The Little Friar

Cinderella Ate My Daughter  is one of my favorite books of cultural and sexual criticism.  In it,  Peggy Orenstein laments how our culture naturally moves from such beauty-centered innocence as to such beauty-centered sluttiness as Take the phrase, sleeping around .  It's sounds innocent enough.  But the reality is something stark.  To quote someone from college, that time of life when sexual partners often number in the double-digits for men and women, "I cannot recall ever rejecting an advance, and I know I never felt good afterward.  On the contrary, I felt used and dirty, at once manipulative and manipulated.  I hated my reputation; I hated the sex".   It bothers me to see women objectified in this way.   Any  woman.  I've discovered over the years that most men don't get it -- this notion of objectification .  It was explained easily enough to me as a seven-year-old:  Only treat women as you would your Grandmothe...

I was re-reading Mark 14.1-9, the story of the woman at Bethany.  Quite probably like everyone else, I've always read this narrative and focused on that line, "the poor you always have with you".  Today, though, something different:  " She has done a beautiful thing". What strikes me so much about this line?  The Greek word that Jesus used for "beautiful" is καλός ( kalos ), which is more usually translated "good.   It crops up all over the NT, but -- for me -- most significantly in John's Gospel, where Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd; for the word means not only "good" and "beautiful", but also "good at the job".  And when Luke reports Jesus saying "Love your enemies, and do good to those who hate you", the good we are called to do isn't only "good (for them)" but also "beautiful".  In other words, if the woman did what she did for Jesus kalos , we're called to do likew...

Several years ago, I led a class that talked about a theology of the ugly.  In that class we spent time thinking about how judgments of righteousness are often captured by aesthetic judgments, where what is beautiful is deemed good and what is ugly is deemed to be bad and sinister. This is a bias that psychologists have studied.  For decades psychologists have studied what is known as the what-is-beautiful-is-good effect .  In these studies we observe that beautiful people are consistently rated as more intelligent, more able and more virtuous than the less attractive. Think about that for a minute.  The beautiful aren't simply judged as smarter and more talented, they are also judged as being better human beings .  And because of this the beautiful gain a variety of social advantages.  For example, the beautiful are more likely to get hired or get the promotion.  Let alone the advantages in social popularity and interpersonal attractio...

A friend asked that I write a bit about pornography from my Christian perspective.  So reader alert:  What follows is a meditation on pornography.  It's something lots of folks -- especially those of us in the Church -- never talk about.  But it's something that deserves to see the light of day in a reasonable way.  What follows beneath the fold may or may not be of interest.  Read at your own discretion.