Acclaimed author and professor Dr. Anthony Esolen delivered a talk entitled “The Gift of Self: Modern Culture’s Impact on Love” to the students and faculty at Christendom College on October 24. The talk examined how modern society’s understanding of human love has destroyed all sense of mystery and imagination.

A professor at Providence College, Esolen explained that society has reduced love to sex, and sex to hygiene—a reduction that has occurred due to a skewed view of what it is to know something.

Esolen proposed the virtue of purity as the answer to society’s current misunderstanding of love and sex. He observed that while abstinence is defined by absence and refraining, purity is “an essential light radiating from the core of the holy.”