background on Human Sexuality

Think how intertwined sex is with the very reality of human existence. You simply would not exist without the sexual union of your parents . . . and their parents . . . and their parents . . . and the...

As we begin to awaken fully to the spiritual, social and sexual dimensions of ourselves in God’s presence, we find that they are inseparably intertwined and not to be compartmentalized. In fact, many ...

…the body is not only biological. Since we’re made in the image of God as male and female, the body…is also theological. It tells an astounding divine story. And it does so precisely through the myste...

James Nelson describes sexuality as the central clue to what God is up to in the world. While this might seem a little over the top, when you think about it, sexuality factors integrally in our relati...

The spiritual discipline of honoring the body helps us find our way between the excesses of a culture that glorifies and objectifies the body and the excesses of Christian tradition that have often de...

Unsurprisingly, whenever we bring the topic of desire into view, our imaginations easily wander in the direction of sex, which can be as discomforting as it is arousing—but it is certainly not irrelev...

Despite what now appears to me to be the overwhelmingly obvious connections between spirituality and sexuality, when I first came to faith and went to church, I had the sneaking suspicion that God had...

Orgasms are one of the most sought-after experiences in life—which is strange, because it’s not like they last forever or even a few weeks, like a long-anticipated holiday. We’re talking about somethi...

The Hebrew word yada (“to know”) is, in fact, used for both sexual intercourse as well as our relationship with God. Every relational event is a stage that affords one a glimpse into the consumm...

Many of the modern controversies surrounding the Bible—for example, human sexuality, creationism and the “openness” of God—revolve around questions concerning hermeneutics. The science of hermeneutics...

The appreciation of life in the body includes embracing our maleness or our femaleness, and thus our sexuality, as a gift from God that helps to reveal his true nature. None of us exists in this world...

The late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck was convinced that buried in our explicit pursuit of sex is an implicit pursuit of God. He noted that sex is likely to be the closest that most people ever come to ...

In his excellent book on the desert fathers, Where God Happens , former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams tells of an encounter between two monastic fathers. The first was Macarius, famous in...

Someone once quipped that we spend the first half of our lives struggling with the sixth commandment ( Thou shalt not commit adultery ) and the second half of our lives struggling with the fifth comma...

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the ...

In the early 1900s, a “respectable” woman wore an average of twenty-five pounds of clothing when she appeared in public. The sight of an ankle could cause scandal. Over the next hundred years the pend...

No person has ever walked our earth and been free from the pains of loneliness. Rich and poor, wise and ignorant, faith-filled and agnostic, healthy and unhealthy have all alike had to face and strugg...

Maleness and femaleness is the fundamental way we carry our relational design. Interestingly, the English word sexuality comes from the Latin word sexus, which means “being divided, cut off, separated...

Desire—eros, or erotic desire, to be more specific—kicked in pretty early in my life. I was often overwhelmed by a gnawing hunger and thirst I didn’t know how to handle. God bless my parents and my Ca...

Christianity Does Not Reject the Body The “spirit-good / body-bad” dualism that often passes for Christianity is actually an ancient gnostic error called “Manichaeism,” and it couldn’t be further from...

Think of your own experiences as a human being: your body is not just a “shell” in which you dwell. Your body is not just a body. Your body is not just any body. Your body is somebody—you! Through the...

Desire haunts us. In its deepest sense, it is a God-given dimension of human identity. As such, desire is what powers all human spirituality. Yet at the same time, spirituality in Christianity and in ...

Somewhere along the way, in the minds of a lot of people in our culture, the word intimacy got all tangled up with sex. But even though there is a connection between the two words, they are not interc...

In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “formed” s...

The concept of humanity’s being divisible into different races has no scientific validity. This has always been the case, even before the advent of rapid global travel enabled the further mixing of pe...

What is the matter with us is a question as old as time. Many philosophers and prophets believe they have an answer, but so too does holy scripture. According to the Dutch-Canadian philosopher Al Wolt...

One common mistake is assuming that everyone else finds faith easy, while we alone struggle. Yet there is comfort in recognizing that we are not alone in our pursuit of Christ in the midst of a broken...

Christians are often accused of two wrong-headed views of the body. One is that we ignore the body in favor of a disembodied, spirits-floating-on-clouds spirituality. The other is that we are obsessed...

Leo Tolstoy, the writer of some of the most beautiful and complex stories in literature, had this to say on the topic of human nature and qualities that define us: One of the commonest and most gene...

Former cultures, whatever their faults, understood the imperialistic nature of energy, especially of spiritual, erotic energy. For the most part, they feared energy, particularly sexual and religious ...