Bøger af Adrian Thatcher

Vile Bodies are bodies that have been vilified by Christian thought, often with catastrophic consequences. The bodies of women, Jews, Muslims, slaves, Blacks, LGBT people, children, wives have all been harmed by negative Christian teaching about bodies. This book sidesteps the endless controversies in the churches about sexuality and gender and goes deeper - unmasking instead the abusive theology that ensures these controversies and their harmful outcomes persist.Drawing extensively from scripture, and from two millennia of church history and theology, Vile Bodies slowly exposes how churches have preferred doctrine to compassion, orthodoxy to justice, and legalism to love, culminating in the global abuse crises in the churches that have largely destroyed their moral credibility.

Very many people, including not a few Christians, do not find the Christian tradition very helpful for making sense of sex. It is not that people willfully forsake a demanding sexual ethic for a more easygoing worldly one. It is that they often cannot see the point of its demandingness. Adrian Thatchers project lays out a wholeheartedly liberal approach to sex and sexuality. Using theological ideas, biblical passages and Christian doctrines, Thatcher places them intelligibly in a twenty-first-century context. Subjects covered include desire, bodies, sexual difference, marriage, spirituality, and sexualities.

For most Christians, marriage is considered a sacrament, created and uniquely blessed by God. Yet, the theology of marriage rarely matches the actual experience. Marriage is too often a violent, loveless institution-and it is increasingly delayed, avoided, or terminated. Marriage After Modernity offers new hope for Christian marriage at a time of unprecedented social and theological change. It provides an unreserved commendation of Christian marriage, reaffirming its status as a sacrament and institution of mutual self-giving. At the same time, it breaks new ground. It draws on earlier traditions of betrothal and informal marriage to accept some forms of pre-marital cohabitation and provides a new defense of the link between marriage and procreation by sketching a theology of liberation for children. Chapters shed new light on divorce and legitimate theological grounds for 'the parting of the ways,' contraception, and the question of whether marriage is a heterosexual institution. Particular attention is paid throughout the book to overcoming the androcentric bias of much Christian thought and the distorting effect it has had on marriage. Marriage After Modernity argues for a vision of marriage which does not abandon its history, and which draws upon its premodern roots to grapple with our current social, cultural, and intellectual upheavals.

This text offers a current source of information for people outside the churches who need to keep in touch with contemporary developments in Christian teaching about issues concerning sex and sexuality.