Vow Of Celibacy

Winner of the Bisexual Book Award for Best Novel Natalie has made a promise: a vow of celibacy, signed and witnessed by her best friend. After a string of sexual conquests, she is determined to figure out why the intense romantic connections she's spent her life chasing have left her emotionally high and dry. As Natalie sifts through her past and her present, she confronts her complicated feelings about her plus-sized figure, her bisexuality, and her thwarted career in fashion design. Piecing together toxic relationship patterns from her past, Natalie finds herself strutting down fashion runways and rekindling her passion for clothing design in the present. All the while, her best friend, Anastaze, struggles with her own secret--whether or not to reveal her true identity to the thousands of fans of her popular blog and her potential first sexual partner. Clever, sexy, and hilarious, Vow of Celibacy delves into the perilous terrain of love and relationships, the uncertainty of early adulthood, and the sustaining force of friendship. This is an irresistible novel about the stories we can't help but tell ourselves about others, and it captures in perfect pitch what it's like to be a young woman coming of age in America today.

Celibacy and Soul: Exploring the Depths of Chastity is for women and men who have chosen to live into celibate chastity. It is also for those people who live celibate love, and though not vowed to a religious calling, know the way of celibate love as their path. You may find yourself celibate not by choice or you may hope it is a temporary stage. Perhaps life interrupted your plans with the death of a loved one, the loss of a relationship, the situation of illness, the trauma of abuse, or you simply didn’t settle with the desired partner and you want to find meaning in your life as a celibate person. Celibacy and Soul is also useful for those in the helping professions, as the work of a therapist asks a celibate kind of loving that can be catalyst for change in both clients and practitioners.

"Fr Christian Cochini has made a thorough examination, based on years of extensive research, of the topic of clerical celibacy in the first seven centuries of the Church's history. ...." [from back cover]

Mimi Bull grew up secure in the love of family, friends, and neighbors, never questioning the unusual circumstances that caused her to be adopted by two women in the late 1930s. It was years before she learned the secret truth: that one of the women was her grandmother, the other her biological mother, and that the story of her adoption had been concocted not only to shield her mother's reputation, but to hide the fact that her father was the gregarious young parish priest everyone adored. It has only been very recently that the Catholic Church has begun to acknowledge the existence of other children of priests, and Bull writes candidly of the emotional toll that this policy of secrecy and denial took on her--"I should like to have lived a life with my loving parents, knowing who we all were, knowing my father's family from the beginning, and without the forty years of depression that compromised me and those I loved."

Richard Sipe examines the continuing sexual crisis facing the Catholic Church today. Has the storm of publicity and controversy caused the church to acknowledge any of the accusations? Will the church accept statistical evidence or alter the way it trains its clergy? How has it come to grips with reforming or retraining abusers? Has it acknowledged the spread of AIDS among its ranks? Why does the church oppress women and react with hostility and fear towards them? Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis addresses these and other questions.