What mourning my husband and son taught me about the fear of death.
We buried my baby in a wooden box in the crook of the arm of his father. My husband was thirty-seven and had died in a car accident coming home from his work as an Orthodox priest in a sudden snow storm on a Sunday afternoon in March. My son was born at twenty weeks gestation about two weeks before his father’s death, but the ground was too frozen to bury him in the cemetery plot just then, so the funeral home offered to keep the tiny…
Что скорбь о потере мужа и сына открыла мне о страхе смерти.
КАТРИН БЕЙКЕР
Мы похоронили нашего мальчика в небольшом деревяном ящике, который нёс его отец. Моему мужу было тридцать семь лет когда он погиб в автомобильной аварии во время неожиданной снежной бури по дороге домой из церкви, в которой он совершил православное воскресное богослужение в начале марта. А мой сын родился на двадцатой неделе моей беременности, примерно за две недели до смерти своего отца. Почва на кладбище сильно промёрзла, и похоронное бюро предложило нам оставить крохотное тельце у них до весны. Но когда умер и отец ребёнка, были применены…
“The only church that illuminates is a burning church.”
I first encountered these words on a meme depicting the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral. The meme appeared before the flames had even been quenched. After some digging I discovered that the quote was attributed both to the Marxist revolutionary, Che Guevara, and to Buenaventura Durruti, an anarchist leader in the Spanish Civil War. Regardless of its origin, the fact that someone thought it appropriate to resurrect the quotation before the ashes of the great church had cooled is a testament to an emergent rage that deserves our attention.
Is God really indifferent to our suffering?
Since my teens I had been familiar with the common atheist argument that God either does not exist or He must be utterly indifferent to our suffering and therefore not good. The first long road trip I attempted to make with my children after the death of my husband in a car accident brought new insight for me into those arguments.
My six children were between 14 and 4 years of age at the time. …
How out-of-control empathy may be polarizing our public discourse.
Empathy is widely regarded as one of life’s most important skills, but can it ever go too far? In his 2016 book Against Empathy, Canadian American psychologist and professor of psychology Dr. Paul Bloom makes the case for “rational compassion”, reminding us that empathy has a dark side.
Of the possible definitions one could use, the definition Bloom uses here is “imagining the feelings of another and attempting to feel them too”. He argues that imagining someone else’s feelings is probably impossible and even if a person is successful in imagining…
Is gender merely a social construct?
Sexuality has become increasingly politicized in the last decade in America. It has become popular to think of gender not in a binary way but as a spectrum with as many as 50 or more possibilities, each fading into the next. In some academic and social justice circles, the word “binary” has become synonymous with what is limiting, simplistic, and worthy of being dismissed with an eye roll. Whatever spectrum we feel we need to express sexuality in these times, the binary notion should not be thrown out altogether. Perhaps there is an alternative…
Virtue and valor against “Toxic Masculinity.”
When my 16, 14 and 12 year-old sons asked me if they could watch Thor: Ragnarok for a second time, I reminded them that it wasn’t likely to improve upon second viewing, and they good-naturedly agreed. Their next choice was Saving Private Ryan. That gave me pause. I hadn’t thought about that movie in a long time. I decided in spite of the intense realistic violence it would be much more worthy of their time.
When the movie came out it in theaters in 1998 my family took my grandfather to see it. He…
The great power in the unhistoric acts of the faithfully hidden life
Two myths shared by feminism and the radical left have a major influence on contemporary culture. The first is that the external problems of life are the most significant; the second is that men do all (or most of) the bad things. These are united by one underlying assumption: the public is more significant than the private. Yet some things are bigger on the inside.
It’s the system
The idea that systemic, chronic, historically verifiable injustice is what keeps people from their desired goals seems to be an original principle of the extreme political left. While I agree that we…
