[HN Gopher] Families of Choice: On the Shakers and Catholics in ...
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Families of Choice: On the Shakers and Catholics in Early America
Author : Vigier
Score : 18 points
Date : 2021-06-29 05:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| If you are interested in early Christianity, I've put together
| some quotes from Philo of Alexandria (b.25 BC) -- he describes
| the hellenized Jewish scene in Egypt that Jesus would have been
| connected with.
|
| The core idea in Philo is that god is conceived as an ineffable
| Oneness -- from which emanates the Logos (translated poorly in
| English as "word", but is much more complicated than that-- see
| Plato). Philo describes the Logos as "the son of god". This is
| all very esoteric though; it is definitely not referring to
| personality gods or large persons living in the sky. Seeing this
| as the root of Christianity may help make sense of why it
| resonated with some of the philosophical intelligensia of the
| time. (Because otherwise, Christianity makes is really
| incomprehensible). See what you think.
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JATMRSh4b6wlFlYWw8t1FdrG...
| bobthechef wrote:
| Esoteric? Maybe his version, but see John 1:1. It's practically
| the first sentence. Jesus is the Logos incarnate (the "Word").
| aeneasmackenzie wrote:
| I don't know about Shakers, but dragging Catholic religious into
| this is laughable.
|
| > Breaking away from families of origin and remaking them into
| families of choice were not incidental for ... Catholic men and
| women, but should be understood as a deeply political act. The
| alternative structures of ... monastic family life and the
| intimacies they created without sex built an explicit,
| nonnormative sexual culture in a society that rigidly presented
| heterosexual love and family as the only legitimate and legal
| option.
|
| Catholic religious will be happy to tell you that "heterosexual
| love and family" is the only moral option.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Maybe Protestant Catholics, but that hasn't been true since 34
| AD :)
| pessimizer wrote:
| Early Christianity had indifference bordering on disdain for
| marriage, and there's no record of a Christian rite for
| marriage until the 9th century. Celibacy was considered the
| ideal. Same for the Shakers, which is why they died out.
| iammisc wrote:
| Catholicism taught that celibacy is ideal until vatican II.
| Nominally, it still does.
|
| That being said, marriage is still the only appropriate place
| for sex, and then only heterosexual sex, by church teaching.
| So both you and the one you replied to are correct.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Catholic religious will be happy to tell you that
| "heterosexual love and family" is the only moral option.
|
| The Catholic _heirarchy_ will be happy to tell you that
| consistently.
|
| Catholic _religious_ are...not the same thing, and
| substantially more diverse.
|
| (Source: been Catholic approximately my whole life, and known
| quite a few religious, having spent a long time in a parish run
| by an order, and some more time regularly attending and
| volunteering in a retreat center run by a different order.)
| aeneasmackenzie wrote:
| Can you be specific? I anticipate that the people you are
| thinking of are heretics. I mean specifically that they
| deviate from dogmas of the church, not any colloquial
| definition.
| ijasidfjiajsdf wrote:
| Some Catholic priests and parishes are considerably more
| "progressive" than others. Every major city has at least
| one progressive parish, often it can be the Jesuit parish.
| Catholic teaching is quite strict that the purpose of sex
| is "bonding and babies." (More formally, sex is "unitive,
| marital, and procreative.") The progressive priests and
| bishops don't blatantly contradict this, but they do stress
| how "welcoming and inclusive" they are to practitioners of
| sexual acts that are neither unitive, marital, nor
| procreative, while never choosing to preach any homilies
| about God creating sex for the purpose of strengthening the
| bond between husband and wife and to enable the two to "be
| fruitful and multiply."
| trasz wrote:
| This is true in certain places, but far from universal.
| I'd be quite surprised if you found such progressive
| priests in Poland, for example. The official Catholic
| stance - essentially "teaching" people are no different
| from cattle, sexuality-wise - seems to be enforced very
| heavily there.
| javagram wrote:
| > The official Catholic stance - essentially "teaching"
| people are no different from cattle, sexuality-wise
|
| The church is perfectly fine with promiscuity, artificial
| insemination, sterilization etc. among cattle or pets.
|
| The same behaviors they tell humans are immoral, because
| they think humans aren't just cattle.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| "The official Catholic stance - essentially "teaching"
| people are no different from cattle, sexuality-wise -
| seems to be enforced very heavily there."
|
| This is a straw man assertion...
| bobthechef wrote:
| What's with your condescension? It's horrible.
|
| The Catholic position is grounded in natural law theory.
