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diff --git a/website/src/content/blog/2024-12-17.md b/website/src/content/blog/2024-12-17.md deleted file mode 100644 index b5d6893..0000000 --- a/website/src/content/blog/2024-12-17.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,46 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: Questions I have about sex -description: >- - Mark Vernon got me thinking about how the Church’s teaching on sex may be - evolving. -pubDate: 2024-12-17 -updatedDate: 2024-12-17 ---- - -I just listened back to [Mark Vernon][mark-vernon] talking about sexual desire -and Christian spirituality. - -He recounts how his sex ed at an evangelical camp as a boy taught him to think -hard about holding hands with someone, just in case it led to something -‘immoral’. He felt he had been taught a sexual naïvety, which has perhaps -blinded people to the possibility of abuse – and misunderstood the gospel. - -He puts forward an alternative to that naïvety, whereby sexual experience is an -image or a foretaste of love for, or union with, God, exploring thoughts by -Origen, Julian of Norwich, Dante, William Blake, Iris Murdoch, and various -parables and episodes from the Gospels themselves. - -Part of what’s so interesting about this, is I feel I got my first proper sex -ed, as an adult, in an evangelical Christian context – and it pretty much lined -up completely with what he was putting forward. - -I’m also currently reading (as is Mark Vernon) Diarmaid MacCulloch’s epic -history of Christian sexuality, [Lower Than the Angels][lower-than-the-angels]. -But so far (I’m about a third of the way through and up to about the 5th -century) there have only been odd glimmers of positive Christian understandings -of sexuality. The overwhelming Christian consensus of the early Church -(according to MacCulloch) is that sexual desire is a symptom of humanity’s -fallen state, not our longing for God. - -So I want to know: what changed between Mark’s experience and mine? How is -Christian teaching about sex changing right now? Was my experience typical of -other Christians growing up today, in evangelical churches, across the -denominational spectrum, across Britain, across the global Church? What _is_ -the Christian consensus on sex now, and how old is it, and where did it come -from? - -I guess I’ve got two-thirds of a gigantic tome to work through, first of all. -That’ll be a start. Any answers? Postcards please. - -[lower-than-the-angels]: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/313582/lower-than-the-angels-by-macculloch-diarmaid/9780241400937 -[mark-vernon]: https://www.markvernon.com/the-gospel-sexual-desire-and-the-abuse-scandals-in-the-church-what-has-the-erotic-to-do-with-god |