A Christian reaction to porn that doesn’t dehumanise the objectified further?

It’s quiet here, so let’s go back to controversy and write about some kind of weird subject like the pornification of images (moving or not) of human beings made in the Divine Image… (generally called ‘porn’ by most people) And let’s give it a long title full of complicated words so I won’t attract too many Beavis and Butthead-type of readers…

Yeah,  it’s been a while since I wrote a post about things related to sex and love and so (the last and only one since July or so being my little effort to raise some awareness of asexuals as the most ignored sexual minority) so why not….

So where to start? A while ago I read this article called 3 lies that kept me trapped by porn from a guest-blogger on Micah Murray’s redemption pictures. To clarify where I stand on these things I must probably start here with saying that, while it’s an understatement to say that I’m not a fan of porn at all, I’m generally not a big fan of most Christian anti-porn propaganda either… so I didn’t expect that much from the article, since most articles with a title like that are just more of the ‘every man’s battle’ stuff, an affirmation that it’s more or less expected for a man to be addicted to porn on one hand and a lot of guilt-creation that partly misses the point on important details on the other hand. I tend to not find that especially healthy. But, to my big surprise, this article turned out to be a completely different cup of tea that needs to be shared more. (if you still get my mixed metaphors here) .

The post was written David E. Martin, who has a Christian website for people who do have problems with porn called ‘My chains are gone’. His website and ministry have an approach to the problem of porn and its solution that is worth looking at, so I recommend you all to not just read his guestpost on redemption pictures but also his site if the subject is of any interest to you.  I might not agree with every line they write, but overall they have a lot of interesting things to say that I hadn’t heard before. It’s quite quite different from the standard stuff most Christian repeat all the time, as the 3 lies in the title already show:

1. The unclothed human body is primarily sexual in nature.
 Therefore, to see another body unclothed is a sexual event.

2. The automatic and natural response to the sight of an unclothed body is sexual arousal. Therefore, the best strategy against lust is to limit the opportunity to view the unclothed body.

3. To be drawn to the sight of nudity (beyond your spouse’s) is a perversion.
Therefore, we must make every effort to eradicate this “perversion” from our hearts.

He exposes these ideas as lies that hinder those trapped in an addiction pornography in breaking with those habits. Maybe a bit counter-intuitive but I do agree with him, and I would say that the de-pornification of the human body might be the most important thing in learning to look at human beings as made in Gods image and loving our fellow human who happens to be of the sex we’re sexually attracted to. His approach is connected to ideas I have been alluding to in some of my blogposts (See for example posts with titles as On sexy poorn models and human dignity; meditating on sexy models; on nudity in game of thrones and some American bloke again…; Some thoughts on the myth that ‘men are visual’; On similar misandry in Christian fundamentalism and comsumer capitalism) But it’s not at all something I’ve seen discussed that much by most of my co-religionists even though some of them like to talk about porn a lot…

It’s an easy subject to start discussions of sin and holiness and whatever, but I often feel like important things are missed.  Although I naturally completely agree with Jesus who says in the sermon on the mount that looking lustfully at a woman is to commit adultery in your head, there are some points in the standard blablah that I don’t find very helpful.

Some of these things have to do with what David writes about on his site. the standard approach is not helping in what I earlier called the depornification of the human body, and moreover  ‘Looking lustfully’ is not synonymous with looking at a nude. Also we do easily forget that porn as we know it in our current culture is not a universal thing but in the current incarnation something unique in world history and very specific to our culture. The way bodies are depicted in our porn would not be very sexy to a lot of people from other times and cultures….

Well it actually isn’t even to me. And I’m a 21st century Western male…

So let’s get to some more points that are often overlooked:

1.) Assuming porn addiction is just how men are wired: Normalizing problems of a certain part of the Western population in a very peculiar time and culture as ‘this is how men are wired. Get used to it.’ is not the way to go. Men are not wired into being addicted to what is called ‘porn’ in our time and culture and in the very myopic way a certain subculture frames our human sexuality in a very narrow and unhealthy way. Porn addiction means that persons (male or female) are conditioned to like it and neuroplastically deformed into it.

2.) Missing the core of the problem gives us some pretty bad solutions: The problem is not in the first place what we see, but it is what is in our hearts when we see it. Porn is very often in the eye of the beholder. If we really learn to love watching porn is impossible, since seeing someone as a human being is incompatible with pornificating them.  The deepest problem is not what we see, but how we watch it and why we’re watching it.

