THE DEATH-HAUNTED ART OF FRIENDSHIP, PART II: At Catholic Lane. This time, sacrificial friendship in the Bible and in our everyday lives:

How often in Scripture we find violence mingled with love, like water mingled with wine: in the Song of Songs, the watchmen beating the lover as she searches the city for her beloved; in Genesis, Abram’s knife poised over Isaac’s breast. Yet it is friendship that features most prominently in this strange dynamic of love and violence. It is most explicitly and insistently linked to death and sacrifice.

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edited: de mortuis.

WHY I WOULD NEVER PLAY "I WOULD NEVER": Uh, hello. I realized that this post, written in a state of post-debate lethargic, self-indulgent wrath, broke at least two of the rules for not being awful on the Internets: 1) Don't psychoanalyze anyone, especially but not exclusively people you don't know, especially if you think your take on them is so very clever; and

2) Don't tell people you "genuinely don't understand how" they believe what they do. Nothing's more frustrating than being told you're not merely wrong but unimaginable. I don't find any defenses of a Christian abortion-neutral perspective even remotely persuasive given the events of the Gospels, but yeah, I'm not so desperately ingrown that I can't imagine why someone would believe otherwise, and I shouldn't've affected that intellectual naivete.