secular worlds. For a thousand years the Bible has been at the center of life, culture, education, art, philosophy, and science. It inspired Dante, Spencer, Milton, Wordsworth, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky to name just a few authors. But now it is increasingly becoming a shield situated between the spiritual self and that dreaded secularization—or the world outside of religion. While this bifurcation helps to maintain Christian identity, I’m not convinced it is the most productive use of scripture. Continue reading →