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Beauty now begins the final movement Malcolm Guite:
Come close with Mary, Martha, Lazarus So close the candles flare with their soft breath And kindle heart and soul to flame within us Lit by these mysteries of life and death. For beauty now begins the final movement In quietness and intimate encounter The alabaster jar of precious ointment Is broken open for the world’s true lover, The whole room richly fills to feast the senses With all the yearning such a fragrance brings, The heart is mourning but the spirit dances, Here at the very centre of all things, Here at the meeting place of love and loss We all foresee, and see beyond the cross.
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These Days, “Conservatives” Aren’t.
Jonah Goldberg:The market system is man-made, just as gardens are. But it is not the product of any individual will. It is a crowdsourced network of institutions, constructed over generations of trial and error, learned best practices, and the accumulation of common law and legislation alike. …
It is only when someone tears down or batters these Chestertonian fences all around us that we discover those fences are there for a reason. … That’s where we are now. One man is singlehandedly taking a plow to the garden because he is confident that he knows better than, almost literally, everyone. And his defenders have few, if any, serious arguments in his defense beyond “trust him.”
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Fascism and the Rule of Law Can Run on Parallel Tracks As Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely.
. . .The trick was to find a way to keep the law going for Christian Germans who supported or at least tolerated the Nazis, while ruthlessly executing the führer’s directives against the state’s enemies, real and perceived. Capitalism could jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy, and even genocide.
America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State
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THFC’s Vision Thing Ange must go (regrettably). But, for pity’s sake, Levy, hire a manager still committed to attacking! (Preferably one who also improves a midfield that neither serves the forward players nor protects the defense, which has been Spurs' undoing this year, imo.) @frjon, thoughts? ⚽️
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Speak Up Some view Cory Booker as a guy who pulls stunts, but I urge you to watch the end of his 25-hour Senate oration and be inspired and activated to resist the harm Trump & Co. are inflicting: Good trouble.
One way to make a point is to join a “Hands Off” protest in your area this weekend.
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Still, Possibly Not as Wrinkled as the Mature Auden Fragment of a human face aged over one million years discovered
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The Vocabulary of the Heart Six years after my dad died, three after my mom died, and this year, when my first two grandchildren are born, this resonates. Frederick Buechner, The Eyes of the Heart.
Each time members of the tribe die, the self we were with them dies too, which is to say that the kind of words we spoke only to them, were only to them, and the kind they spoke only to us are spoken no longer. But if outwardly our language is thus impoverished, inwardly it is enriched because when members of the tribe die, the words they were are added to the vocabulary of the heart, where we have more than just ears for hearing them. And each time a member of the tribe is born, a new word comes into being, and nothing is ever the same again.
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Ancient Times Frederick Buechner remembers the summer of 1948 from his The Eyes of the Heart: a Memoir of the Lost and Found:
… he used to give far and away the most enchanted cocktail parties I had ever attended or have ever attended since, where he served endless martinis in frosted silver glasses and where, in the spring, petals from a flowering plum sometimes drifted in through his mullioned windows to lie on the floor like snow. Colleagues from the English department like R. P. Blackmur, Donald Stauffer, and John Berryman came from time to time, together with occasional undergraduates like myself, and there were also friends he had made in the town of Princeton including a handful of beautiful young women, one of whom I fell fathomlessly in love with and on the starlit summer night of my twenty-first birthday on the balcony of the St. Regis roof in New York proposed matrimony to because such was the world in those now almost unimaginable days there seemed no other thinkable way to consummate our relationship. She wore her hair in two short pigtails, wore ballet slippers on her feet, could squirt through a gap in her teeth with remarkable accuracy, and at the same time had the good sense to turn me down. How things would have turned out for both of us if she had decided otherwise I shudder to imagine, but if we had had children they would now be past fifty, and that is shuddersome enough.
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Hang On, There WTF? Although non-citizens don’t enjoy full free-speech protections, they are entitled to due process.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, confirmed Khalil’s arrest in a statement Sunday, describing it as being “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”
Khalil’s arrest is the first publicly known deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against the war in Gaza that swept college campuses last spring. The administration has claimed participants forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas. Time.com
Not letting his wife (an American) or lawyer know where he is being held is especially chilling.
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Let’s Talk About Sex “Anora” – a movie about a sex worker and her client – won a bunch of Oscars this year. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t comment on the movie. But it struck me that both the lead actress and the writer/director made a point to express solidarity with sex workers. What might they have been trying to convey? And what did they convey without trying? As with almost all human endeavors, I suspect there were a bunch of motivations, some of which contradict each other.
First, they seem to have been holding up the truth that prostitutes are, indeed, real human beings, not types, and therefore are worthy of respect as humans. Excellent. Count me in.
They may also have been endorsing the idea that prostitution should be freed from old, outworn stigmas that a repressive society traditionally associates with the oldest profession. Maybe they think women and men should be free to provide sex (safely) in exchange for money, especially if the money translates to power that’s traditionally inaccessible to sex workers. This notion views sex as a good or service tradeable for money (aka power), the same as any other commodity.
Here, we part ways, because this misunderstands the right purpose of sex. My understanding that there even is a right purpose of sex necessarily arises from the notion that God, as the giver of the gift that is sex, attaches an intent to it. I hold that God’s intent for sex is to nurture intimacy between the lovers. Undoubtedly, God has additional intentions, such as the gift of children; but here I’m concerned with intimacy. Also, I quite understand that sex certainly can be used as a means to an end, and that’s a very old story (see, e.g., Lysistrata). But that’s not OK in my book. Also, it can be just plain fun. But, it’s meant to be fun that’s shared, ideally with someone you care about.
It’s no accident that at its best, sex is something we do naked. Nakedness is a stripping away of pretense as a way to truly see and be seen by the one you love. Opening our bodies to each other is emphatically not intended as a tool to wield power or extract payment. Using sex for those purposes instrumentalizes sex and commodifies one’s self and one’s partner. It’s the antithesis of nurtured intimacy. (For the same reasons, I don’t like “using” as a verb in this context.)
The “Sex-as-ATM” idea is a manifestation of what Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) calls “Metaphysical Capitalism,” which treats all creation and the entire human condition as elements of a vast market. (See, the discussion of Kant’s view of sex and marriage in this post.)
What’s particularly poignant about viewing sex in this way is that it subverts the humane and tender motivation to understand prostitutes as human beings deserving of respect. I don’t know that many in the “pro-sex-worker” cohort see it, but the idea that our bodies and our intimacies are tradeable commodities is truly, sadly, deeply inhuman.
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