"...and the two shall become one flesh"
Sometimes you hear that NFP is too hard; that it puts too much stress on one’s marriage; that it’s unfair. One former champion of the ‘open embrace’ (who is now on the pill) went so far as to call NFP a ‘theological attack on women’. And they’re right. NFP is a threat; and practising NFP can be dangerous to your marriage, but not for the reasons its critics imagine. The Narrow Way of NFP Abstaining is Read More
What happens when sex meets “Sola Scriptura”–that pillar of Protestant doctrine that says that scripture alone (and the individual’s interpretation alone) is the authority on what Christians are to believe? What happens is pretty predictable. Scripture ends up blessing whatever the hell we want it to, because in a culture of lust what we want often comes straight from Hell. Read More
In a dialogue with an imaginary atheist who found it impossible to believe and asked how he might believe in God, the French philosopher Pascal replied that he should do what believers do; have masses said, genuflect, make the sign of the cross, etc. Pascal promised that the atheist would soon believe and would be amazed. Pascal’s advice shows great insight into the relationship between our actions and our beliefs. Read More
Remember the older Hollywood love scenes? A man and woman are wrapped in each other's arms in front of gently billowing curtains and moonlight as they tenderly and lovingly kiss and caress each other--beautiful music playing in the background--for what seems like hours of intimate bliss. Today, we might laugh at such a romanticized picture of lovemaking and object that the reality is much different. We might note Read More
Nearly sixteen hundred years after Augustine's meditation on his struggle for sexual purity and chastity—and in our similarly lust-saturated society where feminism has duped women into imitating the worst of men's behaviours—it's fitting that a woman should follow in Augustine's footsteps. In The Thrill of the Chaste, New York writer and editor Dawn Eden has written an account of her post-conversion struggle for Read More
For our cultural contraceptive mentality, where fertility is divorced from sex and no longer seen as an essential aspect of it, sex ends after intercourse ends. But in reality, the nature and significance of sex reaches far beyond the individual act of intercourse. And only by seeing it in relation to everything it affects as a whole, does one really see what its true nature is. We might say, then, that sex ends Read More
The metaphor of “bearing fruit” indicates something different than the mere production of something. “Production” is a manufacturing metaphor, but “fruit” is a metaphor taken from the world of living things. Life has been traditionally defined as anything having a principle of growth, motion, and reproduction originating from within itself. That “vital force” is intrinsic, it comes from within, not from Read More
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