What's Tony Thinking

Some Great Stuff at the Weekend

Wow, just a bunch of great pieces to enjoy this weekend. Valentine’s Day being yesterday let’s start with “True Love Is Boring” from The School of Life (philosopher Alain de Botton’s project). Thanks to Todd Brewer at MBird for calling this to our attention. Here’s an excerpt:

“Our archetypal images of true love skew heavily towards the dramatic and the intense: someone on their knees protesting eternal fidelity, a couple embracing passionately while enemies bang at the door, star-crossed lovers embracing in a rain storm as lightning streaks across a slate-grey sky.

“Yet some of the more persuasive and quietly true images of love come from a different mood and place.

“Love properly understood entwines us deeply with the day to day experience of another, much of it entirely boring to the wider world but deeply redolent of commitment and of mutual daily care for one’s small trials and joys.

“We associate love with grand occasions. But it’s in the steady accumulation of discrete elements – perhaps over decades – that it reaches its apogee: a person who remembers another’s need for some lip balm, someone who keeps in mind a sore bit on their partner’s leg or the particular sort of raisins they like and who is happy to know that they found a pleasant table to sit at not too far from the window.”

Blue Cities Like Seattle Went Woke But It Didn’t Help the Marginalized. Great piece at Post Alley from Sandy Kaushik and David Hyde interviewing the sociologist, Musa al-Gharbi. You might call this “the truth about Woke.”

Two pieces from Christianity Today. First is an article on the life of the church during the week as a community hub and refuge. The interview that follows hits similar themes.

“Church in the Anti-Social Century,” is by Cathy McKean. “Churches, she argues, are rare ‘third places,’ community gathering spots that don’t require a purchase for people to be there. The church ‘values people as more than consumers. It ought to have a place for everyone, no transaction required.'”

Deeper down at that link you’ll find CT’s Editor, Russell Moore interviewing Jonathan Rauch about “What We Got Wrong About the Church.”

Russell Moore speaks with atheist thinker Jonathan Rauch about politics, gender and sexuality, and what he got wrong about Christianity’s decline.

Rauch: “It turned out that what we were taking for granted was all of the work that those churches were doing to build community bonds, to give people a place every Sunday where they met and worshiped together, to teach higher values, to transmit those values to young people.”

Lastly, from The Free Press, Bari Weiss interviews author Louise Penny on “Loveless Sex Is Not Empowering.” Penny dares to tell the truth that, “hook-up culture benefits men at the expense of women.” I’m not sure it does that much, in the end, for men either, lots of whom seem lonely and isolated, but it’s a mess for women and children.

“Sex must be taken seriously,” argues Louise Perry in the introduction of her upcoming book, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century. A good old-fashioned feminist, Louise believes that casual sex is not, by and large, good for women; she made that case in The Free Press’s first-ever live debate, and in her explosive debut book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.”

If none of this works for you, check out the video of the kayaker who got swallowed by a humpback whale and then spit-out again. And you always thought that bit in the Jonah story was only a metaphor! I did a kayak tour in humpback waters in Mexico seven years ago. Just for the record, the being swallowed experience was not (gratefully) included in that tour.