Judge This: No Gay Kissing On Modern Family?

I am a bit late on this story but wanted to offer a contrary viewpoint to the dominant one of the outraged blogosphere. Though I have never seen the show, I was interested in the controversy over the show Modern Family which apparently features a gay couple among its lead characters.  The controversy centers not […]

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Emotional Rollercoaster Relationships Harder On Young Men Than Young Women

A study of 1,000 men and women ages 18-23, “Nonmarital Romantic Relationships and Mental Health in Early Adulthood” by Robin Simon and Anne Barrett, finds that young men benefit more from a romantic relationship going well and suffer worse from the strain of a bad one, whereas young women benefit more from simply being in […]

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Marriage As Rooted In Pre-Social Goods And As Having Radical Potential

Courtney at Feministing is quite skeptical of marriage but characterizes Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) as making a relatively compelling case for “the radical potential to be found in the privacy of the family unit” in her new memoir, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage: [Gilbert] writes, “It is not we as individuals, […]

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Christian Anti-Kissing Propaganda

(via) I find this really creepy, perverse, and emotionally poisonous, having at one point in my life been indoctrinated into such unhealthy and irrational, extremist ways of thinking.  As hilariously corny as the ham handed filmmaking is and as laughably naive as the film’s apparent morally hysterical fear of sex is, the consequences of such […]

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The Perils Of Unrequited Love

Richard Wade’s new column is typically sage, this time  as he soberly and accurately advises someone who is unrequitedly in love with a friend: When a friend learns that their friend loves them romantically, but they don’t have that kind of love to return, they often feel a tension because of an odd quirk in […]

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Loving Wives And Loving Countries

On Bloggingheads, philosophers Simon Keller and Niko Kolodny dissect love.  If you don’t have the hour to watch the whole thing or if you are only interested in one of the subtopics they discuss, below is the set of topics.  The time listed next to each topic indicates how long that portion of video runs. […]

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Philosophical Ethics: Whether It’s Worth It To Be Just With No Incentives Or With Disincentives

Before we get to the philosophy this time, let’s enjoy my favorite Flaming Lips song: In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or […]

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Sundaily Hilarity: Puppet Love

So so creepy. Your Thoughts?

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Gay Kids Coming Out In Middle School

The times sure are a-changin’.  From a long interesting piece in the New York Times Magazine: Still, the younger they are when they come out, the more that youth with same-sex attractions face an obstacle that would be unimaginable to their straight peers. When a 12-year-old boy matter-of-factly tells his parents — or a school […]

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Daily Hilarity: Love’s Designs

The story of my life. Your Thoughts?

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On Meeting People Where They Are

While he was hospitalized a couple years ago, Daniel Dennett got irritated when people offered to pray for him and insisted that they thank doctors rather than offer their ineffectual prayers.  The Wittenburg Door was appalled and inferred (quite unjustifiably) that Dennett did not understand that all many people mean to say when they say […]

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Not “I’ll Pray For You” But “I Love You”

Joe Bob Briggs from The Wittenburg Door visited a convention of atheists last year.  The Wittenburg Door is primarily a satire magazine written by Evangelicals with a sense of humor and perspective which I remember fondly from my teen years. So, writing for a “with it” sort of Evangelical publication, Briggs’s barbs at the atheists […]

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The Complicated Relationship Of An Apostate To His Religious Friends And His Reilgious Past

In reply to this post from the other day and subsequent discussion in the comments section about the ways that religious belie can interfere with both reason and love, George writes, For the past year I have been trolling blogs and websites trying to wrap my brain around religion in general and evolution denial in […]

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Love, Religious Style

Daniel M of Good Reason relays this poignant anecdote: I was on a long car trip with my very Mormon mother. Out of the blue, she said, “So you think it’s okay for gay people to get married, do you?” “Yeah,” I said. “I think it’ll be fine.” Mom said “What if your sons turned […]

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Angular Momentum

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Call It Volitional Love Rather Than Unconditional Love

Earlier today I posted Brendan Palla’s reply to my posts on unconditional love and love in general.  In what follows, I have interspersed my replies to him within the stream of his argument. I want to open with a bit of a critique. I don’t think you’ve captured very well the notion of unconditional love […]

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A Challenge To My Critique Of Unconditional Love

A week ago I posted twice on the theme of love, spending the first post on what I saw to be conceptual problems for the ideal of unconditional love and then focusing the second post on a constructive attempt to characterize love and then locating unconditional love within that new framework. The next day, Brendan […]

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How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways

In the first part of this series, I explored the reasons for rejecting “unconditional” love as a candidate for the ideal essence of love since as a concept it is riddled with numerous problems as a recommendation for human psychology it is hopelessly unrealistic. In this part of the series, I sketched out a theory […]

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Conceptual Problems For The Ideal of Unconditional Love

The ideal of unconditional love strikes many as the purest, most ideal way to define the essence of love.  It is easy to see why this characterization of the essence of love is appealing.  Unconditional love is an undiluted love—if I love only the good in you but do not love the bad in you, […]

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From Economic Desperation To Romantic

With less money to keep them warm at night, people more desperate for love apparently: “They’re looking for something that’s genuine in a world that isn’t very secure,” said Bathsheba Birman, co-founder of the Chicago dating event Nerds at Heart. “With headlines full of why you can’t trust established institutions that you thought you could […]

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