Episode 104: Jennifer Roback Morse on "The Sexual Revolution and Its Victims" (November 1, 2024)

In this episode of The Catholic Bookworm, Kiki Latimer interviews Jennifer Roback Morse on her chapter entitled "The Sexual Revolution and Its Victims: The Church was Right All Along" in the book "Lived Experience and the Search for Truth: Revisiting Catholic Sexual Morality."This book is an initial attempt to arrive inductively at the truths embedded in the moral teaching of the Church through the lived experience of faithful men and women, rendered intelligible in conceptual terms. While attending to one’s own experience is certainly one step in coming to understand oneself, it provides but a glimpse – a partial clue – into the mystery of who one is and is meant to be. Indeed, experience is not alienated from human cognition but integral to it. Wisdom is the fruit of both experience and reason. But, contrary to claims of those who would give primacy to subjective personal experience over and against the conclusions of right reason, it is only possible to arrive at the full truth about oneself if the intellect is allowed to pursue its proper end, not mere knowledge but understanding. We hope to persuade the reader that a proper grasp of the place of lived experience in the search for truth reveals that the Catholic understanding of the human person and human sexuality provide the only sure route to human happiness. -- Jennifer Roback Morse is the founder of The Ruth Institute, an interfaith international coalition to defend the family and build a Civilization of Love. She taught economics at Yale and George Mason Universities for 15 years. She resigned her tenured teaching position in 1996 to care for her children, a badly neglected Romanian adopted son, and a birth daughter. She founded the Ruth Institute in 2008, and has devoted her professional skills to developing a defense of traditional Catholic teaching on marriage, family and human sexuality. https://enroutebooksandmedia.com/livedexperience/