Rarely have I read in so few pages (145) a book as thought-provoking and compelling as J. Budziszewski’s On the Meaning of Sex (ISI Books). Budziszewski, a Yale Ph.D. and professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas, has clearly grappled for years with the sad effects of our era’s shallow understanding of sex on the lives and psyches of the young people he teaches. This book represents his effort to convey the significance of the human sexes and sexual relationships to young people largely persuaded (but not satisfied) that sex is a momentarily intense but largely casual kind of pleasure. I will leave it up to the reader to decide how well he convinces.

While the author is clearly a Christian, God’s presence discreetly occupies the background through interspersed quotations from the extraordinary verses of the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross. In the forefront, Budziszewski presents arguments largely drawn from the natural law and set out in a finely honed use of the Socratic teaching method.

Clearly this is the method he follows at the University of Texas in Austin, where his students for the most part (judging from their reactions as recorded here) have trouble thinking clearly on a topic that does not so much concern them as obsess them.

Budziszewski’s book is an attempt to restore to sex what has been tragically and shortsightedly lost by our culture, and that is “meaning.”

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http://www.catholicity.com/mccloskey/on-the-meaning-of-sex.html