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Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality
Are transgender people discovering their authentic self? Is the hookup culture really liberating? Does abortion lead to equality for women? Does homosexuality contradict our biological sex?
In Love Thy Body, bestselling and award-winning author Nancy Pearcey takes on the hard questions about life and sexuality. A two-time winner of the ECPA Gold Medallion Award, Pearcey has been hailed by The Economist as "America's preeminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual."
In Love Thy Body she offers a respectful but riveting exposé of the secular worldview that lies behind trendy slogans and political talking points. A former agnostic, Pearcey is a sensitive guide to the secular ideas that shape current debates. She empowers readers to intelligently and compassionately engage today's most controversial moral and social challenges.
In a surprise shattering of stereotypes, Pearcey demonstrates that while secularism promises much, in reality it delivers little. She turns the tables on stereotypes that portray Christianity as harsh and bigoted, and invites a fresh look at its holistic, life-affirming principles: it is a worldview that matches the real world and fits with human experience.
All along, Pearcey keeps readers entranced with gripping stories of real people wrestling with hard questions in their own lives--sharing their pain, their struggles, and their triumphs.
In Love Thy Body, bestselling and award-winning author Nancy Pearcey takes on the hard questions about life and sexuality. A two-time winner of the ECPA Gold Medallion Award, Pearcey has been hailed by The Economist as "America's preeminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual."
In Love Thy Body she offers a respectful but riveting exposé of the secular worldview that lies behind trendy slogans and political talking points. A former agnostic, Pearcey is a sensitive guide to the secular ideas that shape current debates. She empowers readers to intelligently and compassionately engage today's most controversial moral and social challenges.
In a surprise shattering of stereotypes, Pearcey demonstrates that while secularism promises much, in reality it delivers little. She turns the tables on stereotypes that portray Christianity as harsh and bigoted, and invites a fresh look at its holistic, life-affirming principles: it is a worldview that matches the real world and fits with human experience.
All along, Pearcey keeps readers entranced with gripping stories of real people wrestling with hard questions in their own lives--sharing their pain, their struggles, and their triumphs.
337 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2018
989 people are currently reading
9495 people want to read
About the author
Nancy R. Pearcey
29 books538 followersNancy Randolph Pearcey is the Francis A. Schaeffer Scholar at the World Journalism Institute, where she teaches a worldview course based on the study guide edition of Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. In 2005, Total Truth won the ECPA Gold Medallion Award in the Christianity & Society category, in addition to an Award of Merit in the Christianity Today book awards.
A former agnostic, Pearcey studied violin in Heidelberg, Germany, in the early 1970s and then traveled to Switzerland to study Christian worldview under Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri Fellowship. After graduating from Iowa State University with a Distributed Studies degree (philosophy, German, music), she earned a master’s degree in Biblical Studies from Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, then pursued further graduate work in the history of philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto (with emphases on ancient and Reformational philosophy).
Pearcey is currently a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, where the focus of her work is on the cultural and philosophical implications of the evolution controversy. A frequent public lecturer, Pearcey has spoken to actors and screenwriters in Hollywood; students and faculty at universities such as Dartmouth, Stanford, USC, and Princeton; scientists at national labs such as Sandia and Los Alamos; staffers at Congress and the White House; and various activist and church groups around the country, including the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. She has appeared on NPR, and a lecture based on Total Truth was broadcast by C-SPAN.
She began writing in 1977 for the nationally distributed Bible-Science Newsletter, where for 13 years she wrote pioneering in-depth monthly articles on issues related to science and Christian worldview. In 1991 she became the founding editor of “BreakPoint,” a national daily radio commentary program, and continued as the program’s executive editor for nearly nine years, heading up a team of writers. Under her leadership, the program grew into an influential organ for teaching a Christian worldview perspective on current events, with an estimated weekly audience of five million. She was also policy director and senior fellow of the Wilberforce Forum, and for five years coauthored a monthly column in Christianity Today.
Pearcey has served as a visiting scholar at Biola University’s Torrey Honors Institute, managing editor of the science journal Origins & Design, an editorial board member for Salem Communications Network, and a commentator on Public Square Radio. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including the Washington Times, Human Events, First Things, Books & Culture, World, Pro Rege, Human Life Review, American Enterprise, The World & I, Homeschool Enrichment, Christianity Today, and the Regent University Law Review.
Pearcey has authored or contributed to several works, including The Soul of Science, which treats the history of science and Christianity, and the bestselling, award-winning How Now Shall We Live? She was invited to contribute the Foreword in The Right Questions, as well as chapters in Mere Creation, Of Pandas and People, Pro-Life Feminism, Genetic Ethics, Signs of Intelligence, Reading God’s World, Uncommon Dissent, and a Phillip Johnson Festschrift titled Darwin’s Nemesis.
Pearcey resides in Northern Virginia, where she and her husband are homeschooling the second of their two sons.
