Blogging Around: Heavenly Spy, Casablanca, Big Weddings, Singing Nun, Gone Girl, and the Catholic No-Go

Heavenly Spy

A new blog ... Lebanese Catholic ... with some interesting things to say. Check it out and say hi!

Gone Girl and Christian Engagement With Art

Jeffrey Overstreet on a subject dear to his (and my) heart. Be sure to read it all because this is just the tip of the iceberg.

... there is a distressing delusion at the heart of so much Christian engagement with art: It's the delusion that says "The style and the substance are two different things. We should care much, much more about substance than we do about style.

Here's the thing: Style is substance.

Casablanca and the Four Main Types of Love

Ferdy on Films is not the place where I'd expect to find a discussion of how we see the four types of love as the Greeks defined it. What's more, Casablanca doesn't automatically spring to mind in this mix either. Definitely read this piece.

Casablanca is much more than just a boy-meets-girl kind of romance, and to show that, I’m going to have to go all schoolmarm on you. The birthplace of most of the philosophies that guide Western societies is Greece, and the Greeks had four terms for the main types of love human beings experience: agape, eros, philia, and storge. Agape means love in a spiritual or humanitarian sense, wanting the good of another. Eros, the most common love in Hollywood romances, is the passionate love of longing and desire. Philia is more general and can extend to family, friends, or activities. Finally, storge is natural love, as by a parent for a child; importantly, Greek texts also use this term for situations people must tolerate, as in “loving” a dictator. Casablanca activates each of these forms of love, giving audiences a quadruple whammy of loves so powerful that the film has become the stuff of legend, with well-remembered quotes that distill the essence of these forms of love.

Singing Nun Sister Christina Releasing an Album for Christmas

I've seen just enough Sister Christina clips from Italy's "The Voice" tv show to know one thing. I want this album. Old news maybe but I thought you'd like to know ... read more at The Deacon's Bench.

Mega-Weddings: Why You Should Say I Don't

Although this showed up in the WSJ's financial section it could easily have been an advice column. Financial strain isn't the only thing wrong with extravagant weddings. It may be an early indicator to underlying problems. It seems to me that if more couples were paying for their own weddings instead of relying on fond parents to cough up the cash, this might be less of a problem.

"The evidence suggests that the types of weddings associated with the lower likelihood of divorce are those that are relatively inexpensive but high in attendance," write Messrs. Francis and Mialon.

(This is a subscriber only feature on the internet. But if you look it up on Google and click through there you should be able to read the whole thing.)

Why is Gay Marriage the Catholic No-Go?

This question comes up more and more, especially as the Synod on the Family is going on in Rome. Jen Fitz sets it out for us clearly and understandably.

I’d like therefore to review some of the myths concerning Catholic teaching on same-sex attraction and Church participation, because the reality is both more extreme and not nearly as extreme as people guess, and that paradox is what bites.