It was not quite another tennis masterpiece. The much-anticipated rematch between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer lacked the consistent quality and, above all, the crescendo finish of their five-act drama in fading light at Wimbledon last year.

But this Australian Open final was certainly epic entertainment, too. It also lasted five sets and more than four hours. It also featured plenty of abrupt reversals of fortune and unexpected breaks of serve, and it also ended with Nadal triumphant and Federer devastated.

Federer, the 27-year-old Swiss star, needed just one more victory to match Pete Sampras’s all-time record of 14 Grand Slam singles titles. But he faded badly in the final set on Sunday night and was then unable to keep his composure after Nadal’s 7-5, 3-6, 7-6 (3), 3-6, 6-2 victory.

In the post-match ceremony, Federer choked up after receiving the runner’s-up plate from one of his idols, Rod Laver, and was unable to get more than a few sentences into his speech to the crowd before he began to cry in earnest.

I ended up only catching part of it this morning on the early run before I had to leave the house. What a rivalry. Congratulations to nadal. Read it all

KEVIN RUDD has denounced the unfettered capitalism of the past three decades and called for a new era of “social capitalism” in which government intervention and regulation feature heavily.

In an essay to be published next week, the Prime Minister is scathing of the neo-liberals who began refashioning the market system in the 1970s, and ultimately brought about the global financial crisis.

“The time has come, off the back of the current crisis, to proclaim that the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed, that the emperor has no clothes,” he writes of those who placed their faith in the corrective powers of the market.

Read it all.

He’s been described by an admiring New Yorker as “God’s go-to man on Wall Street”, an energetic Australian churchman ministering to the fallen financial gurus once considered masters of the universe.

That, the Reverend John Mason says modestly, is an exaggeration. His Wall Street ministry attracts more middle-managers than corporate masters, and its reach extends to the arts, legal, media and other professions.

But, yes, it is being increasingly sought out by people who have lost well-paid jobs and, with them, financial security, status and self-esteem.

“Over and over again, I’m hearing phrases like ‘I feel such a loser’ or ‘I feel a nobody’; that’s especially true among guys who’ve lost their jobs,” said MrMason, Anglican rector of StClement’s, Mosman, for 16 years before he accepted an invitation from the Redeemer Church in New York to set up new ministries in lower Manhattan.

Read it all.

As always Christmas takes us further than an unreflective acceptance of appearances, calling us to a deeper reflection as we go beyond the Christmas wrapping to search for the gifts inside. The birth of a child is always mysterious and wonderful, bringing out the best in all of us, even if that goodwill sometime fades quickly. But it requires an honesty and readiness to set aside our self-centredness, our imperial egos, to accept that this newborn Jewish child was and is the son of God. Joseph was present for the birth of his redeemer. This claim turns everything upside down. The world’s fulcrum is not the financial centre’s of New York’s Wall Street or London city, but a cave in Bethlehem.

Read it all.

To better understand how investors found themselves in their predicament, it helps to take a look at a synthetic CDO called Torquay — named after a small town in Australia’s Victoria state, famed for its surfing. Torquay was born during the credit boom in 2006.

Torquay belongs to the most popular type of synthetic CDO, known as a mezzanine deal. Morgan Stanley estimates as much as $400 billion in mezzanine securities are outstanding. Bankers engineered them to provide the highest possible return while still garnering gold-standard credit ratings. But one feature made them a lot riskier than a similar portfolio of corporate bonds: If losses to defaults rose above a certain threshold — typically between 3% and 6% of the underlying pool of debt — investors would lose all their money.

An arm of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. won a mandate from an Australian bank called Grange Securities to put together Torquay. J.P. Morgan pioneered the use of credit derivatives in the early 1990s. People close to the bank say J.P. Morgan had revenues of $400 million to $500 million from synthetic CDOs in 2006.

J.P. Morgan and other investment banks typically paired with local financial institutions to market synthetic CDOs in Australia, where small investors such as the town of Parkes make up a large part of the market.

The mind boggles. A town in Australia bought a higher yielding instrument with their money, which, if certain conditions were met, would result in them losing all their money. The collateral damage of these pernicious CDO’s and CDS’s continues apace worldwide. Read it all–KSH.

Read it all.

NEWS Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch is urging Australians to move out of their comfort zones and embrace new technology.

