Critiquing Christopher West
As a long time “chastity speaker” and recent author (How Far Can We Go? A Catholic Guide to Sex and Dating, Novalis 2009, Paulist Press 2011), I am often asked my view of other, better known, workers in this corner of the Lord’s vineyard. Christopher West is inevitably at the top of the list. In the sorts of forums this question gets asked, there is rarely time for any kind of in-depth analysis and so my response generally looks something like: “He does a lot of good work. I wouldn’t say everything in exactly the way he says it, but he seems to be helping a lot of people.”
Critiquing Chris West is dicey business. First of all, we live in a culture that produces confusion and trauma in the arena of sexuality at an alarming rate. For a Catholic to critique another Catholic who has devoted his life to helping people in this context requires some tact. Many people live healthier, more integrated sexual lives because of Chris West’s work.
Secondly, as Dawn Eden recently discovered, West has powerful friends. Eden wrote a (publicly available) Master’s thesis critiquing West and Dr. Janet Smith came out swinging in his defense. (Smith has since taken her critique down, though excerpts from it, along with a pretty balanced analysis, can be found over at Aggie Catholics. Eden’s friend, the indomitable Steve Kellmeyer, has responded to Dr. Smith in his typical fashion over at The Fifth Column.) If I were Dawn Eden I’d feel a little in over my head right now, though she seems to be taking it in stride.
Here’s the thing: though I am hesitant to rail too loudly against someone who is helping so many people, and though I certainly don’t want to have to face down Chris West’s defenders in some sort of Catholic media tempest, I have never been able to fully endorse his program. Vox Nova readers may have noticed oblique critiques of West’s presentation in some of my early posts here and here. And when the whole Schindler, von Hildebrand thing broke, I watched with baited breath, hoping someone with a bit more weight than I would be able to articulate my problems with West’s work.
It didn’t take. It’s not that I thought Schindler and von Hildebrand were wrong, and I certainly didn’t think they were jealous, but their criticisms were not my criticisms. West’s risque language had never been what bothered me about his presentation. It’s just that he seems so, well, hokey.
Now I know that being hokey isn’t an indictable offense. In fact, my sense that such a critique was too superficial is what kept me from saying it out loud until just now. But perhaps being too hokey has pastoral implications that we should be careful about? It wasn’t until I came across some lesser-known literature critiquing West that I was finally able to name the issue: West’s celestial rhetoric about sex, God, and the meaning of life never seems to touch the ground. This resonated with me. The reason “hokey” is pastorally problematic is because “hokey” isn’t enough when real people in real relationships have real problems. Rereading my old posts, it is easy to see that this was my real issue, even if I didn’t name it.
You may not have heard of David Cloutier, William Mattison III, or David McCarthy. They are relatively young, especially Cloutier and Mattison, and they are not popularizers, though McCarthy’s Sex and Love in the Home has sold well enough to warrant a second edition. (I would not be surprised if we soon hear similar news of Cloutier’s Love Reason and God’s Story: An Introduction to Catholic Sexual Ethics or Mattison’s Introducing Moral Theology: True Happiness and the Virtues. They are both excellent.) These are not the types to hold press conferences. Nevertheless, their comparatively low profile did not prevent them from approaching Chris West’s work from just the angle I was looking for.
The high-profile attacks on West (Schindler, von Hildebrand, Eden, Kellmeyer) have all come from the right (in Kellmeyer’s case, the extreme right), the place where West and his allies are thought to stand. These lesser-known scholars, while supportive of Church teaching in the area of sexual ethics, are not so easy to place on the spectrum. Their critiques don’t so much come from right or left, but from below. And they ask some tough questions that I think are worth looking at. I will finish this post with a couple quotes from their work to give you a sense of their concerns.
