Chastity Overseas

The last few months have seen many thoughtful responses to Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses in the United States, where the book was published in January. I’d single out three. Nathanael Peters reviews the book in a contextual essay, stating a premise with which I am in full agreement, ‘I’ve come to see chastity as primarily a question of freedom’. He goes on to provide an illuminating juxtaposition with Maestro. Carl E. Olson is attentive to ‘a robust and self-aware anthropology’ and, a really important point, to the eschatological dimension of chastity. Jared Staudt engagingly writes of ‘the resurrection of chastity’ – and indeed there is much to suggest that it is not dead but, like Jairus’s daughter, ‘sleepeth’. He notes: ‘My largest takeaway from the book regards the way in which chastity fulfills our nature rather than diminish it’, and this delights me. It is a blessing for a writer to have careful readers. The book, already out in Spanish, is currently being translated into Italian, French, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, and Greek.

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