Joan Drennen

Thanks for linking this talk, Katie.
I know what you mean about its datedness, but overall, it contained valuable, honest testimony.
It is interesting to read about a marriage headed for divorce saved by a man who finally made himself present within his wife’s inner life. The two lives couldn’t merge before this.
Unable to spare her from her sufferings, by participating in them and accompanying her, he valued her, and everything changed.
I loved how he saw the connection between loving the feminine and loving God.
Feminism or not, I find liberty in owning and sharing my weaknesses as well as my strengths, and security in a man at home with both.

I am so personally grateful for the clarity that philosophy brings. I can’t imagine operating without its groundngs.
Thank you for your fine tuned thinking and wrestling (true work!) with the selections you bring to the Linde. Work that bears much fruit!

When I was driving around today, I was thinking the same thought. We do need all those witnesses
and disciplines to make the truth take shape, to make the truth clear, and to fight the onslought of half truths.

Katie, I shouldn’t have used Hathaway’s name and Heffner in the same sentence because they are world’s different. I don’t see any value in Heffner’s work and I see great value in Hathaway’s.
I understand what she was getting at, and I am tempted to think in a reactionary way like her. I can think of many artists that have the same sensitivity and hunger for beauty who have ended up becoming slaves in their attempts to find it. I am grateful to my dear Savior who’s spared me from taking dangerous roads in my pursuit of beauty and poetry, but rather has led me to a large fullness where there is an unlimited supply. I guess what I’m saying is living a moral and generous life (as opposed to a self consumed one) is compatible with living a life filled with joy, poetry, passion, and beauty.
The hunger for all that is beautiful is so much a part of our inheritance as human beings that to stuff it distorts our personhood. You’re so right. JPII and DvH have shown us fine tuned ways to rescue and reconcile the flower of life as well as the nuts and bolts. The marriage of the two is so important, one without the other doesn’t work. They compliment each other. 
To say that living a life filled with joy and poetry is compatible with living a moral and generous life (as I said above) seems so obvious and yet not obvious.
Hathaway’s complaint, “those members of society who make and enforce rules which are hostile to anything they themselves cannot understand, and who take upon themselves the right to treat the most sacred experiences in the manner of the police court” is a valid one. But those members of society who promise, do your own thing and you’ll be happy aren’t hitting the answer either.
How do we live with rules and not get squished by them. How do we live the spirit of the law and not the letter of the law without rejecting the liberating benefit of having law? I daresay it is very very hard.
I believe deeply in the poetry of life and that it is part of our dignity. Our hearts cry out in unstuffable symptoms for Life with a capital L.
We need a Savior!

Wow, Katie. I like Katharine Hathaway’s fiery spirit and dissatisfaction with the bland.
I agree with what her poignant complaints, but wish she came up with equally striking solutions.
Could the antidote for prudery, ordinariness, sterility be truth and love? I’ve been reading your quotes from Pope Benny’s encyclical which put me in mind of the amazing challenge of truth and love.
Jesus, the Man, doesn’t strike me as being plagued by prudishness, though he was Himself the New Law. He constantly perplexed the standard of his day (healing on the Sabbath, dining with tax collectors and prostitutes, befriending women.) His way, Truth and Love, was such a complete answer to all the quarrels about rules and regulations. He wasn’t permissive but he was free. Free from solving things with set, easy answers. Hathaway (in this instance) and Heffner, answer the challenge of life being lowered to the humdrum with answers that aim for the solution, but turn into other problems and new humdrums.
Those that want to fit life and love into neat packages fail to solve and create new problems as well.
True love (in all of its arenas, not just romantic) is so absolutely brilliant, a person must struggle with blood, sweat, and tears when faced with it. Saints and artists run themselves ragged in dealing with it. It consumes them and they don’t have many followers, or at least people that want to sell all and be like them, and they often hang for it.
They are misunderstood, misjudged, mistreated all because they grapple with truth and love which is much bigger and messier than the ordinary.
It is so much easier to solve the fluid challenges of love and truth with a rigid damn or by caving in to its flood. Somehow, mysteriously, Jesus is able to balance on water. Life presents us with a constant flow of situations that require an honest grappling with love and truth. We most often fall short of choosing the hard way and look for inadequate short cuts which require much less of us.

You’re right, Bill. I am grateful for technology.
I bet, though, that had you started using a GPS before you took orienteering in the Boy Scouts, you may never have wanted to.
I am amazed by technology and thankful for it. Technology is keeping our dear niece alive as I write. On a lesser note, machines have made way for leisure. I’m not about to start hand washing all of our laundry or drive a horse and buggy (though I greatly admire those that do.) But I think we’ve got to use technology without loosing total contact with handwork.
Because I was reared in the age of convenience, I have a natural inclination toward seeing the old fashioned way of doing things in a nostalgic light. I wouldn’t think the same way if every time I had to light a fire I had to rub flint and steel. Give me a match any day.
So what is it that draws me to an elemental way of doing things?
The experience of the process teaches the participant so many wonderful things. In the same way that listening to a beautiful piece of music draws one outside himself, engaging in a process (not merely a product) helps the participant to listen. To history, to those that repeated the same process, to other craftsmen, to the craft, to beauty, to the Origin behind these elements.
This is spoken from one who is not usually efficient with her time, so don’t take it from me! And, I am ever so grateful for much technology that enables me to participate in those unnecessary processes that enrich me full well! Hopefully, the desire to “touch the earth” will never be dulled in the presence of so many gadgets. It might be unless we encourage shop class and the like to our kids, girls and boys(!)

This article reminds me of Romano Guardini’s, Letter’s From Lake Como. I frequently find myself faced with the fact that what was valuable in the past is no longer valuable today. Necessity and Fashion have changed.
Fixing things during The Great Depression was a necessity and the skills required for fixing things were held valuable. Today household appliances are actually built, I was told by a service man, to operate for several years, break, and be disposed of. Skills needed to fix them are becoming more and more obsolete, so the possession or education of those skills aren’t valued.
While these skills aren’t needed as much in our times, they have an innate value. They give us knowledge, contact, and appreciation of the tools we use and the world we live in. There is something within us that cries out for our bodies and minds to be tested by manual labor, which if we can’t perform ourselves, gives us respect for those who do.
A wealthy society looks down on manual skills which in a large part of the world are necessary for survival. But is living in a disposable society good for us, for our ecomomy, or for the world?

Katie, I fully agree.
A husband who demands sex from his wife in a legalistic way not only shows he doesn’t know what sex is, but that he doesn’t know who she is. He is as foolish as a gardener who tries to force a bloom from his rose bush without watering, pruning, staking and nurturing it.

Dr. Healy,

1 further point regarding male and female. I think while it is obviously true what you say about CW being male, as a theologian the theology should idealy be balanced between the two.