Author: mfcooper

Matthew Cooper is a fourth-grade teacher at Ascension Catholic School and a parishioner of St Herman's Orthodox Church (OCA) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has a master's degree in international relations and has worked as a microfinance advisory intern, an ESL and European history teacher in China, a data analyst and a machine-shop worker. His interests include Russian religious philosophy and modern Arab nationalist thought as well as the material culture and history of Central and East Asia - China in particular.

Marriage as communion: strangers in a strange land

· mfcooper
In the previous entry in this series, I discussed the idea in Saint John Chrysostomā€™s homilies of marriage as freedom, but as freedom paradoxically defined as mutual service. From this idea of freedom-as-mutual-service, which is the idea of the marriage as a miniature church, we can begin to see how the importance of communion arises. The distinction between unity and communion is a subtle one, but it is important to Saint John and important for our purposes. It consists in the analogous Liturgical difference between the Holy Mysteries of Baptism and of the Eucharist. The processā€¦

Freedom in Marriage

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In the prior essay on marriage and the theme of unity, we explored a bit how Saint John Chrysostom might answer the critics of marriage and family, who level against the institution of marriage the charges that it is too atomising and too alienating. We have seen from Saint Johnā€™s writings that the standard for marriage is that of a complete dissolution of ā€˜mineā€™ and ā€˜yoursā€™, even at the level of the body and the breath. But how do we answer the charges we saw before, that marriage and the family are too stifling, too conformist,ā€¦

Marriage, unity and the ends of the person

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One of the unfortunate genres of opinion writing that has cropped up in this past year, from the left-liberal magazine The Nation to the editorial pages of the centre-right Washington Post, is that the coronavirus has exposed the fundamental faults and flaws of the family unit. The feminist radical Sophie Lewis writes: ā€˜the unfolding of Covid-19 in the United States makes more palpable, among other thingsā€¦ that the familyā€”as the property logic and mode of social reproduction central to capitalismā€”is killing us.ā€™ A month and a half before this, the capitalist Harvard professor Ian Marcus Corbinā€¦

Congress as ā€˜sacred groundā€™?

· mfcooper
To listen to the New York Times and the Washington Post tell it, the events of 6 January were nothing less than an unforgivable act of sacrilege and blasphemy. ā€˜Inside the most sacred spaces of American democracy,ā€™ went the New York Times report by Grynbaum, Koblin and Hsu, unfolded an abomination of desolation worthy of the breaking news format ā€˜reserved for foreign wars, natural disasters or terrorist attacksā€™. Now, I am someone who likes public order and stability as public goods. Order and stability are valuable no matter where they happen to be. So yes, Iā€¦