Intimate Glass

Comment from Kyle C. Foley
Time March 8, 2010 at 9:00 pm

basically her arugment is that you should be chaste because the bible says so. she doesn’t answer why the bible says so. this is the equivalent of a father saying do this because i said so. that rarely inspires us to piety. i believe chastity is a virtue because those who are willing to resist pleasures for the sake of other’s happiness are infinitely more enjoyable people to know. i’m going to write my own essay on the subject. incidentally, lauren is very similar to my favorite female name. i am thankful that God lead me to the book, any book that praises chastity is a positive.

how cobreskan, sharp and magman

was my hunger to end my four

years of celibacy last night, Lord!

to resist the femme’s jubilo

is to endure the claws of the grizzly,

to run the marathon without water,

and to walk through a field of mines,

and yet how pathetic is my pain in

comparison to the jews’ nineteen hundred

year exile from their homeland, or the

russians’ endurance of stalin’s lust for

slavery, or the blacks’ hidium beneath

the heartless concrete of my ancestors’ greed.

i do not know what to do.

do i pray for deliverance from this cardiatraz,

and supplicate for liberation from the bloat-bull,

and beg for emancipation from the hex-siren,

or do i castigate myself for

ignoring the rhodadendra of my blessings,

forgetting the macro-abundance of my gifts,

and disregarding the fruits of your compassion.

author of lorelei pursued and wrestles with God
Rating: 4 / 5

Comment from C. Stewart
Time March 8, 2010 at 11:53 pm

This book is a bizarre neo-Puritanism, all predicated on the distorting false distinction between “real” sex and other forms. Only someone deeply alienated from Nature and Nature’s God could presume that the source of most sexual pathology–Christian dogma–could be its only source of legitimation. Everything she says about relationships between two can be better realized in relationships of three or four.
Rating: 1 / 5

Comment from Darren Gruett
Time March 9, 2010 at 12:39 am

I don’t even know where to begin. Like the reviewer Charlie, I too am wondering about the convent Winner came out of.

Instead of ways to avoid sex, one ought to consider getting married and enjoying sex the way it was meant to be enjoyed. Parts of the book were just strange.

I for one got nothing out of it.
Rating: 1 / 5

Comment from Charlie
Time March 9, 2010 at 12:43 am

“…chastity is doing sex in the Body of Christ.” Our reading group’s monthly topic was sex. I tried to read a few parts of this book to the group. They couldn’t take it, wondered which medieval convent the author came out of. This is not about real sex. It is about ways to avoid it to keep from feeling guilty. The book mixes up sinning, chastity, celibacy and sex, never clarifying, only obfuscating. Actually, even one star seems too much.
Rating: 1 / 5

Comment from Professor Goatboy
Time March 9, 2010 at 3:19 am

The author starts out announcing she’s going to give us an informed, world-wise view of a Christian sexual ethic. It never happens. It’s a little objectionable to get this book from an author who admits she slept her way through college and much of grad school and has been married a grand total of 3 and a half months. She just gives us the old Pauline fear of sex in a new guise. Her world-view is basically pre-modern and pre-scientific: I agree that sex is ethically clearly meant for marriage, but she wakes up all the old neurosis-inducing crap about the evils of masturbation, immodest clothing, etc, etc. For a scholar of religion, she knows shockingly little about the Bible: she reads Genesis as literal and doesn’t know the difference between letters written by St. Paul and those written in his name. And how is it that she can write a book in the early twenty-first century and not mention gay people or lesbians even once? A completely ignorant performance.
Rating: 1 / 5