For the first time in almost 20 years, I preached in a church yesterday. And, through the magic of the Internet, it is archived for all time. If you are curious, here it is.
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...
Exactly twenty-two years ago, in February of 2002, I was living in River Forest, Illinois, finishing up my undergraduate degree. I was living in an enormous old priory, hoping that I would be able to join the Dominicans when I was done with school in the summer (which, in fact, happened). The priory was built in the 50s, when the Dominicans would have classes of a fifty or sixty students a year. Those days were long gone, and so I was the only person living on the hall, on the far other side of the building from the actual Dominicans. Other than meals, I was basically living entirely by myself. In my evenings, after getting done with my homework, I had a ritual on weekdays. I would turn on the radio to the Chicago rock radio station Q101 and listen to the syndicated show Loveline . Loveline was a call-in show, focused on giving sex and relationship advice to teenagers and twenty-somethings. The hosts of the show were comedian Adam Corolla ...
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