3.) Furthering dehumanization is part of what we should eliminate: Pornification is always a dehumanization of the depicted humans into mere sex objects. If we want to get beyond it we should not follow that line of thinking but reject it. Accepting that women are nothing but sexy temptation and then avoid them is equally dehumanising. The ‘rape culture victim-blaming’ stuff that when a man has sinful thoughts when he sees a woman it’s her fault is only perpetuating the deeper sin of dehumanization, and actually not solving even a molecule of the problem.

4. We should also never forget the  formative danger in porn: We seem to ignore as a culture how porn shapes and deforms our view of the human body. It creates a new and perverted reality, in which sex is not that healthy at all and in which humans are less human than how God created them to be.  It is a fake ideal world that fills peoples head but that no living person will ever live up to. We might think that porn is just showing us how sex is and how sexy people look, but it’s actually completely fake on one hand, and transforming human sexuality to its own image and likeness on the other hand.

Yes, one of the exact dangers of porn is how it is making up it’s own very depraved standard of sexiness that isn’t real at all and then it tries to conform the real world to it. Which is especially dangerous for young people who don’t have their view of sexuality fully formed, like teenagers in puberty. Peoples brains are actually altered by watch porn by the way.  This brain-altering already happens with adults watching porn, but it’s extremely dangerous with young people whose view of porn isn’t even formed yet like I said.

5. Porn is not just ‘showing sex’ but  lying: The things depicted in our modern porn are not default human sexuality at all, let alone human sexuality as God meant it. It’s a very peculiar way of framing sex, a language that seems universal to many people.It’s actually a very artificial and unnatural mutation of human sex, not just a way of visually describing how humans have sex. The bodies are fake, the angles are very artificial and unrealistic.  Our modern ‘porn’ goes way beyond nudity in what it gives to stimulate our sexuality so a very big and abusive industry can make a lot of money.

Yup, the end goal of most porn is probably money for some shady types somewhere.

6. Watching modern porn is learned behaviour:
Looking at the beauty and sexiness of the sex one is attracted to is very natural, but modern porn goes a lot further than this and is much more niche… Consuming modern porn is learned behavior, like drinking wine or listening jazz.

It’s something I didn’t learn though. Except for simple nude pictures most porn when I accidentally see it doesn’t work for me, probably because it’s too far away from my own sexual experience (and lack thereof in my younger years).  Most times when I do see real ‘porn’ beyond playboy-level I’m actually repulsed, not aroused.

(Clarification: I do like female nude art a lot btw, maybe too much. But one of the things I like most about female nudes is some untouchable sacred innocence which is so real that any ‘wrong’ thought is misplaced.  Which is completely incompatible with porn and probably impossible to describe to people who don’t know what I mean. Think about Ransom and the green woman of Venus… It is because I love female nudity so much that I hate porn.)

I do think not getting it and being repulsed by what goes for porn nowadays is not a very abnormal reaction for a uninitiated person actually. Look at this description from a (female) guest-blogger at irrestistible Fish (and read the post too later after you’ve finished mine and see also her part II) about her surprise when she started to watch porn:

Porn was not exactly what I had expected.
I knew it would be graphic, but this, this was beyond graphic.
This was not like the sex scenes in a movie.
This sex wasn’t just sex.
Porn sex was different.
The bodies were ‘perfect’, the positions, acrobatic.
No one had a single hair follicle visible anywhere on their perfect bodies. And visible their bodies were. Microscopically so.
Everything was up close and zoomed in. Nothing left to the imagination.

There was no kissing, no intimacy, no love, just animalistic, self-gratifying acts of sex.

Only reading this paragraph makes me feel dirty and uninterested… Call me a romantic but I don’t even want to be able to fantasize sex without kissing, let alone intimacy or love.

What would even be the fun of that? Yuck….

This way of picturing the human body and sexuality is blasphemy against the Imago dei itself. Blasphemy against love.

(I’m actually very lucky to have formed my view of how female  bodies are not from porn but from biology books, more regular nude scenes, and more classical nude art or nude photography, and that the default for a female body in my head is mostly just my wife, not a forced ideal that doesn’t exist. )

So what is the most important thing here? I would say that what we should never forget is that porn is in the eye of the beholder. It’s not what comes in through our eyes that makes us unclean, but our own heart and how we process those things. Sexually perverted people will look at every woman with lust and predatory thoughts, no matter how they are dressed. Being a woman is enough to be subject to pornification for some.

