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Review of Lower Than The Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Reposted by Foreign Exchanges

Samuel Huneke @schuneke.bsky.social · 1d

For @fxnewsletter.bsky.social I got to review Diarmaid MacCulloch’s monumental new history of sex and Christianity!

Sex and the Church

Review of Lower Than The Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, by Diarmaid MacCulloch

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Foreign Exchanges @fxnewsletter.bsky.social · 1d

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Foreign Exchanges @fxnewsletter.bsky.social · 1d

In his latest FX column, @schuneke.bsky.social reviews Diarmaid MacCulloch's Lower Than The Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity: www.foreignexchanges.news/p/sex-and-th...

$To believers and non-believers alike, it can seem difficult to pin down what, exactly, Christianity teaches when it comes to the body. The Anglican Communion, a loose grouping of Protestant denominations that dates back to Henry VIII’s schism with Rome in the early sixteenth century, has nearly fractured in recent years over the issue of LGBTQ rights. Likewise, while most Christian churches have remained opposed to abortion—though a growing number of progressive denominations equally oppose legal restrictions on it—the questions of marriage (for clergy) and divorce (for the laity) continue to rive Christian from Christian. All the while, partisans for this denomination or that insist that their way of interpreting Scripture is the one—the only one—sanctioned by God. While these divisions over sex may seem something new—a product of the internet age, modern morals, or a post-truth society—they are, in fact, a core feature of Christianity, writes Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in Lower Than The Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. “There is no such thing as a single Christian theology of sex,” he insists, and “Christian societies and Church bodies have at different times believed totally contrary things about sexuality.” Yet, while MacCulloch tells an often-amusing story about Christians’ many sexual contradictions, he never answers a far deeper question: why should any of us care?$

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Sex and the Church, by @schuneke.bsky.social

Sex and the Church

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