bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Gluttony doesn’t (typically) cause obesity.

    A couple of days ago, I wrote that the existing competing narratives of obesity don’t really “get” the role of gluttony* right, because they lack philosophical grounding in the nature of gluttony.  

    The calorie-is-a-calorie crowd say that gluttony — eating too much — is the whole problem, with some contribution from sloth, and if people would just eat less they’d get thin.  They’ve got the biochemistry wrong, and have unfairly accused fat people of causing their own disease by being gluttons.  

    The insulin-resistance people (think Gary Taubes) have the chemistry right, in my opinion, but they reject the idea of gluttony playing a part at all.  I think that’s wrong too.  Even though I’m convinced that metabolic syndrome exists and is caused by a diet high in refined carbohydrates and sugar and that it perpetuates a vicious cycle of eating and craving, I think gluttony is involved, and beating gluttony is part of the cure.

    In this post (and a couple more) I want to explore the role of gluttony in obesity.  Starting with the question:  Does gluttony — technically defined gluttony — cause obesity?

    + + +

    The insulin-resistance crowd, whom I think is correct as regards the biochemistry, says No:  Gluttony, or “eating too much,” does not cause obesity; obesity is caused by eating the wrong things, not too much of everything.  Eating more than you burn doesn’t cause weight gain; weight gain causes eating more than you burn.

    But we aren’t actually interested in that answer, because it’s the answer to the wrong question.  The common, ordinary meaning of “glutton” is just “someone who eats too much.”  That’s the definition they are using.  But moral philosophers have defined “gluttony” more broadly than that for hundreds of years.  Recall that Aquinas subdivided gluttony into five categories:  eating too expensively, too daintily, too much, too soon, or too eagerly. Aquinas was also perfectly aware that it didn’t count as a sin if you didn’t realize you were eating out of order, or if you had doctor’s orders, or something like that.  

    More recently, I proposed an alternate definition of gluttony that drew brighter lines:   Gluttony, I wrote, is eating behavior that flouts the restraints of charity, obedience, resources, health, duty, or manners.  These sound more promising ways to pin the blame on gluttony, especially when it comes to the “health” bit.  But I agree with Aquinas that it can’t count as a sin if you don’t know your eating is wrong — if you think you need the food. 

    If we use Aquinas’s definitions, the following are obvious:

    1. Gluttony could  be a cause of obesity, if eating too much causes obesity.  
    2. But even if eating too much did cause obesity,  gluttony wouldn’t necessarily be the problem because eating too much doesn’t qualify as gluttony if the eater has good reason to believe it wasn’t too much.  For example, if he was truly experiencing feelings of hunger.

    Seeking out food when you’re hungry is not gluttonous behavior; it’s normal behavior.

    And guess what?  One of the things that metabolic syndrome causes is hunger and carbohydrate cravings.  This is from Why We Get Fat:

    Even before we begin eating, insulin works to increase our feeling of hunger…. we begin secreting insulin just by thinking about eating… and this insulin secretion then increases within seconds of taking our first bite.  It happens even before we begin to digest the meal, and before any glucose appears in the bloodstream.  This insulin serves to prepare our bodies for the upcoming flood of glucose by storing away other nutrients in the circulation — particularly fatty acids. …

    …The insulin makes us hungry by temporarily diverting nutrients out of the circulation and into storage… The greater the blood sugar and insulin response to a particular food, the more we like it — the better we think it tastes….

    [T]he fatter [predisposed people] get, the more they’ll crave carbohydrate-rich foods, because their insulin will be more effective at stashing fat and protein in their muscle and fat tissue, where they can’t be used for fuel.

    Once we get resistant to insulin… we’ll … have longer periods during every twenty-four hours when the only fuel we can burn is the glucose from carbohydrates.  The insulin, remember, is working to keep protein and fat and even glycogen… safely stashed away for later.  It’s telling our cellls that there is blood sugar in excess to be burned, but there’s not.  So it’s glucose we crave.

    Grossly oversimplified, elevated insulin is supposed to make you hungry, makes you want to eat carbs in particular, and makes you store fat at the same time.  So even though from the outside, a heavy person may appear to be eating too much, from the inside the person may be experiencing unbearable hunger.  And hunger is the normal drive to eat.  

    I live with one of those weird, always-lean people:

    41401_1464151935_7033_n

    Mostly he eats pretty moderately:  oatmeal for breakfast, soup and salad at lunch, maybe a couple helpings at dinner, a little ice cream at bedtime.  On occasion, however, I have seen him put away what looks to me like an enormous amount of food.  The equivalent of two or three cheeseburgers or something like that in the space of a few minutes.  Is he a closet, occasional glutton?  Perhaps suffering from binge disorder?

    No.  The “binges” happen after a day of skiing, or hiking at altitude, or heavy yard work, or maybe rock climbing.  When he exerts himself, he needs to eat more.

    As astonishing as it is to people like me who have had to think about food their whole lives, I hear that this is what actually happens in metabolically healthy people.  They don’t need to think “Does that workout mean I get to eat more?” because their body tells them to eat more.  So they do.  And we never accuse those people of gluttony — because they don’t look fat.

    Anyway, there is no moral difference between a fat person who gets extra-hungry and therefore eats extra food, and a thin person who gets extra-hungry and therefore eats extra food.  Even if the reason for the hunger is different — in one person, excess insulin, and in the other person, excess physical activity — the subjective experience of the need for food may be the same.

     Look, Aquinas knows this:

     …[T]he sin of gluttony is rather extenuated than aggravated…in consideration of the necessity of taking food, as also on account of the difficulty of discerning and regulating what is suitable on such occasions.

    Gluttony is mitigated insofar as it is difficult to “discern” and “regulate” what is suitable.  Metabolic syndrome creates a feeling of hunger, and that is exactly what makes it difficult to discern and regulate what is suitable to eat.

    + + +

    So, if it’s true that eating the wrong things (too much sugar and white flour and potatoes, for instance) creates metabolic syndrome, can that count as gluttony?  Maybe under the “too expensively” or “too daintily” categories?  

    It might, if a person (before they developed the syndrome) knew that they were eating too much of the wrong things and obstinately persisted.  

