I wasn’t planning to post today, but some of you may be interested in the new review of my book On the Meaning of Sex, just published online in Humanum Review, the journal of the John Paul II Institute for Studies in Marriage and the Family. This joins previous reviews in Catholic Culture, in CatholiCity, and in other places.
It’s a highly intelligent review, and an author is always happy when the reviewers understand what he is trying to do. Matthew and Michelle Kuhner do seem to think I say too little about God, which is interesting because another reviewer, in The Public Discourse, criticized me for saying too much about God. Though he was gracious and generally favorable, he was concerned that no one longs for God except believers. So by mentioning Him, I tempt today’s young people to tune me out.
I guess I would rather be criticized in the former way than in the latter. It seems to me that today’s young people have the same Godward longing that everyone does, but many of them resist thinking about it because they have so badly abused their consciences. The art is to get past their defenses. So although the book is based mostly on natural law, I leave a trail of bread crumbs.
Something else needs to be said too. How can we expect natural law to be plausible to people who experience only the humiliation of their nature, and not the touch of grace? The philosophical method of our day is minimalist. It assumes that people can consider propositions about reality only in small doses, one dry pill at a time. But at least sometimes, the very opposite is true. The reason the pill goes down so hard is that it is only a pill, for the mind, in its hunger, desires a meal.