In his second of five Boyer Lectures, The Challenge of Technology, which will be aired on ABC Radio National at 5pm tomorrow, Mr Murdoch says people should stop whingeing about the challenge of new technology and “get out in front of it”.

He says new technology, such as the internet, is destroying business models that have been used for decades, particularly those with a “one size fits all” approach to their customers.

The US television networks are finding their audiences shrinking every day, he says. “People suddenly have a growing multitude of choices — and they are rightly exercising those choices,” Mr Murdoch says.

Read it all..

Dutch law gives the doctor the final decision to allow euthanasia. Doctors risk legal action, and every euthanasia case is reviewed to ensure the doctor in charge had kept to the legislated requirements.

Riet was shocked and distressed when her wish was refused. Her doctors’ consensus was they were not yet convinced she was making a consistent and rational decision.

Rob de Graaf was her specialist at Valkenhof hospital, where three doctors have performed seven voluntary euthanasias over the past five years.

De Graaf, who says he has had nightmares after performing euthanasias, volunteers to assist those eligible for euthanasia to relieve suffering. “Every doctor knows this is a cry for help,” he says. “The loss of human dignity is the major reason to ask for euthanasia.”

In Riet’s case, de Graaf said, doctors were unsure about her mental competency. Could she make a rational, consistent decision to end her life, or was the tumour affecting her mental state? She had to convince the doctors to help her end her life before the tumour took over and she lost her capacity to choose.

Read it all.

OSAMA bin Laden is planning an attack against the United States that will “outdo by far” September 11, an Arab newspaper in London has reported.

And according to a former senior Yemeni al-Qaeda operative, the terrorist organisation has entered a “positive phase”, reinforcing specific training camps around the world that will lead the next “wave of action” against the West.

The warning, on the front page of an Arabic newspaper published in London, Al-Quds Al-Arabi – and widely reported in the major Italian papers – quotes a person described as being “very close to al-Qaeda” in Yemen.

Read it all.

I sometimes wonder what life in the church would be like if we had never ever developed the concept of winning and losing. In many of the great controversies that face the church at the moment, and Lord knows there are enough of those, many of those controversies it seems to me increasingly clear that nobody’s going to win. In other words, there is not going to be a situation of sublime clarity in which one group’s views will prevail because the other group simply says, ‘Oh I see it all now.’ But if we’re not in the business of winning and losing like that, what does the church look like? What if we were sufficiently unafraid, (and there’s a key word) sufficiently unafraid to be able to put winning and losing on the back burner, to move away from the notion that my triumph is another’s loss. What if we were able to think of the health of the Christian community in terms of our ability or otherwise, our freedom or otherwise, to connect one another with the wellsprings of reconciliation. Let me go back to a phrase I used a bit earlier: ‘Sin is healed by solidarity’.

The monks of the desert were looking for solitude, but not isolation. A good deal of research has been done in the last couple of decades on the importance of community to these people. And the way in which time and again in the narratives and the sayings that stem from them, time and again point is reinforced. Only in the relations they have with one another can the love and the mercy of God appear and become effective. And those mutual relations have to do with that identification, that solidarity, that willingness to stand with the accused and the condemned. And somehow it’s in that action that the real healing occurs. Prayers and fasting, sleepless nights and asceticism, well various of the fathers take varying views of it. Most of them are rather sceptical about how significant that is. But if you are able in some sense, to take away what in you stands between God and the neighbour, then your own healing, as well as the other person’s healing, is set forward.

So asceticism is not simply about loading your body with chains, spending 30 years on top of a pillar, sleeping two hours a night, or whatever, or even working for a merchant bank, it’s about learning to contain that aspect of acquisitive human instinct that drives us constantly to compete and to ignore what’s around us.

Asceticism is a purification of seeing. It’s not a self-punishment, but a way of opening the eyes.

Dated, bit still of interest. Read it all.

In short, regulation and state intervention are likely to become more fashionable than at any time since the end of the Cold War. In political science terms, it seems we’re about to veer left. Witness a Republican president’s $US700 billion example.

But few are yet asking what this might mean for social politics. Perhaps this is because it seems a separate matter to questions of economic policy. Yet it is foolish to assume that each can be quarantined from the other.

