Rave Review for Duolingo

Want to brush up on that Spanish you used to know in high school? Wish you still remember more than a couple of words from that old French textbook? Itching to delve into the language your grandparents once knew, but of which you only inherited a few colloquial phrases? Duolingo is just the place to start. I have found that working through a few lessons each day on their iTunes app is fun, takes only minutes of my time, and a bit more fulfilling and productive than playing card games like Spider Solitaire (my current favorite way to waste time and my phone battery life). The application can also be accessed via any web browser at Duolingo.com.

For me, Duolingo is a good way to remember and practice all the Spanish I learned in high school and college, but use far too infrequently in real life. I’ve also started learning German from scratch since this was the language spoken by most of my ancestors. It’s great fun to watch my own word bank expand beyond the few phrases like “schmechen gut” and “sprechen sie englisch?” that my dad and grandpa bandy around all the time!

Duolingo offers courses in the most popular romance languages—Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese—as well as German. There are also English courses presented in various other languages, so I’d imagine this could also be a great tool for ESL teachers. If you were hoping to pick up a more exotic language like Tagalog, Zulu, or Tamil, you are out of luck. There are also no offerings for other alphabet systems, to the great disappointment of a friend who has been trying to pick up Russian. But Duolingo is a growing thing, and is open for people versed in other tongues to contribute to new or existing courses. Stay tuned, new to- and from- languages may be available soon!

Lowered Mores Will Reduce Harassment?

Encouraging people to have more pre-marital sex will solve the sexual harassment problem in India? You've got to be kidding me, right? But this is exactly the argument Shikha Dalmia makes in her article, "India Needs a Sexual Revolution," published on Friday, May 24 by the Wall Street Journal.  That Indian women are frequently harassed by men when they go out in public is no secret, in spite of the premium their culture places on chastity. Dalmia points out that in India it is generally expected that men and women will not engage in sexual activity before marriage. In fact, two and a half weeks each year are dedicated to honoring female virtue and purity in the festival of Navrati:

"Navrati culminates in "kanya puja," or a day of maiden worshiping: Every household invites over the young girls of the neighborhood and, led by the father or patriarch, bows before them, washes their feet, prays to them, offers them a specially prepared feast of vegetarian delicacies and showers them with gifts and money...But this ancient practice wasn't meant to pamper the girls. It served to remind men of the qualities—mental courage, spiritual wisdom, purity of mind and strength of character—embodied in the feminine spirit, without which, according to Hindu scriptures, the cosmos would collapse into decadence and chaos."

Well and good. Without inculcating such virtue in young women, and young men, societies will indeed fall into chaos. The lack of these virtues in men is what enables the plague of  harassment to occur in the first place. Certainly the men of India must learn to treat women with greater respect, but here Dalmia and I will have to part ways. She argues that men and women simply need an outlet for their sexual urges, and the cultural taboos on pre-marital sex deny them that outlet.

Maybe this would be true if men and women were cattle with no rational powers and no self-control. But as it is, we are rational creatures and we do have the ability to foster virtues such as self-control and respect for others. The inculcating of these virtues in young people, and the creation of a less segregated society where men and women can develop healthy friendships and relationships before marriage would do much to reduce harassment. Lowering sexual mores will hardly have the same effect.

Encouraging pre-marital sex can only increase the degradation of men and women. It will encourage young people to use each other as purely physical outlets for their urges. The door will be opened for women to be used for sexual relief, without men being required to step up and take responsibility for caring for women in other ways, or even providing for their children. Pre-marital intercourse is a fantastic lie. With their bodies men and women say, "I hold nothing back, I give you everything, every part of me." But by saying this outside of marriage there is always the reservation, "I reserve the right to take it all back and leave you in the lurch at any time if it doesn't work out." Sounds like respect to me.

Sources:  Wall Street Journal <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324787004578497420867545326.html?mod=e2fb>

Marriage and God Explain Each Other

That Hideous Strength the third installment in C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy is classified as science fiction and fantasy, but it is also a compelling treatise on God and man--and marriage.  One of the protagonists, Jane begins thinking...what if the spiritual world is NOT a neutral, democratic, vacuum where differences disappear and sex and sense taken away? How if instead the differences and contrasts we see now become richer, sharper, fiercer, more real, more themselves all the way up? What if marriage is not some relic of animal life and patriarchal society, but a first low form, a shadow of a deeper reality that will be repeated again and again on higher levels?

