Account Of Marriage Research Articles

The Body and Desire: Gregory of Nyssa's Ascetical Theology by Raphael A. Cadenhead

Reviewed by: The Body and Desire: Gregory of Nyssa's Ascetical Theology by Raphael A. Cadenhead Anthony J. Thomas IV The Body and Desire: Gregory of Nyssa's Ascetical Theology. By RAPHAEL A. CADENHEAD. Christianity in Late Antiquity, vol. 4. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 267. Hardback, $95.00. ISBN: 978-0-520-29796-8. In The Body and Desire, Raphael A. Cadenhead provides an insightful analysis of the place of desire and sexuality in Gregory of Nyssa's ascetical writings, stressing the need for a diachronic understanding of spiritual maturation. Cadenhead demonstrates that apparent gender fluidity in Gregory's thought must be understood within the context of his larger program of ascetical transformation that progresses through specific stages. Part 1, examining the early phase in Gregory's career, considers marriage and virginity, primarily in De virginitate. Chapter 1 discusses the manner in which virginity supersedes Platonic pederasty and points to Gregory's moderate view of marriage. In a section that will particularly appeal to students of classical philosophy, while stressing that in the ancient world sexual practices were not intimately linked with sexual identity, he shows that Christian celibacy is intended to replace Platonic pederasty; celibacy provides the same beneficial results as pederasty, "fecundity and contemplation of the Form of Beauty," while removing the need for the young male erōmenos. In this fascinating section, Cadenhead argues that Gregory actually presents a critique of pederasty. Chapter 2 shows the implications of Gregory's "integrationist ethic" for his understanding of sexual virtue and vice. In the De virginitate, sexual excess is only treated as one of the vices, with gluttony taking center stage. By making fidelity to Christ, the Bridegroom, the factor uniting the virtues, and thus making any sin a form of adultery, Gregory Christianizes the idea originating in ancient philosophy that the virtues support each other. [End Page 239] Chapter 3 develops Gregory's early understanding of Christ as the proper end of desire. For Gregory, the passions do not have to be utterly extirpated but rather directed toward Christ. Discussing Gregory's use of ancient stereotypes that associate courage with males and weakness with females, Cadenhead argues that effeminacy, for Gregory, is not connected with homosexual identity, noting that it is mentioned in connection with married people. At the same time, the use of male and female imagery "does not refer to ontologically male or female referents"; both male and female imagery are used to depict the soul's relationship with Christ (70). Part 2, examining the middle phase in Gregory's career, considers the effects of the deaths of Gregory's siblings on his theology and also considers the doctrinal controversies in which Gregory was involved. Chapter 4 shows that in the middle phase Gregory nuances his account of marriage and asceticism; spiritual fecundity is superior, but physical fecundity is still good. Cadenhead also notes, against modern attempts to focus on Gregory's positive use of female imagery in describing spiritual ascent, that Gregory criticizes female vice and presents a hierarchical picture of the relations between the sexes. Chapter 5 shows that the deaths of Basil and Macrina led Gregory to consider the possibility that in the resurrection human bodies will not be sexually differentiated. While Gregory resists the confusion of the sexes when addressing married people, when he addresses ascetics, he presents ascetics of both sexes as appropriating virtues characteristic of both genders (89). Cadenhead, moreover, providing insight into an ongoing discussion in the scholarship, concludes that Gregory was not sure if the resurrected body would have genitalia. In considering Gregory's theory of desire in the De anima and the De hominis opificio, Cadenhead notes that Gregory makes use for the first time in his works of a distinction drawn by Hierocles and Seneca between hormai and pathē and suggests that the rationality resulting from being made in the imago Dei allows human beings to use their reason to overcome pathē. Chapter 6 discusses the influence on Gregory's understanding of asceticism of the Christological and Trinitarian controversies in which he was involved. Part 3, focusing on Gregory's Life of Moses and Commentary on the Song of Songs, works...

Kathryn D. Temple. Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England.

Kathryn D. Temple. <i>Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England</i>.

