Book Review
Sex & the Civilized
Civilizing Sex: On Chastity and the Common Good by Patrick Riley
Edinburgh, Scotland: T&T Clark, 2000
(272 pages; $28.95, paper [available in the U.S. in May 2002])
reviewed by Angus J. L. Menuge
For some, the topic of chastity is rather like Ptolemaic astronomy: a fascinating relic of the unenlightened past. Hedonistic license is so mainstream that we find it even in the magazines publicly displayed at grocery stores. The mantra of sex education, “They’ll do it anyway,” is promoted as realism and compassion, rather than as cynical defeatism and irresponsible indifference to the mental, physical, and social carnage that results.
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Angus J. L. Menuge is Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University Wisconsin, where he is associate director of the Cranach Institute (www.cranach.org). He has edited three books, including C. S. Lewis: Lightbearer in the Shadowlands, and has recently published Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science (Rowman & Littlefield).
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more on sex from the online archives
31.1—January/February 2018
Getting Sex Wrong Is a Foundational Error by James M. Kushiner
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18.3—April 2005
on Being a Free Narnian & the Joy of Subordination by Donald T. Williams
18.10—December 2005
on an Apostle’s Encounter with the Son’s Children by Anthony Esolen
23.5—September/October 2010
The Loss of a Christian Understanding of Virginity Is Pure Tragedy by Eleanor Bourg Donlon
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