Another thought on modesty
by John F. Crosby
Dr. Crosby sent me the following friendly note via e-mail. Thinking the readers might benefit from it as I had, I asked for and received his permission to publish it. KvS.
I liked your response to Regina very much. The point about the danger of a judgmental spirit is very well taken. The one point on which I might more incline to her position is on the volatile, incendiary character of fallen male sexuality. I think John Paul is right when in Love and Responsibility he says that women often have difficulty acknowledging a sexual makeup so different from their own and thus often unwittingly stir up male concupiscence. But you are right that womanly modesty should not be only a matter of avoiding male sin. I was just studying with my students the chapter in Love and Responsibility on sexual shame and was struck by this anti-puritanical remark: sexual shame has the tendency to conceal sexual values “but to conceal them only to a certain extent, so that in combination with the value of the person they can still be a point of origin for love.”
John F. Crosby
Dr. Crosby is chairman of the philosophy department at FUS.