In the collected volume, Leaving and Coming Home: New Wineskins for Catholic Sexual Ethics (edited by Cloutier), David McCarthy has a piece titled “Cohabitation and Marriage.” On pages 135-136 he writes:
“West’s personalism is rhetorical rather than epistemological. This point is not necessarily a criticism; rhetoric is important as “public speaking.” In this regard, West’s work is impressive for its attention to sexual practices. He faces up to questions that most of us keep private. His Good News about Sex and Marriage deals with a host of difficult questions: the line between sensual contact and sexual intercourse, masturbation, pornography, oral sex and stimulation, and anal intercourse as foreplay. The appeal of his personalism, it seems to me, is that it offers a public language for talking about sex. There are limits, however. . . . West’s personalism does not extend to difficulties in marriage and what might count as reasons for separation (leaving aside the question of divorce). It does not help with the ongoing struggles of marriage, like raising children, maintaining a home, and figuring out how to pay for cars and school clothes. The ready answer to relationship and practical questions seems to be, for West, a constant return to the sexual act and to the “I do” moment of the marriage vows. (The sexual act is a reliving of the “I do” moment.) For people looking to be married for decades, this kind of personalism will not be of help for very long, probably not past the honeymoon period when sex is the center of the relationship. The real trajectory of West’s personalism is objective conformity to the teachings of the Church. Yet, he does not use these teachings and the Church’s claims about marriage to give a practical picture of how marriage, from day-to-day and year-to-year, looks different than cohabitation, other than the dishonesty of the sexual act. Certainly, the difference extends to the interpersonal and social character of the relationship as a whole. West gives us a definition of sex that shows the failing of sex within cohabitation as an instance of non-marital sex, but he does not attend to the ways that the practices of marriage (apart from the sexual act itself) are different than cohabitation.”
In short, in order to maintain the Catholic position that marriage is a radically different kind of relationship than cohabitation, those interested in defending Church teaching (and West is interested in nothing if not in that) need to look at more than the sexual aspect of the relationship.
In the same volume, Cloutier and Mattison co-author a piece titled, “Bodies Poured Out in Christ: Marriage Beyond the Theology of the Body.” Here are a couple lengthy quotes:
“[West] makes the challenge of embodied self-giving love too easy, reducing the problem of sin to a matter of sexual selfishness vs. self-giving, and presenting the life-giving alternative to sin as intense and private ecstatic moments. The lifelong practice of self-giving love involves struggle and pain and sacrifice that is not simply about controlling (in West’s favorite phrase) “the urge to merge.” Sexual lust is not the primary problem; our real challenge is loving the people we find around us in all their embodied brokenness.
In this way, we believe that TOB is insufficiently prophetic in its challenge to the privatized “SuperRelationsip” ideal of the culture. Our objection is not informed by pessimism about the possibilities of sexual self-giving, nor is it an attempt to dismiss the teaching of Humanae vitae. Rather, the myopic fixation on sexual purity is an importantly incomplete story of married discipleship and the challenges to it in contemporary culture. Yes, it is a strong antidote to the culture of “lust,” and in particular bodily objectification. But though redeemed life in Christ is indeed marked by a healing of our disintegrated and lustful desires that free us to give of ourselves, that self-giving love is exemplified not primarily in ecstatic/transcendent moments such as sex or wedding vows but in the service to each other in our brokenness that Christ exemplified and called his disciples to do the same.” [Pages 219-22]
and
“Because of the absence of any articulation of the social mission of the Christian family, West’s presentation further supports the inward-looking, consumption-oriented, privatized practice of marriage already dominant in most American households. He would do well to attend to the lengthy and substantial presentation of this social mission provided by John Paul himself in his 1980 exhortation Familiaris Consortio and 1994′s Letter to Families. In these works, the call to love other bodies through the works of mercy moves beyond the family circle. Unfortunately these themes are not incorporated into the Pope’s own Theology of the Body, and thus West’s presentation is a very plausible way of reading these particular texts. When the social mission is omitted, TOB makes couples think they can live a closed, consumer lifestyle to the hilt, for example – so long as their sex life conforms to the views of the church. A full presentation of John Paul’s own theology of marriage would lead West to a less privatized view of marriage, where the shared mission and social bonds formed in the community would serve as supports to the couple, as well as a calling to them in the life of their marriage. This would be a truly prophetic call in a culture of consumerism. But perhaps such a call is avoided because it would prove so “unpopular” among West’s intended audiences, who may share the culture’s highly privatized, “closed” version of the household.
When Jesus shows his glory on the mount of the transfiguration, Peter (whom the gospels tell us was so overwhelmed he didn’t know what he was saying) wants to stay and even build houses to dwell on the mountain. But Christians are not allowed to dwell on the mountain, nor in Eden. With its focus on sexual self-giving and purity, TOB threatens to leave its audience on the mount of the transfiguration rather than exhorting them to follow Christ down the mountain to serve the broken bodies of the world, even to the point of death. Christ’s own example reveals that Christian discipleship is more about laying down one’s life in embodied self-giving love than it is about the peak experiences. We worry that TOB’s audience will be left disillusioned and ill-prepared for sacramental marriage. They may find themselves in marriages where self-giving embodied love within the family is understood too narrowly, and furthermore fails to extend beyond the family itself to the world outside.
