Karen Swallow Prior's Blog, page 2

God’s model for the family is beautiful and good, the very picture of the union of Christ and his church: the fruitful marriage of one man and one woman.Yet, the church often doesn’t know what to do with those who—whether by circumstance, conscience, choice or simply through the brokenness of creation—fall outside the mold that shapes this ideal of family life.There is an unspoken assumption that this failure to fit the pattern is just that—a failure. To be sure, sometimes we break the mold by our choices, even our sins. But ours is a God of great imagination and infinite surprises. He sometimes calls us out of the standard mold and into a new one.

I learned from the late Village Voice columnist that Christians need not fear free speech.

The 19th-century writer believed that the power of poetry and democracy came from an ability to make a unified whole out of disparate parts.

“It’s just locker room talk.” With these five words, Donald Trump and many of his supporters have tried to brush away the presidential candidate’s sexually predatory comments recorded in a 2005 conversation between the GOP presidential candidate and NBC host Billy Bush. Presumably, the same defense covers Trump’s conversations with Howard Stern about threesomes, anal sex, and his own daughter’s derriere.

Plagiarism is as American as apple pie. The discovery this week that passages in Melania Trump’s Republican National Convention speech were lifted from a 2008 speech by Michelle Obama scurried up a storm of complaints, accusations, counteraccusations, and questions about what plagiarism is, what it isn’t, and whether it even matters.

Not long ago, my community lost a beloved young member because of his repeated trespassing onto a dangerous train trestle to take selfies. He posted them with the hashtag #liveauthentic. His last time there, he died while trying to outrun the train. (People take such extraordinary measures to get selfies that so-called “selfie-related deaths” are a global phenomenon. Wikipedia now keeps a tally.) For him and for many others, capturing an experience with a photo, video, tweet, or blog post can hold more importance than the actual experience and reflects a phenomenon that the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called the hyperreal.

All this talk about bathrooms is, of course, not really about bathrooms. Perhaps we need to stop using public restrooms as a cover for what’s really at the heart of the bathroom debate: transgender identity.

Charles Camosy, Ph.D., is a pro-life Catholic who teaches Christian ethics at Fordham University. His forthcoming book, Beyond the Abortion Wars, will challenge the intellectually honest on both sides of the abortion debate as well as those in the middle. With extensive research, nuanced reasoning, and humane insights, Camosy undertakes the necessary but seemingly impossible task of dismantling the current stalemate on the issue—and then forges a way forward. I recently asked Dr. Camosy about his book, the future of the abortion debate, and the ways in which Catholics and Evangelicals can work together to uphold the sanctity of human life.