Pucker up: Bring back the Holy Kiss
Commiato dei santi Pietro e Paolo, Messina Museo Regionale (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In a May article for The Conservative, “ Our Starved for Touch Culture ,” Leah Libresco grieves the lack of touch for many in our society. She theorizes that we have abandoned friendly touch because it has been too-frequently tainted or overtaken by ulterior motives of sexual intimacy: “The friendzone is treated as a wasteland not just because we treat sex as an idol, but because friendship and non-sexual affection is written off as irrelevant. Casual dating has been replaced by casual sex; platonic touch has been eclipsed by erotic signalling.” ( Albert Mohler has written a thought-provoking essay making a similar argument.) In addition I suspect that instances of abuse have done their nasty work to bring touch low. Particularly in the church, we are rightly sickened by our public rap sheet of abusers—often church leaders or clergy—who corrupted touch and abused vulnerable human beings to serv...