In defining embodied self-giving love so narrowly, TOB risks giving us the perishable bread of the culture, which we eat but which does not ultimately satisfy, rather than the real bread of Christ’s Body which does not perish. That real eucharist consists of seeing our mutual donation of our bodies to each other in marriage as a commitment not just in the bedroom, but in the entire common life of the marriage. We give our bodies to our spouses not simply for the spouse, but in order to become more fully Christ’s Body. That Body is not one that gives to others and to the world primarily through sex, but rather through pouring itself out in radical service typified in the works of mercy. TOB’s fixation on the body solely in the bedroom is like a fixation on the Body solely at the consecration: crucial, but incomplete on its own.” [Pages 223-224]
The Chris West wars have generated much heat and little light, in part because the cult of personality surrounding the man himself gives such a personal touch to the critiques and defenses. There has been too much said and written that doesn’t deal with the real issue here, namely, how does the the Theology of the Body help us to live like Christians. The work of scholars like McCarthy, Cloutier, and Mattison, in my view, introduces some sanity into the debate.
Brett Salkeld is a doctoral student in theology at Regis College in Toronto. He is a father of two (so far) and husband of one. He is the co-author of How Far Can We Go? A Catholic Guide to Sex and Dating.
Comments are closed.
It can be fair to tell someone they have omitted an important point. In another sense, if someone says they propose to set out to talk about sex, it’s fair for them to actually focus on sex. Whether West, and JPII, *never* talk about the social mission of the family is an empirical question that can be verified, albeit not easily, simply by looking at their entire body of work. I suspect and have vague recollections that they do discuss it. I believe that at leat the TOB’s treatment of celibacy mentions service, so I suspect the Pope’s treatment of the issue is more than in passing in the other portions of his lectures. Perhaps the criticism is that they don’t mention it enough. For JPII, that criticism is blunted further by FC and the Letter to Families themselves, which are part of his body of work beyond the TOB lectures but in close relationship with them.
Thanks for the humble and sober post about yet another Catholic tempest in a teapot. Isn’t it funny how people who all hold what would be regarded in our culture as an extremely conservative position on sex (i.e. it’s only licit between a married man and women who are not using contraceptives) can disagree so vehemently.
You’ve clarified a lot of my own intuitions about popularizations of Theology of the Body. Thanks!
Oops, That’s a married man and woman…there’s a mean joke about other religions in here somewhere, but I’ll control myself.
No attacks on the web are more fierce than conservatives who think that other conservatives are not conservative enough. Kellmeyer is quite breathtaking.
Matt,
I don’t disagree with your general observation. But I do think that West and his follower’s penchant for making TOB about the whole meaning of life does open them to the criticism that other essential things in the Christian life need to be included. The rhetoric is awfully big for them to be excused simply because the topic is narrow.
As for JP II, he definitely makes the connections outside of TOB. I would note that the first analysis of the TOB in English (LeVoir and Hogan’s Covenant of Love) even included Laborem Exercens alongside Familiaris Consortio.
the lengthy and substantial presentation of this social mission provided by John Paul himself in his 1980 exhortation Familiaris Consortio and 1994′s Letter to Families. In these works, the call to love other bodies through the works of mercy moves beyond the family circle. Unfortunately these themes are not incorporated into the Pope’s own Theology of the Body
It would be nice if folks who claim to be knowledgable did not have such a constricted and myopic and WRONG conception of what it is they are talking about.
Anyone who bothers to consult these documents can abundantly see that Familiaris Consortio and the Letter to Families incorporate and include JP2′s Theology of the Body.
TOB is NOT an isolated teaching, much less a teaching restricted to human sexuality. TOB is not an island. Rather, TOB is infused throughout the whole of JP2′s thought and writings and homilies. TOB is not a single topic, it is, as its name implies an entire theology, a theology on the fundamental nature of man and of God, which sheds light on the entirety of the Faith.
Brett wrote “in order to maintain the Catholic position” I didn’t know it existed and it must be pretty “hokey” because you have to maintain it! Is there pictures?
(I couldn’t let this quote go especially in a blog post by you critiquing one’s view on sex)
Old friend,
Nice of you to stop by. I’d recognize that grin anywhere. I think you mean “Are there pictures?” ;)
For what it’s worth, I totally agree that West is hokey. I’d go so far to say that he is effeminate and almost weird in his presentation style.