Economics is important precisely because it has the power to topple social dominoes. And it is in the realm of social politics that some of the most frightening possibilities of the financial crisis suggest themselves.

Consider the Great Depression, to which some are ominously likening this crisis. Latin America, which was hit particularly savagely because of its significant trade links with the US, retreated into a shrill form of nationalism. The result was the rise of fascism across the continent….

Read it all.

The iJET is a new type of solar cell that’s cheap and easy to make, requiring not much more than a pizza oven, some nail polish remover, and a common inkjet printer. Australian scientist Nicole Kuepper describes her invention.

Listen to it all and note carefully HOW she made the discovery.

The world economy is on edge as it awaits the next round of American roulette. The US Senate has voted to create a $US700 billion ($880 billion) rescue vehicle for distressed debt. But the bill now goes to the House of Representatives, which has already rejected the idea once.

What will happen if the House says yes? And if it says no? What is the prize for winning this high-stakes game of chance? And the consequences of losing?

If you strip away the jargon, the core problem is pretty simple. There is an estimated $US2 trillion in dubious debt instruments, tied to the subprime mortgage market, outstanding at the moment. The US banks and institutions that hold them need to do one of two things – either sell them, or put a value on them in their financial statements.

At the moment, they can do neither. Why not? Because there is no functioning market. It’s not like the American sharemarket, where there are dedicated market-making firms that are charged with the job of standing in the market to buy shares, come what may.

Read it all.

From here:

That this Synod: noting (1) the deposition of Bishop Bob Duncan, Bishop of Pittsburgh in The Episcopal Church, by the assembled bishops of that church, on 18 September 2008; (2) the good standing and high reputation Bishop Bob Duncan has as an orthodox Anglican bishop, as represented by statements of support being expressed in recent days by the Archbishops of Sydney, Nigeria, Rwanda, Southern Cone, West Indies, Kenya, Jerusalem and the Middle East, Singapore, numerous bishops within The Episcopal Church itself, and the Bishops of Winchester, Rochester, Chester, Exeter, Blackburn and Chichester; (3) various developments in The Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Church of Canada in recent years which place increasing pressure on faithful orthodox Anglicans to conform to changes in theology, liturgy and ethics rather than to uphold and maintain the 2000 year old teaching of the church; offers its support to Bishop Bob Duncan, to the Diocese of Pittsburgh, and to all bishops and dioceses in The Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Church of Canada as they seek to find a way forward which embodies the true spirit of orthodox Anglicanism.

The Reverend Brian Turner, Methodist Church, Rodney Macanna, Baptist Churches of New Zealand, and the Right Reverend Pamela Tankersley, Presbyterian Church, all described the period before an election as a unique opportunity to intensify discussion about the type of society we live in.

“The affect that poverty has on vulnerable New Zealanders is an issue we need to bring to the fore as part of the call we have as Christians to serve those on the margins of society,” said Pamela Tankersley.

“A question that we need to ask ourselves is whether we are striving hard enough as a nation to put aside self-interest and to find a stronger collective social conscience in 2008,” said Brian Turner.

“When our politicians talk about the policies they plan to introduce we want them to talk about he extent to which those policies can be considered just and compassionate, and we want them to explicitly address the issue of reducing poverty,” said Rodney Macann.

Read it all.

THE future for many small rural churches was unveiled at the tiny town of Beeac yesterday: a direct internet link with a large city church and a shared morning worship service.

New 3G technology and a communal ambition enabled the Glen Waverley Uniting Church to transmit its 11am family service onto a large screen in Beeac in an experiment that has sparked the interest and hopes of many country churches.

“It’s very exciting,” Beeac parishioner Dawn Missen said. “We hope it will strengthen relations between country and city. We’ve already met some lovely people from Glen Waverley. Although we are small in number, we can be stimulated by a strong, vibrant city congregation.”

Read it all.

Lambeth has not resolved the matter of the ordination of gay clergy and consecration of gay bishops.

It is this issue, together with the ordination of female bishops, which has divided the church. While there was no defined schism at Lambeth, the Anglican church us a suppurating sore.

There is no easy way of saying this. The Anglican Church is fast becoming, if not already, dysfunctional. It is a divided house, it cannot stand.

Moreover, there is a significant delusion regarding its future. Over gay clergy, never the twain shall meet.

