From Gary Wills’ new article at New York Review of Books:

The early church had no specific rite for marriage. This was left up to the secular authorities of the Roman Empire, since marriage is a legal concern for the legitimacy of heirs. When the Empire became Christian under Constantine, Christian emperors continued the imperial control of marriage, as the Code of Justinian makes clear. When the Empire faltered in the West, church courts took up the role of legal adjudicator of valid marriages. But there was still no special religious meaning to the institution. As the best scholar of sacramental history, Joseph Martos, puts it: “Before the eleventh century there was no such thing as a Christian wedding ceremony in the Latin church, and throughout the Middle Ages there was no single church ritual for solemnizing marriage between Christians.”

From Peter Brown’s review of the Met’s “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th-9th Century),” at The New York Review of Books:

The exhibition takes us to the heart of this great detonation. It embraces the last century of the pre-Islamic Middle East and the first two centuries of Islam. To our surprise, we do not find ourselves in a world swept by a mighty wind. Instead, we enter a series of quiet rooms where time seems to stand still. Like a perfect late fall day, only the occasional rustle of a falling leaf startles us into realizing that the seasons are about to change. The few clear signs that Islam had, indeed, become politically dominant in the Middle East by the end of the seventh century strike us with almost ominous intensity. For there are so few of them.

From the Los Angeles Review of Books, a review of Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, by Cornel Bonca:

The fallen Catholic DeLillo began to find a way to write about certain inescapable promptings of “awe” and “wonder” that were so insistent that they qualified as spiritual intimations. I’d argue that it’s no accident that his greatest stretch of creation followed this shift, a two-decade-long marvel that helped push the American postmodern movement beyond its previous reliance on linguistic gamesmanship, black humor, and recursive irony, as books like White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld, and The Body Artist assured DeLillo a place in the American canon.

From Holland Cotter’s article on his visit to the sunken churches of Lalibela:

A priest, in white, stood at a lectern and read aloud from an illuminated book as a European video crew fussed with sound checks, then asked him, please, to start again. To an outsider the general impression was confusing, disconcerting. Can this newish, nondescript, somewhat disheveled, in-progress space really be the physical and psychic center of one the world’s oldest versions of Christianity?

The Catholic Church understands far better than patients’ rights advocates do how religion, gender and sexuality work in society. If the debate about health care were focused on men’s bodies, the Church understands there would be a resounding call to make their hospitals subject to legal and medical standards. But because it’s about women’s bodies, the public conversation on all sides gets confused over issues of shame, pain, inconvenience, autonomy, social responsibility and voice.

Amy Levin:  While the image of Oprah endorsing transcendental meditation is about as banal as a priest offering the sacrament, the Queen of the New-Age spiritual marketplace has sold spirituality to those in her pews again. Oprah’s bricolage-like church offered this week’s sermon via her show Next Chapter on the OWN network: transcendental meditation is awesome, readily available for consumption, and so culturally adaptable that even a city in the middle of corn country is bursting with enlightenment.

James Curcio at Modern Mythology on Kony2012 and “virality”:

You see, for something to become “viral” it has to be entirely ubiquitous, which essentially means that it must be stripped of all nuance and worthwhile content. This is an issue facing all propogandists who have any ethics at all. It must act on a common emotion, a simple emotion that is shared by many people. It must have the pretense of a genuine expression….

It’s been more than a decade since the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal rocked Boston.  In that time, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) has provided national support to victims of abuse.  But recently SNAP is finding that the Church’s new approach to managing national lawsuits is not apology and reparation but counter-attack.  Seeking to prove that SNAP is not a “rape crisis center” the Church is subpoenaing to access confidential communication between SNAP and victims, thus exposing victims to public scrutiny.

From Andrew Hartman’s recent post at U.S. Intellectual History, “The Politics of Epistemology,” in which he excerpts the following (and more) from his book Education and the Cold War:

By the beginning of the Cold War, this crisis was seemingly resolved in what Purcell terms the “relativist theory of democracy,” a stripped-down version of Dewey’s pragmatism in which democracy was made normative to America. This relativist theory of democracy blended what its practitioners believed were the best elements of naturalism, especially a faith in the empirical social sciences, with a co-opted version of rationalism, particularly a Platonic belief that American democracy was an end in itself. Although the relativist theorists of democracy considered themselves pragmatists in their attention to means, pragmatism as an identifiable philosophical radicalism, personified by Dewey in its aggressive and reform-oriented form, faded from view. Rather than critique democracy as it existed, relativist theorists assumed that American society was the democratic ideal. The status quo became an end in itself as intellectuals focused their labors on political stability.

(h/t Michael J. Altman)

Of course, mixed feelings are at the heart of ethical discourse and moral practice in all human societies. If life were simple, we wouldn’t have to think about morality very much—but life isn’t simple. What is striking in the case of China is that this “ordinary” moral ambivalence has played itself out against the backdrop of massive social experimentation. What if we try to wipe out our traditional cultural values and practices more or less overnight (as happened during the Cultural Revolution)? What if we restrict families to having one child (as happened with the family planning policy)? What if we take our rural youth and move them, en masse, to the cities (as is happening with the current wave of rural-to-urban migration)?

As anthropologists and others have shown, these experiments have generated an abundance of unintended consequences.