Tag: marriage

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World’s first Agony Aunt column about love, sex and relatonships

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The Athenian Mercury – a London-based broadsheet, one-page, two-sided periodical, brainchild of John Dunton, a printer, not a therapist whose main aim was to make money. Walking in a London park one day, it occurred to him that the (male) patrons of London’s fashionable coffee houses might like to gin up their intellectual discussions with questions posed to a panel of experts – just Dunton and his brothers-in-law- and would pay to see the answers. Published and advertised as “Resolving all the most Nice and Curious Questions Proposed by the ingenious of Either Sex”, in 1690s London which included the … Continue reading World’s first Agony Aunt column about love, sex and relatonships

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Humanity’s deepest desires, fears and hopes

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MacCulloch notes that for the vast majority of people throughout this history, marriage was a “contract between two men” that is between two fathers. And  that “When church weddings did start appearing, patchily, in the fourth century, the Church did not offer them to all the faithful”. Three categories of marriage emerged: the “Glorious ( imperial elite) , the “middle” ( imperial officers), and the “vile” (everyone else), with the vast majority of unions in the last category having no involvement from the Church at all. He rebukes contemporary Christians for asserting that there is a “Christian understanding of marriage” … Continue reading Humanity’s deepest desires, fears and hopes