…..

Indeed. What if in more ways than we ever imagined, marriage is a taste of what it is to love God?  In a sense, we are made to be possessed, united one with Another, though remaining distinct, not absorbed into that other Being. In marriage, in love, you leave all else behind for that one Other.  You give Them everything, every part of you, permanently. For true commitment, real love, requires this total, life-long gift. Marriage is exclusive, because  to act otherwise would be a pantheism, an idolatry. In it, your Lover penetrates you, He takes all of you, and yet you could not be more happy, more free, more yourself that you are here, for this is what you were made for. Submission and obedience is the greatest possible joy. It overloads every sense of your body, every corner of your mind, every inch of your soul--your being is full to capacity. There is no room to think of anything but your Lover. And it must be life giving. You must allow Him to infuse His life into your very being. To say," I love you and am yours, but I will refuse the greatest manifestation of Your love, I will refuse the gift of Yourself poured into me," is utter nonsense. It has no meaning. Therefore love must be open to life, to the creation of new being, a share of His being, within oneself. Thus, Love unites fully without destroying the individual. It satisfies and fills every aspect of self, every desire man ever had. And it is free and not coerced.

In the sense that God is Husband and Lover, we are all feminine. We are all made to be possessed, taken, owned. We are all made to surrender.  It is not a case of equality. It is not even a free companionship--it is a blessed slavery, a desired enthrallment from which you can wish no escape.  You don't think of God so much as a friend or companion, you think of Him as a GOD! What a joy to be obliterated and reshaped by this Power!  One who could truly shatter your being if he so desired, but wouldn't. Could unmake you, but doesn't. We desire this. To love and be love by One far greater than self, yet who treats you as far better than you are.

It is the privilege of woman to have a unique insight into God, in that  everything she innately desires in a man, in her husband, she is also designed to receive from God. It is the privilege of man to be a god of sorts to his wife, and to be, perhaps more than he ever dreams, an imago Dei, a living icon of God for her; it is his privilege to share in the fullest way possible in the creative action of God, for each new human life comes through the action of man.

….

Again, another main character  in the book, Ransom, speaks to Jane about her surprise and uneasiness upon finding that gender and marriage are so integral to what it means to be human. In reaction to her shock, he says, "If this were a virginal rejection of the male,  [God] would allow it. Such souls can bypass the male and go on to meet something far more masculine, higher up, to which they must make a yet deeper surrender. But your trouble ...[is] pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing--the gold lion, the bearded bull!"

...

And yet, this is exactly what we desire.  The ostentatious, beautiful, strong, loud, male being. This is exactly what is so beautifully, intriguingly OTHER than self,  occasionally incomprehensible and always delightful, and such a cause of joy and laughter, such an irresistible attraction! It is for this other that we were made.

Garden of Eden: Take Two

In C.S. Lewis'  Perelandra, we find the planet Venus, or Perelandra as it is know outside our own world, in a state of unmarred, virginal paradise similar to the Garden of Eden. Venus is populated by two human beings, Tor and Tinidril, the King and Queen of this paradise where animals are friendly and obedient,  plants bear such abundant food that one need only reach out for it at any time to satiate hunger, and no words exist to describe things such as pain, evil, or death. As in our own paradise there was a seemingly arbitrary mandate to not eat the fruit of a certain tree, there was also a mandate in Venus that, though they might visit the fixed land during the day, the man and woman must return to their bounteous and caressing  floating islands to rest for the night. This command was not difficult for the man and woman to keep, because the fixed land was comparatively hard and rocky, and it was generally much more pleasant to be on the floating islands.

Cue the tempter. Again, he sought out the woman when she was alone to whittle down her strength and pit his faulty rhetoric against her naiveté. This time he came, not as a snake, but in the body of a possessed man from earth. Day and night he argued with the woman and sought to teach her the "superior" ways of thinking that had developed on Earth, a much older and wiser planet. The tempter argued that Maledil, the name for God in that world, was trying to teach her to be independent and free and to think for herself. Maledil had only given the command to not sleep on fixed land in order that she might break the command thereby becoming truly free as Maledil certainly wanted her to be. She could then teach her husband the same, and become like the progressive earthly women who were also typically smarter and more bold than earthly men, according to the tempter. The woman was hesitant and reluctant to believe what the tempter said and had many questions, but the tempter was clever; he met her objections with half-truths and conversed with her, day-in and day-out, until it seemed that the temper must eventually win by his sheer relentless pestering.

