Several years ago I wrote an essay on marriage, an essay filled with conviction and certainty. I was twenty-two, three weeks into my own marriage, and an out-of-work actress working as a receptionist for IBM. Not exactly Montaigne. Through a series of unlikely events, the essay was published and . . . . Continue Reading »
Beyond Good Will Alan L. Mittleman’s “Christianity in the Mirror of Jewish Thought” (August/September) sets forth an uncommonly interesting and well-crafted thesis. Considering the trivialization of the Judeo-Christian dialogue, its reduction to an exchange of condescension on the one side . . . . Continue Reading »
If one were to seek a connecting thread that runs through the biblical witness, a good candidate would be “faithfulness.” Robert Jenson has written that faithfulness is “the theological heart of the Bible,” and that, in turn, marriage is “the paradigm case of an ethic of faithfulness.” . . . . Continue Reading »
For Christians, as for everyone else, the topic of sexual ethics is today one of widespread confusion, contention, and uncertainty. In this essay I propose to deal with the specific question of the kinds of promises and undertakings people ought to make when they engage in sexual relations. But I . . . . Continue Reading »
In that house of quiet dying, through still sheers that turn the day to gray, only two chairs of six are sat upon, the bed no longer shared. She smiles, a 5 x 10 on the television top, he laughs, a young man upon the mantle. But, air unmoving from dining room to kitchen old woman watches TV alone, . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s been three days now. We continue to find splinters of rice clinging to our scalps; piercing no skin but adamant, predatory at the root. They will not be removed. Thinking back to the Mass we recall the smallest things—yellow neckties splashed with ciliated . . . . Continue Reading »
By now it should be axiomatic that surveys and polls tell us as much about the people who conduct them as they do about those they query. What's involved is the census-taking equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the notion that pollsters affect the content of the responses they . . . . Continue Reading »
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