Deus Misereatur

Nancy Pearcey’s 336 page stout hardback, “ Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality,” came out in January 2018, and hit the ground running! It is a book focused on the human body, what it means to be made in the image of God, and how our culture has increasingly become anti-body and anti-human. And it is a book written in the utmost seriousness. According to Pearcey, and my own experiences, we have moved into a Gnostic era, what Hans Jonas defined as an anti-cosmic dualism. In this Gnostic stage, the body is commodified, treated as a malleable substance that can be discarded or remade to suit the customer’s satisfaction, because it is treated as other than “me”. The statement usually runs something like this: “Why are you focusing on this outside stuff (body; genitalia; physique; etc.). The real me is on the inside!” Unfortunately this kind of dualism is the offspring of Christians in North America over the last 200 years. I have heard and read nume...

Recently, Huffpost Gay Voices (Posted 06/06/2013 and updated on 06/07/2013), relayed that three scholars had written an Op-Ed piece in the Des Moines Register, where they denied that the Bible mandates monogamy (you can find the HuffPost piece here ). The authors, Hector Avalos, Robert Cargill and Kenneth Atkinson, are teachers at three Iowa universities, Iowa State University, University of Iowa and University of Northern Iowa. If the Huffpost piece is accurate in its reporting, then it appears that these scholars come at the Bible with a priori suppositions that are, at the worst, hostile to the Bible, and at the least, simply taking the Bible as disparate, independent works that are stitched together; that the authors are approaching the Bible with the flatness of a flagrant fundamentalist, ignorant of style, genre, and literary variety, as well as social environment. In other words, the Huffpost writer is processing and promoting the Avalos-Cargill-Atkinson Op-Ed piece throu...