I do not agree, however, that West has generated more heat than light. Most people are totally oblivious to Church teaching about sexuality, and probably even more people actively oppose and/or ignore it. West has done a lot to combat this widespread ignorance, even if it is, as I would put it, in a weird (maybe even uncomfortable) way.
Janet Smith’s critique is still online and can be found at the Catholic Education Resource Center site.
TOB has a lot of implications and is not certainly not restricted to the sexual sphere.
But we’re still at the beginning of unpacking it. It will take years to do so. To me it seems a little early to start criticizing others who are trying to unpack it. Mr West was one of the first and deserves credit for that. Certainly he won’t be the last.
Zach,
By “Chris West wars” I meant the controversies in the blogosphere and elsewhere about his work. Many of those debates/shouting matches have generated more heat than light.
Mack,
I think there is a difference between critiquing and criticizing. Cloutier, Mattison and McCarthy approach this as scholars offering critiques of another’s work. This is pretty standard and is done all the time in academia. One of the problems with the cult of personality surrounding West is that every time someone suggests West could improve something, it is spun as a personal criticism. Now Dawn Eden’s work definitely comes close to crossing the line, but not these three.
Fortunately, West himself is very gracious towards those offering criticisms. (Even hokey!) The air would be a lot clearer if some of his more rabid supporters took the same attitude.
Thanks for the tip on the Smith article, btw.
Oh, I’m a dunce. I didn’t read this carefully enough. My apologies.
But yeah!
I think this is my basic position on West also. I’ve tried to dress it up as ‘he over-simplifies and neglects important clarifications’ from time to time, but, really, there is no way for anyone trying to do his job not too oversimplify. To me, it is mostly a matter of taste; and I think most of the attacks on West have ignored or downplayed the fact that he is speaking and teaching popularized apologetics rather than academic theology. It does trouble me somewhat that people who should be on more or less the same side seem so disposed to write scathing condemnations of each other.
Good post. I’m generally a fan of West for the reason Zach mentioned (ie, West has done a lot to combat widespread ignorance of Church teaching about sexuality). But I think the message in Brett’s quotes is extremely important – I don’t think West would disagree with it but I wonder whether West could do a better job of emphasizing it. The more difficult and more challenging, yet more praiseworthy and more sanctifying, aspect of marriage is not the pure self-gift in sexual intercourse; it is the pure self-gift in a non-sexual manner done with no expectation of (and often no receipt of) reward or benefit or gratitude in return.
NB: Although Janet Smith’s critique of Dawn Eden was removed from Catholic Exchange (I do not know why), it is still available here: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/sexuality/se0207.htm
The more difficult and more challenging, yet more praiseworthy and more sanctifying, aspect of marriage is not [1] the pure self-gift in sexual intercourse; it is [2] the pure self-gift in a non-sexual manner done with no expectation of (and often no receipt of) reward or benefit or gratitude in return.
Thales,
If, as I understand the Church to teach, same-sex couples are not capable of 1, would they nevertheless be capable of 2?
I do not want to hijack this thread, so I beg everyone not to turn this into a discussion of same-sex marriage. But I am interested in the answer from Thales on this one question.
Just in general, I remember a discussion at the Newman Center when I was in college (Ohio State University) in which a Paulist Priest (if memory serves me) told this story. There was some kind of academic gathering at which someone read his paper explicating this Robert Frost poem:
After the presenter went on at great length finding deep meanings and allusions and insights in the poem, Robert Frost (who was present) spoke up and said that while the presentation was all well and good, actually he had written the poem because he was walking through the woods one day feeling low, and when a bird kicked some snow on his head, it momentarily brightened his mood.
Isn’t there always a possibility of overintellectualizing? Full disclosure: All I know of TOB comes from reading this article by Luke Timothy Johnson, and he says:
Thank you to David for the pre-emptive strike against “hijacking the thread.”
I any case, readers might be interested to know that following the claim “Our objection is not informed by pessimism about the possibilities of sexual self-giving, nor is it an attempt to dismiss the teaching of Humanae vitae.” Mattison and Cloutier have a footnote that says:
“We take Luke Timothy Johnsons’s well-known critique, “Disembodied,” to be one that, while paying some attention to issues of experience, ends up with a primary focus on opposing TOB due to its reinforcing (poorly, he believes) the teaching against artificial birth control. While our argument is somewhat sympathetic to Johnson’s concerns about actual experience, we think his claim that “none of [love's] grandeur or giddiness” (112) appears in these talks misses the real problem of privatizing romantic love. And besides, West’s work show how the pope’s “purity” can be made all too “grand”!”
