I love this passage by Schnitker:  There should be no such thing as a "sex life".  There is "married life" and within it, the many expressions of love  which includes the renewal of the wedding vows. I have written  extensively  on how failure to internalize the truth of this message has befuddles complementarity of male and female. Read more here .

From The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God: Cardinal Wojtyla had warned in preaching the papal retreat in 1976 of “rebellion,” i.e., the apostasy of the present age, the source for the present crisis of faith facing the Church. I believe it is consistent with Church teaching on spiritual warfare to see in St. Paul’s “son of perdition” one who would lead humanity away from the Church toward a humanist, man-centered world-view claiming the right of authorship of the moral law. This also explains why those who dissent from Church doctrine and the authority of the magisterium claim an amorphous “spirit of Vatican II” (an “anti-word?”) as their authority for what amounts to unbelief. In our own time the reader perhaps has experienced the war for the soul of men waged between the authentic Christian humanism of the Gospel, which permeates the teaching of John Paul the Great, and the “new humanism” which violates the rights of God as true Author of all that is good. This "Spi...

In my book I wrote of pornography as one crack through which the forces of evil enter the culture, which has been pornified, and it shapes our assumptions about identity, sexuality, the value of women and the nature of relationships. Countless Christian men struggle with the addictive power of porn. But common spiritual approaches of more prayer and accountability groups are often of limited help. In this book neuroscientist and researcher William Struthers explains how pornography affects the male brain and what we can do about it. Because we are embodied beings, viewing pornography changes how the brain works, how we form memories and make attachments. By better understanding the biological realities of our sexual development, we can cultivate healthier sexual perspectives and interpersonal relationships. Struthers exposes false assumptions and casts a vision for a redeemed masculinity, showing how our sexual longings can actually propel us toward sanctification and holiness in o...

I believe Paul VI would have been greatly saddened had he lived to see all that developed in the final decades of the third millennium, and not just his warnings on his infamous encyclical. The crisis of authority which grew out of the response to Humanae Vitae in the United States ....But all the news is not bad news. Consider a recent article which reports: “….a different problem has crept up: More adult women are forgoing birth control, a trend that has experts puzzled - and alarmed about a potential rise in unintended pregnancies.” -from The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God For an update on this phenomenon, women instinctively intuiting the unnatural contraceptive experience, see here!  

In the preface to Smoke I recalled:  .... observing from my pew prior to the 6:30 am Mass in 1958 the Sisters entering St. Eugene’s from the front-side entrance of the Church, special to them for access from their one-room convent in the adjoining school. It was winter, and the church was dimly-lit. They entered with awe-inspiring reverence, processing in their full habits, the beads of their waist-draped rosaries colliding gently, genuflecting and kneeling in silent preparation for the soon to occur reenactment in a non-bloody manner of Our Lord’s eternal sacrifice first offered on Calvary for our salvation, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.   The latent aroma of incense and the sight of fresh beeswax candles flickering on the altar, together with the sisters’ silent reverence and obvious practice of what they taught their first graders - the importance of reverence in the House of God - is an impression which not only convinced me that Jesus lived there (in the Tabernacl...