Haley Baumeister’s Reviews > Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses > Status Update

"To be seen in truth is an intimate experience. Sight can in fact be more intimate than touch. As any pastor knows, people often go out in search of sexual adventure because they do not feel seen, suffer from this fact and crave a substitute. The risk is that pleasure serves, then, to exacerbate sadness and make loneliness worse. Intimacy does not have to be sexual. Sex can stand in intimacy’s way."

"The wound which a chaste eye inflicts does not humiliate or hurt. It is sweet, like the infant’s gaze. It cuts us to the quick but feels like a blessing, reminding us of what sight can be like. To see in this manner is to re-enter paradise, says Bruno. It is part of the process of exchanging the garment of skin for the robe of glory."

"Once our eyes have been opened to faith as something real, a reorientation of existence is called for.
Faith in the Son of God made man requires of me an embodied response, made concrete in a life of conversion, not just in the rehearsal of abstract sublimities."

“But to have a reliable pedagogue is splendid. In virtue, as in science and wisdom, we need to be taught. Our conscience must be formed. The point of Christian moral teaching is to outline a process of learning conceived of in terms of conversion and ascesis, i.e. ‘exercise’, a fitting metaphor in our society, which has a gym at every corner."

a Marilynne Robinson novel reference. I knew I liked this guy.

"The divinization of eros is not innocent. Even false gods require offerings... Eros, be it through high art, touches depths in us for which we have no words. It calls forth a sacrificial impulse of which we may not be aware - except in the darkness of the night. It matters to resolve freely in advance, in the light of day, at which altar we wish to perform it."

Matthew Lee Anderson says this was one of his favorite books last year (among others' high praise) ...so of course I took note.