“Love is only between living beings who are equal in power”: On what is alive (and what is dead) in Hegel's account of marriage

AbstractThe paper develops a conception of marital love as a complex recognitive relation, which I articulate by juxtaposing it against other recognitive relations that figure in Hegel's theory of modern civil society (i.e., respect and esteem). Drawing on Hegel's early writings, I argue that, if love is to provide its unique sort of recognition, it must obtain between “living beings who are equal in power”—a peculiar form of equality that I name (drawing on Stanley Cavell's work) “dynamic equality.” I conclude that it is by Hegel's own lights that we should reject his notorious conception of the sexual difference. However, I also offer reasons why, from Hegel's early 19th century perspective, he could consider the following two conditions as compatible: (1) equality within marriage and (2) sexual hierarchy outside marriage, namely, in civil society.

An Invitation to the Feast: A Positive Biblical Approach to Equal Marriage

This positive biblical argument for same-sex marriage begins by noticing that it is unlikely Christianity should be interested in marriage at all. That interest comes from the eschatological account in Isaiah and Revelation of the relationship of God and creation as one of marriage. This eschatological approach enables a deeper reading of the household code in Ephesians and its account of marriage. The paper then turns to an account of Gentile inclusion as a model of how the Church might accept gay and lesbian people. It challenges Andrew Goddard’s use of Acts 15 to reinforce the prohibition of same sex relationships, by drawing attention to the way in which the Council of Jerusalem uses scripture. The paper challenges the way in which the enforced celibacy imposed on gay clergy undermines the liberating origins of Christian celibacy. It argues that Genesis 2 is badly misused to support compulsory heterosexuality. The paper then identifies a number of gifts that same-sex marriage brings to straight marria...

Marriage, “Bodily Union,” and Natural Teleology

In recent years the account of natural law that has come to be known as the “new natural law theory” has come under criticism. Rebekah Johnston has engaged quite seriously with the NNL account of marriage and sexuality and has deemed it insufficient and internally inconsistent, going so far as to argue for the legitimacy of homosexual “marriage” based on the NNL’s own system. The author argues in this essay that the NNL does not fully realize the implications of its position in this regard, and that Rebekah Johnston’s critique fails similarly in providing an account of marriage and sexuality. To remedy these errors, the role of normative, natural teleology must be investigated thoroughly.

Until choice do us part: marriage reform in the Progressive Era

For centuries, people have been thinking and writing - and fiercely debating - about the meaning of marriage. Today, politicians speak often of defending or protecting this institution, but just a hundred years ago, Progressive-era reformers embraced marriage not as a time-honored repository for conservative values, but as a tool for social change. In Until Choice Do Us Part, Clare Virginia Eby offers a new account of marriage as it appeared in fiction, journalism, legal decisions, scholarly work, and private correspondence at the start of the twentieth century. Beginning with reformers like sexologist Havelock Ellis and anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons-who argued that spouses should be class equals joined by private affection, not public sanction - Eby guides us through the stories of three literary couples - Upton and Meta Fuller Sinclair, Theodore and Sara White Dreiser, and Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood - who sought to reform marriage in their lives and in their writings, with mixed results. With this focus on the intimate side of married life, Eby gives readers a view into a historical moment that changed the nature of American marriage-and which continues to shape marital norms today.

The Dance Is One

The biblical injunction that man and woman are one flesh in marriage has had a powerful effect on the legal imagination. This image of oneness has sustained the common law’s account of marital unity and the civil law’s ideal of a “shared life” or vie commune in marriage, although the ordinary language of the law, even where it turns metaphoric, seems to leave some of the great mystery of the legal idea of marriage unspoken. This essay considers the account of marriage in the work of Canadian law professor and leading poet F.R. Scott and the image of unity in marriage in the art of his wife Marian Dale Scott, a leading figure in the Canadian art world of the igSos and igGos. While family law in common law and civil law in Canada law ultimately fails to speak to the obligations inherent in marriage with candour and intelligibility, the jurist-poet Frank Scott did better in his poem “Dancing,” and his artist spouse Marian Scott did better still in her pictorial account of the felt obligation to pursue a shared life.

