A MrsDarwin review.

MrsDarwin reviews a new book about chastity for adolescents and young adults.

In my days as a young unmarried Catholic, I often suffered through chastity talks or had dating manuals pressed on me. The Protestant dating manuals (or, more accurately, not-dating, since apparently dating is right out in those circles, to be replaced by the nebulous concept of "courtship") were painfully earnest in their descriptions of hypothetical couples who were keeping their relationships 99.44% pure by following strict rules of behavior. Chastity talks were even more painful because you had to be there in person, squirming in your folding chair and wishing the floor would swallow you as the speaker hemmed and hawed, or, even worse, was wildly enthusiastic for Purity! There seemed to be no happy medium between  either rigid guidelines that seemed designed to minimize contact between a couple, or hazy exhortations to purity that gave one no practical guidance in the matter of a relationship rooted in reality.

The book is How Far Can We Go? A Catholic Guide to Sex and Dating, by Brett Salkeld and Leah Perrault.

...One thing I really appreciate here is that Salkeld and Perrault have a respect for their young audience, and don't treat the question "How far can we go?" as an attempt to find out how much whoopie one can get away with, but an honest query about what is right and appropriate at any point in a relationship. (I snickered out loud at their description of a youth group leader who answers this question from a young couple by saying, "I'll let you in on a little secret. Your relationship will do much better if, instead, you ask yourselves how pure you can be." If you haven't heard twaddle like that, you haven't been around the Authentically Catholic! youth scene much.) They emphasize from the start that their model of dating "presumes that those who use it are sincerely trying to live holy lives. If you're hoping to find loopholes so you can get away with as much as possible and still say you're following Catholic rules, this model isn't for you."

Just what is this model? It relies on honestly answering the question "How much of myself does God want me to give to this other person?"

I detest (detest!) Catholic twaddle even more than ordinary secular twaddle, and (unfortunately) there's probably more twaddle in Catholic material aimed at youth and young adults than in Catholic material aimed at young children.  

So far the only anti-twaddle approach I had imagined was going to be to start reading Flannery O'Connor for bedtime stories (I might skip the "people being crushed under farm equipment" parts until they're older) but I submit that this could be an unbalanced approach.

So I'm interested in adding this book to my library -- because material that doesn't treat young people as people -- people with the intent to live a life of integrity, but not one in a bubble -- is not worth having, and this one sounds like a decent alternative.  I'll tell you what I think of it later.

Comments

[MrsDarwin]

Thanks for the link! I actually thought of you while I was reading it, because I thought you would really enjoy the idea of a graph in a book on dating. :). But also, we seem to have similar views on relationships and intimacy. I felt like this was a book our readers would appreciate. I hope you let me know what you think when you read it.

[bearing]

Um, yeah, the idea of the graph in the book on dating sounds... like me.

[Barbara C.]

I'll be interested to see how this compares to "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" which I think does a pretty good job about addressing some of this stuff in a similar way.

[MrsDarwin]

Barbara, I read "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" as a teenager, and I recently had cause to flip through it and read portions. I felt when I was younger (but couldn't articulate it then) that it falls very seriously into the fallacy that Salkeld and Perrault describe in their book, and which I quoted in my post, of describing physical interaction like getting closer and closer to a cliff's edge. "You wouldn't take your boyfriend or girlfriend in your arms and take them right to a cliff's edge, would you? Then why would you want to get too physically involved before marriage?" This has the fault of making physical interaction seem like something dangerous, something bad, and it's very consonant with the Protestant literature I've read. I think the Catholic viewpoint in How Far Can We Go? is much richer and much more in sync with human nature and the way that healthy loving relationships are formed and developed.

[jcntvbilgg]

l8R56u wmbjcicpnvei, [url=http://jpkiadudwgeq.com/]jpkiadudwgeq[/url], [link=http://vtvwrvjhsqbp.com/]vtvwrvjhsqbp[/link], http://btfbmhvvdrus.com/