Encyclicals are too long for me to do on my own...I'm just not smart enough....but I'll take a small stab at it...
"Our culture has lost its sense of God’s tangible presence and activity in our world. We think that God is to be found in the beyond, on another level of reality, far removed from our everyday relationships. But if this were the case, if God could not act in the world, his love would not be truly powerful, truly real, and thus not even true, a love capable of delivering the bliss that it promises. It would make no difference at all whether we believed in him or not. Christians, on the contrary, profess their faith in God’s tangible and powerful love which really does act in history and determines its final destiny: a love that can be encountered, a love fully revealed in Christ’s passion, death and resurrection."
in my small mind, I can't help but think of some friends, a gay couple who adopted refugee twin babies at birth. Could anything be more selfless than to raise these waifs.... to give them a chance at a decent life? So I don't know if we've lost a sense of God's presence or if we refuse to acknowledge it everywhere.

Encyclicals are too long for me to do on my own...I'm just not smart enough....but I'll take a small stab at it...
"Our culture has lost its sense of God’s tangible presence and activity in our world. We think that God is to be found in the beyond, on another level of reality, far removed from our everyday relationships. But if this were the case, if God could not act in the world, his love would not be truly powerful, truly real, and thus not even true, a love capable of delivering the bliss that it promises. It would make no difference at all whether we believed in him or not. Christians, on the contrary, profess their faith in God’s tangible and powerful love which really does act in history and determines its final destiny: a love that can be encountered, a love fully revealed in Christ’s passion, death and resurrection."
in my small mind, I can't help but think of some friends, a gay couple who adopted refugee twin babies at birth. Could anything be more selfless than to raise these waifs.... to give them a chance at a decent life? So I don't know if we've lost a sense of God's presence or if we refuse to acknowledge it everywhere.

Then what do you think of this one, Jerber?

52. In Abraham’s journey towards the future city, the Letter to the Hebrews mentions the blessing which was passed on from fathers to sons (cf. Heb 11:20-21). The first setting in which faith enlightens the human city is the family. I think first and foremost of the stable union of man and woman in marriage. This union is born of their love, as a sign and presence of God’s own love, and of the acknowledgment and acceptance of the goodness of sexual differentiation, whereby spouses can become one flesh (cf. Gen 2:24) and are enabled to give birth to a new life, a manifestation of the Creator’s goodness, wisdom and loving plan. Grounded in this love, a man and a woman can promise each other mutual love in a gesture which engages their entire lives and mirrors many features of faith. Promising love for ever is possible when we perceive a plan bigger than our own ideas and undertakings, a plan which sustains us and enables us to surrender our future entirely to the one we love. Faith also helps us to grasp in all its depth and richness the begetting of children, as a sign of the love of the Creator who entrusts us with the mystery of a new person. So it was that Sarah, by faith, became a mother, for she trusted in God’s fidelity to his promise (cf. Heb 11:11).

While I would not want to comment on your friends, gay men cannot become one flesh and engender life. What I find wrong are gay men who go to India, and pay a poverty-stricken woman to bear a child and have no contact with it the rest of her life. This flies against God's plan, in that the child is consciously deprived of a relationship with his or her mother, his or her sibblings, and from the mother's entire familiy lineage. This child is rootless, and this goes both against human anthropology and against God's plan as it inscribed in our gendered reality.

they can't engender life together, no but they have made the decision to nurture and sacrifice..... and that is in essence a wonderful thing. I am by far too selfish to do that so...In my mind its God's privilege to judge and I can only trust in his mercy. And the word that jumped out of the encyclical is STABLE. a stable union....I'd say that is a larger and more universal issue that really should be addressed with the vehemence poured out at gays. (and I've never heard of the India scenario you described)

I agree about not judging and God's mercy, but I can't help but notice that where gay marriage has been accepted, the Church has had to withdraw from finding families for orphans because gays refuse to allow an organization that favors placing children with an adoptive mother and father to even exist.

There have been quite a few articles published on the womb farms of India by the New York Times and other publications. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/world/asia/10surrogate.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Here is one by the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/05/india-surrogates-impoverished-die

and one from Time magazine: http://world.time.com/2013/02/15/why-people-are-angry-about-indias-new-surrogacy-laws/

as an aside, the more reading I do it seems this encyclical was mostly penned by Benedict and 'tweaked' a bit by Francis, no?

#4 proposes that faith is a light "capable of illuminating every aspect of human existence," which is "born of an encounter with the living God who calls us and reveals his love, a love which precedes us and upon which we can lean for security and for building our lives."

Does faith have this power to illuminate 'every aspect' of life, for us? When and where did we encounter the living God as one who reveals his love as the source of all stability?

Grassette— in reading what Pope Francis has written, each of us must look to see if what he describes is something that happens in our life, here and now, or just something that we— more or less— agree with.

For me, then, does faith have the power to illuminate 'ever aspect' of life? Can it illuminate the boring hours at work as well as the excitement of working on new projects or being the one to solve a particular problem, the struggling with meeting the mortgage every month, missing out on vacation with friends, the difficulties of our children, the illnesses and sufferings of friends, realizing at the last minute that we could see Independence Day fireworks just by walking down the block (haven't figured this out this in 9 years, LOL). I can't reconcile all these contradictions myself and I have no reassurance that things will all work out the way I would plan them, but yes, I repeatedly find myself revived by a secret thrill that Christ has risen from death, and that the daily tedium, needs, and desires have their answer in his face.

How did it happen for me? In 2006 I was on vacation in Wisconsin, reading a book called The Friendship of Christ by RH Benson. I agreed with all it said, but I wanted to know why it wasn't happening in my life. When I asked a friend about this, he told me that in his experience that was because he wasn't surrendering himself to Christ, but holding something back. I joined in singing some songs with others at the campfire (I remember Ghost Riders in the Sky in particular), and that was the beginning for me, of following.