What if the purpose of marriage isn't to make us happy but to make us better people?
Climbing the 7 Story Mountain is our work-in-progress. It's a book that envisions marriage as a journey modeled on Dante’s epic poem The Divine Comedy. In a series of short, informative chapters, it offers couples a practical guide for eliminating the vices that poison their marriage, and building the virtues that make marriage joyful, holy, and sacramental.
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We have sought to create a book that is readable and practical. Our book integrates a broad experience of marriages and their problems with insights from contemporary marriage and family counseling research and practice, along with teaching of the Church drawn from Scripture, Church Fathers, and Popes (and especially insights from Dante and Thomas Aquinas). We seek to startle people with the realization that traditional Church teachings on marriage are fresh, sensible, and consistent with contemporary research.
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Marriage is a quest to learn how to love
Many marriage books utilize the metaphor of marriage as a journey; in this book we structure the text using the analogy of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The journey begins in Hell, with examples of how marriages built of mutual need and desire often founder and fall into despair and divorce. Descriptions of these failed marriages are organized around the seven deadly sins of lust, greed, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy and pride.
The second section of the book offers tools for controlling such destructive habits and replacing them with better habits. In the third section, we offer practical tools for building the virtues your marriage needs, particularly those of prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope, and love.