Tender Love and the Dormition

[Ancient Faith Radio; August 15, 2008]

My mother lives far from me, many states away; it takes me about twelve or thirteen hours to drive there. So I don’t get there that often. I usually fly down about once a month. I didn’t used to go that often, but she had emergency surgery last January, and ever since then she’s been in a nursing home, and her mind is a little fuzzier than it used to be. She’s never quite gotten her strength back, never gotten on her feet again. Eighty-two years old, and it’s hard to foresee what the future holds. At present it looks like she just might continue being in that nursing home. I’m grateful that my two sisters live closer, so they can go there frequently, and one of them goes every day.

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Men and Church (podcast version)

[Ancient Faith Radio; October 24, 2007]

I’m in the car today driving down I-95, going south (as usual) toward Washington, this time toward northern Virginia, where I’m going to a reunion of my seminary class at Virginia Episcopal Theological Seminary. It’s our 30^th anniversary so I’m going back on campus to hear some speakers today and to attempt to give the seminary library a stack of my books; we’ll see if they will accept these, we’ll see what happens. I expect so; they’re actually very gracious people at Virginia Seminary.

I’m thinking about a conversation I’ve been having, an email conversation, with a lot of people in the last couple of weeks, that has led up to an article just published on Beliefnet.com. Beliefnet was doing an interview with John Eldridge. Now if you don’t know that name,

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Dating vs Courtship

[Ancient Faith Radio; August 2, 2008]

Frederica: We’re at Five Guys Burgers, which is the best burgers in Baltimore, and everybody is chowing down except me, because I came late, so mine is still on order.  These are some pretty hefty burgers.  In Pasadena.  They just opened one of these in Pasadena; I got the word from the end of the table.  Our Pasadena.  Pasadena, Maryland.  And Jocelyn sent me something she’d written earlier today about dating, and ‘I kissed dating goodbye,’ versus ‘I gave dating a chance,’ versus people should just do courtship.  And you’d read an article by somebody who said he’s very much in favor of courtship, but the problem is when people meet for the first time, they want to get to know each other.  They’re not ready to jump into courtship.  So his solution was parents should absolutely control every moment of their children’s lives, and children should know that their parents are going to choose their mate when they’re grown up.  They will have no choice whatsoever.  I don’t think that’s completely feasible [laughter] but it does show that even for people who are kind of opposed to the dating whirl, what’s the alternative?  So, what do you think? Jocelyn?  My daughter-in-law Jocelyn, married to my handsome son Steve.  Did you and Steve date?

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Victoria's Secret

[Ancient Faith Radio; July 26, 2007]

This shopping mall, Arundel Mills Mall, is one (I think) of a national chain of malls, the Mills malls.  All of them are made up of a lot of discount stores.  We’ve got a discount Saks 5^th Avenue, a discount Neiman Marcus; there’s always an Outdoor World, I can see that over there.  There’s a Bed Bath & Beyond, a, what’s it called? Birmingham Coat Factory? That doesn’t sound right.  Burlington! Burlington Coat Factory.  So it’s a big mall; it’s built in a circular shape so as you walk around it, I think it’s a whole mile if you walk all the way around the circuit.  And it’s a great place for people to come with kids because you can walk, it’s air conditioned, it’s warm in the winter.  And as you go along, there are different, kind of, themes, as you go from section to section.  Right now, you might be able to hear this electronic sound of a cricket overhead.  And there goes a loon or something.  This section here is supposed to be like, you’re out in a marsh and there are giant dragonflies and butterflies hanging overhead and a bench – a sort of circular thing to sit on – that’s a great big water lily. 

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Loving a Child with Autism

[Beliefnet, April 13, 2007] 

Last summer we had a houseful at the beach, with our children and their spouses and the seven (soon to be nine) little grandchildren. The cousins don’t see each other much, so they splashed and ran and shouted, the wind tearing at their voices. But Adam, then four, stayed by himself. He moved along the edges of the dunes, circling the family like a silent satellite. Last year, Adam received a diagnosis of autism.

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Internet Child Exploitation

[FirstThings.com Blog, August 21, 2006] 

Buried in the course of Sunday’s New York Times front page story about pedophilia and the internet there was an unexpected kernel of good news. There are “a shrinking number of internet locations for sexual images of minors.” A pedophile who goes by the screen name Heartfallen complained to a discussion list that the sources for graphic child porn are disappearing: “They’ve vanished. There is much less freedom on the internet now.”

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A Bouquet of Vacuums for Mother's Day

[National Review Online, May 12, 2006] 

On Mother’s Day, what says “I love you, Mom!” like a new vacuum cleaner? A whole lot of dark chocolate with almonds might do it. Or a pair of chunky silver earrings, or a dozen of the smelliest roses. Even a phone call saying “I love you, Mom!” does a pretty good job. But it takes a vacuum cleaner to really evoke the whole motherhood experience. Oh, the many times I shoved a vacuum under a child’s bed and got a pajama bottom tangled around the brushroll. Do tears spring up prompted by wistful memory, or by the smoke of the jammed rubber belt?

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Three Kinds of Childhood Innocence

[Unpublished; email to a friend, January 7, 2006]

There are three things people mean when they talk of childhood innocence: vulnerability, ignorance, and moral purity. (I touched on this in my First Things piece on “Against Eternal Youth,” but didn’t have room to get into it fully.)
 
A child's (1) vulnerability ought to stir us; we want to protect them physically and emotionally. That's one of our most urgent drives. But (3) moral purity is a chimera; children are born completely selfish, and slowly and painfully learn to make room for others in their lives.

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Against Eternal Youth

[First Things, August 2005]

I'm a fan of old movies, the black-and-whites from the 30's and 40's, in part because of the things this time-travel reveals about how American culture has changed. One thing that's struck me lately is how differently the adults in these films carry themselves, walk and speak. It seems adults used to have a whole different kind of bearing. It's hard sometimes to figure out how old the characters are supposed to be. They seem to be portraying a phase of the human life-cycle that we don't even *have* any more.

Take the 1934 version of "Imitation of Life." Here Claudette Colbert portrays a young widow who builds a successful business (selling pancakes, actually. Well, it's more believable if you see the whole movie.)

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The Real Meaning of Sex

[Touchstone, June 2005]

On January 24, 2005, I stood on the sidewalk of Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., as the March for Life surged by. There was a small band of pro-choice counter-protestors, and I positioned myself just past them because I was curious about how pro-lifers would react to their presence.

Now, I’m a convert from pro-choice to pro-life myself, and I have a strong interest in getting the two sides to understand each other’s positions more clearly. I was one of the founders of a group called The Common Ground Network for Life and Choice, which sponsored ongoing dialogue groups in twelve cities and held two national conferences. So I have known and talked with many pro-choicers.

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