Christopher West, Hugh Hefner and the Domestication of God

Cupid in a Cage

The danger in West’s approach, as it could be misunderstood at least, is in its domestication, intended or not, of the mysterious. He and Hefner want to get it all out there, so to speak, as if to overcome the mystique of the forbidden. He is not so much forgetful of concupiscence as he is of that which is awesome, the tremendum ...

Our sexuality is anything but “harmless.” As Donald Keefe has said, there is no common ground between yes and no. Sexual love in marriage, he would note, is the occasion for blissful joy, not simply the elements of fun. Any attempts by West or Hefner to domesticate the beautiful, to make the holy into something manipulable, even manageable, will be about as successful as rap music has been in lowering the crime rate.

Nudists make a similar mistake. The naked body is shrouded with clothing because it is shrouded in mystery. To walk around naked has no power to remove the veil of that mystery, it only has the power to make you a tad bit chilly.

And so to dispense with custody of the eyes and "Look at her butt! Her breasts!" as Fr. Loya urges us to do, in order to see a woman's "magnificent femininity" (yeah, right) is not simply wrong because it's heedless of concupiscence, it's also wrong because it assumes that we can pierce this veil, that we can make use of something that ought to be treated with a kind of awe and reverence.

Comments

Escape from Utopia

“Karen, I was right! Someone escaped! She says they are a cult!” I said to my wife, exuberant. It was Monday, Labor Day. We were at the Lake of the Ozarks, in mid-Missouri, and Karen, my wife, noticed a group of people standing near the overlook on the hill above the lake’s dam. A man about my age was about to take a picture of a group of teenagers with the lake in the background. All of them were well groomed, well behaved and wearing polo shirts and caps that said “Shepherdsfield” on them. Karen offered to take the picture for this man, so he could be in it as well. He was very grateful. “What’s Shepherdsfield?” I asked after the photo had clicked. “We’re a Christian community near Fulton, Missouri,” the man answered. “We’re on our Reward Trip. These young people have been working very hard all summer, and we’re taking them on a Reward Trip before school starts again.” My eyes locked with one of the young people....

Charlie Johnston's Followers take the Next Wrong Step

NOTE - On April 29, 2106, Charlie Johnston responded to this post and my previous one with outright lies, doing his best to libel me in the process. I go into detail about that here - Charlie Johnston Lies about Me - and I Admire Him for It! Charlie is one of the most outrageous frauds in the Catholic Church. He actually fascinates me - in a sad way. Read on ... Charlie Johnston is a false prophet. His archbishop has "strongly" advised Catholics to be cautious of him. His archbishop has also banned him from speaking in his own archdiocese. Charlie, in the great tradition of false prophets, has spun this warning to his own advantage , and Charlie's True Believers have rallied around him and have been guzzling the Kool-Aid since the bishop's letter and Charlie's spin appeared earlier this week. I posted about Charlie Johnston last fall , detailing at least one of his prophecies that have proven false, and detailing, from evidence on his Faceb...

A Note on my Religious Work

For those of you who know me from EWTN, the Society of GK Chesterton, the Prairie Troubadours or The St. Austin Review, I am no longer affiliated with any of those groups. "The truth will set you free" ( John 8:32 ) "To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." ( John 18:37 ) If we deny the truth, we are bad Christians and bad human beings. If we put our faith in a lie - including a Big Lie - we are bad Christians and bad human beings. If we endorse vulgarity, violence, bullying, gaslighting, fraud, irrational conspiracy theories, sedition and hate, we are bad Christians and bad human beings. Since March of 2020, I have felt like a character in the play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco. In that play, the bestial inhumanity of rhinoceroses becomes a fad and people start turning into them - willingly discarding reason and free will and mocking others who don...

Waiting for Godot to Leave

Search This Blog