I have a question for Brett (and for anyone else for that matter).
Does it make sense to read JPII’s TOB as essentially a systematic-theological manifestation of his usual predilection for embracing modern culture with outstreched and optimistic arms, and only then worrying (once the embrace has been made) how it’s all going to work out doctrinally in the end?
It seems to me (and apparently to others) that TOB accepts the goodness and rightness of what is essentially a modern and romantic ideal of marriage as one of self-fulfillment, finding one’s love, the joy of sex, etc. and then tries to show how this romantic ideal is theologically justifiable.
I don’t know if JPII has the same obsession with genitalia that West sometimes seems prone to, but I *do* want to note that locating erotic love *in* the sexual drive, and ultimately in the genitals, is a relatively recent phenomenon. The classical and medieval psycho-physiology of eros placed the locus of eros within the eye, such that one’s perception of beauty was filtered (1) from the outside (2) through the eye and (3) into the soul. Thus erotic desire could manifest itself sexually but was not sexual at its base. (See Debora Shuger’s The Renaissance Bible 167-191 for an excellent discussion).
Reading West (I’ve not made it through TOB itself), I find that he uncritically accepts a post-Freudian idolization of genital sexuality as grounding eros. This is seriously problematic.
It sounds a little simplistic to criticize the TOB (West aside) as failing to emphasize the social giving in marriage. JPII’s premise is man as self-gift. He applies it to sex but not in a narrow way, and in fact to extend it back to social aspects of marriage, tying the conjugal act back into man’s social nature. There’s no divorce between the conjugal aspect and the social aspect of marriage in reality or in the TOB, nor can it be said that the conjugal aspect is not such a big deal. We’re all made for self-gift; marriage is the particular thing that is defined by self-gift being in the context of conjugal life. Maybe someone might say West makes *too* big a deal of sex. But sex is itself *a* big deal, practically and theologically, and it deserves specific reflection. The TOB, like the Church’s general teaching, emphasizes the connectedness between the conjugal self gift and the social. Indissolubility is just one important teaching on self gift outside the bedroom. And it seems to me that the TOB and the Church emphasize the most fundamental connection between the conjugal and social self giftedness of marriage. Maybe it only seems that way to me because several of those connectednesses are running around my house. The family is the first society. It’s somewhat ironic for the Church to be criticized by various voices for on the one hand too enthusiastically linking sex to procreation and child-rearing and the society of the family so as to allegedly improperly fail to affirm sexual experiences outside indissoluble non-contraceptive male-female marriage, and on the other hand for supposedly neglecting the not directly sexual self-giving inherent in man’s sexual nature, which she teaches regardless of the circumstances and even as a way to understand celibacy for the kingdom.
Good post, and touching on some of the reasons why I too feel a bit put off by West (hokeyness and excessive “this explains it all” focus), while at that same time acknowledging the importance of his work in making people aware of Church teaching in the first place, and providing a framework for understanding and accepting it.
I think some of the problem is probably context. West’s message is a helpful start if one is coming from thinking that either the Church simply teaches that sex is icky if not wicked, or if one thinks that sex has no relation to morality or metaphysical realities but is just “that thing we do”. Given that in various times and places these problems are moderately widespread, West can be good medicine for them.
However, once you get past those misconceptions, it does strike me that West’s approach tends to both over-emphasize the place of sex within a marital relationship, and also over-idealize sex in such a way that may not fit well with lived reality much of the time.
As such, his work can function as a good corrective, but it certainly isn’t a fully formed philosophy of sex or marriage. I’m not clear to what extent he means it to be such.
…for just two examples among many possible ones, I don’t think reflections like the following and its development in TOB can be said to neglect man’s social self giving–it seems to me that they do the opposite, by establishing a primordial character to self-gift and communion.
http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/jp2tb9.htm
“…Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion….”
See also
http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/jp2tb14.htm
“…The human body, oriented interiorly by the sincere gift of the person, reveals not only its masculinity or femininity on the physical plane, but reveals also such a value and such a beauty as to go beyond the purely physical dimension of sexuality….”
WJ,
I’ll let others respond to your full concerns, but I will note that, in my reading of TOB itself, I did not personally find JPII nearly as concerned with genitals (and fluid produced by them) as West. More than one person has commented to me that West seems oddly fascinated by genitals and semen.
