(For all other podcast platforms: The Naked Gospel podcast)
Episode Summary:
Nancy Pearcey joins us to discuss current issues about sexuality. Nancy Pearcey is a professor and author who is known for engaging the most difficult cultural issues.
She joins us to discuss a recent book called Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality.
In the book, Nancy argues that many of the challenging, cultural issues are due to disconnecting identity from biology. However, Scripture describes a God who makes a physical world and embeds it with rich meaning. Scripture shows us meaning the material creation.
Consequently, the Bible presents sexuality as valuable because the body is valuable.
Shane and Nancy Pearcey talk through the method that Nancy uses to evaluate modern, cultural issues. Nancy shows how pornography, hookup culture, and transgenderism deny meaning from nature and divorces identity from biology.
Here is a Short summary of each Issue:
Transgenderism disconnects sexuality from biology. It teaches that what’s real about a person is what that person feels should be true about themselves. Nature, including human biology, only tells us what we want to be real. If we don’t like what our biology says about us, then we have the right to change it.
Hookup Culture denies that the body has meaning. It says that sex just means whatever we want it to mean. Sex is not intimate, and sex is not meaningful. Sex has nothing to do with our identity.
Pornography reduces human value to sexual stimulation. Porn presents people as performers of pleasure, as objects for an orgasm. In fact, porn offers sexual pleasure without ever needing sex. It offers sexual pleasure apart from any other person—isolated, lonely intimacy.
The good news is that nature is valuable, that it’s worth protecting, that our bodies host every emotion we feel. There is good news that affirms the senes of disconnect and exile we all feel. And there is good news about sex, about our loneliness and longings, about the pain we feel which we medicate with calloused pleasure.
After looking at the broken, cultural stories about the body and intimacy, Nancy and Shane spend the second half of the conversation talking about Biblical sexuality and the churches approach toward secular culture.
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Some of the Interview Questions:
Why did you specifically choose these issues to research and write about?
What is your method for analyzing current culture?
Can you share some of the biggest, current issues about the body and human sexuality?
What does secular culture teach us is the right way to live as sexual, embodied beings?
What is the Biblical story about sex?
How is that story good news toward the difficulties of porn, transgenderism, and hookup culture?
You argue against the idea of “culture wars,” what role do you believe Christians should take toward their neighbors and toward culture?