    Culpability is hard to establish, though, because in many cases it isn’t an entirely free choice to do so:

    •  many people begin to develop metabolic syndrome while they are still children, being fed by parents and institutions; 
    • government policy has been giving us counterproductive advice for more than a generation;
    • the low-fat doctrine is still pushed heavily by schools and physicians; 
    • we seemingly reasonably assume that if we’re not visibly obese yet, we must be doing okay;
    •  the food that promotes metabolic syndrome is ubiquitous, widely advertised, and cheap.

    It isn’t impossible for gluttony to cause obesity.  But for that to happen you’d have to posit an apparently healthy individual who, as an adult, and knowing that it was bad for him, made a free choice to begin consuming large portions of sugar and white flour until he wrecked his metabolism.

     I think this might happen sometimes.  It’s the sort of thing that people say will happen to kids who are raised in homes barren of soda pop and sugary cereal:  As soon as they’re out on their own, they’ll go crazy, subsisting on fast food, Cheez Whiz, and Captain Crunch.  (One of my friends in grad school claimed to have known a guy in her college dorm who actually got scurvy his freshman year.)

    Most of the time, though, I think we just sort of slide into metabolic syndrome, not by eating a diet that is obviously unhealthy, but by eating… the normal American diet.  Normal Americans drink soda, eat white bread and white rice, and consume a lot of sugar in the course of an ordinary day.  Some are more susceptible than others, and those people develop metabolic syndrome, gain weight, and get hungrier — so they begin to eat regularly in a way that looks like gluttony, from the outside.  But because of the subjective experience of hunger, we can’t automatically call it that.

    + + +

    The next question I want to consider is whether metabolic syndrome causes gluttony, of any of the types that Aquinas identified or that I reclassified.  I’ve already written that eating in response to real hunger isn’t, I think, gluttonous.  But is that the only kind of behavior change created by metabolic syndrome?  

    I’m going to cover that in another post.

    *[Editing note.  Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.  

    I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.  I  touch on what I’m talking about a little more clearly partway through this post.

    I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them.  Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]

    —

    |

    No comments on Gluttony doesn’t (typically) cause obesity.

  • Where to start with gluttony: some links back to my archives.

    Christine, in the comments to the last posts, asked “Where to start with gluttony?”

    + + +

    I reviewed Gary Taubes’s book some time ago in three parts, and I think these are some of my best gluttony posts, especially the second and third one.

     

    + + +

     

    Here is the part where I cheekily suggest a definition of gluttony, complete with new categories, that I prefer to Thomas Aquinas’s.  (Yes, I really am claiming to have improved on the Summa Theologica.) Here’s my new post-Summa definition of gluttony:

    The sin of gluttony is the refusal to eat within the restraints imposed on us by charity, obedience, resources, health, religious/ethical duties, and manners.   

    (The weakness of gluttony is the inability to eat within those restraints.)

     

    Aquinas’s definition of gluttony seems to have one glaring problem:  it lacks a bright-line rule.  “Gluttony means inordinate appetite in eating,” he tells us, and we rightly ask:  What do you mean, “inordinate?”  Out of accord with the natural order of things, one supposes….

    We’ve been over this before:   we can be a glutton by eating too expensively, too daintily (“pickily”), too much, too soon, or too eagerly.  

    This is a nice categorization because it expands the usual definition of gluttony, but it still leaves us asking:  But Thomas, what do you mean by “too” anything?  If one can eat “too” expensively, then surely one can eat “just expensively enough,” and so forth.  Where is the line?  How do we know when we’ve crossed over from eating promptly, to eating “too soon?”  Eating with relish, and eating “too eagerly?”   Selecting good food and being a glutton of pickiness?

    I think the answer is that gluttony, like most concupiscence, abhors restraint; what makes gluttony different from other vices, such as sloth or lust, is that the restraints it abhors all have to do with food.  

    Different people live under different sets of restraints, some more stringent than others; and different times call for different restraints; so the boundaries of gluttony cannot be defined clearly as a set of rules that are appropriate for everyone.   And so eating quite a lot of food, or eating expensive food, or eating at odd times, isn’t inherently gluttonous; what makes it gluttonous is if the eater is supposed to be exercising restraint, but isn’t.

    If I may say so myself, I think it’s worth reading the whole thing.  Rather than Aquinas’s categories of gluttony as eating “too expensively, too pickily, too much, too soon, or too eagerly” my categories — stripped of the vague modifier “too” — could be phrased as 

    • eating inconsiderately
    • eating disobediently
    • eating wastefully
    • eating unhealthfully
    • eating irreligiously (or, if you are not religious, substitute “unethically”)
    • eating rudely.

    + + +

    Oh, and for the people who would like to eat low-carb but feel bad about the environmental impact of consuming so many more animal products:   here are some things to keep in mind for improving the sustainability of lower-carb eating.  I am rather fond of this article.  The short of it is:

    1. Eating enough fats and oils, and not too much protein, will alleviate the famous unpleasant side effects of low-carb diets. 
    2. Don’t overestimate your daily protein requirements.  Three grams for each ten pounds you weigh is a good rule of thumb for the minimum.  You could eat more, of course, but you don’t necessarily need more.
    3. Eat your veggies, and eat them with plenty of tasty, tasty fats and oils — enough to give you all the energy you require over and above your calories from protein.
    4. Don’t waste so damn much food, especially protein.  Avoidable food waste is the most shameful portion of our environmental impact.  
    5. Choose animal products that make efficient use of agricultural protein.  In order, the most efficient “ordinary” sources from the grocery store are dairy; eggs, tied with aquacultured fish; chickens; pork; beef.  (Wholly grass-fed beef, or beef fed on non-human-edible agricultural residue, is great if you can get it, but not everyone can get it).

    —

    |

    4 comments on Where to start with gluttony: some links back to my archives.

  • Untangling the narrative threads.

    As I have been struggling with weight maintenance more than usual this month, I have found myself contemplating the two dominant narratives about weight loss and weight gain, and why neither of them ultimately satisfies.

    Here they are, in brief:

    “A calorie is a calorie.” Weight gain is caused by eating more calories than you burn, and storing the extra as fat; to lose weight, burn all the calories that you eat, plus extra that come out of your fat stores. In this narrative, the amount of calories is far more important than the type of food the calories come from. People who cannot lose weight are people who have a gluttony problem.

