Mo' Dernity, Mo' Problems

Lingva Latina: Familia Romana, Hans H. Orberg

This text teaches Latin without using any English words. Instead of giving you declension charts to memorize, it jumps right in with "Roma est in Italia," and goes from there. Each chapter contains a story, and the stories form a narrative about Roman family.

Symptom of the Universe, Black Sabbath

This double CD set is worth buying simply for the booklet that comes with it. The booklet starts off with Ozzy complaining that when he saw This is Spinal Tap, he thought it was a documentary.

Here's an excerpt:
At the time, Butler was living in a one-bedroom apartment that he'd painted black. "I was getting into, like, black magic," he explained sheepishly. "Everybody was into all that stuff back then, it was just the thing. . . . I had all these inverted crosses all around the place and all these poster of Satan and all that kind of stuff." Not because he intended casting any spells or performing any strange rituals there, he said. It was more because "all the love and peace thing had gone, the Vietnam War thing was happening, and a lot of kids were getting into all kinds of mysticism and occultims."
Then something happened. "One night," Butler began, with no trace of a smile, "this thing appeared to me at the foot of my bed, and it frightened the bloddy life out of me! I was just lying in bed one night, and I woke up suddenly, and there was, like, this black shape standing at the foot of my bed. And I wasn't on drugs or anything, but for some reason I thought it was the devil himself! It was almost as if this thing was saying to me, "It's time to either pledge allegiance or piss off!"
He was so shaken that he immediately repainted the apartment orange and "took all the posters down, put, like, proper crucifixes in there, and started wearing a cross. We all did. But that's how Ozzy came up with the lyrics for 'Black Sabbath.' It wasn't a song about summoning up the Devil, though, as a lot of people still think it is. It was actually, like, warning people against Satanism and stuff."

Before Abraham Was: A Provocative Challenge to the Documentary Hypothesis by Isaac M. Kikawada, Arthur Quinn

Terrific book, though unfortunately out of print.
Some might be tempted to say, "Who cares whether the Penteteuch was written by one author or by five, since either way we know it's the word of God." But it does make a difference - the documentary hypothesis claims that inconguities in the text can be resolved by posulating several authors. This means that the exigete no longer needs to attempt a synthesis. For example - if the magesterial God of Genesis chapter 1 and the anthropomorphized God of Genesis chapter 2 are the work of two distinct authors, then we shouldn't expect that the human author of Scripture had a vision of God transcending both chapters. Instead of trying to find a deeper meaning in the apparent incongruities of the text, the Documentary Hypothesis postulates multiple authors with divergent purposes.
Modern exigesis, according to a friend of mine, is obsessed with "efficient causality." It's interested in who wrote what when, and in minute details of language, rather than in the obvious questions that confront the reader.
Before Abraham Was argues that Genesis 1-11 has a unity of purpose, and therefore cannot be seen as a haphazardly assembled collection of the work of several authors.

Gay Marriage: Why it is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America by Jonathan Rauch
Rauch takes a number of conservative positions - he admits that male-male couples are likely to have higher rates of infidelity than male-female couples, and he recognizes that cohabitation and divorce are bad for children.

No one believes that childless marriages are illegitimate... (109)
Depends on why they're childless. If they are childless because of infertility, then they're legitimate. But the Catholic Church teaches that a couple must be open to having children in order to marry.

we honor and celebrate marriages whether children are in the picture or not (109)
My parents aren't very religious or very conservative, but they certainly found it odd that some of their friends chose not to have children. I remember my father mentioning that one of his co-workers said to him, "We have dogs instead." He found this sentiment somewhat humorous. I think his response is typical.
Infertile couples are a different case. We generally feel sorry for them. We honor their marriage, if they adopt we admire their generosity, but we also see their infertility as a hardship.

