desire on Sexual License

The late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck was convinced that buried in our explicit pursuit of sex is an implicit pursuit of God. He noted that sex is likely to be the closest that most people ever come to ...

G. K. Chesterton was on cue when he suggested that a man knocking on the door of a brothel is in fact looking for God.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignora...

Desire—eros, or erotic desire, to be more specific—kicked in pretty early in my life. I was often overwhelmed by a gnawing hunger and thirst I didn’t know how to handle. God bless my parents and my Ca...

We need to rescue “desire” from attempts to reduce its meaning to sexual libido and its increasingly murky associations with sexual abuse or sexual power games.

Unsurprisingly, whenever we bring the topic of desire into view, our imaginations easily wander in the direction of sex, which can be as discomforting as it is arousing—but it is certainly not irrelev...

Part of the suspicion of desire undoubtedly has to do precisely with the fact that it threatens a rational, controlled, and protected understanding of a mature human being.

Satan, like a fisher, baits his hook according to the appetite of the fish.

Desire alone, divorced from the will, ruins peoples’ lives time after time. In our public life and even among leaders of our denominations or church organizations, time after time we see a desire that...

Sin comes when we take a perfectly natural desire or longing or ambition and try desperately to fulfill it without God. Not only is it sin, it is a perverse distortion of the image of the Creator in u...

You follow your desires wherever they take you, and you approve of yourself so long as you are not obviously hurting anyone else. You figure that if the people around you seem to like you, you must be...

Desire lies at the heart of who God made us to be, who we are at our core. Desire is both our greatest frailty and the mark of our highest beauty. Our desire completes us as we become One with our Lov...

Pastor: For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. All: For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the...

Discipline leads us to desire, which matures into delight.

Have you ever played in a swimming pool and tried to hold a beach ball under the surface? Its tendency-you might even say its penchant and desire-is to rise to the surface. It is “restless” when it is...

The problem is that unless we feel free to own our desires in the first place, we will never learn how to recognise those that are more fruitful and healthy, let alone how to live out of the deepest d...

Desire is primal: to be human is to want

Years ago Wendy and I were out to dinner and she observed that something was different about our marriage in recent years, something good. She asked me if I had any insight into what it was. After ref...

Prayer of Adoration Great God our Father: You are good and You are strong. You are faithful and true, and You won’t tempt or lie to us. In a world that appeals to our sinful cravings and dominated b...

But you take pleasure in the faces Of those who know they thirst.

The desire to feel loved is the last illusion: let it go and you will be free

What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.

Heavenly Father, we confess that we desire many things in life, but that we are not always prepared to receive the things that you long to provide—the things that you know we need. Help us, by your Ho...

Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.

O Lord our God, grant us grace to desire you with our whole heart, that so desiring we may seek and find you; and so finding you we may love you; and loving you we may hate those sins from which you h...

"What is it you’re looking for in this endless quest? Tranquillity. You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there’ll b...

In her thought-provoking book, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes the tension in listening to our deepest desires: some of them these desires are integral to our identity, but they a...

In her engaging treatment, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes both the beauty and pain of seeing our own sinful nature: It is often true that once we are made to see, we don’t like w...

All of us live inside of an economy of desire.

Desire, if it’s to be trusted, should be inspired by a divine vocabulary.