    “Insulin resistance and glycemic load.” Gluttony does not cause people to gain weight. Excess adiposity — fatness — is a symptom of metabolic syndrome, an endocrine disease. The disease comes from a diet that has more sugar and refined carbohydrate than the body can handle, because of an environment that constantly pushes such foods. The only cure for the endocrine system is to cut back on carbohydrate load, and some people have to cut back drastically for a long time to see results. People who cannot lose weight are people who have not tried the right cure, who have not tried a drastic enough cure, or who have not yet given it enough time to work.

    I think the insulin-resistance theory has the chemistry right, but it gets gluttony wrong.

    [Editing note.  Years after writing this, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.  

    I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.  I  touch on what I’m talking about a little more clearly partway through this post.

    I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them.  Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.

    I’ll leave the rest of this post up for posterity, but I want readers to understand that this older post is me trying to figure things out, not me who has already figured it out.  And a lot of it is really just about me and what happened in my head.]

    It is enormously comforting for a heavy person to hear that gluttony is not the cause of his fatness, and it is even more comforting to hear that it is unnecessary to beat gluttony in order to get better. The message from the insulin-resistance crowd is “You are not bad or weak; you are just sick. Take the cure and you will get better.”

    The calorie-is-a-calorie theory has the chemistry wrong, but it doesn’t have the gluttony part entirely right either. It persists, by the way, because it is so comforting to the not-fat people. The people who can control their weight get to go on, like Job’s friends, believing in the essential justice of the universe: that person can’t get thinner because she is weak-willed and lazy. The laws of thermodynamics make it so. Perversely, there is some comfort for heavy people: I am this way because I deserve it and because the universe is just; but there is hope for me, because if only I can become a better person, I will surely lose the weight and become beautiful and accepted. Someday I will.

    Americans don’t grok gluttony because they don’t grok sin and human failings in general. We believe in an essential dichotomy: Either a man’s failing is his own damn fault, so we stigmatize and punish it, and maybe (if we are religious) call it “sin;” or it is someone else’s fault, so we try to pass laws and social programs, and de-stigmatize it and raise awareness. The only difference as you move from Left to Right is which failings are your own damn fault and which failings are someone else’s.

    But the reality is that we each participate, with varying degrees of freedom, in the flaws and failings that nature and society have thrust upon us. Sin and failings beget sin and failings — sometimes in other people — so they spread like a disease. And so it can simultaneously be true that a fat person is sick through no fault of her own, and that she struggles with the sin of gluttony.

    Here is what I think is the right way to look at it:

    • Gluttony does not cause excess adiposity, nor metabolic syndrome. 
    • Too many refined carbs for the particular body to handle causes metabolic syndrome. Of that, excess adiposity — fatness — is a symptom.
    • Metabolic syndrome contributes to the development of certain types of gluttony. You could say that gluttony is another symptom, along with fatness.
    • A person who has metabolic syndrome must fight and beat gluttony in order to apply the prescribed cure.

    So the insulin-resistance crowd is correct that gluttony did not make the fat person fat. But the calorie-is-a-calorie crowd is correct that the fat person must overcome gluttony to become thin.

    (You have to overcome gluttony, but you have to do it the right way.)

    Did I really just say that gluttony, technically a sin for many people and at minimum a human failing of will, is a symptom of a disease? Doesn’t the disease mean they aren’t guilty of the sin?

     Guilt is mitigated where will is limited, sure, but the mitigation of guilt doesn’t destroy the effects of the fault. We all know this, and so does our legal system. Abusers are likely to have been abused themselves, but we don’t give them a free pass; if we are merciful we try to help them change, but we do insist that they stop abusing others. So — gluttons are likely to be sick, and mercy should move us to compassion rather than sneering, but it doesn’t change the fact that they will not get better without doing the hard work to overcome gluttony.

    It is a sort of hysteresis of disease. We amble accidentally along an easy path from health to sickness. The path from sickness to health is not just the return trip. It is a different, and more arduous one, and it requires from us strengths that we may not find entirely within ourselves.

     

    More on this later.

    —

    |

    3 comments on Untangling the narrative threads.

  • Bipartisanship.

    This blog post at the NYT has some fun graphs up showing how various cable networks, alcoholic beverages, cars, and fast food chains skew Republican or Democrat.  

    It turns out that our family drives on the center-left side of the road, as we own a VW and a Toyota, both favored by Dems.  (I suspect the Toyota numbers vary a lot by model, and that the eight-seater Sienna we drive probably shows up to the right of, say, the Prius.)

    I don't watch enough TV or eat enough fast food to register very well on those measures, and I don't have enough brand loyalty to Big Beer to register much on the alcohol spectrum as well.  

    Being rather interested in bipartisanship, I was wondering what cultural forces can bring people together.  It turns out that we can all get along by watching HGTV, A&E, and Spike; driving Chevrolets; dining at Wendy's; looking up movie listings on the Internet; and, in the one behavior I think I can endorse with reasonable enthusiasm, drinking Guinness.  Now at least you know what to serve at those uncomfortable family get-togethers.

    h/t Darwin Catholic, who drinks center-right

    —

    |

    No comments on Bipartisanship.

  • Reader question.

    A few days ago I posted about NFP:

    Any readers who have decided to go the no-charts route, did you find that there was a development over the years of your gut-level understanding or acceptance of Church teaching on human sexuality and procreation, or do you think you already "got it" before you set off on that route?

    Reader Erin in KY comments:

    I am so glad you posted this question…

    My husband and I have been practicing NFP for only the last 5 years of our 11 year marriage. The first 6 were contraceptive. We feel so strongly about this now that we give a talk at the Pre cana session for engaged couples. Since we give the talks about 2-3 times a year we have to sit down and discuss our talk. We have had many discussions on this very topic.

    We don't have the experience of putting it all in God's hands and not charting, but we have definitely known the sacrifice of using NFP and have aligned ourselves with Christ in that sacrifice. Like you said it is something that has taken years to fully appreciate. Along those years we have also learned to more fully put our fertility in God's hands and we are hoping to conceive our fourth child soon!

    Since this is something that takes time and experience to appreciate, if anyone has input that might make this message more clear for engaged couples please let me know.