But one of the most important commandments for Christians is to love our fellow humans as ourselves, which very certainly does not include dehumanising them as sex objects.  Even the label ‘humanist’ to me would imply a higher standard than dehumanising other people in to sex object. And not unimportantly  here is that it doesn’t matter that much if we consume them with our eyes as porn or turn our eyes away… The second one might keep us from certain sins like the ‘looking lustfully’, it still makes us regard the person in question as less than human.

How can we ever learn to love fellow humans that we cannot look at because they are only sex objects for us? This approach will never make us love more even if it can help us by means of mere sin management. But in the end we need to learn to love the other. This is why I do think that for example Dan Brennans work on cross-gender friendship is very important (check out his groundbreaking book ‘sacred unions, sacred passions‘ on the subject) Pornification of the human body is completely incompatible with love and loving the other as ourselves., and we need to let go of it…

But this might requite a letting go of cultural conditioning and might  need some help from the Holy Spirit…

So what do you think?

peace

Bram

sexual dominoes vs the fruits of the Spirit

(Now that’s a name for a first blog post of the new year, isn’t it?)

I was reading a blog post by Dan Brennan[1] about ‘sexual dominoes’, which got me thinking about how much we actually believe the bible and take it serious as a basis for our lives as evangelical christians, as we’d claim we do when someone would ask us.

So what are ‘sexual dominoes’? The article by Josh Hunt Dan refers to is a good example. It basicly boils down to the good old ‘slippery slope’ argument applied to the fear of having a affair: all affairs start innocently and then instantly progress like the collective pieces in the domino game. Once one tips over one tile, all the rest of the tiles follow suit. Don’t come near to other women as a man, it is dangerous and flirting with infidelity. A quote from the Josh Hunt article will make it more clear how far this kind of thinking goes:

I’d invite you to make it a part of the culture at your church: around here. . .

• We don’t share a meal with another woman
• We don’t get in the care with another woman
• We don’t counsel another woman
• We don’t talk about anything personal with another woman.
• We are never alone with another women ever for any reason.

You will be glad you did. So will your kids, your church, your friends and your God.

Impractical as such a thing is in most working contexts, it is probably is possible for a pastor… And it’s nothing new, Billy Graham had policies like this, and Rick Warren still has. The idea is that one can’t be careful enough… So apparently we are not capable of self-control, and just should avoid any situation in which we **could** be able to sin with someone of the other sex. Nevermind that such way of thinking is devaluating the person of the other sex to just a ‘temptation’, supposing the worst of them. Nevermind that our big example Jesus, who was even unmarried, broke all this kind of unwritten laws and taboos (which were really strong in his culture) with the Samaritan woman at the well, and probably with Mary and Martha too… which is an important subversion of all these kinds of thinking, but not what I was planning to write about… Maybe later…

But then I got thinking about self-control. The pop-Freudianism which gave us this framework might not believe in it, but what about us Christians. Shouldn’t the word ‘self-control’ automaticly ring a bell -and especially for me as a charismatic Christian-? Do we or do we not actually believe in the fruits of the Spirit?

Gal 5:22-25 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Now those who belong to Christ45 have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also behave in accordance with the Spirit.

Back to my question: Do we really take the bible seriously as evangelical Christians? Do we actually want the Spirit to transform us according to the fruits of the Spirit? Do we really want to follow Jesus’ example, and the law of love for our fellow human, regardless of their sex? Or do we follow the wisdom of pop-freudianism, which makes us unable to have any unsuspect relationship in the end.

And yes, we should be realistic, and not go there where we know we will be tempted beyond what we can handle. But that does not mean that we as Christians in any way can agree with the worldly way of thought that devaluates humans, created in the image of God, to either dangerous tempting sexy creatures or lust-controlled animals who cannot resist them. This is a very unchristian way of thinking, which goes against all Jesus stood for, against the whole Spirit of the New Testament! (It might be compatible with some muslim thought though) We should love our neigbor as ourselves, regardless of sex, and to really love someone will never go together with sexually abusing them (in real life or in thought). A good cross-gender friendship is a much better way to learn how to cope with the other sex than any kind of segregation tactics can ever be…

When will we really believe in the power of the Spirit, in the seriousness of the first law of love? When will we follow the example of Christ and love our fellow human, regardless of sex, income, social class, color of skin,… De we really believe that in Christ there is no male or female, no jew nor greek?