To this end, the covenant or moratorium over the ordination of gay clergy, achieved at the Lambeth conference, is unlikely to last.

The North American branch of Anglicanism is being held entirely accountable for the demise of the church’s unity over the 2003 ordination of gay bishop Gene Robinson. It has not given a rolled gold assurance it will desist from ordination of gay bishops or bless same sex unions.

In fact, Jon Bruno, Bishop of Los Angeles, said: “For people who think this is going to lead us to disenfranchise any gay or lesbian person, they are sadly mistaken.”

Read it all.

STUDENTS from Moriah College and Punchbowl Boys High approached each other with trepidation when they came together in the morning, but by the end of the day they had discovered they had more similarities than differences.

About 20 students from each school met in Punchbowl last week as part of a program called Together for Humanity, which aims to promote cross-cultural understanding and tolerance between religious groups.

Up to 250 students from seven schools representing children from Islamic, Jewish, Catholic and Anglican backgrounds met to ask each other questions about their beliefs and to plan future sporting activities and projects together.

Tascale Greenberg, a 13-year-old year 8 student from Moriah College at Queens Park said she was surprised to find the students at Punchbowl Boys High, which has a large population of students of Islamic background, shared so many common interests.

“We came to the school and we learnt about how at the end of the day we are the same people and just kids,” she said. “I thought it was going to be very awkward and scary to come. I thought they’d just look at us.

“But they were just normal and friendly to talk to.”

Read it all.

Referring to the ordination of Gene Robinson and the behaviour of the American Episcopal Church, Dr Jensen says in this month’s Melbourne Anglican newspaper: “If we are talking about schism and the break up of the Communion – that’s where it starts and that’s where the responsibility is.”

This is just too simple.

If there is a break-up of the Anglican Communion, then Dr Jensen and the bishops who attended the GAFCON alternative Lambeth, must take some responsibility. There is blood on their hands.

The dual issues of gay priests and female bishops are tearing the Church apart and, indeed, threaten the very viability of Lambeth.

But what do we have?

The Vicar General of Melbourne, Bishop Paul White, writing to all Melbourne clergy, before leaving for Lambeth, said it would be “premature to comment on reports of division in the global Anglican Church”.

This is unhelpful and demonstrates a singular lack of leadership. The Anglican Church is broken and some would argue its very existence is terminal.

Read it all.

Ten kilometres above the earth, the Pope delivered a message to the people of Sydney: the world is God’s creation and humanity needs to safeguard it against the ravages of climate change.

His message, unexpected and delivered in Italian, called for a spiritual response to the environmental crisis and asked Catholics – especially young people – to find “a way of living, a style of life that eases the problems caused to the environment”.

“We need to rediscover our earth in the face of our God and creator and to re-find our responsibilities in front of our maker and the creatures of the earth he has placed in our hands in trust,” he said.

“We need to reawaken our conscience ”¦ I want to give impulse to rediscovering our responsibilities and to finding an ethical way to change our way of life and ways to respond to these great challenges.”

Read it all.

Stephen Crittenden: While we have you here, Canon Conger, as well as being one of the senior correspondents for the truly excellent Church of England Newspaper, you have your own very fine blog site on all matters Anglican, and it seems like a good opportunity to catch up on what’s going on in North America in the lead-up to the Lambeth conference. It seems that things are being ramped up to quite a considerable degree in the lead-up to Lambeth. I notice that the church in California is preparing to conduct its first gay marriages, Bishop G. Robinson of New Hampshire who’s the gay bishop at the centre of the whole crisis, has recently announced that he wants to marry. A number of dioceses in Canada seem to be moving in the direction of same sex blessings. It really does look like Lambeth could be a real showdown would you agree? Or is that not how you read the situation?

George Conger: Well the Archbishop of Canterbury is desperate that nothing happen at Lambeth. He wants to prevent any sort of showdown, and so he’s devised a program that minimises any opportunity for collective mass action on particular issues. Using the tool of small groups and face-to-face discussion, a cynic would say that’s the way to prevent real action from taking place. What you’re seeing in the US are people as I say, establishing facts on the ground, going into the conference saying ‘Well this is the situation where I am’, and basically playing a political gamesmanship. ‘This is how far we’re going to go and get what we want, be it same sex blessings, the normalisation of gay clergy, or from the conservative side, we’re going to have parallel churches overseen by African archbishops in the US’, and basically saying, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ It’s a game of brinksmanship right now in the run-up to Lambeth. And there could be an explosion. Neither side is backing away, and for conservatives this is an issue of salvation; that the liberals are teaching a false doctrine, a false Christ; for liberals, the conservatives are blind to the call of justice and the prophetic words of the gospel. There are two religions in one church. There’s no sanction for bad behaviour in the Anglican communion.