    I am also collaborating with the author of the training manual for marriage sponsor couple training in our diocese. Just to let you know the audience, this is a couple who most likely doesn't practice NFP having to teach an engaged couple what the church teaches. They will likely have to admit that they don't practice it. As it stands the current training manual just has a Catholic Update in the back on NFP…

    I told them these couples are coming to the church for marriage, they should get the truth from the experience. Also, the sponsor couples cannot be forced to practice NFP, but if they are in the ministry of sponsoring couples in the church, I don't think it is unreasonable that they be forced to learn what the church teaches on marriage.

    Any help would be greatly appreciated!

    Personally, I think it's a warning sign when a diocese selects sponsor couples for marriage preparation who are in a state of active dissent on the Church's teaching of marital sexuality — let alone couples who don't even know what the Church teaches.  I applaud you for your efforts to improve the catechesis situation in your diocese.

    Any suggestions, readers?

    —

    |

    3 comments on Reader question.

  • Pants. Pantyhose. Duck and cover.

    Remember Simcha Fisher and the Great Pants Debate?

    I was reminded of this the other day, because I think I have stumbled upon the Working Woman's Version of the Great Pants Debate.

    It is this 2010 question about pantyhose at the popular business/HR blog Ask A Manager.

    A reader writes:

    "Perhaps my question is a bit trite, but do I have to wear pantyhose to an interview? I hate pantyhose. So much so that I haven’t owned or worn any in at least 10 years. I usually just wear slacks to an interview, but I bought this killer new suit, and it has a skirt, so the issue has come up again in my life."

    Ask A Manager's blogger, human resources professional Alison Green, replied:

    In general, no. But there are some industries — fewer and fewer of them — where women are still expected to wear pantyhose.  Are you interviewing in a particularly conservative industry? If not, bare legs are fine these days. Go with a closed shoe though.

    If you’re not sure if the office is particularly conservative or not, you could play it safe and err on the side of pantyhose. (Or you could decide that if they have a problem with you not being squeezed into waist-to-toe nylon, it’s not the culture for you anyway.)

    So far, so good, right?

    Wrong.  Green had to close comments, and the controversy was forever after referred to as the "Great Pantyhose Debate of 2010.

    Notable from the comments was Mike:

    Well no one expects me or the other guys to be wearing the stuff so why should the rest of the office have to?

    Are there still places that balk at the thought of women choosing to wearing pants as well?

    Ah, Mike.  So refreshing, the naivete.

     

     

    —

    |

    2 comments on Pants. Pantyhose. Duck and cover.

  • Engineering ethics, from both directions.

    I recently discovered a blog that's new to me but has been around since 2006:  Engineering Ethics Blog, written by "Kaydee," whose profile states that he teaches engineering courses at Texas State and that he has worked in industry and as a consulting engineer.  

    Engineering ethics is a great interest of mine, coming at it from two directions — the conventional one, and a different one as well.    

    The first and common understanding of "engineering ethics" would be the professional ethical standards of practicing and teaching engineers.  Engineering organizations have their own published codes of ethics (for example, here is the code of ethics of AIChE, in which I briefly held membership before switching my job description to "never worked a day in her life"*).   Engineering colleges routinely offer courses in engineering ethics to their students, although the courses are not always required.  Here is an online, uncredited course in engineering ethics offered through MIT OpenCourseWare.  (I have not reviewed this course and this link is not a recommendation.)

    In that sense, "engineering ethics" encompasses questions of serving public safety, of truth-telling in public statements, of refusing to take part in bribery or corruption, of accurate self-representation, and of working within one's own sphere of competence.  

    There is another sense in which I, personally, like to think of "engineering ethics."  That is the special perspective and specialized knowledge that engineering training brings to the consideration of ethical questions in general.

    Such questions confront all human beings above the age of reason.  They include questions that societies face in balancing diverse interests through public policy; questions of evaluating costs and benefits, risks and rewards in the workplace and in our personal lives; and how specific ethical questions ("case studies," if you will) refine and sharpen the broad principles of moral philosophy.

    What do I mean by the "special perspective and specialized knowledge" of engineers?  Emphatically not that the engineer, or any other kind of scientist, has a specially privileged moral sense.  Scientists and engineers are no more likely to make good interior ethical judgments than anyone else.  We are just as likely to be selfish, corruptible, or arrogant.  If all our policymakers were scientists and engineers, we might have more technically informed policy, but we would not necessarily have policy that better served the public good.  There is precious little about "what one ought to do" in an engineering education — and what there is, appears in the engineering ethics courses.

    Part of what I mean by the relevant perspective and specialized knowledge is our expertise in technical matters that may inform ethical decisions.  

    • We may not be specially able to tell the public whether we ought to mandate such-and-such an adaptive technology to better accommodate the disabled in public buildings.  But we can tell the public how much the machines will cost, how soon they could be installed, which places they would be more difficult to implement, and how frequently they would require maintenance.  
    • We may not be specially able to tell the public whether we ought to ban a particular type of gadget that has fallen out of favor because of some impact its production or disposal has on the environment.  But we can provide a list of feasible substitute gadgets, count up how much the substitutes would cost, estimate how soon new technologies might come to market, consider whether there are alternative means of dealing with the old gadget's problems, and try to predict whether the substitute gadgets will bring worse costs and risks than the old ones.   

    My husband, the other engineer on this blog, says about his responsibilities giving technical advice at work:  "I never tell them that such-and-such an idea is impossible, or that it is a bad idea.  That is not my job.  I always tell them how much their idea would cost, and let them make the conclusions."

    But another aspect that the engineer brings to ethical problems is our trained approach to problems in general.  It's sometimes maddening for the people who have to work with us and live with us, but we can be accused of treating every problem, from public policy to household budgetary dilemmas to difficult childrearing decisions to friends' marital woes as an engineering problem.  

    What are the constraints?  Make a list.  What are the available resources?  Tally them up.  Which pieces of information do we lack?  Take a measurement, go get advice, or make an appropriate assumption along with the necessary caveats.  What are the conceivable courses of action?  Plot them out.  Where are the critical decision points?  Identify them and identify the possible decisions.  

    How much could each path cost?  What are the possible benefits?  Who benefits at each stage?  What are the risks — and what is the probability of each projected undesirable outcome?  Can we live with those possibilities?

