CELIBACY AND CIVILIZATION

The passage below is taken from Andy Nowicki’s collection Ruminations of a Low-Status Male, Volume 2, now available for purchase (along with Volume 1) in paperback and on Kindle. 

 by Andy Nowicki

Within Catholicism, institutional celibacy has retained a place of high regard.

Monks and nuns take oaths to enter into Holy Matrimony, the former choosing to marry the Church, the latter opting to become “brides of Christ”; in each case, each is modeling his or her bond after the example set by the Holy Family, in which devotion is completely untethered from carnality.

MARRIAGE AND THE CHURCH: "FROM THE BEGINNING, IT WAS NOT SO"

The passage below is taken from Andy Nowicki’s just released collection Ruminations of a Low-Status Male, Volume 2, now available for purchase (along with Volume 1) in paperback and on Kindle.

by Andy Nowicki

Apt as I daresay the previous essay is in its thorough examination of New Testament-expressed attitudes towards matrimony, historical Christendom has, needless to say, adopted an entirely divergent mindset on the matter. For adherents to historical Christendom, marriage is indeed an unmixed blessing for men and women, not a concession granted from on high based on a divine understanding of human weakness.

MARRIAGE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT, CELIBACY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

The passage below is taken from Andy Nowicki’s just released collection Ruminations of a Low-Status Male, Volume 2, now available for purchase (along with Volume 1) in paperback and on Kindle.  

by Andy Nowicki

THE TWO TESTAMENTS: A DUBIOUS DISTINCTION

But before going further in this investigation, it would perhaps be appropriate to backtrack and draw attention to one relevant and conspicuous distinction, both in theme and in content, between the New and Old Testaments of the Holy Bible.

ANTISEXUALISM

by Andy Nowicki

In my recent review of Ann Sterzinger's novel Nowhere, I observed that we now now live in an age when most social and intellectual movements with any sort of momentum and enduring traction are essentially negative in orientation, "anti-" in temperament. Sterzinger's book highlights one of the less visible, if most radical of these anti-ideologies – that of "antinatalism," the belief that life itself is a misery best avoided.