The Little Friar

It's fascinating to me that so many folks are invested in defending the recently-released Fifty Shades of Grey movie. I'm not sure there's ever been one single event that brings together feminists, the BDSM community, and conservative Christians (like Focus on the Family) as this movie.  Their concerns really boil down to two: That Fifty Shades is "soft porn" and shouldn't be released to a wide audience. That the story glamorizes domestic abuse patterns. There are plenty of blog articles out there that dissect why so many women -- both inside and outside the Church -- are flocking to see this movie (and why the books have equally divided among Christians and non-Christians, to the tune of 70 million).  Secular and religious experts are focusing on the implications of the movie for our rape culture, feminism, the innate human need for love, and the search for the Divine as explanations of popularity. But that's not what strikes me about it.  I ...

Hebrew text from Song of Songs 6.3 I've been critical of Fifty Shades of Grey already.   And I have no intention to change my opinion of the movie or the book.  Instead, I want to highlight how a robust engagement with Scripture itself can offer an alternative to the book and movie. Make no doubt about it, with the initial reports of sales coming in, Fifty Shades of Grey (the movie) was a box-office hit.  This weekend, tons of couples flooded through the doors of theaters to see the movie.  Most of those, in an attempt to celebrate "love". That, after all, is what the movie-goers on Valentine's Day were in search of.  Perhaps Eloise Mumford, who plays Kate in the film (Anastasia Steele's best friend and roommate), puts her finger on the fascination:  "It's a reality of our culture that people experience love and relationships in tons of different ways.  I think it's important to get people thinking about something they otherwise woul...

I have a confession to make.  I read Fifty Shades of Grey when it was released.  I did so precisely because it was so popular.  I've read my share of trashy novels, but the luster of hot literary lust lost its appeal as I grew older.  I read it only because the female friends I have were reading it and talking about it.  I found I was able to participate in conversations about redemptive sex precisely because I'd taken the novel seriously. That said, I thought the novel was horrible.  It was so poorly written, with little literary variety and value.  Its imagery was cold, the writing was poor and the plot was predictable.  Aware as I was of so many other books -- remember, I've read my share of trashy novels -- I just couldn't bring myself to read the second or third books in the series.  But I have read the first book. And I'm still not going to see the movie -- precisely because I know what's in the book. I've never really said any...

Johann Christoph Arnold's Sex, God & Marriage is a beautiful book, filled with pastoral wisdom for the Church.  As a pastor, I regularly search for those texts that might be used in marriage counseling with couples, in pre-martial counseling, and with teens and pre-teens in the Church.  Sex, God & Marriage meets all those needs, and more. In a world dominated by broken relationships and loneliness, Arnold offers a biblical vision of community, of wholeness, of sexuality, and of marriage.  He provides pastoral insight into biblical traditions of purity and vulnerability.  And his wisdom addresses so many questions -- from sexual temptation to homosexuality, from how to answer the question of whether or not to marry to parenting, from divorce to remarriage. He also has a pastoral wisdom about sensitive issues that often go unaddressed in other texts that I've used in the past -- particularly things like the perverseness of sex even within a marriage....

O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to save us.  Sometimes I'm reminded that I simply don't belong in our culture.   Everyone in the world wants the same thing:  Peace.  But you can't  get it unless, instead of aiming for peace, you aim for God.  Goodness is  something you can possess only by sharing it; as soon as you try to keep it for yourself, you don't have any.  That's Augustine's City of God  in a nutshell.   Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall  is one of the best places I know to read about sex.   And yet it's such an undervalued work among we Christians.  There, Bonhoeffer pits  humans as  imago dei , created in the image of God, bound to and guided by the Creator, against  sicit deus , humans acting as if they were God.   Sicit deus  ignores humankind's inherent limits, doesn't depend on God and acts out of its own resources.  For Bonhoeffer, sexuality expresse...

I've been thinking about this for a long time recently.  Because, to be honest, so few of we pastors ever deal with the real tragedies to our selves and our relationships (and even our marriages) that pornography creates.   So, let me go on the record and be clear:   Porn is bad .   I say this not because I'm a prude or a kill-joy.  I say this because the research backs me up, my counseling experience confirms the research, and I've seen too many wives ask me with tears in their eyes, "Why does he watch this, when I'm just in the next room?  Does this mean he'll be cheating on me now?" This post is my attempt to set out, once and for all, why we Christians don't watch porn.  And some book resources to work toward healing.   What is porn , first? The Greek word  porneia  (πορνεία) means "sexual immorality".  It's the word from which we get our concept of  porn.   Pornography is the depiction of "sexual immorality".  Im...

Tonight, a female friend was lamenting the fact that her eldest son, now approaching 10, had learnt about sexual intercourse at school.  As a family, the mother and father had hoped to wait until their son's 10th birthday to have "the talk".  Now, she's overwhelmed and wasn't sure what to do.  So I thought:   Why not set out a little pastoral advice, and keep it practical, that might benefit every parent?   What follows are some sketches, and just that, of things I think parents need to know.  And I'll close out with some book ideas.  1.  If you're afraid of having "the talk", you're not alone.  Most parents don't have the tools or language to talk to their children about these matters and they are looking for help.  Consider this one of the places you might turn.  The problem, though, is that most of us -- like my friend -- push off having this "talk".  In that way, we only bolster our culture's insistence that sex is so im...

Cinderella Ate My Daughter  is one of my favorite books of cultural and sexual criticism.  In it,  Peggy Orenstein laments how our culture naturally moves from such beauty-centered innocence as to such beauty-centered sluttiness as Take the phrase, sleeping around .  It's sounds innocent enough.  But the reality is something stark.  To quote someone from college, that time of life when sexual partners often number in the double-digits for men and women, "I cannot recall ever rejecting an advance, and I know I never felt good afterward.  On the contrary, I felt used and dirty, at once manipulative and manipulated.  I hated my reputation; I hated the sex".   It bothers me to see women objectified in this way.   Any  woman.  I've discovered over the years that most men don't get it -- this notion of objectification .  It was explained easily enough to me as a seven-year-old:  Only treat women as you would your Grandmothe...

I'm pondering this afternoon an issue that seems so often misunderstood by our culture:  The sacred trust of the pastoral office.  It's built on the biblical admonition:  "Do not seek your own advantage, but instead seek the advantage of others" (1 Corinthians 10.14). Sacred trusts  refer to any fundamental ethical obligation pastors owe to the Church.  Usually, these sacred trusts cluster around three distinct, though in our culture often interrelated, areas:   Power, money and sex .  I say "interrelated" because in the classical wisdom about church leaders, these three tend to bring out the worst in us.  For that reason, reform movements like medieval monasticism developed "rules" -- ways of structuring lives together -- that made folks responsible in all three areas.  Just think the vows of obedience  (power), poverty  (money) and chastity  (sex).  And in my own experience as a pastor, I see that wisdom affirmed again ...