Dear son,
You have known about the birds and the bees for many years; the basics of human sexuality and reproduction are no mystery to you—though no doubt you have a healthy dose of natural curiosity about what sex is like to experience. (Don’t panic! This note will not attempt to answer that question!) Without saying much about what sex is like, I want to say something about what sex is not like, in order to explain why pornography offers something totally different from sex. Continue reading
Romance:
Before we were married and while we were still in the midst of determining if we were truly compatible, my girlfriend (now wife) and I came to that brink that all relationships eventually arrive at–when you have progressed as far as you can without either taking the next step together or drifting apart. For us, that next step was marriage. Was she the one? Would our love and happiness last a lifetime? Did we really love each other enough to get married? Was there someone else out there that would be more compatible with me? Continue reading
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
In late polyphonic music the central aspect is the delicate interplay of voices without any single one of them taking precedence. In music of a century later we find the dramatic use of a powerful individual voice, but in fifteenth-century English polyphone the emphasis rests upon the intricate melody of many voices. The character and abilities of the individual are only of consequence as an element within the harmonious organization of parts; we do not know the names of the masons who created the bell towers and fan-vaults of the great fifteenth-century churches. This is not the world of Luther or of what has become known as post-Reformation culture, but it remained the world of Thomas More.
–From Thomas More, by Peter Ackroyd
In this essay, I hope to trace some parallelisms between the moral shifts in Thomas More’s day and those in ours. The comparisons are, of course, imperfect. But I think they are also significant. Continue reading
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
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
The Brothers Sabey 