Book Review
Sex & the Civilized
Civilizing Sex: On Chastity and the Common Good by Patrick Riley
Edinburgh, Scotland: T&T Clark, 2000
(272 pages; $28.95, paper [available in the U.S. in May 2002])
reviewed by Angus J. L. Menuge
For some, the topic of chastity is rather like Ptolemaic astronomy: a fascinating relic of the unenlightened past. Hedonistic license is so mainstream that we find it even in the magazines publicly displayed at grocery stores. The mantra of sex education, “They’ll do it anyway,” is promoted as realism and compassion, rather than as cynical defeatism and irresponsible indifference to the mental, physical, and social carnage that results.
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Angus J. L. Menuge is Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University Wisconsin, where he is associate director of the Cranach Institute (www.cranach.org). He has edited three books, including C. S. Lewis: Lightbearer in the Shadowlands, and has recently published Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science (Rowman & Littlefield).
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more on sex from the online archives
23.5—September/October 2010
The Loss of a Christian Understanding of Virginity Is Pure Tragedy by Eleanor Bourg Donlon
33.1—January/February 2020
Speaking Truth About the Sexes Is Not Optional by Anthony Esolen
31.1—January/February 2018
Getting Sex Wrong Is a Foundational Error by James M. Kushiner
more from the online archives
14.1—January/February 2001
The Christian Heart of Fatherhood
The Place of Marriage, Authority & Service in the Recovery of Fatherhood by John M. Haas
25.4—July/August 2012
The Corrosive & Far-Reaching Fallout of the Sexual Revolution by Anthony Esolen
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