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In recent years, the study of virtue has experienced a renaissance. While we are recovering our classical grammar of virtue, we should also recover our vocabulary of vice as well. Concupiscence is among our choicest words to be recovered. Because of the great influence of Augustine, it traditionally has been associated closely with sexual desire, […]
Wendell Berry (1934- ) a native of Kentucky, lived in New York and California for several years, before returning to his homeland not only to write but to farm, which he has done for over thirty years. Berry has used his experience as a farmer to write insightfully about agriculture, economics, marriage and families, animal […]
This little book, its website reports, has been a runaway best-seller, appearing on both the New York Times and the USA Today top ten lists and winning Nonfiction Book of the Year, Retailers Choice Awards. Over six million copies are in print. Time magazine has chronicled its extraordinary success. The New York Times ran a […]
The gospel is good news for humans as sexual beings. The Bible affirms sexuality as created good by God and speaks of the profound union of man and woman in the words “the two shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). Marital love is generative, and children are an expression of human love and divine blessing […]
Nature or Nurture? Famous (or infamous) Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner sharply contrasts traditional views of human nature with modern ones. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), the founder of "behaviorism" writes, In what we may call the prescientific view…a person's behavior is at least to some extent his own achievement. He is free to […]
Until fairly recently, any interpretation of the Song of Solomon has focused on rescuing an apparently erotic and secular text from the condemnation of being "purely sensuous." This goal led the rabbis to read the Song as an allegory of God's love for Israel, and most Christian interpreters for two millennia noted a picture of […]
When many Christians, especially the literati, hear the words, "You shall not commit adultery," they probably think of the heroine's indiscretion in The Scarlet Letter. To be sure, their impulse is correct because Hester Prynne's sin is the quintessential example of this transgression. But how would those same Christians respond to the following query: Which […]
One of Scripture’s most arresting incidents occurs in the book of Numbers. Numbers records Israel’s wilderness wanderings. In chapter 25, Israel was encamped at Shittim getting ready to cross over the river Jordan into Canaan. But even there, on the verge of entering the Promised Land, Israelite men began to indulge in sexual immorality and […]
Despite the triumph of the therapeutic in American Protestantism, many evangelicals still strenuously object to the "victim" philosophy and encourage a more robust notion of human responsibility. If a person in such circles struggles with sexual immorality, he or she is likely to be told that the matter is entirely in his or her hands. […]