I’ll go ahead and play devil’s advocate about all this importance of sexuality stuff. For a very long time, the ethics of sex were best understood in conjunction with and as similar to the ethics of eating. This is not only true for the late classical world, but for the world of Antony and the desert monks. Heck, even today gluttony and lust are paired vices. In the middle ages, sex was something that was either to be admitted as a natural human foible or something that needed some regulation; but it was never so important as to make it the *center* of one’s ethical and or spiritual understanding of oneself.
My own sense is that the emphasis on sexual morality–whether in a postive or negative sense–in pastoral circles these days is the double function of (1) technology and (2) our post-Victorian (and Freudian) obsession with the sexual as revealing the “truth’ about the person. I just don’t buy any of it, I guess. And so I’m deeply suspicious of the elevation of the sexual (both in a positive and negative sense,again) that is so commonplace today.
In any case, why does theology of the body focus on sex instead of eating? Gluttony and Lust have long been paired vices, and there is historical precedent for treating eating and sex analogously in moral theology.
WJ,
For the record, that’s why I think that a Church that has stopped fasting doesn’t “get” NFP.
And it wouldn’t hurt for some bishop to write a pastoral letter on gluttony given the stats we’ve all seen.
I doubt the porn epidemic and the obesity epidemic are unrelated. Consumerism anyone?
David,
Yes, everyone is capable (and called to) “the pure self-gift in a non-sexual manner done with no expectation of (and often no receipt of) reward or benefit or gratitude in return.” The easiest example of this is Mother Teresa as she describes it in her writings and as seen in her actions. The essence of love in all of its forms is self-giving.
So, yes, two members of the same sex are capable of this self-gift, just as two members of opposite sex – like a man and his hospitalized grandmother – are capable of it. But this type of self-gift doesn’t constitute a sacramental marriage.
Thales,
Thank you very much. I like your answer.
Brett,
Agreed on the *actual* TOB. The problem is that “Theology of the Body” is kind of like Thomism (or almost any ism, once it’s out of the box).
There is 1) the actual series of lectures by JPII, which are really just an extended reflection on Jesus’ teachings about the indissolubility of marriage, original intent, and the first few chapters of Genesis.
2) The entire corpus of Woytyla, both pre and post JPII, regarding sexuality (i.e., Love and Responsibility, Jeweler’s Shop, various encyclicals). I think, indeed, that the treatment of Love and Responsibility as having the weight of a papal document is one of the reasons B16 makes a point of differentiating between “pre-” and “post-” papal writings (besides the obvious intention of keeping his fans such as myself from expecting his papacy to reflect all his personal opinions).
3) The school of discussing marriage and sexuality that has sprung from it. This is what makes the “West Wars” so interesting: prior to all this, I presumed West, Smith and Alice vonH to be on the same page.
In any case, most of these debates are concerning audiences and which particular aspect of society they’re trying to address.
Personally, I think what’s really lacking in this conversation is the connection of all of it to Catherine of Siena, Faustina and the Carmelites.
JPII’s academic specialty was John of the Cross. I’d be interested to see what Kellmeyer, in particular, thinks of John of the Cross (if you actually read his poetry without reading his Inquisition-pleasing commentaries).
Those who argue that West is saying something new and scandalous ignore a very deep tradition in Catholic spirituality. What West and Smith, building on JPII, have done is turn back to marriage what Catholic spirituality has always drawn *from* marriage.
Am I right in suspecting that West and his defender Janet Smith are somehow slipping modern liberal attitudes to sex under the cover of the ToB? Both of them describe pornography as comparable to junk food, for example. The whole same-sex realm is sedulously avoided by West, but that cannot last long, and may bring another split in his camp.
Joe,
This is, of course, exactly what has the Kellmeyers of the world in a panic. (Granting, of course, that Kellmeyer will be in one panic or other regardless.) The question of same-sex relationships are viewed here as simply an extension of the debate about contraception. Now, I don’t think there is no connection, but my reading of West and others is that they have made a far too simplistic equation here. The Church’s repositioning of the traditional procreation-before-unity hierarchy will not be without repercussions in the area of same-sex relationships. What those repercussions will be, I do not presume to say, though it will certainly not be the wholesale adoption of Western liberal attitudes on the question. In any case, West himself has said some bizarre things about homosexuality, for example, telling a young man with homosexual feelings to come to talk to him after a conference presentation so that West could “teach him how to be a real man.”
It is not clear to me that West understands all the implications of his own positions/articulations. To this point, this school of thought’s response to the question of homosexuality is knee-jerk and lacking nuance.
That said, I’m not sure where his “camp” will split on this. As far as I can tell, a knee-jerk response to homosexuality is something West shares with most of his critics.