Abstinence gets some decent, if a little oddball, publicity in the Times magazine with this article about growing secular abstinence programs in unlikely places.

The Ivy League’s abstinence clubs began emerging several years ago about the same time as student sex blogs, sex columns and, at Harvard and Yale, student sex magazines. Those involved, however, say that the most important catalyst was university-sponsored safe-sex education, which they saw as institutional encouragement of promiscuity. The founders of the Princeton club, the first to form in the Ivy League in 2005, wanted to offer an opposing view. Many were Catholic, but seeking credibility within the university at large, they decided not to present themselves as a religious organization and always to “shy away from arguments with religious premises,” says Kevin Joyce, a former president of the club. “Here at a university, we have to provide the intellectual basis” for abstinence, he told me. “Every position we take as a group can be confirmed by rational thought.”

Much of the piece focuses on Janie Fredell at Harvard, who belongs to the True Love Revolution, a name about as awesome as True Love Waits. 

“People just don’t get it,” Fredell said. “Everyone thinks we’re trying to promote this idea of the meek little virgin female.” She said she was doing no such thing. “I care deeply for women’s rights,” she said. Fredell was studying not just religion but also gender politics - and was reading Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” alongside John Stuart Mill’s “Subjection of Women.” She had awakened to the wage gap, to forced sterilization and female genital mutilation - to the different ways that men have, she said, of controlling women. One of these was sexual. Fredell had seen it often in her own life - men pushing for sex, she said, just to “have something to say in the locker room,” women feeling pressured to have sex in order to maintain a relationship. The more she studied and learned, the more Fredell came to realize that women suffer from having premarital sex, “due to a cultural double standard,” she said, “which devalues women for their sexual pasts and glorifies men for theirs.”

Her group’s arguments are powerful with the university audience, but if her propositions are founded on secular ideologies, they will ultimately fail.  Here’s to hoping there’s more to these groups than the cracked and weary discourse of the body, of oppression, of feminism.  If so, kudos.

WARNING: Frank discussions of sex.

While we’re enjoying the public stoning of a powerful man for his very public sin, we might reflect on mea culpa of sexuality in the church.  One journalist tells the story of Operation Integrity and its founder David Zailer, who teaches Christian men to form, for lack of a better phrase, sexual accountability groups.  One meeting included the following men:

Kevin, 53, a real-estate agent caught by his wife looking at Internet porn before a Sunday morning church service.

Tommy, 35, a political consultant who spent more than three years participating in mate-swapping on Saturday nights, and regularly sitting in church on Sunday mornings.

Nelson, 38, a self-employed businessman discovered by his girlfriend carrying on an emotional relationship in cyberspace.

Evan, 43, a building contractor who claims to have had sexual intercourse with more than 1,000 women.

Another related article also mentions how when one congregant approached his pastor about starting this kind of group, the pastor said no.  Too hot to handle.  Pastors like that must know, and want to suppress, the extent of the problem.

I remain shocked at the number of young men whose father never talked to them about masculine sexuality. Last weekend I led a breakout session titled “Transforming Male Sexuality” at the Jubilee Conference in Pittsburgh for college students. Out of the 70 guys in this men’s only discussion only 3 of them raised their hands to the question, “How many of your Dads sat you down and talked to you about your sexuality?” If boys do not learn about God’s design for their sexuality from their fathers, from where will this wisdom come? Movies? Music? Peers?

Sadly, young guys are left to fend for themselves in an openly sex-crazed, gender-confused culture. While many fathers may discuss the biology of reproduction very few bravely go beyond that. Cowardice and passivity prevail as fathers watch their sons walk into the fire that is lust. They fail to offer any warnings, techniques, or tools to their vulnerable young sons as they battle the blaze.

It is disastrous for a father to flee from openly discussing with his son the realities of both the glory and brokenness of male sexuality. This is a father’s job–to draw from God’s wisdom for us as men and prepare his sons for the issues in life that await them (Prov. 5). Telling sons simply to “not sin” and “hold on until marriage” does not form them. Boys need life-long formation regarding what it means to walk the road of chastity. They need to be trained how to spiritually, emotionally, and physically love women in a way that is pleasing to God and brings joy to a wife.

Fathers, be active and brave. Walk with your sons and be honest about your own struggles, successes, and failures with sexual purity. Demonstrate to them what it means to live in absolute dependence on the Holy Spirit. This is not a one-time conversation. Fathers serve as a reservoir of wisdom for identity throughout the son’s life. There is no better person for this than a boy’s father (Deut. 6:4-6).

Sons without Godly fathers, seek out men in the church to step up and bless you by teaching you the truth. You may need to initiate and lead older men by asking them questions. The silence must end today. It’s never too late to start because the fire awaits and many have already been badly burned.

Why do we see an “epidemic of breakups” and why does romance die? Relevant Church in Ybor City, Fla., says it has the answer: “People are not having enough sex.”

