Skip to main content

Several Shades of Sacred


For those mommies still reading Fifty Shades, might I suggest a follow up? The book is Style, Sex, and Substance: 10 Catholic WomenConsider the Things that Really Matter . Also watch trailer:http://vimeo.com/37515830 


 A review:


I recently read Style, Sex and Substance, a book featuring short essays about...style, sex and substance from ten Catholic women. The contributors will be familiar to anyone familiar with the Catholic blogosphere and include the likes of Hallie Lord, Jennifer Fulwiler, Simcha Fisher, Daniel Bean and Barabara Nicolosi. There essays confront important issues like how to approach sex (yes, with your spouse), what it means to be a Catholic woman in the world today and how to engage the culture we live in. For those who picture Catholics as having a bunker mentality, they will be surprised Without giving anything away, these essays do not encourage the exclusive use of the missionary position, treating the house like a cloistered convent or engaging the culture by throwing rosaries at passers by. No, these women are frank, honest, modern and deeply committed to the teachings of the Church. They are each in their own way models for the Catholic women of today. Not that they set themselves up as perfect. In fact, they are perfectly clear about how hard it is to find a balance in life and that doing so with five kids throwing their shows at each other in the minivan is even harder.
And yeah, I'm a guy and still enjoyed the book. For the most part, all of the advice in it would apply just as for men if you swap out the word "husband" and replace it with "wife."
And that brings me to my last point. The guys who write books for Catholic men could take a hint or two from these ladies. Don't be afraid to be funny for one. Yeah, it's cool to use the imagery of knighthood and battle, call us to imitation of St. Joseph and all that. Heck I'm a particular sucker for the knighthood imagery but it only goes so far. Make a good joke! About family life and the kids. Yes, you can just wind up complaining and that isn't a good thing but it doesn't mean we need to hide the fact that living out the Church's teaching is a pain in the neck sometimes. And for crying out loud, not every guy on the planet thinks sports is the most important thing in life after God and family. I may rank it in the top ten but it's near the bottom of that list.
In any case, no matter if you are a man or woman you should get this book. Even if you aren't Catholic, but are curious about what real Catholic women think about how real life and faith intertwine, you should get this book.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dancing With Mr. D: Grooming the Little Children

A former pro-transgender activist said she regretted her previous work in pro-transgender activism, adding she felt she was "indoctrinated" on gender ideology in an interview with  Fox News Digital.  "I started to realize that what I had been doing at my job at the LGBT Center, it was grooming," Kay Yang, a former employee of a location in New York, said. Grooming in this context means "to get into readiness for a specific objective." Kay works as a 'deprogrammer' to help parents and children who have been 'indoctrinated' by the 'cult-like' transgender agenda. Yang herself previously went by they/them and worked as a 'trans educator' in schools for years.  Listen to her testimony.    

Libido Redux: A Case of Mistaken Identity

Back in June of this year I wrote about Pope Francis' view of Gender identity : " Gender ideology is demonic!’”   said the Holy Father. One thinks of this statement wonders what the New York Times  thinks of t his statement by  a Pope they admire after running this piece on gender identity . The article tells of how  there are not only man and woman, but also other ‘genders;' furthermore: every person can choose his or her gender . Fr. Longenecker stands this on its head: " Well, call me old fashioned, but remember  Humanae Vitae?  The underlying teaching was a defense of the essentials of human sexuality. Basically “sex is for babies” and if you separate sex from babies all sorts of monstrous things will come about. When sex becomes more about recreation than pro creation people become confused about what sex is for, and if they’re confused about what sex is for, then they soon become confuse...

The 21st Century Must Come Into the Church

Continued from September 14.... T hrough the Church’s teachings, God has also revealed his truth on how humanity can live happily. What is so little understood by Catholics and Christians is that doctrinal revelations that come through the Church come out of God’s very Self. They are not tied to culturally constructed norms! Read Vatican II’s   Dei Verbum : “by divine revelation God wished to manifest and communicate both himself and the eternal decrees of his will concerning the salvation of humankind.” Our Lord’s Church derives its basic vision not from mere human speculation, which would be tentative and uncertain, but from God’s own testimony—from a historically given divine revelation.  Thus Catholics believe that just as God himself is immutable, so, too, are His teachings as revealed through the Church because they come from him. As I discuss in my book, although the Church does not change its central teachings, we do see the theological principle of “devel...

Are We in a War?

