Tea at Trianon: Family Life: A Call to Holiness

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, May 25, 2020

Family Life: A Call to Holiness

From Crux:

Hookup culture communicates a narrative about the meaning of sexual activity - pleasure with no commitments. Its dominance in our cultural imagination makes people believe that this is what everyone desires, even though most research indicates most don’t. Given this dissonance, it seemed logical to start with it.

What is surprising in the hookup essays is the way they connect love and justice, avoiding simple conservative and liberal perspectives. The contributors draw on people’s experiences and found how unhappy they are with hookup culture and how fraught it is with sexual assault. What is missing is a basic sense of justice. Other essays in the book bring a similar attention to justice to sexual relations in dating, marriage, singleness, and gender, and they do so in hopes of more genuinely loving relationships. (Read more.)