Category: Loves
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Chivalry as Formalized Courtesy
Romantic courtesy is a liturgy of service which springs from the veneration of the Lady. Its goal is simply the lady’s felicity, and her looks and gestures are signs of acceptable service. All veneration is a selfless art, requiring patience, constancy, and discipline — in short, virtue. Eros may or may not…
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Helper
We are snobs by nature. If salvation had ever depended on us, we would never have deigned to redeem the world by entering its sordid mangers. Even when we come for a moment under the spell of the fairy-tale peasant who becomes king, the slave who delivers the city, the cinder girl who marries the…
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On Biblical Gender Roles, Experience Filters Theology
This is just my observation from life… the more responsible and caring a woman’s husband is, the more likely she will read the NT submission passages literally. The more passive or mean or noncommunicative her husband is, the less she will be able to comfortably imagine that God really made gender as a functional heirarchy.…
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The Mystical Ladder, for Husbands
Note: this is secret mystical knowledge, for men alone. Let the deacons now show the women out and let the doors be shut. Stage 1, the New Convert: If I talk to her about it, I can understand why she is crying and help her understand why she doesn’t need to cry. Stage 2, the…
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The Human Face is a Set of Liturgical Conventions
At times you might have been told you don’t smile enough. Everyone is right, of course, to say that an insincere smile is bad, and right that just smiling alot is not a useful goal in itself. But there is a common assumption in all this that is not false but just not true enough…
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Alan Jacobs: that dialogue is between persons, not words on a page
Goodbye, Blog – Books & Culture I find myself meditating on a passage from a book by C. S. Lewis. In his great work of literary history, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, Lewis devotes a passage to what he describes, with a certain savageness, as “that whole tragic farce which we call the…
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The White Stone
Adam named Eve when she was found to be a companion just for him. Mary’s eyes were opened to the Resurrected Christ when He called her by name: “Mary!” Religious conversions of all kinds prompt the adoption of a new name to go along with the new identity. Saul becomes Paul, Simon becomes Peter, and…