That’s why the “openly edgy” church is issuing a 30 Day Sex Challenge, daring married couples to do it every day for 30 days and challenging singles to abstain for 30 days. Challenge-takers will record their impressions, sexual encounters or abstentions in journals. They can share their thoughts on a blog that will launch when the challenge begins: February 17, 2008.

The objectives: Challenge the assumption that God frowns on sex, improve Christians’ sex lives and strengthen relationships. The theory: Increasing intimacy will increase communication. The reactions: visceral, and varied.

Pastor Paul Wirth told Fox News, “Our married people are far more fearful than our single people.” St. Petersburg Times says one’s wife’s initial reaction — “Oh – okay” — was tepid compared to her husband’s. “Of course, all the guys say it’s genius,” Wirth reports. “The married women think we’re out of our minds.”

Cary McMullen from TheLedger.com wonders, “Are they going to sell Viagra in the lobby? … Thirty days in a row could kill a guy at my age.” CPBlotter.com mocks the Challenge blog as “homegrown porn,” calls participants “Perverts for Christ,” and deems the whole idea “creepy.” A Little Leaven puts the Challenge in its Museum of Idolatry and takes a moral tone: “Is this why Jesus came to earth, sweat drops of blood, was scourged, nailed to a cross, hung naked and bleeding with a crown of thorns on His head and died?”

Maybe it’s one reason. Wirth told First Coast News, “I don’t think sex was created in the back alleys of the porn industry. I really think God is the one who designed it and it’s a beautiful thing and God wants us to enjoy it.”

If you have teenagers or work with them, you might benefit from watching this multimedia piece on “Life at 15.”  Christian parents can lie to themselves all they want, but so many of their children are behaving just like the kids in this piece.  It’s done by an Australian paper, but the perspectives are varied - interviews with school administrators, parents, young people.  Part 1 is Sex.  Part 2 is alcohol.  Part 3 is technology.  No graphic images, but some very frank language.

The New York Times ran a story about the recent exponential cost increase for birth control on college campuses. Because of a change in federal law, young women are now paying much higher prices for their formerly subsidized prescription contraceptives. Get me a violin.

Planned Parenthood, however, has opened its doors to encourage promiscuous, dehumanizing sexuality on college campuses. At Tufts University in Boston, for example, the contraceptive NuvaRing rose in price from $8 to $50. The nearby Planned Parenthood facility offers the contraceptive for $27.

“The potential is that women will stop taking it, and whether or not you can pay for it, that doesn’t mean that you’ll stop having sex,” said Katie Ryan, a senior at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, who said that the monthly cost of her Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo, a popular birth control pill, recently jumped to nearly $50 from $12.

Ms. Ryan, 22, said she had considered switching to another contraceptive to save money, but was unsure which one to pick. She has ended up paying the higher price, but said she was concerned about her budget.

“I do less because of this - less shopping, less going out to eat,” said Ms. Ryan, who has helped organize efforts to educate others on campus about the price jump. “For students, this is very, very expensive.”

Here’s a crazy idea: What if college women stopped having sex until they established, with their male cohorts, a committed, whole-life partnership for the good of each other and for the rearing and education of children, cultivated in an ancient institution called marriage? The intimate commitment of life and love which constitutes the married state is the best context for human sexuality, even for college students.

By not having sex at all, however, the high cost of contraceptives can by-pass college women altogether. Wounded, narcissistic college men use young women for personal gratification, disguised by manipulative phrases like “I love you” and “you’re so beautiful,” but the men have no interest in living out the full implications of human sexuality, namely, a life of love committed to one woman and to nurturing children. Wounded, narcissistic women willingly participate in the premarital sex factory that ultimately produces nothing but emotional, physical, and spiritual pain.

Some will welcome the cost increase in hopes that the expense may retard the injurious practice of narcissistic sex and raise awareness of the great divorce of sexuality from its marital intention to produce children and cultivate life-committed love–a divorce, many argue, accelerated by the introduction of artificial contraceptives.

It’s not the first time the Rev. Earl Paulk has been engulfed in a sex scandal. But this time he’s in trouble for sex he had in 1973:

The 80-year-old leader of a suburban Atlanta megachurch is at the center of a sex scandal of biblical dimensions: He slept with his brother’s wife and fathered a child by her. Members of Archbishop Earl Paulk’s family stood at the pulpit of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit at Chapel Hill Harvester Church a few Sundays ago and revealed the secret exposed by a recent court-ordered paternity test.

The secret is that Reverend Earl’s nephew, D.E. Paulk, is actually Reverend Earl’s son.

Then there’s the matter of Mona Brewer, a church employee who is suing Reverend Earl, his brother and their church. Brewer alleges that between 1989 and 2003, Reverend Earl manipulated her into an affair, saying it was her only path to salvation.

Disgusting.