Excerpts In Excellence

Since I accidentally linked to it earlier, I thought I'd make it official and give the link to Peter Kreeft's excellent speech on Christian anthropology vs. the Sexual Revolution, an address to the The Catholic Medical Association's 79th Annual Educational Conference (October 27-30, 2010).

Kreeft is amazing. He is a professor, a theologian, and an author, and yet what he says is in perfectly understandable English! You really should read the whole speech. Here is a little sample:

We moderns think sex is for us; it isn't; it's for our children. We moderns think we're so enlightened because we're not legalists any more, we're personalists, we're about people, not about laws or rules or commandments. We think of the people who make sex, and we want those people to have fun and be happy. Which is fine, but we're so fixated on the fact that people make sex that we've ignored the fact that sex makes people.

h/t Mike in CT (again!)

24:15 Talking About Sex With Your Son

Today marks my first article of As For Me And My House over at Catholic Dads Online.

I chose a bit of an ambitious subject for my first column, but one I hope is timely and profitable to you. (Maybe next week's article will be on bubblegum or something simple...)

Anyhow, head on over and check it out and leave me a note telling me you did so. Be gentle with me, it's my first time ...

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  Boys.

They are like chips off of the old block. When they’re four years old, they follow Daddy everywhere, because he’s a hero and can do no wrong.

Anything Daddy does is fascinating and your boy wants to copy everything. But then they start to grow up, lose that baby fat in their faces, and before too long you’re sweating the details of The Talk. 

We’ve reached this point in the House of Nod.

Talking about sex with their boys is dreaded by Dads everywhere. When is the appropriate time? How much do you reveal now vs. later? Is this the end of their innocence? How do I bring this up, anyway? 


Breathe. Breathe.


Continue reading at Catholic Dads Online >>>

Adam And Eve's Unhappy Sex Life

Fellow Catholic Dads blogger, John Jansen posted this picture entitled Adam and Eve. It's a "painting that ... has [been] used in Theology of the Body presentations".

I don't know who painted it or where, but I feel compelled to re-post it. John says it speaks for itself, but I feel like it needs talking about.

It's just so potent, so visceral. I see boredom and pain. I see people trapped in a mechanical sexual relationship without pleasure. I see addiction. The half-nakedness suggests a hot summer night whose carnal activities has not brought relief from the heat outside or passion from within.

She looks old, worn out, tired; but she continues to apply make up to try to make herself alluring -- yet failing. She actually looks older than he does, suggesting some kind of cougar-love where the past-her-prime sexual aggressor actively seeks out the younger man to try to recapture her fading flower. Her vanity mirror is in front of her while she applies the makeup, but her eyes are sliding to the side, as if to see if Adam is still there, still caught in her wiles. Extending the metaphor, the classic pose of turning her head one way and her eyes another gives the viewers the impression that she is looking at us, to catch us too.

Adam looks spent, bored, and non-vital. He's either asleep, in pain, or both as his slack-jawed expression suggests. He looks post-coital, as if he's only just pulled on his pants. He grips the apple near his prominent crotch as he sits splay-legged. The apple here is a symbol of the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden, something that was taken in a way that was not supposed to be taken. It doesn't bring him pleasure, but he keeps hanging on to it, unable to let it go. In this picture the apple represents sex, but without love: a mechanical, even boring pursuit. He looks as if he meant to eat the apple, but fell asleep in situ before he could muster the energy.

The colors are flat: brownish and dull reds, symbolizing a lack of vitality. The browns also suggest earthiness, recalling the Garden of Eden by contrast -- in this case a barrenness, a lack of green growing things, of life. The lighting and shadows are harsh, non-flattering, as if the glare of reality is too much. The window shade is open and it's dark outside, giving the impression that it is a hot night. Since there is light on inside and darkness outside, the open window implies that anyone can see what the couple is doing from outside. The couple's half-nakedness shows a lack of modesty for their own bodies and for the sexual act. It is on display in a form of exhibitionism, but again without pleasure. In fact, Adam's base torso and passed-out pose implies they only just completed the act while the window was open the whole time.

These are just gut reactions I'm having. I'm sure others could explain it better. But I've never seen in one picture the damaging effects of sex without the proper understanding, context, and respect it demands that this picture affords.

Sex outside of marriage, contraceptive sex inside of marriage, self-gratification and selfishness: this is you -- and I've never seen you so unhappy.

Christopher West Corrects Nightline Editors

Recently Christopher West, a Catholic educator, author, lecturer, and faculty member of the Theology of the Body Institute was featured on Nightline. And the criticisms have come raining in from all quarters, somewhat unjustly. But this is a case of editorial skew. Based on the meida report, I thought "this guy is a raving sex lunatic giving Catholics a bad name". Doing my own homework, I find the opposite to be the case.

Several editorial comments which have also been picked up by other news outlets have led to misleading statements which seem to paint West as a radical Catholic sex therapist / preacher who equates Pope John Paul II and Hugh Hefner's approach to sexuality.

[ChristopherWest.com] Regarding the connection between John Paul II and Hugh Hefner, Christopher often points out the interesting historical “coincidence” of the work of these two profoundly influential men. In the early 1950s, as Hefner was founding Playboy magazine, Karol Wojtyla began to lecture and write about the need for Christians to experience a redemption of their bodies and sexuality. In their respective work, both Hefner and John Paul II responded to a puritanical /Manichean approach to sexuality, but they offered completely different solutions to the problem. This is the historical "connection" of which Christopher spoke in the Nightline interview. ABC latched onto this point, but they failed to provide the larger context Christopher offered in his extended interview with Nightline’s correspondent. This lack of proper context has led some to misinterpret Christopher’s remarks as somehow endorsing Hefner’s views.

The point Christopher made—but which wasn’t included in the Nightline piece—was that, as Catholics, we agree with Hugh Hefner’s diagnosis of the disease (i.e., a puritanical rejection of the body and sexuality is utterly contrary to Catholic faith), but we radically disagree with his cure.

This kind of misunderstanding is almost inevitable given the culture's 5 second attention span and the media's desire for shocking headlines and scandalous stories. The plain fact of the matter is that context is everything. If you take a complex subject and thousand pages of instruction and try to distill it down to a sound bite, you're bound to come away with a distorted view.

WBN has covered the topic of media selective hearing before, and it seems like it applies now.

West: The Song of Songs presents an unabashed biblical celebration of the chaste love of a husband and wife, including multiple references to the intimacies of "tasting" the goodness of the other. Let my lover come to his garden and eat its choice fruits. Songs Ch 4

Media: Did he just say "oral sex"?

Church Smiles On Good Sex

Fellow blogger John Jansen over at Lunch Break has put together a cogent collection of discussions showing that the Church has always smiled on good sex, holy sex.