Or are we more inclined to believe the theories of this world? Pop-psychology, freudian reductionism, etc… If that is the case, we better stop using words like ‘evangelical’ or ‘biblical’. There’s nothing biblical at all about this. It’s just fear, and disbelief in the words of Jesus and Paul, in the Love of Christ in us, and in the Image of God that we all share.

Is it true that perfect love drives out all fear, like the bible says? do we really believe such things?

Let there be more of You, Lord
and less of our silliness,
More Holy Spirit and less ZeitGeist
so that Your Kingdom come
and Your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven

Shalom

Bram

[1] Author of the much-needed book ‘sacred unions, sacred passions‘, about Christians and cross-gender friendships.

Sacred unions, sacred passions II: Freud and the irresistible sex drive

So right now I’m blogging about Dan Brennans book ‘sacred unions, sacred passions‘, subtitled ‘engaging the mystery of friendship between men and women’. I’ve started this series with a musical prelude, and part 1: beyond the the romantic myth but I had already introduced the subject in another post earlier this week.

So Dan writes in his book about cross-gender friendships, a topic that is naturally to me (and him) but still it is very controversial for some christians, and some others in this world. One of the reasons for having problems with the idea of cross-gender friends  is the way we view sexuality as an all-controlling power in our post-Freud age. Freud himself reacted rightly againt the repression of sexuality in his victorian age, but what he gave in return was the other evil side of the pendulum… He sexualised and genitalised every form of human tenderness, and interest between the sexes and even within the same sex(even between mother-son and sister-brother pairs) and this myth has been deeply injected in the fundaments of our modern western way of viewing relationships, even for conservative christians.

If you combine this with an almost medieval worldview on creation order, that is still alive in some more conservative strains of evangelical christianity, you get a very deterministic view on any kind of relationships, which does in fact not differ much from St-Augustines, who was so affraid of women that he didn’t let his widowed stepsister stay in the same house as himself. but those were they days the church was absolutely negative about both sex and women (which is not very biblical, just read the song of Solomon…) and I don’t think anyone wants to go back to that time…

Like Dan points out: For many conservative believers, sexual drive towards the other sex is almost embraced as a nonnegotiable part of the created order. A number of Christians, like my former pastor (who told me I was playing with fire), believe men and women are hardwired for sex, as if that is the sole purpose for female-male relationality in Christ’s Kingdom and the world. It is “natura!” and therefore predictable for men and women who enter into any kind of close relationship with each other to take it to the next and ultimate level—which would mean having sex. Romantic and sexual coupling is in our genes as a man and a woman get close to one another, according to this interpretation.
Nature takes over and overrides the best of intentions between the sexes with irresistible force. Conversation, then, about male-female relations before marriage or in addition to marriage immediately goes toward temptation, lust, avoidance, rules, and boundaries. The discussion quickly degenerates into finding a list of rules to stave off powerful sexual urges. This common approach, however, is in danger of reading into the divine order a narrow, Freudian view of human nature as well as the romantic myth.

And from elsewhere: When Christian communities make Freud’s view of sexuality (even modified) and the romantic myth “compatible” with their biblical principles, the idealization of marriage becomes coherent with the rejection of intimate male-female friendship beyond marriage or outside of marriage: all the gestures, pleasures, emotions, and desires of nonromantic love are genitalized on this side of Freud. (..) As Lisa McMinn comments: “Although Freud has been misunderstood and criticized for saying so, hè saw sexual energy as the life force that motivates all human behavior. When conservative Christians adapt a modified Freudian view of sexuality and conflate the romantic myth with the meaning of one flesh, one wonders how Christian husbands and wives are able to pursue deep intimacy and become companions on the marital journey. Perhaps the greatest enemy of marriage when the notion of one flesh has been made synonymous with the romantic myth is the one flesh vision of marriage itself. When the romantic myth makes sex and romantic passion the end of marriage, it creates impossible standards. As Tallis notes, in romantic idealism “we unwittingly expect love to deliver the kind of happiness that was associated with a direct experience of the numinous. In effect, we look to another human being to give life meaning and purpose.

