💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~oldernow › 2023-10-27-12-00-00.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:57:01. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Something rather miraculous happened last night: my wife finally gave a favorite author of mine a fair try.
A bit of context: while I've had my more strictly religious moments in life, she's far more traditional along those lines than I, so investigations outside of Christianity tend to seem sacrilegious to her, and she has no problem openly saying so when finding me pursuing such - which you might imagine having been closer to bone-of-contention-ville than in support of the relationship along the way.
So last night on the living room couch she once again looked over at me to ask what I was reading. The temptation toward heat-avoidance lying was strong, but I managed a mild fess up a la "Take a *wild* guess?", which of course provoked the anticipated rolling of eyes and verbal statements suggesting I might be playing with satanic fire (okay, a wee bit of creative hyperbole on the end, there..).
That led to enough inner ire to fuel replying something like "For the life of me, I can't understand how you can be so critical of something you've never given a fair chance!"
So, she started digging around online, found an article of someone describing their take on said author, which I quickly recognized as not really getting to what I consider the heart of the author's key messages. But, of course, she started picking apart aspects of said opinion piece as though it accurately represented said key messages, leading me to saying "You're criticizing this <image of me holding my right thumb and index finger tips about an inch and a half apart> apart from at least this much <image of holding hands as far apart as possible> context!"
So, she dug more deeply.
And I'll be damned (mild attempt at humor, there..) if she didn't stumble upon some direct quotes that I'd honestly read within the last 24 hours, and found them intriguing to the point of wanting to pursue even more.
Longer story shorter: she was suddenly fascinated with the author to the point of wanting to discuss topics I think he's top-of-the-line about without my having to say a word to her what I thought those topics were. And (we were in bed by then) we did. And it was glorious!
So I've suddenly gone from feeling mostly utterly alone in my love of said author's favorite topics and ways of putting things, to having someone else eager to explain to me what they think such mean. And much of what she said felt somewhere between "spot on" and going even further than I had with such all these years.
Anyway, the author is:
And should you feel interested, this is a pretty good starting point:
especially the "PUBLISHED WORKS - BOOKS" link, which leads to digital copies of the first couple dozen chapters of each of his books.