Given that I don’t watch much TV, I’ve entirely missed the Christopher West kerfuffle. The short story:
..For those who haven’t followed it, here’s a summary: Christopher West is a Catholic theologian who has popularized Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. On ABC’s Nightline last week, he dared to try to understand the hypersexualization of America, as symbolized by Hugh Hefner. Can’t have that, said the blogosphere: The only appropriate response to the naming of Hefner is “boo, hiss,” or, to continue with Orwell, “doubleplus ungood.”…
…West, like John Paul II, is trying to cope with the results of original sin in a creative way. The brokenness of man is manifested in many ways, to be sure, but in our times the obsession with sex (both pro and anti) is surely one of the most conspicuous. The Theology of the Body, in its various articulations (including West’s), is a praiseworthy attempt to think outside this box.
Here is the news story that is taken out of, here is a longer sample of West’s philosophy (scroll down a bit in the linked article). Boiled down, West wishes to rescue sexuality from both the Puritan heresy and the Hefnerian degradation – to have people understand that sex is, indeed, a gift from God. Of course, it isn’t something to be just tossed in the gutter – it is for a married couple open to the gift of life. And there’s an end on it.
What is really good about this is the revival of the proper understanding of the human body and the sexual act – the human body isn’t a thing for personal gratification, but it is also not something dirty to be hidden away…it should be respected as in the image of God, used as God intended – as a means of expressing the love between a man and a woman. Some people are quibbling with West and some are downright angry with him for daring to show love even for Hefner…as if Hefner’s despicable philosophy makes him permanently outside the pale. West understands that Hefner just found the wrong cure for a real problem – the answer to the puritannical hatred of the body isn’t to lust after and objectify it, but to understand it in the context of inherent human dignity.
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