The Liberal Case for Disestablishing Marriage

What role should the state have in recognizing and regulating marriage? Until recently, liberal political theorists paid little attention to this question. Yet the challenges that the public–private boundary-crossing institution of marriage poses to liberalism are substantial. Tensions in contemporary debates suggest that these challenges remain unaddressed and thus, invite attempts to formulate a coherent and compelling model of the relationship between marriage and the liberal state. This article responds to this invitation. Marriage has long been a concern of at least some liberal thinkers. Typically they focused on the dual (contract/status) character of marriage, or its role in (re)producing gender inequality. While these critical insights are essential to any adequate account of marriage and the state, they are only part of the picture. To grasp the sources of confusion and silences in contemporary debates, and formulate a robust liberal model of marriage and the state, we must examine the functions — intended and effective — of public recognition of marriage. This examination highlights the relevance to the marriage-state relationship of familiar liberal approaches to negotiating the religion-state relationship. Drawing on these approaches and liberal feminist thought, I sketch a model of marriage and the state that aims to expand the area of protected freedom without sacrificing equality, fairness or marriage. Under the model I propose, marriage would be disestablished. The state would neither confer marital status, nor use ‘marriage’ as a category for dispersing benefits. Legitimate public welfare goals currently treated through marriage would be addressed through an intimate caregiving union status.

Family and Personal Income Tax in Europe: How the Fiscal Framework Takes Account of Marriage and Children

This paper compares the treatment of families in thirteen European income tax systems: twelve countries from the European Union and Poland. For the sake of simplicity families with only one wage earner are considered. In the first section, we survey the main features of twelve European tax systems to take account of dependent spouse and children. In the second section, we compare the tax-exempt income brackets for each country. In the third section, we calculate the costs that each tax system associates with the presence of dependent spouse and children in the taxpayer's family. These costs may be explicitly stated as fiscal arrangements and child benefits or implicitly derived as a function of tax credits, family quotients and tax schedules. In the fourth section, the tax systems of Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, France, Portugal and Poland are simulated on a representative population derived from the total number of employees in Italy. The simulation allows to evaluate the total tax yield and the impact of the different fiscal frameworks on three family types: single households, married couples with dependent children, singles with dependent children.

Justice and Virtue in Kant's Account of Marriage

All duties are either duties of right (officia iuris), that is, duties for which external lawgiving is possible, or duties of virtue (officia virtutis s. ethica), for which external lawgiving is not possible. - Duties of virtue cannot be subject to external lawgiving simply because they have to do with an end which (or the having of which) is also a duty. No external lawgiving can bring about someone's setting an end for himself (because this is an internal act of the mind), although it may prescribe external actions that lead to an end without the subject making it his end. (Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals)

Family Charges and the Personal Income Tax in Italy and Europe: Some Proposals for Italy

This paper compares the treatment of the family in the eleven Euro Countries and U.K. tax systems. For the sake of simplicity families with only one earner are considered. In the first section we survey the main features of the current systems in the twelve Countries to take account of marriage and the presence of children. In the second section we compare income thresholds below which no tax is due for each Country. In the third section we calculate the costs that each tax system recognizes for the spouse and dependent children. These costs may be explicitly stated as family allowances and child benefits or implicitly derived as a function of tax credits or family quotients and tax schedules. In the fourth sections the tax systems of Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, France and Portugal are simulated on a representative population obtained through a manipulation of the universe of the whole employees in Italy: the simulation allows to evaluate the total tax amount and the impact of the various approaches on three family types: singles, married couples with dependent children, singles with dependent children. In the fifth section, using the same representative population, we present the effects of the adoption of two system based, respectively, on one and two rates: the rates are chosen in order to preserve the same total amount of the current personal income tax in Italy.. A reduced version of this paper was published on ECONOMIA PUBBLICA, Vol. 31, No.5, pp. 5-54, 2001. The published version keeps into account minor changes introduced into the Italian personal incom tax in autumn 2000.

The Sisyphean Torture of Housework: Simone de Beauvoir and Inequitable Divisions of Domestic Work in Marriage

This paper examines Simone de Beauvoir's account of marriage in The Second Sex and argues that Beauvoir's dichotomy between transcendence and immanence can provide an illuminating critique of continuing gender inequities in marriage and divisions of domestic work. Beauvoir's existentialist ethics not only establishes a moral wrong in marriages in which wives perform the second shift of household labor but also supports the need to transform existing normative expectations surrounding wives and domestic work.

The Sisyphean Torture of Housework: Simone de Beauvoir and Inequitable Divisions of Domestic Work in Marriage

This paper examines Simone de Beauvoir's account of marriage in The Second Sex and argues that Beauvoir's dichotomy between transcendence and immanence can provide an illuminating critique of continuing gender inequities in marriage and divisions of domestic work. Beauvoir's existentialist ethics not only establishes a moral wrong in marriages in which wives perform the second shift of household labor but also supports the need to transform existing normative expectations surrounding wives and domestic work.

