Pope Francis’ Outlook on Conjugal Love as an Inspiration for the Pedagogy of the Family

The paper shows Pope Francis’ understanding of conjugal love, the causes of its crisis and inspirations for the pedagogy of the family. This topic has not been dealt with in Polish pedagogy, therefore, the author aims to draw attention to the innovative, pedagogical potential of Pope Francis’ teaching. The following questions are addressed here: What is Pope Francis’ outlook on conjugal love and what features does he indicate in particular? What kinds of crisis of conjugal love does he emphasize? What does it imply for the Polish pedagogy of the family?

The Rhetoric of “Bragoro”: The Philosophy Behind Akan Traditional Concept of Marriage

This paper discusses the intertextual relationship between the world of Akan Bragoro (puberty rites) song texts and the real world of Akans. The Akan Bragoro song texts are performed during Bragoro celebrations and the song texts define the Akan concept of sex and marriage within the parameters of traditional Akan philosophy. The paper uses qualitative research methods that are irrigated by ethnographic and stylistics approaches to text interpretation. The findings of the research indicate that texts of Akan Bragoro songs key all the meanings this traditional philosophy has to offer: sex is strictly a marital affair and marriage is for those who are prepared for it. The stylistics of the song texts also frame the epistemic of Akan love and that the basic condition of Akan conjugal love is a good character on the side of both the man and the woman. The paper further reveals that the Akan Bragoro song texts constitute the site where the precipitates of Akan marriage are provided and Bragoro initiates are introduced to the Akan way of life. These precipitates are rehearsed in performance year after year, making the Akan Bragoro an enduring cultural practice that guides the life of the Akans throughout all ages. Keywords: Performance, Bragoro song texts, Verbal art, Cognitive poetics, Tradition

In Fortune Fair and Foul

This article focuses on the idiosyncratic conception of happiness Sir Kenelm Digby develops in the letters he wrote after the death of his wife in 1633. It contextualises Digby’s vision of happiness through an examination of the different traditions he revisits and appropriates to develop his personal and subjective ethics of self-care, mainly Renaissance Neoplatonism, the idealisation of conjugal love, the idealism of Italian poetry, and an ascetic model of widowhood linked to the tradition of spiritual mourning. It analyses how Digby’s conception of happiness, through its vindication of subjectivity and excess, challenges the early modern ethos of consolation and speculates on the reasons that may have led Digby to present his readers with such an extraordinary self-portrait.

Conjugal Love from a Sociological Perspective: Theorizing from Observed Practices.

This paper presents a sociological reflection on contemporary conjugal love, both from an empirical and a theoretical point of view. Drawing on analyses of data regarding financial arrangements between partners forming a couple, as well as on the sociological literature concerning love relationships, we present a theorization of contemporary conjugal semantics. We define these semantics as consisting of eight “meaning rules” through which social actors respond to the challenges of intimate relationships. Our analysis shows us the gaps and the tensions between different logics of love, on the one hand, and logics of love and social realities, on the other. However, partners’ utterances feature an integration of elements stemming from opposed semantic frameworks; meaning rules fostering mythical idealisation are combined with rules regarding relationship work, therapeutic communication, and the entrepreneurial management of the relationship. This empirical analysis also allows us to tackle a double confusion in the contemporary sociological literature on love and couples.

From Virginity to Orgasm: Marriage and Sexuality in Twentieth-century Greece

This article charts the gradual sexualization of marriage in twentieth-century Greece, exploring both expert and lay ideas. First, through official writings and marital correspondence, it sketches the subtle transformation of the nineteenth-century ideal of conjugal love into a more sexualized emotion by the turn of the century. Then, it analyzes the writings of “sex experts” and the correspondence with their clients, showcasing how sexual pleasure became a priority within marriage after World War II. Lastly, the records of a postwar mental health service show that by the late 1970s, the consensus on the importance of mutual sexual satisfaction was being established.

The Shame of Conjugal Sex

This chapter traces the effects of Pauline and Augustinian soteriology on Protestant views of marriage. The Reformation is conventionally understood as elevating conjugal love above the lifelong celibacy privileged by the Catholic Church. But this redemptive vision of marriage overlooks a key argument of leading reformers like Luther and Calvin: both deemed marriage superior to celibacy not because marriage sanctifies shameful creaturely desires, but because it publicly acknowledges them. This view of marriage as humbling confession of impurity runs counter to the ideals assumed by the US Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the majority affirmed the constitutional right to marriage equality on the grounds that marriage confers unique dignity. By contrast, Protestant anxiety that nuptial sex shares the excess and indignity of fornication structures the sexual and racial fantasies of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion. When Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets cast poetry as a reproductive technology free of the contamination of lust, they valorize not only same-sex desire but also the preservation of specifically “fair”—white—life and culture. Spenser reveals that the ideal of chaste romance generates sadomasochistic fantasies that naturalize white male sexual violence and racialize female innocence.

“The genealogy of the person is inscribed in the very biology of generation”. Towards the heart of the dispute on Humanae vitae

Since the publication of the encyclical "Humanae vitae" by Paul VI in 1968, a heated discussion has been taking place around this document. It comes alive in a particularly intense way on the occasion of the subsequent anniversaries of the publication of the document. Subsequent decades showed a number of problems related not only to the ethics of marital life and sexual ethics, but also to the concept of conscience or recognition or rejection of the seriousness of the Church's Magisterium. Recent months have brought further opinions of antagonists and protagonists of this document.Among opponents or critics of the encyclical, there are views questioning the teaching that contraception is intrinsically evil. This, in consequence, means accepting the thesis that there are no intrinsically evil acts at all. What is more, it should be noted that every human action is determined in its moral nature only by the proportion between its good and bad effects.In confrontation with these views, the article presents an outline of the anthropological and theological truth underlying "Humanae vitae" which was analysed with insight by St. John Paul II. This allows for the extraction of several basic theses relating to the theological vision of marriage and parenthood: 1) to read the truth about marriage and parenthood, it is necessary to fully recognize the truth about the dignity of the human person, 2) the person realizes fully in the reality of the gift that creates interpersonal communion with the participation of the human body, 3) communion and endowment made with the help of the "sign" of the body are realized in interpersonal conjugal love, 4) the special (though not the only) act of conjugal love is a sexual act, 5) marital logic of being a mutual gift is specific and this is inseparability of the bond between the inter-marital gift (between spouses) and the non-marital gift (between parents and children). Ultimately, this leads to the thought of St. Pope John Paul II, ordering to combine the order of the marriage act with the creative act "the genealogy of the person is inscribed in the very biology of generation".