    It's not that we don't take into consideration people's feelings about their problems.  It's just that the potential effect of feelings  have to be factored into the cost-and-benefit structure.  If you're going to have an irrational reaction to one potential outcome of this decision, then I have to factor your irrationality into the potential negative costs.

    We tend to drive nontechnical types a little crazy when we import our approach into nontechnical problems.  But I think it's a good way to approach problems of all kinds, and is one reason why I'm grateful for my engineering education, which has shaped the way I look at all kinds of things, even though (as noted) I haven't worked a day in my life.  At least not recently.

    Anyway, here is a sample of posts from Engineering Ethics Blog.

    On the unintended consequences of the ethanol-in-gasoline mandate ERISA:

    At the time, ERISA was passed, ethanol was the only biofuel that had any reasonable chance of making it into the nation’s gas tanks in a reasonable time frame….

    The not-so-advertised reasons for the law have to do with the strength of the agricultural lobby.  The E10 mandate was a tremendous windfall for everybody who grows corn.  While some ethanol from corn was being used voluntarily as a fuel additive before 2007, the mandate caused this use to skyrocket.  By 2011, according to the Mosbacher Institute report by economist James Griffin, 37% of the entire U. S. corn crop went toward ethanol production.  And corn prices soared from $2.50 per bushel up to as high as $7.50.

    If the only people hurt were U. S. food consumers (not everybody drives a car, but everybody eats), it would be bad enough.  But the U. S. grows and sells more corn than any other nation, and much of it is exported to poorer countries, where it is a staple in many diets.  While the rise in corn prices was not solely responsible for the worldwide inflation in food costs that led to food riots in many nations in recent years, the timing is suspicious, and there is no question that the ERISA law led to hardships for many poor people around the world who were now even less able to afford to eat….

    Unintended consequences show up all the time in considering engineering ethics, and the ERISA mandate has plenty.  The parties who appear to have benefited are:  growers of corn and producers of corn-based ethanol (a lot), the U. S. driving public (a little), and the U. S. overall, from the viewpoint of slightly improved energy security.  The losers include refiners (who have had to fool with the mandate and change their processes), anybody who buys corn (U. S. food consumers, U. S. livestock growers, and millions of foreign food consumers, many of whom are poor), and the U. S. public in the sense that they have had to pay the 45-cent-a-gallon subsidy through the U. S. treasury.  Quite a mixed bag, to say the least.

    On the Air France 447 crash of June 1, 2009:

    While we will never know why co-pilot Bonin (the one with least experience) did what he did, the fact remains that at 2:10, he pulled the stick back and basically kept it there until it was too late to correct his mistake….

    In older aircraft, the two pilot sticks are mechanically coupled together, so only one message goes from the cockpit to the ailerons. If two pilots disagree on what to do with such a stick, they find themselves literally fighting a tug-of-war in the cockpit, and most reasonable people would react by at least talking about what to do next. 

    But even in the autopilot-off mode, the Airbus sticks could be moved independently, and the plane responds to the average of the two sticks’ motion. To my ears, this sounds like a software engineer’s solution to a human-factors problem. In the event, even though the senior pilot eventually did the right thing with his stick, the computer averaged it with Bonin’s all-way-back stick, and the stall continued. 

    … I hope the software and hardware engineers working on the next Airbus rethink their strategy of independent sticks and averaging. While human-machine communication is important, this accident emphasizes the fact that interpersonal communication in a crisis is vital. That single additional channel of communication through a mechanical link between sticks might have been enough to avoid this accident. 

     

    On the show Mythbusters:

    Hyneman and Savage are really doing what used to be called “natural philosophy,” back when philosophy really meant the love of knowledge, and not some arcane specialty that you have to get a Ph. D. in to understand, which is mostly what it means today. Before about 1800, most science was done simply because people were curious and wanted to know whether a thing was true or not. There were no huge funding agencies, no boards of proposal review or journal referees—just a few curious guys (it was nearly all guys then) who got together in coffee shops and wrote each other letters about their experiments. And because there was almost no organized industry producing scientific instruments, they had to build almost all their equipment and experiments themselves.

    Hyneman ran a special-effects shop before getting involved with MythBusters, and so the very hands-on demands of that type of work (especially before digital technology took over movies to the degree it has) gave him a set of skills that fits very well into the kind of things required by the MythBusters shows. So his lack of formal scientific training isn’t really a disadvantage—instead, he goes about things the way the average guy with time on his hands might look into them. 

    Somewhat to my regret, I noted that the Wikipedia biographies of both stars list them as sympathetic with the skeptic or atheist turn of mind. While such a philosophy may be an advantage in their particular line of work, it is by no means a necessity….

    The MythBusters people deserve credit for popularizing both science and how to do dangerous things safely. Their latest mishap, although attention-getting, could have been a lot worse, and I’m sure they will be more careful in the future while investigating questions from the past, such as whether a cannonball could really breach a stone wall. And I’m glad they are continuing a long-established tradition of science for science’s sake—even if they are interrupted by messages from their sponsors.

     

    _______

    *This joke is the property of MrsDarwin.

    —

    |

    No comments on Engineering ethics, from both directions.

  • Our own, and not our own.

    Last week, the 13-year-old whom I co-teach two days a week, the daughter of my good friend M., did not come to my house with her younger sister to learn Latin and History with me, or English with my other friend H. She was off all day "shadowing" a ninth-grader at a high school near her home, a well-regarded "classical academy," because she and her family are trying to discern whether high school for her, instead of homeschool, is the best choice for their family next fall. So I gave a quiz in Latin (so she wouldn't miss anything), and her "classmates" (H.'s sixth-grade son and mine) worked on history by themselves — an ordinary sort of lesson, I saved the art project for the next time — and we thought about her all day while we were serving lunch and later making tea.

    Yesterday, we asked her how it went. "It was really fun," she told me. "The girl I was with was one of those really fun, bubbly types. She had a weird schedule. We sat with her friend at lunch, and the friend had been homeschooled. Pottery class was fun — I made an ear. I went to an astronomy class, and that was really interesting."

    M. told me: "She really liked it. It's only four miles away from the house, too — she could ride her bike to school."

    H. told me with no little pride: "They were studying the Iliad in English class, and she got to participate in the discussion." I found a brochure in their kitchen she had brought home: "Why Study Latin?" explaining all the benefits to logical thinking, future language study, and vocabulary building. I wondered how I — I mean she — would do when she took a placement test before beginning school.

