Lately I have been rereading two Alice von Hildebrand books, By Love Refined (which I quoted from in my last entry) and The Privilege of Being a Woman.

The first is a series of letters written to a young friend in her first years of marriage. It is full of invaluable wisdom, advice, and inspiration for any Christian woman trying to live her vocation to marriage faithfully. The epistolatory style is warm and accessible, and she strikes just the right note between general principles and concrete application. I particularly love the way she talks about taking the clear vision of our beloved at his best that we are given through love and storing it away in a treasure chest for those times when we are angry or disappointed or lose sight of the beauty of marriage.

The second, The Privilege of Being a Woman, covers some of the same ideas, sometimes the ideas that underpin the advice in By Love Refined, but in a rather more systematic and scholarly way. I could read this book over and over, and I think that anyone who wants an alternative and an answer to secular feminism should do the same.