A former agnostic, Pearcey studied violin in Heidelberg, Germany, in the early 1970s and then traveled to Switzerland to study Christian worldview under Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri Fellowship. After graduating from Iowa State University with a Distributed Studies degree (philosophy, German, music), she earned a master’s degree in Biblical Studies from Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, then pursued further graduate work in the history of philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto (with emphases on ancient and Reformational philosophy).
Pearcey is currently a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, where the focus of her work is on the cultural and philosophical implications of the evolution controversy. A frequent public lecturer, Pearcey has spoken to actors and screenwriters in Hollywood; students and faculty at universities such as Dartmouth, Stanford, USC, and Princeton; scientists at national labs such as Sandia and Los Alamos; staffers at Congress and the White House; and various activist and church groups around the country, including the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. She has appeared on NPR, and a lecture based on Total Truth was broadcast by C-SPAN.
She began writing in 1977 for the nationally distributed Bible-Science Newsletter, where for 13 years she wrote pioneering in-depth monthly articles on issues related to science and Christian worldview. In 1991 she became the founding editor of “BreakPoint,” a national daily radio commentary program, and continued as the program’s executive editor for nearly nine years, heading up a team of writers. Under her leadership, the program grew into an influential organ for teaching a Christian worldview perspective on current events, with an estimated weekly audience of five million. She was also policy director and senior fellow of the Wilberforce Forum, and for five years coauthored a monthly column in Christianity Today.
Pearcey has served as a visiting scholar at Biola University’s Torrey Honors Institute, managing editor of the science journal Origins & Design, an editorial board member for Salem Communications Network, and a commentator on Public Square Radio. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including the Washington Times, Human Events, First Things, Books & Culture, World, Pro Rege, Human Life Review, American Enterprise, The World & I, Homeschool Enrichment, Christianity Today, and the Regent University Law Review.
Pearcey has authored or contributed to several works, including The Soul of Science, which treats the history of science and Christianity, and the bestselling, award-winning How Now Shall We Live? She was invited to contribute the Foreword in The Right Questions, as well as chapters in Mere Creation, Of Pandas and People, Pro-Life Feminism, Genetic Ethics, Signs of Intelligence, Reading God’s World, Uncommon Dissent, and a Phillip Johnson Festschrift titled Darwin’s Nemesis.
Pearcey resides in Northern Virginia, where she and her husband are homeschooling the second of their two sons.
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December 27, 2017
As post–gay Christian, I was interested in how Nancy Pearcey would navigate the muddy waters of faith, sexuality, and gender in her new book “Love Thy Body.” I loved how Pearcey laid the groundwork from based on “the choice of affirming or rejecting the goodness of God’s intended design for our bodies and sexuality.” Almost every page of my personal copy is underlined with notes on the side.
Over the course of the last five years I have understood that I must surrender my sexual attractions and desires for other women to be a fully devoted follower of Christ. What I have discovered in reading this book is my need to realign my perspective of the value and dignity of the male and female bodies. One of my favorite quotes sums up the reason why here:
“It (the teleological philosophy) tells us how to fulfill our true nature, how to become fully human. In this purpose-driven view, there is no dichotomy between body and person. The two together form an integrated psycho-physical unity. We respect and honor our bodies as part of the revelation of God’s purpose for our lives. It is part of the created order that is “declaring the glory of God.”
Changing the question
Pearcey brilliantly states that those who wrestle with faith, sexual and or gender identity must change the question from “Where did this come from? To “How can God best work through it?” She goes on to state that “our feelings do not define us, but our moral commitments do.” She emphasis that “when we affirm the goodness of creation. We affirm our own maleness or femaleness is not a meaningless or oppressive fact of nature but a reflection of history’s greatest storyline. My greatest take away from this book is that I called to live out a holy sexuality through sexual purity and to hold loosely my relational future entrusting it to a God who always has my best in mind.
Over the course of the last five years I have understood that I must surrender my sexual attractions and desires for other women to be a fully devoted follower of Christ. What I have discovered in reading this book is my need to realign my perspective of the value and dignity of the male and female bodies. One of my favorite quotes sums up the reason why here:
“It (the teleological philosophy) tells us how to fulfill our true nature, how to become fully human. In this purpose-driven view, there is no dichotomy between body and person. The two together form an integrated psycho-physical unity. We respect and honor our bodies as part of the revelation of God’s purpose for our lives. It is part of the created order that is “declaring the glory of God.”
Changing the question
Pearcey brilliantly states that those who wrestle with faith, sexual and or gender identity must change the question from “Where did this come from? To “How can God best work through it?” She goes on to state that “our feelings do not define us, but our moral commitments do.” She emphasis that “when we affirm the goodness of creation. We affirm our own maleness or femaleness is not a meaningless or oppressive fact of nature but a reflection of history’s greatest storyline. My greatest take away from this book is that I called to live out a holy sexuality through sexual purity and to hold loosely my relational future entrusting it to a God who always has my best in mind.