    If she takes the placement test, I mean. "She isn't in yet. But she probably will, because they have a lot of attrition and turnover between eighth and ninth grade. And of course it isn't decided yet."

    There is so much to think about here.

    First, the inevitable: Can our kids really be this old? When I met this girl she was barely walking, toddling around with a piece of cake that fell off her plate and that she subsequently trod upon. I watched her learn to talk. She was the little girl whom I looked to to learn what I, the mother of a firstborn a bit younger than she, had in store for me in a year or so. It was bad enough when she turned thirteen last year, but can she really be getting ready for high school work? I guess I had better start getting our family ready too.

    Next: if she goes to school next year, I will miss her so much! You might think that it would be more work to teach three than to teach two, but it really is not so. She is so delightful and adds so much to the discussions we have. The kids do a lot of teaching each other, of course, and it warms my heart to see someone so serious about printing labels on her maps clearly and legibly, about making the sketches and diagrams so detailed and beautifully colored. She loves writing verse that doesn't just tell the story, but that sounds elegant to the ear and has accurate meter. She loves composing sentences. And I truly enjoy working with her — it is a real motivation to create a good lesson, for a young woman who will be eager to do the work and learn from it. I had been planning to teach the kids proof-based geometry when they had all finished enough algebra — I just know she would love it, all those constructions and careful logical steps, and I was more excited about teaching her and sharing that (admittedly really geeky) passion I have for the subject than I was about teaching anybody else.

    But: Whatever is best for her, well, I want that too. I will be so sad to see her leave our little school group. ("She'll come back around three in the afternoon," H. said to me hopefully this morning. "The boys won't be done with their work yet. Maybe she'll want us to tutor her.")

    Still, the school exists for the child, not the child for the school. We don't send our children into the schools of any kind to spend hours per day just so they can improve the general environment. We send them to school to learn and grow and to gather, not to spend themselves for someone else's benefit. I know this. Most homeschoolers do. We are familiar with the accusation leveled at us that we, the involved parents, are selfishly keeping our children to ourselves instead of sending then away to strengthen the peer group at the neighborhood public school, instead of sending them out to float a foundering diocesan school system, instead of employing them to prop up the fragile charter-school movement. And of course we hope that the public school system will be stronger, that the diocesan schools will thrive, that the charter-school movement will flourish, because everyone is better off when there are plenty of good choices.

    But every family's first responsibility is to its own health, safety, and growth. That is the whole purpose of being in families: to know and be known, to grow and to thrive, protected and cared for as someone's "own." Communities, extended families, even "chosen" extended families like our little tribe, all exist to support those little cores of "own-ness," not to supplant it.

    So I want what is best for this young lady who is not mine, even if I have to do some work, letting go and standing back, learning to watch. As with so many other things, she is still teaching me what I have to look forward to.

    —

    |

    5 comments on Our own, and not our own.

  • Gut-level development of doctrine.

    On the last post, Darwin makes a provocative comment:


    When I wrote about the NFP article over at TAC I found myself arguing with a couple of fairly young guys who were upset that the Church didn't provide Very Clear Guidance on when it was okay to use NFP and when it wasn't, for fear that people would use it as just another way to separate procreation and sexuality.

    Coming at the question from the vantage point of 11 years of marriage and NFP use, it seems to me that simply using NFP is in and of itself probably the best way to come to a real understanding of the intimate connection between procreation and sex. The fact that not getting pregnant means not having sex for a good portion of the time will do that to one.

    That is certainly the case for me — I intellectually understood the connection, of course, and was willing to follow the rules, but years of actually practicing NFP did give me that gut-level intuitive understanding.

    What about Catholic couples who decide they have a particular call to, as some folks put it, "put their fertility entirely in the hands of God?" I am not talking about quiverfull types who believe they should have as many children as possible, nor providentialists who think the rest of us sin when we use NFP to avoid pregnancy for less-than-deadly-serious reasons, but people who have believe they have discerned a particular call to let the babies come as they may.

    Do you suppose that this lifestyle, which does not call for periodic abstinence, also develops the gut-level understanding of the connection as well as the periodic abstinence does?

    Or perhaps that such couples usually already "get it" or they would not have made such a decision, heard such a call?

    Any readers who have decided to go the no-charts route, did you find that there was a development over the years of your gut-level understanding or acceptance of Church teaching on human sexuality and procreation, or do you think you already "got it" before you set off on that route?

    —

    |

    14 comments on Gut-level development of doctrine.

  • Talking past one another’s contexts.

    Simcha and Jen have posts up about the difficulty of communicating publicly about NFP given the different assumptions that people bring to the table, which arise out of different life experiences and varying levels of exposure to cultural norms.

    Jen:

     ….to some extent this kind of miscommunication is inevitable, because the way secular society understands human sexuality and the way the Catholic Church understands it are so vastly different.

    When I re-read the Post article  [in which she was quoted, but not the way she thought she would be] and some of the resulting commentary, I noticed undercurrents of the idea that NFP is the Catholic version of contraception. Most of the posts and comments I read took for granted the following ideas:

    • Babies are, by default, burdens to be avoided
    • People are entitled to engage in sexual activity without having to think about the possibility of new life
    • Parents can and should control their fertility with as much precision as possible, only being open to children when they are absolutely sure they are completely ready

    Thus, even when people are sincerely seeking to understand the Catholic understanding of NFP, the questions sound something like:

    • How does Catholic teaching help women avoid the burden of babies?
    • How does Catholic teaching allow couples to engage in sexual activity without having to think about the possibility of new life?
    • How will Catholic teaching allow parents to control their fertility with as much precision as possible, only being open to children when they are absolutely sure they are completely ready?

    …And we end up completely missing each other.

    (Confession time:  those last three questions really are the ones I was asking when I first studied up on NFP before marriage and then when my husband and I entered marriage together.  It really wasn't until I saw that NFP was really working — what a relief! — that I loosened up and began to understand the babies-are-people-not-burdens view, and even that wasn't cemented for me till we had children.  Which doesn't say much for me as a person, except that I am human.  Just like the aforementioned babies.)