Power Line POSTED ON   NOVEMBER 22, 2020   BY   JOHN HINDERAKER  IN  DEMOCRATS ,  LIBERALS ,  SOCIALISM FIGHTING WORDS, BY DAVID HOROWITZ Our friend David Horowitz wrote this essay, which he titled “Fighting Words.” It is a call for freedom-loving Americans to fight back against the totalitarian Left. By now it should be obvious – even to conservatives – that we are in a war. It is a conflict that began nearly fifty years ago when the street revolutionaries of the Sixties joined the Democrat Party. Their immediate goal was to help the Communist enemy win the war in Vietnam, but they stayed to expand their influence in the Democrat Party and create the radical force that confronts us today. The war that today’s Democrats are engaged in reflects the values and methods of those radicals. It is a war against us – against individual freedom, against America’s constitutional order, and against the capitalist engine of our prosperity. Democrat radi...

Libido Redux: Germain Grisez on Vatican II

Germain Grisez For 30 years, until 2009, Germain Grisez   was professor of Christian Ethics at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Md. He is one of America’s most respected Catholic philosophers. He began his career teaching ethics at Georgetown in 1959. His 1965 book  Contraception and the Natural Law  was an important part of the debate over contraception, and he assisted Jesuit Father John Ford when Pope Paul VI called on him to serve on the Pontifical Commission for Population, Family and Birthrate prior to the drafting of the 1968 encyclical  Humanae Vitae . Both men's writings provided a counterpoint to those who suggested that birth control was not an intrinsic evil and the choice to use it should left to couples, and were instrumental in research for my chapter on Catholic sexual moral teaching.  His magnum opus ,  The Way of the Lord Jesus Christ , can be found both  online and in  print . He recently discussed the Second Va...

Pray for Papa Bergoglio

I s the Holy Father being "sifted like wheat" of late? I ask this because he has made some interesting remarks of late, such as: Pastors should not be “putting our noses into the moral life of other people.” Isn't there the requirement that confessors and a pastors priests have some sense of the moral life of those to whom they minister?  S econdly,  during a question-and-answer session , Francis spoke of a “pastoral cruelty,” such as priests who refuse to baptize the children of young single mothers. “They’re animals,” he said . Most priests are very generous in extending baptism to infants, realizing that they are not responsible for the sins or shortcomings of their parents. Those who do, at times, delay baptism do so for other reasons, such as little evidence for a well-founded hope that the child will be raised in the faith. There  are  some prudential judgments to be made and pastors are required to make them (see canon 868).  ...

This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News

DANCING WITH MR. D:   This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News : 'via Blog this'

What God Hath Joined Together...

A recent 2016 study of suicide risk from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a 24% increase in suicides in the United States over the 15-year period between 1999 and 2014,      including a tripling of the suicide rate for females 10-14, this in a culture that posits that all family structures are the same. Research on the children of divorce provides overwhelming evidence to disprove the myth that divorce does not harm children.  In fact, the divorce epidemic has contributed to the serious and growing psychopathology in American youth. One example is the 2010 study of American adolescent psychopathology published in 2010: 49 percent of the 10,000 teenagers studied met the criteria for one psychiatric disorder and 40 percent met the criteria for two disorders. Research by Penn State sociologist Paul Amato (2005) on the long-term damage to children from divorce demonstrated that, if the United States enjoyed the same level of famil...

Who is Behind the Church That Never was?

At the close of Vatican II, Pope Paul VI remarked that Christianity, the religion of God-Incarnate, had encountered the religion of man-made God. He was of the opinion that much of the Council was given over to demonstrating the compatibility of Enlightenment belief with Catholicism. 4 Several years hence, on June 29, 1972, Paul delivered another assessment of the state of the Roman Catholic Church since the close of Vatican II. As Cardinal Silvio Oddi recalled it (in an article first published on March 17, 1990, in Il Sabato magazine in Rome) the Holy Father told a congregation: We have the impression that through some cracks in the wall the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God: it is doubt, uncertainty, questioning, dissatisfaction, confrontation. And how did this come about? We will confide to you the thought that may be, we ourselves admit in free discussion, that may be unfounded, and that is that there has been a power, an adversary power. Let us call him by his n...

A Book for all Seasons

  Decades as a Christian leader — most notably at the U.N. as president of the Center for Family & Human Rights — have earned writer Austin Ruse, once a Washington liberal with little faith, his share of defeats and triumphs. Perhaps most valuably, he has intuited keen tactical insights from his confrontations with the dark side of human nature. You come away from this groundbreaking book with the sense that Ruse knows the enemy better than the enemy knows himself.  In Under Seige, Ruse carefully examines how the anti-Christian forces gained power over every elite institution in America. He exposes their most deviant plans for the future. He then issues his authoritative call to arms, brilliantly arguing that there is no finer time to be a faithful Catholic. God Himself called each of us to live in this time and place, to contribute to the renewal society and the Church, and to vanquish the enemies of civilization. Ruse argues that each of us is called specifically to th...