At first glance, much that went on at Yale University during the week of February 12th was enough to make even the most tenacious of culture warriors throw up their hands in defeat.
This year the infamous “Sex Week” was back, bigger and badder than ever. Just a glance of the week’s activities made this Catholic girl blush a shade much redder than her hair. Talks included: “Contraception 101,” “A Tantric Toolbox of Personal Enlightenment, Interpersonal Intimacy, and Humanitarian Aid,” and “Stripped Stories—A Night of Hilarious Sex-Themed Storytelling and Games.”
And those are just the G-rated talk titles. At least relatively speaking. Most of the others aren’t appropriate for a familyfriendly magazine, and I’m really not in the market for any new millstones at the moment.
For as sickening and saddening as it is, however, that Yale students and professors think panels on sex toys and the mechanics of making porn are topics worthy of serious intellectual discussion, there is some good news to go along with the bad.
This year, rather than simply protesting all the debauchery and titillation disguised as education, another group of Yalies sponsored an event of their own: True Love Week.
For the week, Undergraduates for a Better Yale College, working in conjunction with the Love and Fidelity Network, put together displays, talks, and panel discussions designed to highlight the beauty of married love and the glory of sexuality in God’s plan.
Featuring Catholic intellectual and activists such as author Anthony Esolen, Project Rachel Founder Vicki Thorne, and philosopher Christopher Tollefson, the talk titles for “True Love Week” couldn’t sound more different from their secular campus counterparts. “What They Didn’t Teach You in Sex-Ed,” “The Person as Gift,” “Chastity and Human Goods,” and “Relationship Intelligence in the Age of Ambivalence” are titles that most certainly won’t earn anyone a millstone by merely uttering them aloud, let alone by attending the actual talk.
Not surprisingly, many of the Love Week talk titles sound like sub-headings from John Paul II’s theology of the body. Actually, some of them are sub-headings from the theology of the body. Which is a good thing. A great thing even.
Yes, the theology of the body has its detractors out there (although usually those detractors’ issues are more with how some people present the theology of the body or misunderstand it than the teachings themselves). But even for those detractors, it has to be hard to deny the gift that the language of the theology of the body is in discussions like those which took place at Yale last February.
Unlike the language of scholasticism or fundamentalist Christianity, the language of theology of the body is rooted in human experience. As such, it gives Christians a way to speak about married love and sexuality that people can identify with and that they don’t need a degree in theology or philosophy to understand.
After all, we all know what it feels like to use and be used. We all long to give ourselves to another. We’re all seeking union and communion. And we’re all wrestling with understanding the value and dignity of our bodies in a culture that equates the body’s worth with its youth, virility, and sexual desirability.
It doesn’t matter if you worship God, Obama, or the tree in your backyard. Those ideas make sense. They resonate. They speak to our deepest wounds and deepest desires. They also invite discussion and reflection. They create a space where people of differing belief systems and backgrounds can meet. And in that space, healing—conversion even—can begin.
That’s a gift to the Church trying to talk to a deeply wounded culture about issues of love, marriage, and sexuality. It’s a gift to faithful college students courageously standing up against political correctness gone mad. And it’s a gift to all of us as we sort through the confusing and damaging messages coming at us from the culture everyday.
The more time passes, the more Catholics and Protestants alike are using that language. And the more we use that language, the fewer weeks like Sex Week college students will have to endure in the future.
For now, however, would it be better if Sex Week hadn’t taken place? Heck yes. A thousand times yes. But it did, and thanks to a group of very bold and bright Yalies (not to mention a beatified Polish pope), it hopefully turned out to be a not entirely bad thing. At least not for those who heard for the first time the truth about who they are and how they’re called to love.
Emily Stimpson is an award-winning Catholic writer based in Steubenville, OH. A contributing editor to Our Sunday Visitor newspaper, her work has also appeared in Franciscan Way, First Things, Touchstone, Faith and Family, Loyola’s Best Catholic Writing series, and elsewhere. She is also the author of “The Catholic Girl’s Survival Guide for the Single Years”.
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