Parish the Thought
Musings about the mission of Christ and his Church from Brooklyn.
"Is Sex the New Food?"
Posted by Matt Brown on Mar 22, 2009
In last Sunday's sermon on adultery I quoted from Mary Eberstadt's excellent article in Policy Review entitled "Is Food the New Sex?" which suggests that our culture has adopted moral sensibilities toward food that used to be reserved for sex. This is a particularly cogent apologetic in a borough as obsessed with food as Brooklyn has become. Again, I offer an excerpt:
"It is a curious coda that this transvaluation should not be applauded by the liberationist heirs of Nietzsche, even as their day in the sun seems to have come. According to them, after all, consensual sex is simply what comes naturally, and ought therefore to be judged value-free. But as the contemporary history outlined in this essay goes to show, the same can be said of overeating — and overeating is something that today’s society is manifestly embarked on re-stigmatizing. It may be doing so for very different reasons than the condemnations of gluttony outlined by the likes of Gregory the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas. But if indiscriminate sex can also have a negative impact — and not just in the obvious sense of disease, but in the other aspects of psyche and well-being now being written into the empirical record of the sexual revolution — then indiscriminate sex may be judged to need reining in, too."
Keep the Fast, Keep the Feast
Posted by Matt Brown on Mar 22, 2009
"Keep the Fast, Keep the Feast" by Peter Leithart is the best piece on Lent I've read in a long time. Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:
"Fasting looks like an enemy to life, but the opposite is true. We live abundantly only if we know how to fast—which is to say, only if we are disciplined to wait until the feast is ready. Lent trains us to be a people of patience and restraint, a people who rejoices in a God who has time and gives us time and makes us wait for the treasures He gives. Lent trains us to follow the Master who kept the fast. We must learn the lessons of Lent and the fast if we are going to be the people of the new Adam and not just another variation on the old."