In January 2014, M. G. Bianco published Letters to My Sons: A Humane Vision for Human Relationships. I am thoroughly enjoying this book and will write a full review of it when I finish, but for now here’s a portion to whet your appetite. Although I have not finished reading it yet, I can already highly recommend it to everyone. It is a work worthy of reading. Twice.
Here’s the quote for today:
We need to recognize that to fail to treat others as they deserve is to objectify them. When we limit someone by the way we look at them we are objectifying them. To objectify another human being is to reduce them to something other than their full humanness. I will use the term “dehumanize” in these letters to refer to the way we treat others improperly. For many of these letters, we will consider how we dehumanize others with our eyes, our thoughts, and our sexual behaviors toward or with them.
Think of it in terms of the phrase, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” What is meant, of course, is that you cannot know the true value of the words within the book simply by looking at its cover. How much more true is this of humans? The complexity of the human person prevents us from truly knowing their inner beauty and goodness, their value and dignity as humans created in the image of God. When we determine that someone is not worth getting to know or have a relationship with because of how we have judged their appearances with our eyes, we are objectifying them, we are dehumanizing them.
As M. G. Bianco states in the subtitle, he has a “humane vision for human relationships.” The purpose of these letters is to pass this vision along to his sons. Through the pages of these letters, now published, the non-Biancan reader can also see with new eyes that which is a very old vision, for it is the vision of the triune God, who created humanity in His very image.
Go to Amazon, and buy your own copy via this link. Hard copy or Kindle.<>
[…] a link to my quote from […]