Read it all.

Opening tonight at the elegant Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in the heart of Paddington is an exhibition of photographs by Bill Henson, featuring naked 12 and 13 year-olds….

Such images presenting children in sexual contexts are so commonplace these days they seem almost to have lost the capacity to shock.

The effort over many decades by various groups – artists, perverts, academics, libertarians, the media and advertising industries, respectable corporations and the porn industry – to smash taboos of previous generations and define down community standards, has successfully eroded the special protection once afforded childhood.

Read it all.

I will consider posting comments on this article submitted first by email to Kendall’s E-mail: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Note: please be cautioned that this may not be appropriate for certain blog readers.

Group readings of Dolly Doctor at high school are an Australian rite of passage. Most teenagers know exactly how to flip from the cover of the magazine straight to the sex and body advice column at the back. In schoolyards across the country, girls, and sometimes boys, can be found nervously giggling at the questions but eagerly awaiting the answers. “Is my period normal?”, “What’s a wet dream?” and “Can I get pregnant the first time?”

But now it is adults who are gasping at what they read. Dolly Doctor and its counterpart in Girlfriend magazine came under scrutiny last month at the Senate’s inquiry into the sexualisation of children in the contemporary media environment. The inquiry was set up to address parents’ growing concerns about their children’s exposure to sexual material via advertising, pop culture and the internet, and the rendering of them into sexual objects.

But in focusing on these magazine Q&A columns, the inquiry has taken a strange turn. Several senators, particularly the Tasmanian Liberal Stephen Parry, argued they were not appropriate reading material for younger teens. In particular, sexual questions were cause for alarm.

Read it all.

I will consider posting comments on this article submitted first by email to Kendall’s E-mail: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

I was walking through Ashfield shopping centre at 10 o’clock last Sunday morning. Every shop was open. It could have been any day of the week.

If I had been on the west coast it would have been different. In Western Australia a referendum to deregulate Sunday trading was soundly defeated in 2005. Countries such as Belgium and Germany restrict Sunday trading, and others impose strict limits on hours and regulate the types of businesses that can open.

But the extraordinary thing is that children in most Australian cities must now be left without parental supervision for so much of the time. A Bureau of Statistics report this year on how Australians use their time confirms we are spending less time playing, sleeping, and eating and drinking, but longer working.

We can feel it and see it all around us. Hairdressers are often open into the night, international banks are conducting business on combined southern and northern hemisphere time, emails and text messages find us day and night, seven days a week.

Read the whole article.

Australian bishops are educating the faithful about the possibilities and dangers of the Internet, and doing so with their own Internet ventures.

A pastoral letter called “Internet Safety” marks World Communications Sunday, celebrated in Australia this Sunday. And the letter has a unique element — a video introduction featuring Bishop Peter Ingham on YouTube.

Bishop Ingham, the Australian bishops conference’s delegate for media issues, said the video is a way to get the message out.

“That’s where we have to be, if we’re going to be talking to people, especially to young people about navigating the Net safely,” he said. “If only a few people see this video message and think over the points raised, it will be most worthwhile.”

Read it all and Check this out also.

[We will now discuss]…the decision by Griffith University in Queensland to accept $100,000 from the government of Saudi Arabia for its Islamic Studies Centre.

Griffith University describes itself as ‘The Australian university of choice for Saudis’, and in the past Week District Court Judge Clive Wall, who is also Deputy Judge Advocate General in the Australian Defence Force, has compared the university with a Pakistani madrasa and accused its administration of naiveté over its decision to accept funding from the home of hardline Wahhabist Islam.

It has also revealed that the university had previously lied when it said it had not solicited the funding. Documents obtained by The Australian newspaper show the university asked for $1.35-million from the Saudis. Even worse, the university offered to keep the source of the donation secret.

