Catching Up With A Week's E-mail - From James Bond to Same-Sex Messages

 Guardian film stories:

Villain review – Richard Burton's masterclass in nastiness

Eureka review – booze, bird souls and Viggo Mortensen in barmy yet rich experimental enigma

Dr No: Sean Connery behind the scenes on the first James Bond film – in pictures

From The Bulwark:

The Greatest 20th-Century Russian Novel Finally Gets a Film Version Worthy of It

The Millions;

50 Reasons Why You Should Read Joy Williams

Brisbane Times

Why we just can’t forget Marcel Proust

Bing and Billie and Frank and Ella and Judy and Barbra

Eight books: Margaret Atwood’s group novel and two philosophers chat

CrimeReads:

SHERLOCK HOLMES, THAT ENIGMA WE KNOW SO WELL

10 ACTORS WHO SHOULD HAVE THEIR OWN DETECTIVE SHOWS

Public Books:

HUMANS ARE NATURE’S ECCENTRICS—LAUGHING AND CRYING SHOW WHY

Uniquely in the natural world, humans for Plessner are characterized by their “eccentric” positionality, in the sense that being aware of a center is inherently decentering. Like plants, humans are their bodies; like animals, they are and they have their bodies; and, uniquely, they are their bodies, they have their bodies, and they are aware of this situation. Self-awareness here is a kind of recursive doubling: aware of yourself, you are also necessarily aware of your awareness of this, and thus cannot simply be in your body and its possibility of action in the world, but are always looking over your own shoulder.

Plessner derives important philosophical, social, and historical consequences from humans’ eccentric positionality. Human beings are the organism that is “artificial by nature,” living in “mediated immediacy.” And because the human being is an ineluctably open question, each human group must answer for itself anew the question of how to live.

Thus, for Plessner, biology underpins culture in a very precise and nonreductive, nondeterministic way: human nature is to have no fixed nature. As Bernstein paraphrases it, “Humans can only have a biological life by leading a cultural life.”

Public Orthodoxy: 

Same-Sex Marriage in Greece: A Critical Analysis

In fact, Orthodox theology discourages us from categorizing human beings in the way that gender essentialism does. Orthodoxy’s understanding of personhood, reflected in our teaching of the Trinity and Christology, suggest that human persons, with all their complexity, cannot be reduced to the categories that gender essentialism requires.

The Trinity, as Metropolitan John Zizioulas explains, provides a model of personhood beyond classification. The Trinitarian persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—share a divine essence (ousia), but each has a unique way of being in relationship with us (hypostasis). Reflecting the Trinity, humans share in a common human nature (ousia), from which we derive a collection of attributes (e.g. race, body type, sex, gender) for which there are variations.[5] A set of characteristics constitutes someone as an individual, which is different from their personhood (hypostasis).

Personhood is one’s unique identity that emerges in relationship with others just as, for example, the unique hypostasis of the Holy Spirit is realized in relationship with other Trinitarian persons. The Holy Spirit constitutes us as irreducibly unique persons who share in the Son’s relation to the Father. Each human person, therefore, is beyond classification and transcends our shared essence.

Since Orthodoxy emphasizes the person rather than the individual, the Synod misplaces its emphasis on an individual’s attributes instead of a person’s hypostasis. Put simply, the Synod mistakes being LGBTQ as determinative of personhood.

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