So what is the problem? First that those 2 cultural myths are adapted and used as foundation of bible-exegesis, on which we build our view of relationships. And worldviews and expectations are really self-fulfilling. If you just believe self-control does not exist, and that it’s only logical to look at women like sex objects, it will be that way. I am reminded here in a scene of the narnia book ‘the magicians nephew’, where the evil uncle Andrew, who does not believe in talking animals, tells to himself they are just making animal noises. And in the end he isn’t able to hear anything but animal noises, even if he would try (and the speaking animals don’t recognise his speech as language either.) I believe it is the same with the way how we look at the role of our sex drive: if we genitalise it all, all will be genitalised. If we start from friendship, mutual respect, and love, we will end with them…

It is not true that when I’m in love with a girl, that I have to start a relationship with her. Au contraire, even if you’re both in love you can decide to not start a relationship if you know it wouldn’t work… Like I did once. Neither is the sexual drive ever irresistible. If you really cannot fight temptation, you have a problem, and might even be a danger to society. There are enough people whose life proves that the irresistible sex drive is just a lie, christians and non-christians alike. And others who’ve made it truth in their own universe…

And especially we as Christians should not fall for such determinism that gives our flesh so much power! Don’t we believe in the fruits of the Spirit, including self-control? Don’t we believe that we are called to love each opther (a command which is never sex-segregated) and that in christ we as brothers and sisters live in a new reality, in which there is neither ‘greek’ or ‘jew’, nor male and female? We may do like the bible as a source for abstract truths, but when will we learn to live inside it’s new reality? Did Jesus die in vain to reconcile us, if all we want to believe is exagerrated psychological and biological determinisms, and the power of our flesh? shouldn’t we be living in the law of love, the resurrection and the new life?

shalom

Bram

sacred unions, sacred passions I: beyond the romantic myth

Right now I’m blogging about Dan Brennans book ‘sacred unions, sacred passions‘, subtitled ‘engaging the mystery of friendship between men and women’. I’ve started this series with a musical prelude, but I had already introduced the subject in another post earlier this week.

so now it’s time to start talking about Dans book itself. And what I like a lot about it, is his thoroughly investigation of the subject.You get a lot of background information, history, bible verses, and quotes (somtimes it’s almost academically) of which you wished you’d know it before.

In the beginning of the book he identifies some of the underlying assumptions in how Western society (and thus, in modified form, Christian subcultures too) view sexuality, relationship and marriage. And the sad thing is that we most of the time don’t seem to be able to see through them… One thing Dan identifies as the foundation of a lot of our thinking is what he calls ‘the myth of romantic idealism’, which we all will recognise if I give you 2 quotes that were used in the book:

Our culture generally elevates the romantic experience of falling in love above religious commitment, teaching us that this emotional experience is both beyond our control and beyond all reproach! Idealizing romantic passion as the unique, one-and-only, exclusive form of love between a man and woman has created a pervasive romantic myth in our contemporary world when it comes to male-female paired relationships. (Laura Smit)

Romantic relationships are celebrated as an ideal woman-man relationship in our society. The myths of our culture secure a special status for romantic heterosexual relationships since these myths idealize romantic love and promote the notion that the emotional well-being of men and women is dependent upon their involvement in a ‘successful’ romantic relationship! (Kathy Werking)

So romantic love is seen as the most important and deepest form of love, and ones life will never be complete without it. A lot of movies and books and songs do have that idea as the basis of the underlying worldbview.

The sad thing is that ‘conservative’ christianity has absorbed a lot of this idea, and combined it with the biblical of “one flesh” (an expression used for both marriage and sexual union from genesis, which is referenced to in the new testament by both Paul and Jesus himself) to create something unrealistic. The “one flesh” relationship is supposed to satisfy all our deepest yearnings for oneness, sexuality and deep friendship. So every male-female interaction is viewed in this light:

The Christianized version of the romantic myth exaggerates, idealizes, and isolates the path of dating or courtship to marriage as the only prize in paired male-female relationships under the justification of “one flesh!’ Embodied knowledge, relational depth, emotional closeness, physical tenderness, sensual warmth and play, vulnerability, trust, fidelity, commitment, union, spontaneity, understanding, giving the utmost— these dynamic nongenital relational qualities are romanticized and sexualized under the evangelical rhetoric of one flesh. Some Christians who see these dynamics in male-female pairs presume this “couple” must be on the path toward romantic and genital intimacy.