The Sisyphean Torture of Housework: Simone de Beauvoir and Inequitable Divisions of Domestic Work in Marriage

This paper examines Simone de Beauvoir's account of marriage in The Second Sex and argues that Beauvoir's dichotomy between transcendence and immanence can provide an illuminating critique of continuing gender inequities in marriage and divisions of domestic work. Beauvoir's existentialist ethics not only establishes a moral wrong in marriages in which wives perform the second shift of household labor but also supports the need to transform existing normative expectations surrounding wives and domestic work.

Hegel and Homosexuality

In the Odes of Sappho the language of love is indeed heightened to lyrical enthusiasm, yet it is the insidious and devouring flame of the blood which is expressed rather than the deep feeling of the subjective heart and mind. -Lectures on Aesthetics1 Hegel seems to have had next to nothing to say on the subject of homosexuality. He would not, of course, have used this term to refer to same-sex sexual behaviors or dispositions, much less to mark a sexual identity, because the term had not yet been coined (nor had the notion of "sexual identity" yet been invented). But Hegel could not have been simply at a loss for words, because other of his contemporaries and predecessors, Kant, for example, address the topic of "unnatural" sex. In his early notebooks Hegel remarks that "the Greek love of boys is still little understood," though he adds that its basis is "a noble disdain for women."2 And in The Philosophy of History he makes mention of the "amatory bonds" between soldiers of the Theban Sacred Legion.3 So he is not ignorant of same-sex desire, yet his system does not address it. Hegel does, however, consider an array of topics that, taken together, can help us to see how he would likely have construed homosexuality, had he made a place for it in his thought. Specific elements of his philosophical system point toward a position on the topic, and the aim of this essay is to reconstruct that position, not in order to pretend to capture what Hegel did think, but in order to capture what it seems likely he would have thought had he thought and written it. I will begin with a brief overview of Kant's views, and then consider three deeply related aspects of Hegel's thought: (1) his moralistic condemnation of Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde, placed in the context of Hegel's own views on love and friendship; (2) his account of marriage in the Philosophy of Right; and (3) his theory of sex differentiation in the Encyclopedia Philosophy of Nature. Having proposed an Hegelian position on homosexual desire, I will conclude by addressing the question: does it matter that Hegel had nothing to say about homosexuality? Kantian Precedent First I provide a schematic picture of Kant's views on "unnatural" sex, marriage, and male friendship, because despite notable disagreements between the two figures (especially regarding Kant's contractual conception of marriage), Kant's perspective will help frame the relevant issues when we approach Hegel. Kant makes no mistake that a variety of sexual desires and behaviors are contrary to the purposes of nature. The unnatural use of the sex organs "takes place either with a person of the same sex or with an animal of a nonhuman species;" through such misuses of his sex, including masturbation, as well, "man surrenders his personality . . . since he uses himself merely as a means to satisfy an animal impulse."4 Just as love of life is destined by nature to preserve the person, so sexual love is destined by it to preserve the species; in other words, each of these is a natural end, by which is understood that connection of a cause with an effect in which, although no understanding is ascribed to the cause, it is still thought by analogy with an intelligent cause, and so as if it produced human beings on purpose.5 Even though the Critique of Judgment casts "natural purposes" as reflective heuristic devices that we should not mistake as determinate configurations of nature, that text also argues for seeing the supreme moral purpose of nature as providing the locale for our pursuit of our moral perfectibility. To the extent that that goal requires the perpetuation of the species, Kant helps himself to the notion that sexual reproduction is naturally purposive because morally purposive. Of course, even if one were to imagine that sex has reproduction as its natural end, even such a problematically ideological view could not on its own justify the view that sex has but one purpose, nor could it prevent us from ascribing to sexual activity other, highly valued functions, whether construed as natural purposes or as cultural achievements. …

Accounting for the family in European income tax systems

Tax systems are expected to achieve many things at once and this paper discusses the trade-offs involved in attempting to reconcile conflicting aims. It surveys the various instruments that are used to take account of marriage and the presence of children and describes the current systems in the 15 European Union countries. The impact of alternative tax treatments of the family 'borrowed' from other countries is examined for the UK, using the tax-benefit microsimulation model, POLIMOD. The paper explores the implications of the alternatives for the tax paid by families of different types and for the work incentives of individuals in different family situations. Copyright 1999 by Oxford University Press.