As the Holidays Approach...

Rachel Held Evans has a helpful chart to determine whether you are  being persecuted for being excited about Christmas.

persecution-download.jpg

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus Doesn't Care if You Masturbate, and Other Provocations

Image
1.  A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon this post on the Patheos Catholic channel .  In it, a young woman named Marina S. Olsen began what she promised is a series of posts discussing sexual sins, and she begins with masturbation.  To call the post alarmist would not do it justice--even in the heyday of the drug scares in the 80s, an anti-drug ad that adopted this tone would be seen as over-the-top.   But something struck me in reading her post--Ms. Olsen believes, with an apparently unshakable conviction, that what the Catholic Church has to say about masturbation is true.  Actually, that's not quite right--she takes as a given  that what the Church says about masturbation is true.  It is noticeable that at no point does she try to do the Dr. Greg trick, which is to justify her opposition to masturbation on the basis of ostensibly neutral or scientific grounds .  No, her thesis is that people despair about masturbation because masturbation is going to result in those folks
Read more

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

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
Read more

Holy Sex!--Part 3.3 Getting Down to Business, Part II

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 see how his constant use of
Read more