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Tag: purity culture

When Conservative Pastors Rail Against Consent

When Conservative Pastors Rail Against Consent

So apparently there’s yet another conservative Christian article out about the theology of sex from a patriarchal perspective. (Apparently that narrative is super important to defend—all the eyeroll emojis.) Anyway, I couldn’t bring myself to look that particular article up after the trainwreck that was the last one I wrote about, but hearing about it got me thinking this week about a sermon I heard a few years back from a nuanced but right-leaning pastor in which the idea of…

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When Shame–Er, Purity Culture—Becomes a God Term

When Shame–Er, Purity Culture—Becomes a God Term

So this week I had the strange experience of re-reading the book Pure by Linda Kay Klein when an article came out suggesting that Evangelical missionary, martyr, and purity culture icon Jim Elliot seems to have longed for death at the end of his life because of struggle against something unspecified that he deemed a (sexual) sin. Considering Pure is an ethnographic study of the damage and trauma caused by the Evangelical purity culture movement that was in part pioneered…

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Not My Mark Driscoll? The Threat of Dismissing Extreme Christianity

Not My Mark Driscoll? The Threat of Dismissing Extreme Christianity

Mark Driscoll, the toxic masculinist megachurch pastor who was defrocked a couple of years ago, yet has formed a new megachurch in Arizona, is in the news again this week. This time it’s for reports of increasingly cult-like behavior in his church, including excommunicating and surveilling a family whose brown-skinned son kissed Driscoll’s 15 year old daughter (more details can be found here about the incidents). When I heard about this incident, my first impulse, I’ll confess, was to dismiss…

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Healthy Acts of Resistance: A Book Review

Healthy Acts of Resistance: A Book Review

A Review of  Sacred Signposts: Words, Water, and Other Acts of Resistance Benjamin Dueholm Paperback: Eerdmans, 2018. Reviewed by D.S. Leiter NOTE: This review was published first at Englewood Review of Books. Sacred Signposts is by a minister in the mainline Lutheran tradition. As such, the book is organized according to the “sacred possessions” of the church offered by reformer Martin Luther: words; water; a meal of bread and wine; confession and forgiveness; ministry; prayer, praise, and worship; and the cross…

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