We often hear, quite rightly, that the Church and her members should “go to the margins,” to “meet people where they are,” and to practice the art of human encounter, especially with the vulnerable, the poor, and the downtrodden. As Pope Francis exhorted in Evangelii Gaudium, “all of us are asked to obey his call to go forth from our own comfort zone in order to reach all the “peripheries” in need of the light of the Gospel.”
Too often, however, this approach, and its emphasis on subjective experience, is used to exclude the capacity of reason to apprehend truth and objective moral norms, and ultimately to justify those who persist in rejecting Church teaching, especially on matters of sexual morality.
A newly published volume addresses this false dichotomy: Lived Experience and the Search for Truth: Revisiting Catholic Sexual Morality, edited by Deborah Savage and Robert L. Fastiggi. The goal of the collection of essays is to arrive inductively at the truths embedded in the moral teaching of the Church precisely through the lived experience of faithful men and women, and thus to demonstrate the proper integration of subjective experience with objective moral reasoning. Contributing authors include J. Budziszewski, Richard Doerflinger, Mary Eberstadt, and Carl Trueman.
I was honored to be invited to contribute to this much-needed text. In a chapter titled, “The Design of God’s Love: The Gift of Children Through Adoption,” I share some personal anecdotes from our journey through infertility and miscarriage to adoptive parenting, and in particular our discernment about the use of IVF, to explain how this experience helped us to understand the truth and wisdom of the Church’s teachings on marriage, sex, and parenthood.
The book may be purchased here.
