This work by Alfonso Lopes Quintas enters the great human battle to uphold human dignity and carries off the task not only with success, but with a brilliance that amazes and enthuses. The battle is often envisaged as between understanding the human person either as an animal or as an angel. Most choose one or the other of these and then head swiftly to an easy but destructive exit.

On the one hand, much commercial profit us to be made if the most explosive passions of sexuality can be reduced to physical gratification and then exploited. Those less mature and struggling to find their way in life are particularly prone to being abused in this way. Society is rightly insensed by child abuse in all its forms. Amazingly, it fully accepts the abuse of adolescents and young adults through commercial twisting of their minds and hearts. In this the social sciences can too often be complicit through their tendency to look for data that is certain because physical in nature and therefore available to animal experiments and to theories that does not exceed the human imagination.

On the other hand, and in reverse, some would shy away from the bodily and especially sexual dimension of the human person in fear of the powerful passions they entail. This may be less a matter of those who could dismiss the physical for the spiritual, than of parents unclear about their own sexuality and who feel incapable of helping their children cope with its fundamental and emerging dynamisms in their own process of development and of transition from home to marriage.

In this work Professor Lopez does not accept either extreme or facile solution. Instead, he wades into the frey that all this entails, takes both dimensions of the human person and welds them together in the special unity that is the human person. On this basis he proceeds to show how couples can build together a love, a home and a family in which all can truly flourish.

Professor Lopez is especially well suited for this as an outstanding professor of philosophy at the famed Comillas University, a member of the Spanish Royal Academy, and an outstanding musician deeply experienced in the creation of things beautiful. He is moreover a priest who has devoted all has resources to the development of youth development and programs of preparation for marriage which are widely dispersed in multiple languages from Argentina to Russia.

Uniting all these personal resources, he is able to identify the cultural pitfalls which tempt and threaten young persons on all sides in their search for identity and community, maturity and deep love But it is characteristic of this book that he considers this alone to be less a matter of protection than of the development of a positive appreciation of the amazingly rich and varied process by which mutual attraction, when promoted in broader ambits of value, can enable physical attraction to evolve into love and commitment between the two as persons. In this process sexuality comes to fruition in passion that transcends self and is fully generative.

This positive vision is developed progressively chapter by chapter. It is the needed, but generally missing, vision which can enable people, especially young people, to navigate the swift currents within and the obstacles without so as to find and fulfill the meaning of life. Seldom if ever has the whole process been evolved with so intensive an integration of all dimensions of the human person, such depth of meaning, and so exhalted a sense of human destiny. It is truly the light that is needed by all who would mature humanely and all who want to help the young in their battle to find the way to live in love and reflect this in family and community.