Reese
In studio

On Purity Culture

  • Pure, Inside the Evangelical Movement and How I Broke Free (Atria 2018) by Linda Kay Klein is a recounting of Klein’s experience with the Purity Culture in her church as well as the stories of many young women from her former youth group who were coping with the same shame-induced issues. This is a recounting of a twelve-year quest to facilitate her own healing help her discover a new way to reconcile sexuality and spirituality.

  • #Church too, How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing (Broadleaf Books 2021) by Emily Joy Allison who started #ChurchToo reveals the church's sexual dysfunction, that allows sexualized violence in those religious spaces that become uniquely traumatizing. She examines how there are many paths for victims of assault to heal from religiously instilled sexual shame, secrecy, and control to live full, free, healthy lives.

  • See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity, (Beacon Press 2011) by Amy Frykholm revolves around the stories of nine American Protestants at the intimate intersection of sexuality and spirituality as they maneuver through the simple indictments of, or blind allegiance to Christian cultures in their lives. She addresses how some American Christians can access their spiritual tradition and heal the divide between religion and sexuality.

  • Talking Back to Purity Culture: Rediscovering Faithful Christian Sexuality by Rachel

    Joy Welcher (IVP 2020) who is an evangelical critiques the harmful aspects from the Purity

    Culture by rejecting legalism and moving instead to the stories of Jesus.

  • The Great Sex Rescue, The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended, by Sheila Wray Gregoire, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky, (Baker Books 2021) is based on a study of over twenty thousand women that exposes what happens when Christian households are taught sex negativity that is destructive for relationships. The authors also offer correctives to this church culture.

  • Living in Sin: A Bishop Rethinks Sexuality (HarperCollins, 1990) by John Shelby Spong, a well-known and widely published Episcopalian bishop, proposes a pastoral response to the changing sexual realities of the modern world. Using scripture and history, he proposes a moral vision to empower the church with inclusive teaching about relationships that are equal, loving, and non-exploitative.

On Biblical Studies

  • Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperCollins, 2007) by Bart Ehrman a biblical scholar who makes the case that many widely held beliefs about the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible are actually the results of alterations by scribes, both intentional and accidental.

  • God and Sex (Twelve 2011) by Michael Coogan who is scholar in Old Testament scriptures writes of what they really say about sex and how contemporary understanding of those writings is frequently misunderstood or misrepresented. Coogan explores the language and social world of the Bible, showing how much innuendo and euphemism is at play, and illuminating the sexuality of biblical figures as well as God.

  • Sex Texts from the Bible: Selections Annotated and Explained (Skylight Paths, 2007) by Teresa Hornsby is a short text that demystifies the Bible by explaining each key biblical text about sexuality and how to read it inclusively and critically. It bridges the divide between biblical authority and current views of gender roles, marriage, sexual orientation, virginity, lust, and sexual pleasure.

  • Unprotected Texts: The Surprising Biblical Contradictions about Sexuality (HarperCollins, 2012) by Jennifer Wright Knust, an academic theologian, thoroughly investigates the many sexuality-related passages of scripture and concludes that, given the wide discrepancies and contradictions in the Bible, absolutist conclusions are simply not supported and cannot be justified.

  • The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (Brazos Press 2021) by Beth Allison Barr is an evangelical woman who returns to church history-ancient, medieval, and modern times-to show how the belief of women’s roles is not divinely ordained but a product of human civilization that continues to creep into church teaching.

  • Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom (Praeger 2007) by Raymond Lawrence is an accounting of how the early Jesus movement and the morality of the Greco-Roman culture and empire intersected and Christianity’s moral code was reshaped when Constantine adopted  Christianity as the imperial religion. Later key figures of the Middle Ages promoted a religion with a chief goal to obliterate sexual pleasure.

On Spiritual Discernment of Sexuality

On Sexual Ethics

  • Damaged Goods (Jericho Books 2015) by Dianna Anderson is a personal account of how she moved from the strictness of the Purity Culture cultural stigma, and media pressures and how she reconciles scripture and culture using common sense to come out the other side.

  • Sensual Faith: The Art of Coming Home to Your Body (Convergent books 2023) by Lyvonne Briggs charts a path for us to practice spiritual wellness that aligns and harmonizes our bodies with pleasure and sexuality. As a womanist, the author believes “Pleasure is your birthright” as she vulnerably shares her insights with a disarming style. She centers the rich traditions of ancient West African spirituality to offer a radically inclusive model of companioning one’s self.

  • Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions

    (Zondervan first published as Evolving in Monkey Town 2010) by Rachel Held Evans is only one of Held Evan’s books detailing her spiritual journey from certainty to doubt to faith as she shifts away from false fundamentals to move toward trust in a God who is not put off by our questions.

  • Femmevangelical: The Modern Girl's Guide to the Good News by Jennifer D. Crumpton  (Chalice Press 2015) is all about finding good news in the gospel of Jesus with an emphasis on finding a different reality of equality, freedom, and wholeness.

  • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us (Convergent books 2022) by Cole Arthur Riley, a creator of Black Liturgies uses stories of three generations of her family to find the sacred deep inside. In seeking healing and wholeness she focuses on the spiritual stories of embodiment to learn to survive by asking the provocative question, “How can spirituality not silence the body?”

  • Erotic Justice: A Liberating Ethic for Justice (Westminster John Knox 1996) by Marvin Ellison, a pioneer in contemporary rethinking in Christianity about sexuality and sexual ethics, demonstrates a liberating Christian ethic that goes beyond the traditional patriarchal view.

  • Making Love Just: Sexual Ethics for Perplexing Times (Fortress Press, 2012) by Marvin Ellison uses provocative real-life scenarios to shift conventional thinking based on rule-based sexual morality to show how redrawing the sexual map helps to transcend fear and shame. He applies a relationally focused ethical framework grounded in justice to issues such as premarital and extramarital sex, marriage and divorce, homosexuality, contraception, abortion, spousal abuse, and sex education.

  • Liberating Sexuality: Justice between the Sheets (Chalice Press 2016) by Miguel De La Torre, a Christian ethicist who works at the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender. He tackles controversial topics such as an androgynous Jesus, ethical S&M, and confronting racism in one's sexual preference.

  • A Lily Among the Thorns, Imagining a New Christian Sexuality (Jossey Bass 2007) by theologian Miguel De La Torre promotes a just and biblically based sexual ethic by reading the Bible from the viewpoint of those who have been marginalized. He shows how the church’s traditionally negative attitudes toward sex in general, especially to women, people of color, sexual minorities and have made it difficult to foster intimacy, vulnerability and openness between loving partners.

Jaya
In studio

Jackie
In Studio

Jaya
In Studio

Jaya
In Studio