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 . . . . Continue Reading »
When my daughter was seven, her Austrian grandmother sent her three Erich Kaestner novels for Christmas. Her favorite was Das Doppelte Lottchen, a disarming tale about a pair of nine-year-old identical twins separated from infancy by an acrimonious divorce. When these girls meet accidentally . . . . Continue Reading »
From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Traditionby john witte, jr.westminster/john knox, 315 pages, $24 As its principal objective, this ninth volume in the series “The Family, Religion, and Culture” aims to illuminate the transformation of the institution of . . . . Continue Reading »
It is not exactly traditional to speak about the education of Abraham. Pious tales of the patriarch regard him as a precocious monotheist even before God calls him, a man who smashed his father’s idols, a man who sprang forth fully pious and knowledgeable about the ways of God. But, in my view, a . . . . Continue Reading »
Especially in America, when we think of the Catholic intellectual tradition we tend to think exclusively of the many varieties of Thomism. And for the decades between Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) and the Second Vatican Council, this equation was largely accurate. Before . . . . Continue Reading »
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 »
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