What if the problem with desire is not that we want what we can't have, but that we don't want it enough? What if desire itself - the gap between wanting and having - is the key to living well? Holiness and Desire explores these questions, considering what a distinctive holiness might look like in our highly sexualized modern culture.

Jessica Martin

Copyright information

Epigraph

Dedication

Acknowledgements

To the Reader

Part 1: Scripture

1. Reading

Part 2: Desire

2. Longing

3. Looking

4. Joining

5. Self-Fashioning

Part 3: Holiness

6. Converting

7. Meeting

What if the problem with desire is not that we want what we can’t have, but that we don’t want it enough? What if desire itself - the gap between wanting and having - is the key to living well? Holiness and Desire explores these questions, considering what a distinctive holiness might look like in our highly sexualized modern culture.

• A wide-ranging theological reflections offering a fuller and richer Christian understanding of human desires and behaviours. • Future understandings of sexuality are likely to arise out of ground-up thinking, not top-down theories. This book will resource such thinking. • Transcends the divisive approaches traditionally taken in exploring these issues.

We live in a world that prizes gratification of desire. But what if this pressure to satisfy our wants instead makes us settle for lesser imitations? What if the problem with desire is not that we want what we can't have, but that we don't want it enough? What if desire itself - the gap between wanting and having - is the key to living well? Holiness and Desire explores these questions and the challenges they pose to modern living. Drawing on sources from the Bible to literature and social media, Jessica Martin considers what a distinctive holiness might look like within the distorting pressures of our highly sexualized modern culture.

'Illuminating, challenging and liberating - a vital part of the conversation about the way we live now.'

'The weaving together of scholarship, personal narrative, history and scripture is a faithful, needed and ultimately redemptive offering to us all.'

'This book knocks right through the various 'official stories' which we tell ourselves, inside and outside churches. Reading it strengthens my feeling that the decline of Christendom has opened the way for a remarkable flowering of new avenues towards the faith'.

'Profound yet simple; robust yet vulnerable. Reading it is like reflecting on life and one's own story in front of an amazing piece of art'.

Acknowledgements

To the Reader

__Part 1: Scripture__

1 Reading

__Part 2: Desire__

2 Longing

3 Looking

4 Joining

5 Self-Fashioning

__Part 3: Holiness__

6 Converting

7 Meeting

'Illuminating, challenging and liberating - a vital part of the conversation about the way we live now.'

__Sarah Perry, prizewinning author of The Essex Serpent.__

'The weaving together of scholarship, personal narrative, history and scripture is a faithful, needed and ultimately redemptive offering to us all.'

__Nadia Bolz-Weber, author of New York Times bestseller Shameless__

'This book knocks right through the various 'official stories' which we tell ourselves, inside and outside churches. Reading it strengthens my feeling that the decline of Christendom has opened the way for a remarkable flowering of new avenues towards the faith'.

__Charles Taylor, Templeton prizewinner and author of A Secular Age__

'Profound yet simple; robust yet vulnerable. Reading it is like reflecting on life and one's own story in front of an amazing piece of art'.

__Rachel Treweek, Bishop of Gloucester__﻿

__Jessica Martin__ was formerly a Fellow in English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, and is now a Canon of Ely Cathedral. She was a theological adviser to the Bishops' working Party on Human Sexuality and is a member of the influential Littlemore group of theologians.

Holiness and Desire

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Holiness and Desire

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