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 →

Dear Presidential Candidate – I believe in the Constitutional Convention

| davidsabey

Dear Presidential Candidate,

I watched the Republican debate earlier this month. Their rhetoric (like that of other parties) often riffs on the claim, “I believe in the Constitution.” What that actually means is somewhat harder to express in a soundbite. As with all historical texts, our understanding of what it means is not as straightforward as we might like to think—it is based on conjecture of authorial intent, interpretation of judicial precedent, and appeals to implicit ideals. This is not to say that we should ignore the actual text of Constitution, but I think recognizing the complexity of constitutional law can help us tolerate and even collaborate with those who interpret it differently. Continue reading →

Thomas More, Martyr of Traditional Marriage: Part One—His Greatness and His Values

| briansabey

After watching BYU’s production of “A Man for All Seasons,” a play about Thomas More, I was so inspired that I ordered Peter Ackroyd’s biography of the man. I finally finished it this summer, having worked my slow way through it mostly on Sunday afternoons during the last two years. (Law school has left little time for extra reading.) Although the play “A Man for All Seasons” portrays him, in some ways, more heroically than he deserves, I find that the true facts of his life and death are altogether more inspiring than the play—though I strongly recommend both. (And by the way, the play has been made into an excellent movie of the same title that won six academy awards in 1966, including best picture. Go watch it.) This first essay will be primarily an encomium on Thomas More, though I will depart far enough from my subject to contrast his values with the predominant moral sensibility of our day. In part two, I hope to compare the moral shift that society underwent in More’s day with the shift that has taken place in ours. I have made no secret of the fact that I am opposed to gay “marriage,” and this is part (but only part) of what motivates me to write—for More was, so far as I am aware, the first martyr who can be said to have died, in part, for traditional marriage. 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 →