| The telos of the sexual organs is essentially
| procreative; deny the procreative end and sex becomes
| incomprehensible. To use sexual organs in a manner that
| _intentionally_ works against their end is to
| intentionally frustrate their end. To intentionally
| thwart the operation of your faculties and misuse them is
| immoral and therefore contradicts one's fulfillment and
| actualization as a human being.
|
| Calling people cattle for living in accordance with the
| procreative end of sexual intercourse, which is the
| ultimate end of sexual intercourse, is nasty, if not
| irrational. Before you do so, I suggest you acquaint
| yourself[0] with the actual position held and defended by
| the Catholic Church.
|
| [0] https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/lets-
| think-a...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The Catholic heirarchy will be happy to tell you that
| consistently.
|
| To correct myself, actually, relevant to the instant article,
| no, even they won't. Because choosing neither heterosexual
| love nor family in the usual sense (or, for that matter, even
| the sense that religious communities are a kind of family, as
| both lay committed celibacy and eremetic life, both private
| and consecrated, are recognized vocations) is very much an
| option, even to the heirarchy.
|
| They hierarchy is fairly certain to say romantic love and
| family are a moral option only within a committed, exclusive,
| heterosexual context, though.
| mustafa_pasi wrote:
| The "nonnormative sexual culture" they are referring to is
| celibacy. Besides monks and nuns there are also hundreds of lay
| Catholic organizations that require members to remain celibate.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| " rigidly presented heterosexual love and family as the only
| legitimate and legal option."
|
| This may be a straw man against Catholic culture, and it might
| have been true in early American Protestant culture, but
| Catholics have had a theology on vocations of life for over a
| millennia...
| iammisc wrote:
| Moreover, traditional pre-Vatican II Catholic teaching (and I
| mean traditional) says that remaining celibate in the
| priesthood or in religious life is superior.
|
| This is one of the reasons for the evisceration of convents
| following vatican II. Whereas before women who entered the
| convent were seen as holy, and in a superior vocation to the
| laity, Vatican II 'laicized' them and made them like everyone
| else. Without the special status, the women left.
|
| It's quite far reaching. For example, Mother Abbesses would be
| considered on par with bishops in terms of their 'position' in
| the hierarchy, and could even hear confessions from her
| subjects, even if she could not impart the sacraments.
|
| People think Vatican II elevated the position of women in the
| church, but it didn't. It elevated the position of married
| women, in the same way it elevated the position of married men,
| who were heretofore considered to be in an inferior vocation to
| both priests and nuns and brothers.
|
| Note the inferiority/superiority is of the vocation, not of the
| person. All persons are equally unworthy of God's grace, but he
| gives it anyway.
| bobthechef wrote:
| Yeah, this article seems very confused from the start. I'm
| still unclear what the author was trying to _really_ convey.
| There's a strange and sustained attempt to suggest some bizarre
| equivalence between LGBT and Catholic monastic orders and
| trying to characterize the latter as subversive like the
| former, "challenging" this or that. Maybe, as you say, American
| Protestant culture had real issues with celibate life, but in
| the Catholic view, the good of marriage, which for Catholics is
| elevated from natural institution to the status of sacrament,
| is sacrificed for the higher vocation of the religious life
| (Catholics speak of the married life also as a vocation). But
| this is not a denial of the goodness and rightness of the
| natural family. If anything, it is its affirmation. The natural
| family remains the fundamental pattern that is mirrored in
| these orders just the same as it is even in government, though
| perhaps in a more distant fashion. Families where, say, the
| grandparents take care of their grandchildren is not the
| natural family, but it is not opposed to nature and not a
| perversion of it and still patterns itself on the natural
| family. The same with adopted families. The impediment, such as
| the death of the parents, forces the formation of a family
| arrangement that would not naturally be the case, but this does
| not mean it is disordered (please note: "not natural" is not
| the same as "opposed to nature"; it is not the natural end of
| toes to push elevator buttons, but doing so is not per se
| opposed to their end either). In other words, not natural is
| not necessarily evil, but evil is necessarily unnatural. Or,
| not natural is not the same as opposed to nature, but evil is
| opposed to nature and thus unnatural.
|
| The author seems to be trying to use monastic life and whatever
| fraternal friendships might arise between members of monastic
| orders as an vaguely salacious instrument to attack the sole
| legitimacy of marriage understood as heterosexual union
| naturally ordered toward procreation and raising of children,
| and she seems to do this by manufacturing precedent. According
| to a Catholic understanding, monastic life in no way undermines
| these notions.
|
| Strange article.
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