    Simcha:

    In the same way, conversations the Church's view of sexuality are going to be tricky, even for the best-equipped among us.  Say, for instance, that I'm a faithful young Catholic who has been brought up with the understanding that sex is a gift, not a right; that babies are a privilege, not a burden; that marriage is for making children and helping us grow in holiness, not for enhancing our portfolios and giving us a scuba diving partner when we summer in Cabo.

    So, confident and righteous, we dive whole hog into conversations about human sexuality, armed with the liberating truth. 

    But then we come head to head with someone whose unfaithful husband refuses to abstain. 

    Or someone with a short life expectancy, who can't admit of even the smallest risk of conception. 

    Or someone who already has three severely autistic children.  Or someone who does't have any extrarodinary physical or emotional trials, but who has simply been reared on the world's view of sex, and for whom any amount of abstinence (never mind providentialism) is a mindblowing impossibility. 

    Suddenly, just saying the truth as we know it isn't doing the trick.

     

    Keep this in mind.

    Now, check out this opinion piece from the Minneapolis Star Tribune a few days ago.  Bear in mind that it is an opinion piece; notice that the writer of the piece (as is his prerogative, it being an opinion column) really only seeks direct quotes from one "side" in the debate, and the other "side's" view is only presented via filtering through other people's impressions.   Bear in mind also that if this was mandatory coming from the Archdiocese, likely the same presentation occurred in other Catholic schools, but we have no news from them.

    De La Salle kids have a few words with archdiocese at marriage talk

    Go ahead, read it, come back.  (By the way, I haven't looked at the 300+ comments on the article either — I try to avoid newspaper-site comment sections, especially when they get that long.)

    + + +

    Okay, some questions for the audience.

    — What do you think the presenters likely actually said to the students about adoption?  (Not long after the article appeared, a non-Catholic friend of mine sent me a link to the article, asking "What's with the rhetoric about adoption?")  

    — Do you think the archdiocese is at fault for sending people who were unprepared to deal with difficult questioning, or do you think it likely that no presenters on this topic would have been well received?

    — Assuming good faith on the part of the questioners, what is the right way to answer publically difficult questions about the Christian life that are rooted in questioners' life experiences? Is there no way to avoid being taken out of context later, assuming that any public statement will wind up in an opinion piece in the local paper?  Given that there is no way to avoid being taken out of context, is there a way to frame the answers such that one has actually to be misquoted in order to be spun incorrectly?

    — Should the archdiocese have communicated with the students some other way?

    —

    |

    10 comments on Talking past one another’s contexts.

  • Searching for words.

    So, I mentioned some time ago that I was going to start working on learning Spanish with the tweens I co-school. I mentioned that I didn’t want to do a traditional curriculum because they are already a couple of years into Latin and it seems to me we could save some time by exploiting what they already know. Once you have learned any second language, after all, you are alert to many of the things you need to know in order to learn another one, and there are so many points of contact between Latin and Spanish that it ought to be a fairly easy transition.

    I know enough French and Latin, and have picked up enough knowledge about Spanish from various attempts to teach myself, to score 12 out of 12 on this BBC Language quiz ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/gauge/ ). Can’t speak it at all, and would like to do better. After quite a bit of research, I decided to work with the kids using my own method — the one where I teach myself, and I bring them along.

    I have two sourcebooks, one scholarly and the other popular.

    The scholarly book is Frederick Bodmer’s The Loom of Language, http://www.amazon.com/The-Loom-Language-Approach-Languages/dp/039330034X , which blew my mind when I found it in the library. The author comes at it with the perspective of one who was deeply involved in the “international language movement,” inspired by an optimistic belief that eliminating the language problem would do away with misunderstandings and, thereafter, all wars would cease. Clearly his vision did not play out, but the way he thinks about language-learning is jaw-droppingly insightful. Plus the book has a decent amount of background information in linguistics, and all sorts of useful word lists and tables which make it really useful, at least if you are setting out to learn a Romance language or a Teutonic language. The writing itself is crisp and clear, if dated.

    The popular book is entertaining and somewhat incredible (in the sense that I am not sure he is telling the truth about all of his polyglot experiences). This is How to Learn Any Language http://www.amazon.com/How-Learn-Language-Barry-Farber/dp/1567315437 by Barry Farber. It has some tall-sounding stories, but also some solid-sounding advice on how to tackle a new language: First, get a basic grammar and read about five chapters. Then, get a phrasebook, a magazine or newspaper (one copy of one issue) in the target language, and some audiotapes (or the modern equivalent) and start working your way through the text a paragraph at a time. He has some tips for how to design an efficient flashcard system, how to use spare moments to study, and how to use memory-association visualization, but the main thrust is to attack the language through multiple channels at once: auditory, text, and speech, and also grammar study.

    Since his first piece of advice is to learn a little grammar, that is where we are starting: one quick lesson a week, with a little bit of practice making sentences.

    Lesson one was conjugating regular verbs ending in -ar — those are very much like the verbs of the first conjugation in Latin. I picked “hablar” (to speak) as a model verb, not “amar,” because I did not want to muck up the “amo, amas, amat” in Latin class. So I gave them about three dozen verbs, many of them derived directly from Latin verbs they know, and we practiced making sentences with those for a week. I had them translate from English to Spanish and Spanish to English and Spanish to Latin and Latin to Spanish.

    Lesson two was the irregular verb “estar,” one of the two verbs that translate “to be,” and then using it to form the present progressive tense — “I am speaking,” “Estoy hablando” — with the three dozen regular verbs. The kids liked that Spanish has this construction that they are so familiar with in English and that is missing in Latin.

    What was great about it was that we could jump right in without having to explain about why verbs are conjugated, or how it can be that you do not need to use a subject pronoun, or what person and number and tense mean. The same recitation of the same meanings in the same order: hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, hablais, hablan. There are some differences to get used to, like the appearance of informal and polite forms of address, but most of it is comfortable already.

    Now the only hard part will be not letting my excitement at starting a New Thing crowd out the important work we are doing in intermediate Latin. I have four more weeks till we finish one of our history books, and when that happens we will open up a block of time I can devote just to Spanish — till then I am itching to move ahead. I have a few more books on order, so at least I will have to wait till they get here.