Their real position is that the possibility of procreation defines marriage when homosexuals are involved, but not when heterosexuals are involved. To put the point more starkly, sterility disqualifies all homosexuals from marriage, but it disqualifies no heterosexuals. (112)
I think this is the heart of the pro-gay-marriage case.
One response draws on the "teleology of the body" thing - even though some couples are sterile, they're nevertheless ordered towards children. I suspect this argument might be made to work, but in our contraception-friendly society I don't think people accept the necessary premises.
This is the argument I prefer: Society benefits enormously by having heterosexual couples commit to stay together before having intercourse. This is because heterosexual intercourse often results in conception, and when conception occurs it is preferable that both biological parents are committed to taking care of the child. We give special status to committed heterosexual couples because we want to encourage biological parents to be committed to taking care of the children they've concieved. We don't expect that every couple will produce children, but we want to make sure that those which do produce children are married.
Sounds great. But there's a snag. Rauch says that if we believe marriage is ordered towards procreation, then we shouldn't allow post-menopausal women to marry. We might respond that they're allowed to marry because prohibiting them from marrying would be too invasive - we don't want the government administering fertility tests. But this seems like a really lousy answer. We do not want to say that post-menopausal women are only allowed to marry because we don't know that they're post-menopausal, because if we did then we'd be saying that post-menopausal women really shouldn't marry, even though it's legal, and that we should discourage infertile women from marrying.
At first, this appears absolutely devistating to the anti-gay-marriage case. But on second thought, Rauch's argument turns out to be an argument against making any distinctions of status, except on the strictest bases of merit. For example, if you say, "We call people 'professors' in order to indicate that their work is of a higher dignity than those people we call 'teachers.' This is because professors teach more sophisticated concepts and are do research." But one could reply, "Yes, but there are some teachers who teach higher level classes than some professors. And teachers some teachers do original research. Lack of original research disqualifies all teachers but no professors. So what we have here is blatant anti-teacher bias. To correct this bias, we should allow all teachers to be called professors." The point is that even though some professors contribute less than some teachers, we are still justified in making a general distinction of rank.
More to the point, Rauch's argument can be used to undermine his own claim that "If I had to pare marriage to its essential core, I would say that marriage is two people's lifelong commitment, recognized by law and society, to care for each other" (24) and "prime-caregiver status is the sine qua non of marriage" (26). First, this means that two spinster sisters or a single mother and her single daughter should be able to marry if they make a lifelong committment to caring for each other. Second, I reply, "So therefore if the spouse is not the prime-caregiver then the couple isn't really married?" In traditional Chinese society, the eldest son has primary-caregiver responsibility for his aging parents. It may be the case that a friend or relative does more to care for a person than the spouse does. So the primary-caregiver distinction doesn't always work.
If Rauch points to infertile couples and says that this shows that marriage is not really about fertility, then I can just as easily point to uncaring marriages or open marriages to show that marriage must not really be about caring for each other or about fidelity. Marriage is promoted in order to encourage mutual-caregiving, fidelity, and procreation, even though particular marriages may not attain those ends.
Nominalism begets relativism.

An adulterous spouse is not a good spouse but, in the eyes of most people, would be a flawed spouse rather than a nonspouse. What would lead me to think of someone as a nonspouse? Only, I think, abandonment. (25)
Not everyone agrees - in Brideshead Revisited Lady Brideshead refuses to give her husband a divorce, despite the fact that he has abandoned her. She considered him a flawed spouse rather than a nonspouse.

Rauch convinced me of one point. Prior to reading this book, I thought the "if gay marriage, why not polygamy" argument was solid. Rauch gives reasons for opposing polygamy, independent of the gay marriage issue. He points out that since wealthy/high-status men in polygamous societies marry several women, poor/low-status men are left without any women to marry. These low status men tend to create lots of social unrest. We see this in Africa and the Middle East. So it seems like the reasons for outlawing polygamy are distinct from those for outlawing gay marriage. Accepting the arguments for gay marriage does not mean that one should accept the arguments for polygamy.

No-fault divorce dealt a severe blow till 'to death do us part,' which was certainly an essential element of the traditional meaning of marriage. (167)
What does Rauch think of no-fault divorce?

People predicted that bad things would happen if contraception became legal and widespread, and indeed bad things did happen, but that did not make legalizing contraception the wrong thing to do, and, in any case, good things happened also. (167)
What are these mysterious "good things" and "bad things"?