I had the privilege a few weeks ago of speaking together with Anthony Esolen at the Illinois Family Institute. His talk was fantastic — he has the kind of subtlety that is vigorous, lively, understandable, and brave. He is not like that scribesnpharisees seminar prof doing nuance to beat the band, watching his own hand as it languidly gestures toward the mahogany wainscot, the wainscot that, incidentally, was bought and paid for by some evangelical donor a hundred and fifty years ago. No — to lurch wildly to a different metaphor — his subtlety is the kind that a fencing master shows just before your foil flies across the room, and you find yourself rubbing your wrist.
While I was there in Chicago, I picked up this book of his, Defending Marriage, one that I did not have, and am pleased to mention it to you all as my next book of the month. It is simply magnificent. This robust defense of marriage as marriage is, I think, the best thing to pick up if you want to defend marriage against its barbarian critics, or simply if you want to stirred up to love and good works in your own marriage. Fantastico. Arresting. Superb. Smashing. Did I mention that I like it?
On the subject of marriage, not only has secularism kidnapped us all, duck-taped our hands and feet, and thrown us into the trunk of their car, as we are going down the road it slowly dawns on us that we are in the trunk of a clown car escaping from the circus.
The subtitle is “Twelve Arguments for Sanity.” Each chapter tackles a different argument — on why we must not give the sexual revolution the force of irrevocable law, why we must not grant that sexual gratification is a personal matter only, why we should not give godlike powers to the state, and so on.
This book is instructive, helpful, and invigorating. It is moving. It is everything a book on marriage needs to be — political, cultural, spiritual, and personal. In fact, I can’t believe you don’t have it yet.
Excellent, thank you.
really do not understand your anti gay marriage stance, when your own daughter lives in a gender fluid relationship with her husband
there is no male and female
she is the provider, she leads, she spends her time blogging while her husband runs the home and looks after the kids…
if male and female can be so easily swapped and still be called biblical ( only a husband who runs the home is worth submitting too…)
clearly God does not care about male and female…
So did you know that bearing false witness is still a sin even when attempting to promote a very conservative view of roles in marriage?
Yes, it’s actually true that it is, and Ben Merkle is president of New St. Andrews College — hardly “running the home” and failing to be a provider. And what makes you think she leads?
I wasn’t aware that blogging and selling
sashes to the merchantsdesigner fabrics online was unwifely behavior. Who knew?oh please,this ain’t a time where everyone has servants and nannies if a woman works full time and blogs out of that time her husband is doing the homemaking and looking after the kids the P31 woman that is described had a string of servants and was brilliant at managing them… ( rich wife!!) even worse is the other woman Jankovic boasting how she makes her husband work and then come home and do all the homemaking because she is pregnant please women in other parts of the world and in the past would scoff at her laziness also pregnancy… Read more »
Are you completely making stuff up? Who is “working full time” here, besides her husband, who is working at his job full time? The P31 woman had a string of servants — the modern woman has a stove that turns on at the turnn of a knob, a dishwasher, an automatic washer and dryer, disposable diapers, a supermarket, and a car. It’s ridiculous to say that P31 had more free time on her hands for things other than scrubbing and changing diapers, because she had servants. She also had orders of magnitude more hands-on labor due to the lack of… Read more »
Bekah teaches. At the school where all of her children attend. There are no unattended toddlers running around. And she has written a whopping total of eight blog posts in the past year.
The thought of Rachel “making” Luke do anything other than be a happy man is pretty hilarious.
Dude, whatever you’re smoking, try a new dealer next time. The one you’re using clearly doesn’t have quality merchandise.
OK, OK, I get that Pastor Doug is fairly treated under internet rules as a combatant, so his alleged pastoral malpractice(s) are fair game. But how do his children qualify as legit targets? No Christian attains perfection in this world, so not even the Pope himself (any of them, not singling out this one) falling short on sex or marriage (or anything else) means that somehow the whole Catholic Church is wrong about marriage or female priests or gay priests (or anything else). That some TV minister gets caught doing strange field touch-and-goes with his church secretary does not prove… Read more »
Whaa…??? Where did you get such a story? Are you confusing some other woman with Doug’s daughters, because it bears no resemblance to the women I know, or their quite gainfully employed husbands.