… and I have faith that Christopher, who along with his family, are old and dear friends, will beat back this cancer. Best and heartfelt wishes for a complete remission.
In a statement released through his publisher Twelve, the British-born provocateur, 61, said that he has “been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me.”
Meanwhile, meditations on mortality and inquiries from Eugene gently pressing me on my argument below cause me to repent the tone thereof and apologies for any snark. I’ll try to post something responding to Eugene’s questions by email. But the questions in my case are fundamentally broad ones, and I won’t pretend to do justice to them in a blog post. They go to fundamental issues of how one frames questions of religious accommodation, but also many other things, in which the standard mode of legal and much moral argument is by analogy.
The question raises, in my case, two other interconnected issues, also large. One is the question of how much the social context – which is very much open to interpretation, of course – should enter into the framing of a question of analogies, whether that social framing should be “thick” or “thin.” The other is, for want of an easier name, boundaries, and whether they matter in the framing of social practices and their acceptability or not.
But I am at the dentist, and can’t think about this right now, because I am afraid I am about to hear about gum disease, which, while not in the same universe as esophageal cancer, nonetheless is not a spur to intellectual movement.
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