Tag Archives: Sex
Altruism at Dawn
So would you conclude from this fact, if it’s a fact, that all of our ideas about altruism are just a bunch of unrealistic religious mumbo-jumbo that we’d be better off without? Altruism is really hard, after all. We’re not very good at it. So maybe it’s best to forget the whole thing and live the way evolution made us to be.
On Junk Food and Pornography
Natural and inevitable desires become a matrix into which the clumsy, inefficient reality of organic life gets plugged. The consequences of this development are ultimately more spiritual than political, as we risk becoming estranged and cut off from the physical world we have learned to use with such remarkable dexterity.
Rehabilitating Mary
While Mary’s circumstances are unique, her restoration to respectability is part of a larger trend. The gold-hearted prostitute of legend fit in rather well with a long scholarly tradition that located the followers of Jesus and the first Christian communities in the underclass of the Roman world. Christianity thrived, historians once argued, among the oppressed: slaves, landless laborers, women and people with disabilities. Lately this image of a lumpenproletariat church has been dramatically gentrified.
Brutally Ordinary Things 