Merge branch 'main' of https://github.com/joeacarstairs/personal-website

website/src/content/blog/2024/12/17/open_questions_about_sex.md

@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
+---
+title: Questions I have about sex
+description: >-
+  Mark Vernon got me thinking about how the Church’s teaching on sex may be
+  evolving.
+pubDate: 2024-12-17
+updatedDate: 2024-12-17
+---
+
+I just listened back to [Mark Vernon][mark-vernon] talking about sexual desire
+and Christian spirituality.
+
+He recounts how his sex ed at an evangelical camp as a boy taught him to think
+hard about holding hands with someone, just in case it led to something
+‘immoral’. He felt he had been taught a sexual naïvety, which has perhaps
+blinded people to the possibility of abuse – and misunderstood the gospel.
+
+He puts forward an alternative to that naïvety, whereby sexual experience is an
+image or a foretaste of love for, or union with, God, exploring thoughts by
+Origen, Julian of Norwich, Dante, William Blake, Iris Murdoch, and various
+parables and episodes from the Gospels themselves.
+
+Part of what’s so interesting about this, is I feel I got my first proper sex
+ed, as an adult, in an evangelical Christian context – and it pretty much lined
+up completely with what he was putting forward.
+
+I’m also currently reading (as is Mark Vernon) Diarmaid MacCulloch’s epic
+history of Christian sexuality, [Lower Than the Angels][lower-than-the-angels].
+But so far (I’m about a third of the way through and up to about the 5th
+century) there have only been odd glimmers of positive Christian understandings
+of sexuality. The overwhelming Christian consensus of the early Church
+(according to MacCulloch) is that sexual desire is a symptom of humanity’s
+fallen state, not our longing for God.
+
+So I want to know: what changed between Mark’s experience and mine? How is
+Christian teaching about sex changing right now? Was my experience typical of
+other Christians growing up today, in evangelical churches, across the
+denominational spectrum, across Britain, across the global Church? What _is_
+the Christian consensus on sex now, and how old is it, and where did it come
+from?
+
+I guess I’ve got two-thirds of a gigantic tome to work through, first of all.
+That’ll be a start. Any answers? Postcards please.
+
+[lower-than-the-angels]: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/313582/lower-than-the-angels-by-macculloch-diarmaid/9780241400937
+[mark-vernon]: https://www.markvernon.com/the-gospel-sexual-desire-and-the-abuse-scandals-in-the-church-what-has-the-erotic-to-do-with-god

website/src/data/links.ts

@@ -104,6 +104,36 @@ const LINKS: Link[] = [
     description: 'Read the interviews. Economists give interesting, and diverse, opinions on the economic potential of LLMs.',
     isoDateAdded: '2024-07-18',
   },
+  {
+    href: 'https://www.noemamag.com/the-human-cost-of-our-ai-driven-future',
+    title: 'The Human Cost Of Our AI-Driven Future',
+    description: "In case you'd forgotten: content moderation is still carried out by appalling worker exploitation. This is not news, but nonetheless an excellent and suitably chilling essay on the topic. Be aware that the essay describes some deeply traumatic content.",
+    isoDateAdded: '2024-10-11',
+  },
+  {
+    href: 'https://blog.scottlogic.com/2024/09/10/llms-dont-hallucinate.html',
+    title: "LLMs don't 'hallucinate'",
+    description: "I posted on the Scott Logic blog a while ago about how the word 'hallucination' doesn't accurately capture how LLMs work.",
+    isoDateAdded: '2024-10-11',
+  },
+  {
+    href: 'https://sgringwe.com/2019/10/10/Please-just-stop-saying-just.html',
+    title: "Please just stop saying 'just'",
+    description: "A pretty good case for avoiding the word 'just' in software engineering. I admit I've been guilty, too.",
+    isoDateAdded: '2024-11-11',
+  },
+  {
+    href: 'https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/11/sexual-symmetry-and-asymmetry.html',
+    title: 'Sexual symmetry and asymmetry',
+    description: 'Alexander Pruss has a bizarre, but at first blush convincing, argument that complementarians about gender don’t have to appeal to morally significant intrinsic differences between men and women.',
+    isoDateAdded: '2024-12-17',
+  },
+  {
+    href: 'https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/26/terminal-rules',
+    title: '"Rules" that terminal programs follow',
+    description: 'Handy for the next time you develop a CLI or TUI. Also handy as a user: now I know about <a href="https://readline.kablamo.org/emacs.html">readline key bindings</a>, which are everywhere apparently.',
+    isoDateAdded: '2024-12-20',
+  },
 ];
 
 export default LINKS;