    By the way — if you, like me, ever decide to use phrase books as part of language learning with kids — take the time to read the Amazon reviews first and then to “look inside.” I was all set to buy the Lonely Planet phrase book for Latin American Spanish when I happened upon a review warning parents that the book is not for the kiddies, as it contains explicit material in the “Romance” section. I had enough trouble with the kids yesterday translating “specta virum in equo retinae” as “look at the man in the queen’s horse,” which they found hilarious, and I can hardly blame them, but I do not need to burden them yet with phrases like “Touch me here!” or “Faster!” or “Sorry, I can’t get it up” or “I never want to see you again.”

    Although it did make for an amusing image of someone trying to consult his phrase book in the heat of the moment. Or more likely sitting alone on some hostel cot, studying up optimistically so that, if things go well, he won’t look like such a loser tourist.

    —

    |

    2 comments on Searching for words.

  • More on forgiveness.

    I had a post Asking for forgiveness, some days ago, in which I outline my theory about teaching children to apologize.

     In a nutshell, that stems from the realization that the proper purpose of an apology is to invite forgiveness.  That is what guides me as I figure out how to teach my kids to apologize and to forgive people, and it guides the selection of the words that we use.  

    Anyway, today commenter Barbara C. asks a couple of good questions:

    1. How do you handle it if the "injured" party just does not feel capable of forgiving…if the hurt feels too big to let go of easily?

     
    2. How would you handle those who seem to apologize for their own benefit (i.e. "by expressing the feelings that are inside him, so that the speaker feels his true feelings has been heard")? They do it more to relieve their own burden even if they know that in the process they will be putting a larger burden on the other person.

    Of course, maybe I am taking what is meant to be a lesson for children and applying it to my adult problems….(sigh)

     

    Here's my answer, tidied up a bit for better bloggery.  

    Obviously each question is really two questions:  what if it's your kid?  and what if it's the other kid?  And maybe there's also a subtext of what if it's me, the grownup, dealing with this from other grownups?

    1a.  When my child can't or won't respond to an apology with "I forgive you."  Truthfully, my child usually easily say the words "I forgive you" because, I think, they are so well practiced at it.  They know that the sky doesn't fall down if they say it before they "feel" it.  They know that life goes on, and usually the words have helped.  

    But if it was one of my children who felt they could not forgive another, I would take that as a sign that the kids need additional intervention before the discussion is over — maybe my child is reasonably afraid that the behavior won't stop, etc., in which case it is probably time for some redirection to different activities. You can forgive someone and still decide you're done playing with them for the day.  We would stay there and explore it further.  On the other hand, if my child is just being obstinate, well, I don't allow that for the young ones.  If you can say "I forgive you," you do.

    1b.  When my child seeks forgiveness and doesn't hear it.

    More commonly, it's my child who has apologized and asked for forgiveness, and another child doesn't say the words.  I've been through this one a lot.

    • First of all, I teach them to wait until the angry, hurt child has calmed down enough to hear an apology — no point in apologizing to someone who's screaming in her mother's lap. 
    •  After that, the first thing to check is whether the other child has reason to believe that my child is going to continue causing a problem for him!  "Do you think maybe he is still worried you will tease him again?  Have you promised that you will stop?"
    • If it's clear that the bad behavior has stopped, I tell my child, "Sometimes people need time to forgive you, and when that happens you just have to wait until they are ready." I might add, "Maybe s/he doesn't know how to say it and will show you instead." With small children, at least, they usually go back to playing eventually.

    2a.  The "fake apology" coming from my kid.  Well, young children rarely give "fake apologies," right? The "I'm sorry you took what I said the wrong way" kind? They sometimes refuse to apologize, and they sometimes say "I'm sorry" when they don't mean it — and that last is something I wholeheartedly support! 

    Fake apologies, which have the words "I am sorry" or "I regret" in them but point the sorrow or the regret the wrong direction because they are not grounded in a desire for forgiveness but instead in a desire to continue making a point, are the domain of older kids and adults. People who want to save face.

    I have yet to hit the teen years, but I imagine that if I hear one of those coming out of my tween's mouth, I will take him aside and explain that there is nothing wrong or unusual about feeling that you have been misunderstood or wrongly accused, but that the fake apology is never appropriate.  If you really desire to be forgiven (and even if the other person is wrong about you, you should desire his forgiveness because forgiveness is good for him and good for your relationship) you will find a way to express that desire sincerely.

    Maybe you will have to suck it up and say "I am sorry" and let the person think it is an admission of wrongdoing. Maybe it is not advisable to admit wrongdoing (there are sometimes legal consequences after all) and if no apology you can offer is accepted, at that point you just have to let it go and try (silently) to forgive *him* for refusing to forgive *you.*

    2b.  Other people's fake apologies.   "If someone fake-apologizes to you," I guess I will tell my kids, "the ball is in your court."  

    You have the choice to accept it as if it were a sincere apology.  This is called "taking the high road."  It is difficult, but you can have some satisfaction because it is an exercise in humility.  It means you let the other person have the last word, and you let it stand for what it is.  Sometimes the exact choice of words can be a little tricky, though, because what makes a fake apology fake is that it does not, actually, ask for forgiveness, and so "I forgive you" is a non-sequitur.

    (Try it:  "I'm sorry you took what I said out of context."  "I forgive you."  Doesn't work, does it?  You see why the fake apology is so insidious?  It deprives both people of forgiveness.  The only logical response is… "…Um… I'm sorry I took what you said out of context, too?"  Or… "I forgive you for being so unclear that I couldn't tell what the context was?"  Logically, the argument continues.)

    Anyway, "I accept your apology" might work.

    There is an alternative response, particularly if you care what the other person thinks of you.  You have the choice to treat it as an opportunity for more dialogue, chock full of I-statements ("I get the sense that you feel I have misunderstood you. Do you want to tell me more about that?") Past history and expected future interaction are the guide to which approach makes sense, and you can stop at any point and accept the apology — such as it is — on the theory that it is the best you will get.

    + + +

    One more thing:  I think it is totally appropriate to apply lessons for children to adult problems. That is exactly what we are supposed to do as we grow up:  apply what we have learned in the past to whatever is going on right now. It works really well if the lessons were good. And I think that the purpose of apologies does not change with age.

     

    —

    |

    5 comments on More on forgiveness.

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Categories

…more to come later