Category: Marriage
The Questions of Gay Marriage: An Inquiring Essay, Part One
What should we make of marriage? Or should we perhaps frame the question differently? Should we instead take up what marriage makes of us, and so consider ourselves as fundamentally responsive to it rather than creative? Why does a particular form of...
Don’t Try the Same Marriage Debate Again
If at first you don’t succeed, you should change your approach. Despite how the Supreme Court rules on Windsor, marriage advocates have been losing cultural headway, particularly among “Millennials,” since 2004. While a legal fight defending religious freedom and liberty...
Think Like Progressives: Marriage and the Pro-Life Movement
Faced with declining social and political support for traditional marriage, conservative evangelicals have started wrestling with the possibility that the time has come to let go of their opposition to gay marriage. It’s forever-ago in internet time, but I was...
The Gay Marriage Debate: Tactical Withdrawal or a New Paradigm?
After two very lengthy overviews of the recent blogosphere debates on natural law and gay marriage (see here and here), I am at last going to offer some of my own thoughts and constructive proposals for the debate. Of course,...
The Late Great Natural Law Debate: Synopses and Reflections, Pt. 2
Last week, I sought to offer an extended summary, with a few reflections of my own, on the barrage of posts and counter-posts prompted by David Bentley Hart’s “Is, Ought, and Nature’s Laws.” Although Hart’s essay had addressed the problem...
What We Talk about When We Talk about Marriage: A Guest Post by Daniel Darling
This is a guest post by Daniel Darling, who is a pastor and author in the Chicago area. You can check out his blog here and follow him on Twitter. So we are here at a place where gay marriage is becoming inevitable....
Why C.S. Lewis is Wrong on Marriage
You won’t find a more apt example of an excerpt that is contradictory to an author’s broader writings than this bit from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity: Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which...
Marriage & My Common Good
“The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations.” –G. K. Chesterton I’ve recently returned from celebrating my wife’s grandparent’s 6oth wedding anniversary. Their...
A Word of Caution on the Same-Sex Marriage Debates
Oliver O’Donovan: The old conservative aspiration to recover the jewel of minimal government out of the ashes of conflagration is delusive. A government will find agreement wherever it can, and will enforce it by all such measures as it can summon to...
Friendship and Publicly Disagreeing with the FRC: Updated–FRC Responds to Critics
We have heard much recently about the negative effects of partisanship on Christianity’s public witness. And for good reason: the partisan mind, the peculiar disposition to distrust another person’s arguments simply because of their source, is genuinely inhibitive of effective...