sex on Half-Heartedness

Augustine of Hippo's (63AD-114) Confessions is widely considered to be one of the most important books ever written, some consider it the world’s first biography. Augustine's early life was ch...

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...

Give me chastity and continency—but not yet!

An elderly couple lies in bed. She is not satisfied with the distance between them. She reminds him, “When we were young, you used to hold my hand in bed.” He hesitates, but in a few moments a wrinkle...

A few years ago, a journalist named Joseph Blackman wrote an Op Ed on an interesting subject, “Why Clubs are Dark.” That is, why is it when you walk into a nightclub or a bar, the lights are off, or a...

Marriage is not a union, merely between two creatures - it is a union between two spirits; and the intention of that bond is to perfect the nature of both, by supplementing their deficiencies with the...

The tension between autonomy and intimacy is most clearly evidenced in the trend toward cohabitation. Today, between 50 and 70 percent of American couples are cohabiting before or instead of marrying....

In the Hebrew lexicon, there are multiple words for love, but one of my favorites is the word dod. Although it is often rendered “love,” dod refers specifically to sexual love and is better translated...

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...

Someone once quipped that we spend the first half of our lives struggling with the sixth commandment ( Thou shalt not commit adultery ) and the second half of our lives struggling with the fifth comma...

I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: “No good in a bed, but fine against a wall.

The church is often called a killjoy for protesting against sexual license. But the real killing of joy comes with the grabbing of pleasure. As with credit card usage. the price tag is hidden at the s...

I believe in God and the whole business, but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all.”

A few years ago, while celebrating our fifteenth wedding anniversary, my wife, Esther, and I stayed at the base of the twin mountains of Whistler and Blackcomb, the mammoth ski resort on Canada’s West...

Human sexuality includes more than hormones, organs, and orgasms; it runs through the psychic and spiritual ranges of our lives. We experience our sexuality on the spiritual level as a yearning for an...

I never met my father-in-law; he died when my wife was a young girl. But I admire him tremendously because of the intuition he had as a new husband. At church the day after his wedding, having consumm...

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.

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...

James Nelson describes sexuality as the central clue to what God is up to in the world. While this might seem a little over the top, when you think about it, sexuality factors integrally in our relati...

Maleness and femaleness is the fundamental way we carry our relational design. Interestingly, the English word sexuality comes from the Latin word sexus, which means “being divided, cut off, separated...

It’s easy to take off your clothes and have sex. People do it all the time. But opening up your soul to someone, letting them into your spirit, thoughts, fears, future, hopes, dreams… that is being na...

When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. One of the primary laws of human life is that you become l...

When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass – may pass in the first half hour – i...

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the ...

Marital love is a reflection of how God loves. It is free, total, faithful and fruitful.

The early church was strikingly different from the culture around it in this way - the pagan society was stingy with its money and promiscuous with its body. A pagan gave nobody their money and practi...

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...

In the early 1900s, a “respectable” woman wore an average of twenty-five pounds of clothing when she appeared in public. The sight of an ankle could cause scandal. Over the next hundred years the pend...

Seduction is never ugly in appearance.

Why was Christ so compassionate towards sexual sinners, especially women? Think of the woman caught in adultery. Think of the prostitute who wept at his feet. Could it be because Christ knew that thes...