First Things RSS Feed - Amy A. Kass https://www.firstthings.com/author/amy-a-kass en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:55:20 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/amy-a-kass 60 Proposing Courtship https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/10/proposing-courtship https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/10/proposing-courtship Fri, 01 Oct 1999 00:00:00 -0400 Anyone interested in improving relations between men and women today and tomorrow must proceed by taking a page from yesterday. For today’s tale regarding manhood and womanhood is, alas, both too brief and hardly edifying. True, as they multiply taboos on speech and gesture, our sexual harassment police emphatically prescribe how not to behave toward the opposite sex. But outside of certain strongly religious communities, we have no clearly defined positive mores and manners that teach men how to be men in relation to women and women how to be women in relation to men. What instruction there is for relations between the sexes is largely gender-neutral: respect the other person’s freedom, avoid sexist speech and unwanted advances, be sincere, sensitive, and caring. Even the prominent descriptions of pairing-off are neutered and unerotic: people have a relationship, not a romance, with a partner or a significant other, not a lover or a beloved. In our increasingly androgynous age, sexual speech and mores are designed to fit all couples, homo- and heterosexual, and all manners of intimacy, serious or frivolous.

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]]> What's Your Name? https://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/11/whats-your-name https://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/11/whats-your-name Wed, 01 Nov 1995 00:00:00 -0500 The authors of this essay on names have just identified themselves. Well, not quite. For the sake of full disclosure, they are willing to have it known that they have the same last name not by coincidence or consanguinity but because they are married to each other (and have been for over thirty-four years). Some will suspect that this biographical fact is responsible for the authors’ attitudes toward names and naming. The authors respectfully submit that the reverse is closer to the truth, that their attitude toward names and naming—and the many things that they have slowly come to understand about what names imply—is responsible for this paramount biographical fact. This essay is a first attempt to articulate, not least for themselves, what they have tacitly understood.

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]]> After the Fall https://www.firstthings.com/article/1993/08/after-the-fall https://www.firstthings.com/article/1993/08/after-the-fall Sun, 01 Aug 1993 00:00:00 -0400 Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America
by mark r. schwehn
oxford university press, 143 pages, $19.95

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