My parish, St. Dominic's in San Francisco, performed Bruckner's Requiem Mass in D Minor for All Souls Day last week. I wasn't at all familiar with the piece, but it was beautiful, and beautifully done by the outstanding choir.
I was introduced to The Body's Grace by Frank from Letters to the Catholic Right in this post , where he quotes Williams saying: It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralist by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…? I want to talk about the first part of that quote here, regarding the clitoris. I am not aware of any theology that has been done on the clitoris, but there should be. As Williams alludes to, the existence and nature of the clitoris is a theological "problem," especially if you want to hold on to traditional Christian sexual morality. It is especially problematic if you want to hold that sexuality needs to be understood through the...
Less than a month ago, I said I would stop talking about Roman Catholicism , and I had every intention of sticking to that. But I am going to break that promise to talk about the release of the report of the Royal Commission in Australia about clerical sexual abuse. The results are shocking--if the reports are correct, the scope of the problem in Australia was even worse than in the United States or in the UK/Ireland. To give an example, there was a reference to a Benedictine monastery in Western Australia in which 17.6% of the monks had an abuse allegation lodged against them at some point in the 1950s. Think about being in a room with a group of monks in which one out of every six of them had someone in the 1950s accuse them of committing a sexual violation on a minor. Think of how many complaints were not made in the culture of the 1950s. One in six. My God. I had a twitter exchange last night with Maureen Clarke about the rep...
Chapter 12 is about foreplay. Most everyone acknowledges that foreplay is good, and this chapter is no exception. Popcak makes the interesting but seemingly effective choice to break foreplay down into the various senses. So, for example, under seeing he discusses things like wearing lingerie, under smell he suggests to use scented candles, etc. There is nothing revolutionary or earthshaking here, but the suggestions are solid and reasonable. He also provides an unambiguous defense of oral sex. Some might be puzzled as to why oral sex needs defending, but the traditional position of the Church opposed oral sex--hence the reason it was traditionally grouped with anal sex under the heading of "sodomy." So, Popcak is stepping out a bit on a limb here, and he deserves his kudos for that. He also makes clear that oral sex goes both ways, subject only to the One Rule. Good on him for recognizing the needs of the ladies in this realm. I could...
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