Three vices may be observed concerning difficult things:  Making them too easy, making them unnecessarily obscure -- and making them both at once.

Conversion

This letter is a follow-up from the doctoral student who wrote last Monday.  I’ve paraphrased a little just for brevity.

Question:

Thanks for your response -- that helped.  Let me ask one of my remaining questions.

Why do you write so much about sexuality?  Do you have an obsessive mind?

I write about sexuality because I can’t think of anything more fundamental to the ordering of society than the ordering of the family.  If you don’t understand what sexuality has to do with the ordering of the family, there’s the problem.

What Is to Be Done?

Bonus link:  Second half of interview in World magazine

I will devote several Mondays to the exchange of letters which this interesting note began.

Bonus link:  Second half of interview in World magazine

Transexual:  A person who identifies as a member of the other sex.

Transracial:  A person who identifies as a member of another race.

Transpresleyan:  A person who identifies as Elvis Presley.

Bonus link:  Video of my talk at BYU

Other talk videos here

Mondays are for answering letters.  This isn’t exactly a letter, but I think it's close enough; it’s a question I have been asked frequently, most recently when I was speaking about natural law at Acton Institute’s annual conference on the foundations of a free and virtuous society.

Everyone admits that pain is educational:  Since I feel agony when I put my hand into the fire, I don’t do it again.  Curiously, we are much more reluctant to admit that there is such a thing as natural disgust, and disgust is educational too.  St. John Chrysostom makes this point exactly in his Homily on First Timothy: