Sublime

Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, all human beings are endowed with three “intrinsic dignities”: infinite worth, equality, and uniqueness.10

“It is natural” has never been an adequate defense for immoral behavior in the Jewish legal system.

we need to be impartial in our commitment to partiality: If it is okay for me to feed my child before I feed yours, it is equally okay for you to feed yours before mine. If I am entitled to my partial loves and commitments, then so too are you.

Somehow, Hildegard managed to balance equal dignity with meaningful difference, in a way I’d not yet encountered. I wish I’d followed that thread; perhaps it would have pulled me into the Christian cosmos earlier. Instead, I let it go and lost myself in the labyrinth of postmodern feminism for the next ten years.

People are not monads. A real, live human self is always already partial to certain, select others. Morality needs to take this essential fact about human selfhood into account rather than pretend to override it.

In all roles theologians are committed to that form of existence arising from Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. They know that

human warmth is fundamental to what it means to take human dignity seriously, and it is elemental to what it means to be a religious person.

parental constancy is, in a sense, the paradigmatic instance of human faithfulness and commitment. In all genuine relationships meant to endure over time, faithfulness constitutes the essential baseline.