Customer Reviews

Man and Woman: Love & the Meaning of Intimacy

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It's too bad there is not a rating with six or seven stars. Man and Woman: Love and the Meaning of Intimacy is the best book on love and intimacy in marriage I have ever read. It is written in plain easy to understand language. I wouldn't let an engaged couple, or a couple even thinking about marriage, out the door without first reading and understanding the beauty of married love and intimacy as expressed by Dietrich von Hildebrand in this book.

It was just two years before Pope Paul VI's Humane Vitae that Dietrich Von Hildebrand published his brilliant "Man and Woman: Love and the Meaning of Intimacy" (My quotes are from Sophia Institute's 1992 edition.):

"Although we hear that sex is overemphasized today, this is not correct. Rather, we live in a time in which sexuality is no longer understood in its true nature. People today are generally as blind to its true meaning as are persons who completely lack sensuality....Today's blatant sexuality conceals a pathetic sensual emptiness" (p. 3). "It was said that Christians are to be recognized by the fact that they love one another. I would add: Christians should also be recognized by the fact that they who have received the festival clothes in Baptism shun any superficial, mediocre approach to the great goods of creation, that they understand more profoundly than others `how admirable are they works, O God'" (p. 45). "As long as conception and birth are seen exclusively as mere physiological processes, we cannot understand the impact and seriousness of the making of a new human being" (p. 61). "Every active intervention on the part of the spouses, which eliminates the possibility of conception through the conjugal act, is incompatible with the holy mystery of the superabundant relation in the incredible gift offered by God....To make use of natural family planning is not to imply the slightest irreverence or rebellion against God's institution and the wonderful link between the love union and procreation" (pp. 68 - 69).

Just last month, Pope Benedict XVI welcomed the establisment of the "Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project" in Steubenville, Ohio(Zenit New Agency, 10/25/07).