This essay is going to start on a very different subject from where it is going to end.( Read more... )

The drift away from normative lifelong monogamous marriage seems to be as old as the human race. That seems to me to be what Our Lord meant when He said: "Moses told you so [allowing divorce] because of the hardness of your hearts, but from the beginning it was not so." Jesus had asked "What did Moses teach you [about marriage]?" And he had been ( Read more... )

According to a recent piece of research that the BBC is heavily publicizing, one good third of British teen-agers do not consider their parents people they admire or want to imitate. Even disregarding the obvious notion of teen-age rebellion, this is rather a worrying number. However, the BBC does not draw one clear conclusion from it: if teen- ( Read more... )

What follows is probably very imprecise. I have not been able to find it on any British news site, but it was reported in different forms by two Italian newspapers. This is my translation of the longer report, from today's La Repubblica.
( Read more... )

At one end of life, avus, who is old enough to be my father, works like a demon to help rehabilitate his wife, who has suffered a terrible accident, and is rewarded by a slow but constant improvement, till he is certain that the woman he married is back. At the other, photosynthesis, who is young enough to be my daughter, and who has a had a life in which ( Read more... )

A few months ago, I wrote an essay on the Catholic doctrine of marriage - http://www.livejournal.com/users/fpb/84324.html. Among the responses, this one by rfachir stood out for its length, eloquence and passion. Why any couple would want to be married is beyond me... ( Read more... )

( Read more... )