Issue
Sex in the Christian Life
Vol. 10, No. 6 • Nov/Dec 2001
In recent years, the study of virtue has experienced a renaissance. While we are recovering our classical grammar of virtue, we should also recover our vocabulary of vice as well. Concupiscence is among our choicest words to be recovered. Because of the great influence of Augustine, it traditionally has been associated closely with sexual desire, […]
All Articles (9)
Concupiscence
In recent years, the study of virtue has experienced a renaissance. While we are recovering our classical grammar of virtue, we should also recover our vocabulary of vice as well. Concupiscence is among our choicest words to be recovered. Because of the great influence of Augustine, it traditionally has been associated closely with sexual desire, […]
“The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life” by Bruce H. Wilkinson
This little book, its website reports, has been a runaway best-seller, appearing on both the New York Times and the USA Today top ten lists and winning Nonfiction Book of the Year, Retailers Choice Awards. Over six million copies are in print. Time magazine has chronicled its extraordinary success. The New York Times ran a […]
“Amour Adulterine:”
When many Christians, especially the literati, hear the words, “You shall not commit adultery,” they probably think of the heroine’s indiscretion in The Scarlet Letter. To be sure, their impulse is correct because Hester Prynne’s sin is the quintessential example of this transgression. But how would those same Christians respond to the following query: Which […]
Sin and Sins
Despite the triumph of the therapeutic in American Protestantism, many evangelicals still strenuously object to the “victim” philosophy and encourage a more robust notion of human responsibility. If a person in such circles struggles with sexual immorality, he or she is likely to be told that the matter is entirely in his or her hands. […]
Sexual Relations as Redeemed Intimacy
Until fairly recently, any interpretation of the Song of Solomon has focused on rescuing an apparently erotic and secular text from the condemnation of being “purely sensuous.” This goal led the rabbis to read the Song as an allegory of God’s love for Israel, and most Christian interpreters for two millennia noted a picture of […]
The Double Cure: Addictions and God’s Grace
Nature or Nurture? Famous (or infamous) Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner sharply contrasts traditional views of human nature with modern ones. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), the founder of “behaviorism” writes, In what we may call the prescientific view…a person’s behavior is at least to some extent his own achievement. He is free to […]
