Is the reform we have seen in the wake of the pedophilia scandals in the Catholic Church meaningful? Have our conversations about the causes of these scandals delved as deeply as they need to? For those questioning the relations between hierarchical power, secrecy, and sexuality in institutional religion, Mark D. Jordan's eloquent meditations on what truths about sexuality need to be told in church-and the difficulty of telling any truths-will be a balm and a revelation.

"We don't need books about teaching so much as books that teach ."Considering Jesus himself taught in a variety of ways—parable, discussion, miracle performance, ritual observance—it seems that there can be no single, definitive, Christian method of teaching. How then should Christian teaching happen, especially in this time of significant change to theological education as an institution?Mark Jordan addresses this question by first allowing vario...

By using religion to get at the core concepts of Michel Foucault's thinking, this book offers a strong alternative to the way that the philosopher's work is read across the humanities. Foucault was famously interested in Christianity as both the rival to ancient ethics and the parent of modern discipline and was always alert to the hypocrisy and the violence in churches. Yet many readers have ignored how central religion is to his thought, particularly with regard to human bodies and how t...

In Teaching Bodies, leading scholar of Christian thought Mark D. Jordan offers an original reading of the Summa of Theology of Thomas Aquinas. Reading backward, Jordan interprets the main parts of the Summa, starting from the conclusion, to reveal how Thomas teaches morals by directing attention to the way God teaches morals, namely through embodied scenes: the incarnation, the gospels, and the sacraments. It is Thomas’s confidence in bodily scenes of instruction that explains the often ov...

CHOICE: OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLEFINALIST, THE RANDY SHILTS AWARD FOR GAY NONFICTION, THE PUBLISHING TRIANGLE AWARDSA passionate exhortation to expand the ways we talk about human sex, sexuality, and gender.Twenty-five years ago, Mark D. Jordan published his landmark book on the invention and early history of the category “sodomy,” one that helped to decriminalize certain sexual acts in the United States and to rem...

At most church weddings, the person presiding over the ritual is not a priest or a pastor, but the wedding planner, followed by the photographer, the florist, and the caterer. And in this day and age, more wedding theology is supplied by Modern Bride magazine or reality television than by any of the Christian treatises on holy matrimony. Indeed, church weddings have strayed long and far from distinctly Christian aspirations. The costumes and gestures might still be right, but the ...

The opponents of legal recognition for same-sex marriage frequently appeal to a "Judeo-Christian" tradition. But does it make any sense to speak of that tradition as a single teaching on marriage? Are there elements in Jewish and Christian traditions that actually authorize religious and civil recognition of same-sex couples? And are contemporary heterosexual marriages well supported by those traditions?As evidenced by the ten provocative essays assembled and edited by Mark D. Jord...

"What makes this work so exciting is not simply its content . . . but its revolutionary challenge to . . . Western culture's most familiar moral assumptions." — NewsweekJohn Boswell's National Book Award–winning study of the history of attitudes toward homosexuality in the early Christian West was a groundbreaking work that challenged preconceptions about the Church's past relationship to its gay members—among them priests, bishops, and even saints—when it ...

Is it possible for orthodox, creedal Christianity to change its views on matters of sexuality and gender? In order to do so, must it simply incorporate elements of the secular world that are foreign to it? In That We Might Become God, Andy Buechel argues that many of the basic insights of queer theory are not only deeply amenable to the wider Christian tradition, but that they allow us to see that tradition with fresh eyes. The churches that are most concerned with maintaining theological ...

The Frontal Lobes, Volume 163, updates readers on the latest thinking on the structure and function of the human frontal lobe. Sections address methodology, anatomy, physiology and pharmacology, function, development, aging and disorders, and rehabilitation. Patients with focal lesions in the frontal lobes have long been studied to reveal the organization and function of the frontal lobes. Over the last two decades, studies of patients with neurodegenerative diseases and developmental diso...

Sexual Disorientations brings some of the most recent and significant works of queer theory into conversation with the overlapping fields of biblical, theological and religious studies to explore the deep theological resonances of questions about the social and cultural construction of time, memory, and futurity. Apocalyptic, eschatological and apophatic languages, frameworks, and orientations pervade both queer theorizing and theologizing about time, affect, history and desire. The volume...

At the heart of Christian ethics is the biblical commandment to love God and to love one's neighbor as oneself. But what is the meaning of love? Scholars have wrestled with this question since the recording of the Christian gospels, and in recent decades teachers and students of Christian ethics have engaged in vigorous debates about appropriate interpretations and implications of this critical norm.In Love and Christian Ethics, nearly two dozen leading experts analyze and...