Tag: book review

Biblical Sex:Interpreting the Good Book’s Laws

Posted on by

Unprotected Texts:  The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire, by Jennifer Wright Knust (HarperOne, 2011)

by Natasja Sheriff

If you listen to the rhetoric of the more vocal proponents of conservative Christianity, you would be forgiven for believing that the Bible contains clear instruction on sexual conduct and morality.  You might be less inclined to believe that the Good Book is actually full of hidden meaning and innuendo, erotic poetry, extra-marital seduction and love affairs between same-sex couples. Doesn’t the Bible teach that sex is for procreation, sanctioned only within the confines of marriage between two heterosexual adults?

No, says Jennifer Wright Knust, author of Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire. An ordained Baptist minister and religious scholar with a doctorate in Religion from Columbia University, Knust knows what she’s talking about. The Bible, Knust argues, is not a sexual guidebook. It is inconsistent, contradictory, complex and, at times, “patently immoral.”  “The Bible does not offer a systematic set of teachings or a single sexual code,” she says, “but it does reveal sometimes conflicting attempts on the part of people and groups to define sexual morality, and to do so in the name of God.” Continue Reading →

Biblical Sex:Interpreting the Good Book’s Laws

Posted on by

Unprotected Texts:  The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire, by Jennifer Wright Knust (HarperOne, 2011)

by Natasja Sheriff

If you listen to the rhetoric of the more vocal proponents of conservative Christianity, you would be forgiven for believing that the Bible contains clear instruction on sexual conduct and morality.  You might be less inclined to believe that the Good Book is actually full of hidden meaning and innuendo, erotic poetry, extra-marital seduction and love affairs between same-sex couples. Doesn’t the Bible teach that sex is for procreation, sanctioned only within the confines of marriage between two heterosexual adults?

No, says Jennifer Wright Knust, author of Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire. An ordained Baptist minister and religious scholar with a doctorate in Religion from Columbia University, Knust knows what she’s talking about. The Bible, Knust argues, is not a sexual guidebook. It is inconsistent, contradictory, complex and, at times, “patently immoral.”  “The Bible does not offer a systematic set of teachings or a single sexual code,” she says, “but it does reveal sometimes conflicting attempts on the part of people and groups to define sexual morality, and to do so in the name of God.” Continue Reading →

Biblical Sex:Interpreting the Good Book's Laws

Posted on by

Unprotected Texts:  The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire, by Jennifer Wright Knust (HarperOne, 2011)

by Natasja Sheriff

If you listen to the rhetoric of the more vocal proponents of conservative Christianity, you would be forgiven for believing that the Bible contains clear instruction on sexual conduct and morality.  You might be less inclined to believe that the Good Book is actually full of hidden meaning and innuendo, erotic poetry, extra-marital seduction and love affairs between same-sex couples. Doesn’t the Bible teach that sex is for procreation, sanctioned only within the confines of marriage between two heterosexual adults?

No, says Jennifer Wright Knust, author of Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire. An ordained Baptist minister and religious scholar with a doctorate in Religion from Columbia University, Knust knows what she’s talking about. The Bible, Knust argues, is not a sexual guidebook. It is inconsistent, contradictory, complex and, at times, “patently immoral.”  “The Bible does not offer a systematic set of teachings or a single sexual code,” she says, “but it does reveal sometimes conflicting attempts on the part of people and groups to define sexual morality, and to do so in the name of God.” Continue Reading →

Inspired, Yes, but Divinely?

Posted on by

A review of Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life

by Clint Rainey

A few scientists and believers once naïvely clasped hands in hope that the evolutionary explanation for belief in God would signal a détente in the science-religion war. Belief could satisfy science by being instinctual, as Dean Hamer’s The God Gene and others argued, while also satisfying religion by being divinely set in motion. This détente, we know now, was a pipedream. Since being etiologically explained as instinct, belief has suffered at the hands of an army precision-trained in the scientific method.

Attempting to deliver the deathblow in a new book is Jesse Bering, an evolutionary psychologist and director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast. Articulate and amusing, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life is a coupe de grâce as much as it is rage, arguing that belief, for modern man, is indeed an adaptation—a crucial one, up to a point—but that it’s become a vestigial organ of the mind, uselessly outmoded. Continue Reading →

Stories the Religious Left Must Tell Itself

Posted on by

Changing the Script: An Authentically Faithful and Authentically Progressive Political Theology for the 21st Century, by Daniel Schultz. Ig Publishing (2010) $15.95

Reviewed by Brent  A. R. Hege

For as long as there has been a religious right barging its way into Americans’ lives, bedrooms, pocketbooks and polling places, there have been religious progressives wondering how perceptions of their faith had been hijacked and twisted into something virtually unrecognizable. The record of the religious right is as long as it is upsetting: from creationism in public schools ( the Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925 to the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case of 2005) to Judge Roy Moore and efforts to eliminate the wall between church and state; from the Terri Schiavo fiasco to Proposition 8, the tendrils of Christian conservatism have reached into virtually every corner of American life. Many critics ask, often with exasperation and even resignation, where is the religious left? Where is the alternative vision, the principled opposition, the united voice of a sane and progressive religious movement raised in righteous protest?

Yet the voice of the religious left is present; in the church, in the academy, and in the public square. Continue Reading →

Crossing The Divide Between Religion and Science

Posted on by

Louis A. Ruprecht reviews Krista Tippett’s new book, “Einstein’s God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit” at Religion Dispatches today. Tippett, the host of NPR’s “Speaking of Faith,” offers us a way around and through the polarized landscape of what we call the culture wars, says Ruprecht. And she does so with the same skill she applies to her show, by “displaying what reasoned and respectful discussion of the complex and manifold phenomena of faith might look like…” Continue Reading →