One other long, science-fictionary piece that may (or may not at all) be your cup of tea:
I watched an Anime cartoon, and I was trying to put a finger on what profoundly disturbed me about a thread in science fiction and how it treated spirit and body.
The title "Ghost in the Shell", which in my opinion had the heart of the series nailed, was a reference to Cartesian discussion of the "ghost in the machine," which is essentially a philosophical question that arises when you reach a philosophical conclusion that body and spirit inhabit watertight compartments that simply shouldn't be able to mix, but yet we are able to do things with our bodies out of what is in the mind. (Most people who try to address this question do not seem to consider that we might be unities with a single nature, so that mind and matter should naturally have some interaction with influence over each other.)
Out of that irritation, and one Lenten ascesis later, I wrote "Yonder" (read it on the web; or buy an ebook where it is the final work).
My intent wasn't to establish anything about sex, or anything about marriage. That its inner story focused on marriage arose by the way of trying to find something pure with which to answer something very unhealthy in much science fiction, but the event that odd science fiction tendencies were answered by talking about marriage says a lot.
