An Interview About What Marriage Is

My book with Sherif Girgis and Ryan Anderson,  What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense , was recently published by Encounter Books.  Brandon Vogt has now interviewed me for  Our Sunday Visitor Newsweekly  about the principal themes, claims, and arguments my co-authors and I advance.

Let me also take this opportunity to encourage people to read a splendid new book by Baylor University philosopher Alexander Pruss entitled  One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics . It appears in the Notre Dame Studies in Ethics and Culture book series. In my review of the manuscript for the University of Notre Dame Press, I said:

This is a terrific—really quite extraordinary—work of scholarship. It is quite simply the best work on Christian sexual ethics that I have seen. It will become the text that anyone who ventures into the field will have to grapple with—a kind of touchstone.  Moreover, it is filled with arguments with which even secular writers on sexual morality will have to engage and come to terms.

John Finnis was similarly enthusiastic in his review:

Alexander Pruss here develops sound and humane answers to the whole range of main questions about human sexual and reproductive choices. His principal argument for the key answers is very different from the one I have articulated over the past fifteen years. But his argumentation is at every point attractively direct, careful, energetic in framing and responding to objections, and admirably attentive to realities and the human goods at stake.

Professor Pruss has thought as deeply and rigorously about the meaning and moral significance of human sexuality, and about the norms by which sexual choices should be guided and sexual conduct governed, as anyone of whom I am aware writing today.

Dear Reader,

Can I be direct with you?

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