Chastity as the Power to Love: A Discussion as Parents and Teachers on the Reconciliation of the Senses Toward the Fullness of Desire

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Course Description

In this short course, three friends and educators—Christine Perrin, Dr. Grant Holbrook and Scott Endicott—share reflections and conversation from their reading of Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses by Eric Varden. This virtue, often referred to as chaste eros, is active and aims to integrate and reconcile our desires and our senses. In this book, Bishop Eric Varden sympathizes deeply with the heavy burdens that we carry through adulthood related to disordered eros. How can communities of parents and teachers be helped by such reading and discussion to mature their thinking on this topic? Inform your own reading and reflection with this course on a subject vital to human formation. This course supports teams of teachers and parents who are working to develop clear and helpful ways of thinking together about this human capacity and virtue that is easily misunderstood and distorted. Allow this model of readers in conversation to encourage your learning together on such topics within your own schools and homes.

Christine Perrin has served as director of writing at Messiah College and taught literature and creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, with Gordon College’s Orvieto Program, through the Pennsylvania Arts Council to students of all ages, and at the local classical school where her children attended. She consults with classical schools in curriculum development and faculty development in poetry and writing, and speaks regularly at the CiRCE Institute as well as the Society for Classical Learning conferences. She is a two-time recipient of the PA Arts Council Artists Fellowship and a Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Fellowship. Her own work appears in various journals, including The New England Review, Image, TriQuarterly, Blackbird, Christianity and Literature, and The Cresset. She attended Johns Hopkins as an undergraduate student and earned her MFA from the University of Maryland. Christine is the series editor for the Writing & Rhetoric series and the author of The Art of Poetry, a textbook for middle and high school students. Christine and her husband, Christopher, are the parents of three grown children.