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).
more on sex from the online archives
28.2—March/April 2015
Man, Woman & the Mystery of Christ
An Evangelical Protestant Perspective by Russell D. Moore
32.5—September/October 2019
on the Inhuman Transformation of Transgenderism by Anthony Esolen
32.4—July/August 2019
Does Biblical Language for Man Matter? by Stephen F. Noll
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more from the online archives
31.5—September/October 2018
on the Congregation as a Wilderness by Paul Gregory Alms
32.5—September/October 2019
on the Inhuman Transformation of Transgenderism by Anthony Esolen
