Marriage is a good road to God.
HUMANAE VITAE: A GENERATION LATER is three good books between two covers. It is a meditation manual for very serious young men and women considering Christian marriage as a path to holiness. Secondly, it is a book about recent Roman Catholic theological debates on the link between personal fulfilment in marriage and openness to children. Finally, A GENERATION LATER argues for the truth of a vision drawn from natural law and personalist philosophies of the rock bottom elements of any SECULAR marriage.*** The best part is also the briefest: Chapter 8, ¿Self-Giving and Self-Mastery: John Paul II¿s Interpretation of HUMANAE VITAE.¿ The Pope proves a tough but profound read. His grounding of marriage in the creation stories of Genesis could help men and women all along the Judeo-Christian spectrum rediscover God¿s plan for a human nature created equally male and female. This part of Professor Smith¿s large book reminds of St Francis de Sales leading ordinary people to seek personal perfection and holiness. *** Less devotional and more scholarly are the large portions of the book in which Janet Smith presents, interprets and defends against ¿revisionist¿ Catholics the theological and biblical teachings on human sexual behavior of Popes Leo XIII, Pius XII and Paul VI and culminating in the personalist insights of John Paul II. Christians who make Scripture the firmest anchor of personal belief may be pleasantly surprised by Bishops of Rome hard at work to derive from Sacred Texts a vision of married behavior which firmly unites both the life transmitting and the personal bonding dimensions of married sexual intercourse. *** The book is weakest in sketching a non-revealed, purely philosophical ethics of sexual behavior. Janet Smith herself wonders if a Western philosophy teacher today is not inevitably influenced by what she has learned from Jewish and Christian teaching and practice. Secular readers might well prefer more reliance on Plato and Aristotle and less on Thomas Aquinas. Professor Smith sketches an exalted vision of secular marriage. All men and women everywhere, if they have good will, self-discipline and a well-formed conscience will see in the special form of friendship called marriage that it is meant by nature to be heterosexual, life long, exclusive and that its acts must not permanently separate the life-generating and the friendship-forming dimensions of sexual intercourse. ***
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Editorial Reviews
Library Journal
Smith reviews the controversies preceding and following Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical forbidding artificial birth control, giving special attention to the views of today's Pope John Paul II. Agreeing with the Vatican's stance, he typically presents dissenting viewpoints briefly, then refutes them with lengthy reviews of the works of theologians/philosophers opposing contraception. Contemporary overpopulation concerns receive minimal attention, though other factors are thoroughly discussed. Smith includes a new annotated translation of the encyclical. His densely argued, unyielding approach probably will convert few birth ...