Fortunately for the woman, the possessed man was not the only earthly human who had been brought to Venus. Another man, by the name of Ransom, had also been spirited to this infant planet. He witnessed the arguments between the woman and the tempter. He would interject, sometimes successfully, and try to make the woman see that every other mandate from Maledil, such as to eat, or to sleep, or to teach the animals, was something that had a clear purpose and  came naturally, giving joy in its own right. This special command not to sleep on the fixed land seemed to have no such purpose, but instead was a chance to love and obey Maledil strictly for the sake of love and obedience, thereby giving a unique joy that comes from willingly submitting to the One Whom It Is Joy To Obey. Ransom's words seemed good and reasonable to the woman, yet the tempter always had some quick rebuttal for Ransom's position. At long last, Ransom realized that the tempter could not be allowed to continue to wear the woman down, and so with a pure and yet perfect and rightful hatred he provoked a death fight between himself and the tempter.  Ransom was ultimately victorious and Venus was spared from great evil.

Meanwhile the Tor, Venus' Adam, was allowed to watch from afar what was happening to his wife. He saw that if she listened to the tempter she would bring suffering to the world and would eventually die. He saw that he could follow her, whom he loved as himself, and join in her evil and share her fate to the end. Or he could repudiate her action and hope that perhaps by continuing to obey Maledil, perhaps there would be some way to save her also, but perhaps not. There was no way to know. He would have to choose. As his wife persistently resisted the tempter, Tor decided that, regardless of what she eventually did, he would not follow her if she chose wrongly. Though the one half of himself would be crippled and die, the other half of himself must stay healthy that he might love and nurse his wounded  bride, and provide a just rule over the rest of the planet rather than committing total suicide by condemning his whole self and his whole world to death.

Venus was spared our earthly fate. The woman resisted temptation long enough to be rescued by a friend, and the man chose not to follow his beloved partner and companion if she fell. Though this story is fictional, we have much to learn from it of the joy of obedience out of love, the value of friends, both earthly and heavenly, in combating the tempter, and of the incredible caliber of love shown by the man Tor, who knew that the best thing he could do for his beloved wife would be not to follow her into error, but to do right himself. If he also disobeyed, he could never love her so well or care for her as he ought, as he could if he remained obedient, hoping against hope to save her, somehow.

Image courtesy of: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2011/04/the-man-who-showed-us-perelandra-a-short-tribute-to-c-s-lewis/

The Scientific Laws of Matrimony

Welcome to the modern, liberated world. Anything goes here. Religion is out. Science is in. Thanks to science, we now know that romantic love is merely the product of our reproductive drive, a natural force of evolution, fed by chemicals called hormones and pheromones.  Thanks to science, we also know that men and women are designed for faithful, monogamous relationships.

One of my personal favorite hormones is oxytocin, often dubbed the "love hormone." Like many hormones, oxytocin is a protein; one particular specialty of this protein is to form bonds between people. Signs of trust, physical contact, and especially sexual contact, release oxytocin into the bloodstream, increasing trust and affection between a couple. For women, who naturally have higher levels of oxytocin than men, this hormone has a strong, long-lasting bonding effect. While  oxytocin also has a bonding effect for men, it clearly plays up to one of a woman's stereotypical strengths, her emotions, to attach her very strongly to a man that she has sex with. For men, oxytocin harnesses his sex drive and orients it toward his partner, making other women less attractive, and creating in him a tendency toward faithfulness. 

This effect of strong attachment and tendency toward exclusivity produced by oxytocin predisposes couples toward monogamy. The biology of men and women is designed for faithful, exclusive, long-term relationships. From a survival perspective, it all makes sense. In general, faithful, monogamous relationships increase the stability, health, and well- being of the couple and of any children they may have. This increased stability and economic well-being afforded by the family unit in turn increases the well-being of human society at large by contributing to economic growth in that society and reducing the incidence of crime and psychological disorders, among other things.

Science is telling us something, if only we will listen. Listening to hormones like oxytocin shows us that the most natural way to increase our well-being, is to find a suitable partner, and enter into a permanent, faithful relationship with them. (So go find somebody that you are crazy about, get married, stay married, and don't cheat!) That is what science is telling us.

Sources:

http://www.sunherb.com/men_woman.htm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/14/oxytocin-fidelity-committment_n_2130436.html

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/21/the-love-hormone-as-sports-enhancer/