Then last week in an opinion piece published in The Australian, the Vice Chancellor of Griffith University, Professor Ian O’Connor, described the official religion of Saudi Arabia as ‘Unitarianism’ and suggested that the reason the Saudi government was financing Islamic Studies Centres in foreign universities was because it was keen to promote progressive Islam. It was later revealed that Ian O’Connor had lifted his material on Wahhabism from Wikipedia, substituting the innocuous term ‘Unitarianism’ for ‘Wahhabi’ on the way through.

Professor O’Connor has since released a statement in which he says the material used in his newspaper article was provided by senior staff, and a small number of sentences were not directly attributed, but that this was unintentional.

Read it all from The Religion Report Down Under

Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. “It was our little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety,” he said, imitating the giant fans that dried the rice, “and now it has stopped.”

The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to satisfy the daily needs of 20 million people. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia’s rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.

Ten thousand miles separate the mill’s hushed rows of oversized silos and sheds — beige, gray and now empty — from the riotous streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but a widening global crisis unites them.

The collapse of Australia’s rice production is one of several factors contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months — increases that have led the world’s largest exporters to restrict exports severely, spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off violent protests in countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

Read it all.

The Spitzers are the latest in a chain of publicised indiscretions where the wife not only stays put, but stands by her man: from Hillary Clinton to Wendy Vitter and Kathy Lee Gifford.

Public or not, what motivates someone to stay after his or her spouse has an affair?

In her 25 years of research and consulting on extramarital affairs, DearPeggy.com’s Peggy Vaughan says as much as 70 per cent of people stay in the marriage after infidelity. “Most people think all infidelity ends in divorce, but frequently they (the couple) just keep it quiet,” she says.

The common yet judgmental question “Why did she stay?” implies that she shouldn’t, Vaughan says. “It’s an extra burden for all the women who stay to have to defend themselves to their family and friends. When somebody tells you ‘If it were me, I’d …’ you can ignore the rest of the sentence because they aren’t you.”

She cautions couples from seeking divorce right away. “The people who get out right away second-guess themselves the rest of their lives,” says Vaughan, founder of the Beyond Affairs Network and the author of eight books, including The Monogamy Myth.

Read it all.

Paul is 28. He’s had one serious relationship that only lasted six months, but he says it was enough to put him off them for life.

“It sounds bad but if someone offered me either love and companionship or an endless stream of loveless sex with different men, I’d take the second one,” says Paul. “Sex exists over here, and I get my love from my friends over here, “ he gestures. “Some might say that I’m missing out, but I don’t agree.”

He said when he fell in love with his ex he was cautious, but his partner kept re-assuring him. “He told me over and over that he felt the same way I did, that he’d never hurt me. He begged me not to hurt him. And then one day he just left. Dropped me like a hot brick. No explanations, nothing. I was left hanging for months, wondering what I’d done wrong. I don’t want to go through that ever again….

Adrian, 35, is of the opinion that while gay rights activists are waving the flag of domestic wedded bliss, less of us are actually settling down in meaningful relationships. He says that he thinks it’s all about what’s fashionable.

“Yes, there’s this political push for relationship rights, but that’s all about looking equal to everyone else. If we have marriage then we have to be treated like equally. It makes sense. I don’t think that’s necessarily reflective of what the community wants or how many of us are actually partnering up.”

—Christian Taylor, A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Since I work for the Anglican Church, sexual and social politics also dictates that I can be relied upon to reinforce religious fear and guilt to “constrain the sexuality and sexual freedom of women”. Sheehan does not offer any support for these deeply held beliefs, and perhaps I can’t dislodge them. I wish I had his faith. But for what it is worth, the biblical authors consistently and resolutely expect men to take responsibility for their own sexual thoughts and feelings.

In an argument throughout the Gospels, Jesus attacks his contemporaries for their divorces of convenience to remarry young things, and “everyone who looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew chapter 5, verse 28). The point is not to amplify male guilt. He wants men to direct their sexual energy toward their wives, as in the ancient proverb “Take pleasure in the wife of your youth ”¦ be lost in her love forever.”

Here is a profound point about our quest for true intimacy. Nothing replaces the time invested in a marriage, a time long enough to grow the intimacy we all crave.

Read it all.