Which is asking way too much of romantic relationships and marriage. Surely in this sexually broken world it is important that we point to marriage as a place of love, passion and sexual fidelity (also with our lives!), but that does not mean that all other ‘unions’ in our life are just peripheral…: To use Dans words:

Here, classical Christianity calls us out to something much more than the ‘much more” embedded in romantic idealism. God, who is love, calls us all—singles, husbands, wives, widows, widowers, divorced— into a spirituality of love and friendship in marriage, beyond marriage, and outside of marriage. While God honors and blesses the marriage bed, God does not confine delight, goodness, passion, attraction, beauty, sensuality, spontaneity, or creativity to the boundaries of married love. Jesus himself embodied these realities as a single man. The spirituality of love and friendship in classical Christianity does not give us a stark contrast between great mystery of marital love and uninspiring platonic friendship outside of marriage. Both in the Bible and in tradition, the spirituality of friendship is presented as hungering for the good, the beautiful, and the true.

The whole romantic myth is not something we should swallow as truth as Christians. We follow a single man as Savior, and most of our new testament was written by another single man. How could we ever believe that ‘being in love’ and having a romantic relationship is the highest good to pursue without which we’ll never be complete? This is very denigrating to singles, and to all non-romantic relationships too. While friendship and brotherly love have been honored throughout a lot of church history (and in lots of other cultures) we seem to not value it very much in our society. Only the expression ‘just’ friends tells us enough, as if a friendship in itself is not enough to be meaningful…

So the first thing from the book that I think everybody should think about is this romantic myth. It doesn’t matter if it’s the christian or the non-christian form, we shouldn’t fall for it!

shalom

Bram

sacred unions, sacred passions (musical prelude)

I’m going to blog about Dan Brennans higly recommended book ‘sacred unions, sacred passions‘, a book which I think is needed in soms Christian circles. But before we go to the book i’ll start with a song that I once made, about how I felt when I was a lot younger and a bit lonely. My apologies for those who don’t like lo-fi music… (and yes I know it is weird and slightly out of tune and will never make the charts, but I do happen to like this kind of music)

(yes the video is not that much…)

That’s how I felt, lonely and stuck on the wrong planet and hopelessly trying to get attention. I may have even instinctively tried to flirt on occasion, in my own clumsy way, but the last thing I would’ve been interested in would’ve been sex. The dark part of me filled with stupid sexual teenage fantasies was just so shallow that it ceased to exist when there were real persons around and I hated that part anyway. All I needed was love in the form of friendship; sex would just have destroyed me and everything I wanted and needed. But friendly love  was something I needed. And there were periods when I easier connected with girls than with my own sex.

Maybe the female friends that I had (and still have) in a way were in part a replacement for the romantic absense in my life, but also they were the sisters I never had. It’s not that the reason I seeked the companion of girls was because I was longing for something that would end in a romantic and later sexual relationship. I tend to start friendships with girls I’d never fall in love with anyway. No, those girls were and are friends, and to add the word ‘just’ before that would be an insult to our relationship. A friendship is complete in itself, and being ‘just’ friends with a girl was all I needed at that moment.
I wouldn’t have been ready for a relationship anyway.

That was in my late teenage years and young twenties, but later there was a girl who became my best friend and even more, and then my sexuality got born again very slowly while we came closer in more dimensions than a friendship has… But my relationship with my wife was not something to replace any other friendship, only a new one, with more depth and a sharing of parts of me that had never been shared with anyone… But we both have good friends of the other sex, and our lives would be a lot poorer without them.

For a lot of people my age and younger there isn’t even a question about that kind of friendships, but for others (and especially some christians) it is unthinkable or risky and dangerous. Like you would guess, all I’ve experienced in my life does place me in the first category. I don’t need anything to justify myself, I just feel blessed with all my friends and I know God enjoys it. I never thought of it as subversive anywey before I got into discussions with some people… And I still believe that this kind of ‘friendly love’ can overcome sexual brokenness and hurt about the other sex in peoples lives, if we open ourselves up for it…

So I’m glad that someone has written a book about the subject from a christian perspective… Thanks Dan

Next time I’ll highlight some insights the book has to offer that are really important for us to consider!

shalom

Bram