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The Week

Thanks to carefully-maintained Instagram and Twitter feeds, as well as easily-manipulated tabloid magazines, it’s become all too easy to feel as though we really know celebrities. We get to see them getting ready for awards nights, enjoying a lazy Sunday, and even breastfeeding their newborns. The result is a sense of artificial intimacy that makes us believe that maybe US Weekly is right; stars really are just like us.

Paltrow is one of the few celebrities who seems unwilling to take part in this little pact. She isn’t anything like us. She is rich and famous and beautiful and sleeps in pajamas more expensive than our nicest winter coats.

Brittany Maynard came up, Phil read from MedicalDaily.com

Maynard made the choice because life as the way she wanted to experience it should have been full of youth, vigor, beauty, and love — not pain, suffering, and a gradual wasting away of her mind and body. But to the physicians arguing against the law, dignity meant embracing the fact that life’s value wasn’t only found in beauty, youth, and independence — things our society values so much. Life itself was dignity, they claimed, even if it meant becoming deteriorated, old, and dependent.

A well-known legal formula, attributed to a Republican lawyer named Quintus Haterius, brings this home with particular clarity. With the Romans as with the Athenians, for a male to be the object of sexual penetration was considered unbefitting to a citizen. In defending a freedman accused of continuing to provide sexual favors to his former master, Haterius coined an aphorism that was later to become something of a popular dirty joke: impudicitia in ingenuo crimen est, in servo necessitas, in liberto officium (“ to be the object of anal penetration is a crime in the freeborn, a necessity for a slave, a duty for a freedman”). 110 What is significant here is that sexual subservience is considered the “duty” only of the freedman. It is not considered the “duty” of a slave. This is because, again, slavery was not a moral relation. The master could do what he liked, and there was nothing the slave could do about it.

Graeber, David (2011-07-12). Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Kindle Locations 4076-4083). Melville House. Kindle Edition.

• Damon Linker
• Rod Dreher
• Dreher responding to Linker

From Linker

Rather, it’s a culture fervently devoted to the moral principle of equal recognition and affirmation — in a word, to an absolute ethic of niceness. Moral condemnation can be mean, and therefore it’s morally wrong — that’s the way growing numbers of Americans think about these issues.

Of course, these nonjudgmental Americans would think differently — they would continue to publicly affirm notions of human flourishing and condemn acts that diverge from the norm — if they confidently believed in the foundation of these judgments. But increasingly, they do not. Judeo-Christian piety used to supply it for many, but no longer.

Get married and have kids? If that’s what you want, sounds good. Live in a polyamorous arrangement? As long as everyone consents, have fun. What about my intense desire to copulate with a horse? Just make sure no one gets hurt — with hurt defined in the narrowest of terms (covering physical harm and the violation of personal preferences).

• Ferguson is the Wrong Tragedy to Wake America Up
• Obama Response to the Grand Jury announcement
• TGC how should you respond to Ferguson
• Vox, why it’s so rare for police to be prosecuted for killing civilians
• Benjamin Watson’s Facebook Response
• Sin’s Part in the System
• Gun Ownership and Police Violence
• The white cop, black youth hugging picture is a lie
• Ferguson Race and the Evangelical Problem
• Tamir Rice Police Contradiction
• Chris Rock on Ferguson

Link

http://blog.ncbaptist.org/renewingworship/2014/06/11/nine-reasons-people-arent-singing-in-worship/

The trailer is out. The pictures look pretty, but I’m worried already. Trailers have a way of forecasting the movie.

I recommend the book. The Audible book is good too. It’s an amazing story. Amazing stories, however, always beg for frames. Part of what makes the book amazing is how Louis Zamperini endured unbelievable adversity only to get taken down by ordinary struggles. I don’t want to give too much away. Read the book.

My angst is that I expect the Hollywood telling of the story to be all about “the triumph of the human spirit”. Really? What about the incredible story of “The Bird“. That’s a story about the triumph of the human spirit too, but in very different ways.

The trailer has a priest saying “the light will always follow darkness”. OK. Why?

American optimistic religion is always about “hope” but pulls back from asserting a story that bears hope.

I should shut up and wait for the movie.

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