How Romance Taught Me Religion

| davidsabey

Wedding_rings

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 →

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 →

Thomas More, Martyr of Traditional Marriage: Part Two—His Time, and Ours

| briansabey

Thomas-More-and-Family

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 →

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 →

Abortion: Our Renewed Monstrosity

| diadarcey

I just finished reading The Good Earth, a portrayal of thousands of years of ancient Chinese history wrapped up in the life of one man. Wang Lung is a father and farmer living in a world of tradition, superstition and blunt mortality, whose existence revolves around the dispassionate but life-giving land. Pearl S. Buck writes,

“There was only this perfect sympathy of movement, of turning this earth of theirs over and over to the sun, this earth which formed their home and fed their bodies and made their gods . . . Some time, in some age, bodies of men and women had been buried there, houses had stood there, had fallen, and gone back into the earth. So would also their house, some time, return into the earth, their bodies also. Each had his turn at this earth. They worked on, moving together— together— producing the fruit of this earth.”

The land is both nurturing and uncaring, life-providing and destroying. It exists beyond the little lives and little centuries. What in Modernity compares; how can we understand with our tiny first world problems and contingency-sparse existence? Yet as one reads, the vitality of the land imprints like a footprint in the soil of a freshly turned mind; one can feel one’s sympathies and world view shifting and even temporarily settling into an ancient order of life, of death, of birth. It is somehow familiar to some primal ancestral self, still stirring in the blood from ages ago.

Continue reading →