In the current issue of America, “A Sexual Revolution: One woman’s journey from pro-choice atheist to pro-life Catholic.”

The Theology of the Body seems key. A bit from the article:

Growing up in secular middle-class America, I understood sex as something disconnected from the idea of creating life. During my entire childhood I did not know anyone who had a baby sibling; and to the extent that neighborhood parents ever talked about pregnancy, it was to say they were glad they were “done.” In high school sex education class, we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. Even recently, before our marriage was blessed in the Catholic Church, my husband and I took a course about building good marriages. It was a video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and the segment called “Good Sex” did not mention children once. In all the talk about bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest the videos came to connecting sex to the creation of life was a brief note that couples should discuss the topic of contraception.

All my life, the message I had heard loud and clear was that sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten. This mind-set became the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being by default closed to the possibility of life, I thought of unplanned pregnancies as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street—something totally unpredictable and undeserved that happened to people living normal lives.

My pro-choice views (and I imagine those of many others) were motivated by loving concern: I just did not want women to have to suffer, to have to devalue themselves by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Since it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with “hang-ups” eventually has sex, and that sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I was lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: the enemy is not human. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendency to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize their fellow human beings on the other side of the line in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized what we saw as the enemy of sex.

As I was reading up on the Catholic Church’s understanding of sex, marriage and contraception, everything changed. I had always assumed that Catholic teachings against birth control were outdated notions, even a thinly disguised attempt to oppress the faithful. What I found, however, was that these teachings expressed a fundamentally different understanding of sex. And once I discovered this, I never saw the world the same way again.

Read the entire article.

Imagine The Incredibles meets A Clockwork Orange. You remember The Incredibles, that Pixar sensation about the family of superheroes who are domesticated by a politically correct society that defines pluralism as an egregious egalitarianism and a uniform mediocrity.

And A Clockwork Orange is, of course, Anthony Burgess’ (and, by way of film adaptation, Stanley Kubrick’s) paean to free will, in which a Beethoven-loving thug named Alex makes a deal with the devil (in this case, Britain’s liberal government) by allowing himself to be “pacified’ by means of extreme aversion therapy in exchange for early release from prison. Problem is, once out in the mean streets, Alex is unable even to defend himself without retching. After almost dying at the hands of a man he had once terrorized, our antihero regains his propensity for sadism–the lesson being, the Alexes of the world must be tolerated if we are to remain fully human and fully free. Coerced “goodness” is no goodness at all.

And so a funky melange of these two flicks is what I expected from Will Smith’s new summer action flick, Hancock. At least it’s what I expected from the trailer. And the first hour of the film itself seemed to confirm my suspicions. Smith plays a lonely, drunken, and foul-mouthed superhero named Hancock, whose attempts at crime-fighting wreak as much havoc as they subdue. Only after a public-relations executive (Jason Bateman), grateful to Hancock for saving his life, decides to remake the loathed superman’s image do things really get interesting.

On the advice of his new PR rep, Hancock allows himself to be encarcerated (after evading roughly 600 subpoenas for destruction of private and public property), which gives him time to get in touch with his feelings and the greater Los Angeles area time to realize that a drunken superhero is better than no superhero at all.

With L.A. in chaos, the chief of police places the call we knew was coming, and a revamped touchy-feelly Hancock (now donning a supertight costume that makes him look like a rogue member of KC and the Sunshine Band) hits the streets to the plaudits of the public and the gratitude of the authorities. Suddenly the much-misunderstood miscreant is celebrated and adored. (Watching Hancock try and “smile” for the paparazzi’s cameras–a wince welded to a scowl–is spit-your-popcorn-into-the-neck-of-the-poor-sap-sitting-in-front-of-you guaranteed.)

So far, so good–a weird, moody summer blockbuster in the making, with strange needle-drops ranging from Freddy Fender to the theme from Sanford and Son. Will the new politically correct Hancock continue to rate as a crime fighter? Or will the emasculated man of steel find that he needs to break a few rules to keep law and order after all? And will Will Smith prove once again that he owns the Fourth of July weekend like Lucas and Spielberg own the last week in May?

I wish I had the answers. Unfortunately, as it limps into its second hour, Hancock gets all I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched on us. The second half of the film reveals Hancock’s distaff “Other.” It seems that he had forgotten that he was, in fact, married to a female superhero–his paired opposite–whom he has been alternately repelling and attracting for lo these past 3,000 years.

What follows is a morose muddle of a message: something about conventional marriage being innately disempowering, the perils of interracial dating, and the self-sacrifice that makes every heroic life worthy of the epithet. Or something like that. In the end, the obligatory showdown and a sentimental twist make Hancock a confused disappointment that tried to say too much too late than the really edgy and countercultural phenomenon it could have been.

My disgruntlement notwithstanding, that first fantastic hour is worth the price of admission. And Will Smith proves once again why he is a star, refining what had the makings of a franchise-worthy character by means of an empathetic demeanor and a self-confidence that is never off-putting. (Nota bene: This is not a film for smallish children. The coarse language and affinity for dismemberment should make that “PG-13″ pop for parents.)

Unfortunately, it’s neither Love nor Evil that undoes our hero but a screenplay that needed one more final draft.

On July 25, a new film of Brideshead Revisited will be released. It has much promise, especially with Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain, so keep your eyes open for reviews and the movie itself later in July.

According to New York Times, Senator Obama went yesterday to Zanesville, Ohio, where he expressed his support for faith-based organizations—or, as he put it, for fulfilling the failed promises that the Bush administration had made. “When I’m President,” he said, “I’ll establish a new Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The new name will reflect a new commitment.”

But his plans to create a new council—even as it risks contradicting his comment later in the same speech, “I believe that change comes not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up”—is not as alarming as another plan he announced yesterday: a new requirement he would impose, prohibiting federally-funded faith groups from considering faith when hiring their own employees. As he put it, “If you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them–or against the people you hire—on the basis of their religion.”

In other venues, Obama has appealed to those in his party who think the Bush administration has delivered over America to church rule. In Zanesville, however, Obama seemed to want to run in the other direction, cheering on the faith-based organizations. Of course, his demand that they secularize their personnel rather mutes the cheer. But at least you can’t say he isn’t trying.