Year: 2013

by Matthew Sitman

Lauren Winner, author of the religious memoir Still, reflects on what she’s learned since the book’s publication:

What has changed is:  I didn’t really know, even when writing the book, that many Christian communities in times gone by would have said “Oh, this is normal, this dark night of the soul, this doubt. This is part of the expected choreography of a Christian life.”  If I had known that, while writing Still, there probably would have been a chapter: “dark night choreography,” or somesuch.

It is only in the last year or so that I have begun to read and study and learn that many, many wise saints from times gone by would say, about a season of doubt or alienation from God or despair, “This is not an aberration.  This is one of the well-established patterns of Christian life.” Not every Christian lives through such a season, but for many people, it is simply part of the architecture, part of what we can expect along the path to God, the path to true intimacy with God and self and neighbor.

by Zoe Pollock

Over the years, religions have sent mixed messages regarding shoes:

One tradition holds that the prophet Muhammad initially encouraged his followers to pray with shoes on, because that was in contrast with Jewish practices of the day. He was then angelically inspired to tell his followers to remove their footwear. Since then, Jews in many parts of the world have been praying with shoes on; indeed an early form of Jewish morning prayer includes special supplications to be said when donning one’s footwear: the right shoe first and then the left. But in Arab countries and further east, there is much evidence of Jewish barefootedness. In some cases, Jews were compelled to remove their shoes, at least when treading near a mosque; such rules existed in Morocco and Yemen. In Islamic theocracies, regulations governing clothing and footwear were often used to mark Christians and Jews as monotheists of a lower status.

(Photo by Edwin Lee)

by Matthew Sitman

Reflecting on the life and work of Paul Petrie, Christina Pugh muses on one aspect of the poet’s temperament:

“Poets are conservative,” Paul the nonconformist used to say, 
hastening to explain that this conservatism had nothing to do with politics. “They want to conserve memory and experience.” The drive toward poetic conservation is occasional, I’d argue, whether we’re conserving something personal, historical, or neither. It can transform a previously unnoticed moment — a patch of red wing, or television noise, or a sentence in Kant’s Critique of  Judgment — into the occasion for language. Where is the poet, of any aesthetic stripe, who doesn’t rush to conserve even a fraction of the spark that might blaze as a poem? This need to preserve moments of a perceptual, emotional, or intellectual life in poetic lines does constitute, again in Paul’s words, a “race with time and the devil” — a race that none of us can win. As Sharon Cameron says, writing of  Dickinson’s work in particular, “the poles of death and immortality are thus those states that poetic language shuttles between.”

by Zoe Pollock

Historically, it’s not been men:

[F]or most of Western history, from ancient Greece to beginning of the nineteenth century, women were assumed to be the sex-crazed porn fiends of their day. In one ancient Greek myth, Zeus and Hera argue about whether men or women enjoy sex more. They ask the prophet Tiresias, whom Hera had once transformed into a woman, to settle the debate. He answers, “if sexual pleasure were divided into ten parts, only one part would go to the man, and and nine parts to the woman.” … Montaigne, [psychologist Havelock Ellis] notes, considered women to be “incomparably more apt and more ardent in love than men are, and that in this matter they always know far more than men can teach them, for ‘it is a discipline that is born in their veins.’”

What changed? For one thing, evangelical Protestantism:

Through the gospel, Christian women were “exalted above human nature, raised to that of angels,” as the 1809 book The Female Friend, or The Duties of Christian Virgins put it. The emphasis on sexual purity in the book’s title is telling. If women were to be the new symbols of Protestant religious devotion, they would have to sacrifice the acknowledgement of their sexual desires. Though even the Puritans had believed that it was perfectly acceptable for both men and women to desire sexual pleasure within the confines of marriage, women could now admit to desiring sex in order to bond with their husbands or fulfill their “maternal urges.” As [historian Nancy Cott] put it, “Passionlessness was on the other side of the coin which paid, so to speak, for women’s admission to moral equality.”

by Zoe Pollock

Rose Surnow profiles a novel approach to matchmaking – Erika Christensen’s subway search for suitors:

As her website explains: “The Love Conductor is the first matchmaker to go underground — targeting New York’s 1.6 billion subway riders, many of whom are the most alluring, creative and energetically sexy on earth.” You sign up online and fill out a questionnaire, then Erika will call to get your vibe and figure out what you’re looking for. She rarely meets clients in person, but once she has a clear idea of the kind of mate you’re seeking and some photos of you, she’ll hit the subway (as well as streets and bars) approaching total strangers that fit the bill.

Most matchmakers focus on hooking up rich people, charging thousands of dollars, but Erika goes as low as a measly hundred bucks. Using a sliding scale, she sets rates depending on how hard it will be to find dates for a particular client. Recently, a guy from Connecticut was eager for her services, but she only works in New York City, so she charged him $500. “I have another guy, 29, really cute, has a great job, and lives in Brooklyn. I charged him $100 for two months because I’ll be able to send him on as many dates as he wants to go on.” All participants pay up-front and there’s no set number of dates per package: She promises a certain number based on each person’s datability, then keeps working until she delivers.

by Doug Allen

According to Colin Lecher, a sense of smell might be your best ally in the dating scene:

Research suggests that men who can’t smell have fewer sex partners than men with fully functioning nostrils. About five times fewer. A team of researchers had already found a correlation between not having a sense of smell and having feelings of insecurity. … A more recent study from the same researchers compared 32 people who couldn’t smell–22 women and 10 men–with a control group, asking both groups about the number of sexual partners they’d had. The question was, if people are insecure because they can’t smell, will that insecurity affect their sex lives, too?

Well, something‘s affecting their sex lives. The men, on average, had way fewer partners than the men in the control group. Curiously, the women without a sense of smell had about the same number of partners as the control group women. But compared with the control group (and the men), the women ranked themselves as more insecure in their current romantic relationship.

by Zoe Pollock

Rachel Johnson recently revisited the collective she volunteered at during her youth:

The kibbutz was a third of the size it used to be, and there was no communal dining hall. Instead, everyone stayed home at night, watching TV. And the average age of the members was 80.

She reflects on the larger changes in Israeli society:

Sociologists date the beginning of the end of the kibbutz movement to as long ago as the war of 1967. The annexation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem meant the end of socialism and the start of messianic, Zionist capitalism. Now signs of the change are everywhere. For example — in one of those tiny changes that symbolises a big shift — sandals, the emblematic item of socialist footwear, almost compulsory on the kibbutz, were banned from the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in 2007. …

As I left Galilee, I realised that it would be simplistic to say that the changes in the kibbutz movement mirror the changes in politics, the economy, and the population. In Israel, things are always more complicated. But a country that was once socialist, secular, and led by men who’d all been on kibbutzim, like David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, and Ehud Barak, has turned religious, nationalist and capitalist. There is only one kibbutznik left in the Knesset, but two settler MPs are already ministers.

(Image by Flickr user epiclectic)