Status Updates From The Dignity of Dependence: ...

But in a sustained relationship, you can trust that, as long as your mutual indebtedness keeps circulating, things work themselves out over the long run. The frequency with which debts, gifts, and favors are exchanged reduces the gravity of any single transaction--it's the relationship that persists. I wanted to enter into the intimacy of slight imbalance...

"When you ask for help from a friend or relative, the help you receive deepens your relationship. You may feel you owe them a favor--a meal when they're the one sick, a witness when they are the one in labor. But more than that...you have been intimately & vulnerably seen by them, & that disclosure of weakness colors your friendship. [Do] you see that weakness as continuous with your ID or as a jarring aberration?"

Not sure if I will end up finishing but 43% of the way through the actual text. Some very interesting ideas, even if the author seems on occasion to use intentionally provocative language. A particularly valuable recurring theme surrounds the dehumanizing forces of contemporary society.

🔥 "When the world starts with a false image of the human person, it is difficult to become rerooted in truth. Unlearning the world’s contempt for weakness isn’t a simple intellectual shift — it takes sustained, lived countercatechesis. We must observe and participate in another way of living. The family, whatever its size, is the natural apprenticeship in welcoming need."

Guys, this book is really important.

"A culture focused on expressive individualism and suspicious of the natural and the needed finds it easy to pathologize the real and idealize the pathological."

"Babies can’t survive a culture that despises dependence. A baby who can’t be easily accommodated is expected to be aborted. Women may be able to stagger on, maimed, but we cannot live a full, flourishing life when our basic biology is treated as a design flaw. We cannot pay an entry price in blood for an illusion of equality."