It's nice to know there is such a society. It's nice to hear they're teaching this message:
The Anscombe Society at Princeton University was organized for the express purpose of promoting chastity. Chastity - now that's a behavior you hardly ever hear discussed any more. It seems more the province of monks and dusty dowagers than something you'd expect to find embraced on a progressive college campus.
"It seems very counter-cultural," said Anscombe member Claire Sully, 20, a Princeton senior who has decided to wait until she's married before having sex.
I caught up with Sully on Monday at a meeting of the Anscombe Society, which was named after the late British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, a staunch supporter of the Catholic church's teachings on sex. About 50 undergraduates - of both sexes - turned out for a lecture on "What Sex Can Be: Self Alienation, Illusion or One Flesh Unity."
Link.
Anscombe is mostly known as the person who humiliated C.S. Lewis in a debate at Oxford. The topic? His book, Miracles. Here's how Lewis' friend George Sayer describes it in Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times:
At a meeting of the Socratic Club on February 2, 1948, Elizabeth Anscombe, who later became a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, red a criticism of Jack's argument that naturalism is self-refuting. Jack replied, and an exciting debate followed. The audience disagreed about who had won the debate, but Jack thought that he had been defeated, and he was still unhappy about the evening when he spoke to me about it during Easter vacation. He told me that he had been proved wrong, that his arguments for the existence of God had been demolished. . .
The debate had been a humiliating experience, but perhaps it was ultimately good for him. In the past, he had been far too proud of his logical ability. Now he was humbled. . . But he saw that he had underrated the difficulty of taking on the new school of Oxford philosophers, that the study of philosophy had changed very much since he had taken first-class honors. The Hegelians of his youth were now completely out of fashion. "Logical positivism" was the current mode, and "linguistic analysis" was gaining popularity.
With that, Sayers leaves the reader with the impression that Anscombe was some sort of Bertrand Russell/Hans Kelsen/Claude Levi-Strauss wannabe. That's not the case. Joseph Pearce provides the needed corrective in Literary Converts:
Elizabeth Anscombe [was] a distinguished philosopher and Roman Catholic . . . According to [R. E.] Havard, Anscombe "had perhaps the most acute intelligence of anyone at Oxford," adding that "she out-argued Lewis." "Of course," Lewis later confessed to Havard, "she is far more intelligent than either of us." . . .
This defeat of Lewis at the hands of a philosopher and Catholic who appeared to be intellectually his superior coupled with his deep admiration for the writings of Christopher Dawson, prompts an obvious question: To what extent had Lewis modified his view of the Roma Catholic Church by the end of the 1940s?