January 15, 2018
I have enjoyed everything of Pearcey's that I have read, and this one is no exception. She is doing great work in keeping Schaeffer's analysis of our cultural deterioration ever relevant, keeping it current with the contemporary craziness. This book is about the modern and postmodern hostility to the human body, as seen in abortion, homosex, and the various trans options.
There are a few weak spots here and there -- she doesn't see the inescapability of stereotyping, for example -- but on the whole this is a very helpful book.
There are a few weak spots here and there -- she doesn't see the inescapability of stereotyping, for example -- but on the whole this is a very helpful book.
June 13, 2018
Are transgender people discovering their authentic self? Is the hookup culture really liberating? Does abortion lead to equality for women? Does homosexuality contradict our biological sex?
In Love Thy Body, bestselling and award-winning author Nancy Pearcey takes on the hard questions about life and sexuality. A two-time winner of the ECPA Gold Medallion Award, Pearcey has been hailed by The Economist as "America's preeminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual."
In Love Thy Body she offers a respectful but riveting exposE of the secular worldview that lies behind trendy slogans and political talking points. A former agnostic, Pearcey is a sensitive guide to the secular ideas that shape current debates. She empowers readers to intelligently and compassionately engage today's most controversial moral and social challenges.
In a surprise shattering of stereotypes, Pearcey demonstrates that while secularism promises much, in reality it delivers little. She turns the tables on stereotypes that portray Christianity as harsh and bigoted, and invites a fresh look at its holistic, life-affirming principles: it is a worldview that matches the real world and fits with human experience.
All along, Pearcey keeps readers entranced with gripping stories of real people wrestling with hard questions in their own lives--sharing their pain, their struggles, and their triumphs.
Out January 2nd, 2018
BIO
"Nancy Randolph Pearcey is the Francis A. Schaeffer Scholar at the World Journalism Institute, where she teaches a worldview course based on the study guide edition of Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. In 2005, Total Truth won the ECPA Gold Medallion Award in the Christianity & Society category, in addition to an Award of Merit in the Christianity Today book awards.
A former agnostic, Pearcey studied violin in Heidelberg, Germany, in the early 1970s and then traveled to Switzerland to study Christian worldview under Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri Fellowship. After graduating from Iowa State University with a Distributed Studies degree (philosophy, German, music), she earned a master’s degree in Biblical Studies from Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, then pursued further graduate work in the history of philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto (with emphases on ancient and Reformational philosophy).
Pearcey is currently a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, where the focus of her work is on the cultural and philosophical implications of the evolution controversy. A frequent public lecturer, Pearcey has spoken to actors and screenwriters in Hollywood; students and faculty at universities such as Dartmouth, Stanford, USC, and Princeton; scientists at national labs such as Sandia and Los Alamos; staffers at Congress and the White House; and various activist and church groups around the country, including the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. She has appeared on NPR, and a lecture based on Total Truth was broadcast by C-SPAN.
She began writing in 1977 for the nationally distributed Bible-Science Newsletter, where for 13 years she wrote pioneering in-depth monthly articles on issues related to science and Christian worldview. In 1991 she became the founding editor of “BreakPoint,” a national daily radio commentary program, and continued as the program’s executive editor for nearly nine years, heading up a team of writers. Under her leadership, the program grew into an influential organ for teaching a Christian worldview perspective on current events, with an estimated weekly audience of five million. She was also policy director and senior fellow of the Wilberforce Forum, and for five years coauthored a monthly column in Christianity Today.
Pearcey has served as a visiting scholar at Biola University’s Torrey Honors Institute, managing editor of the science journal Origins & Design, an editorial board member for Salem Communications Network, and a commentator on Public Square Radio. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including the Washington Times, Human Events, First Things, Books & Culture, World, Pro Rege, Human Life Review, American Enterprise, The World & I, Homeschool Enrichment, Christianity Today, and the Regent University Law Review.
Pearcey has authored or contributed to several works, including The Soul of Science, which treats the history of science and Christianity, and the bestselling, award-winning How Now Shall We Live? She was invited to contribute the Foreword in The Right Questions, as well as chapters in Mere Creation, Of Pandas and People, Pro-Life Feminism, Genetic Ethics, Signs of Intelligence, Reading God’s World, Uncommon Dissent, and a Phillip Johnson Festschrift titled Darwin’s Nemesis.
Pearcey resides in Northern Virginia, where she and her husband are homeschooling the second of their two sons."
MY THOUGHTS:
I received this book in exchange for my honest review.
Wow!
What a nightmare... I seldom like to give my own religious thoughts about any writings since I believe everyone is entitled to their own and who am I to judge another when I'm certainly not perfect. I just wish others would practice this way of life. Let's begin with what I could find as the better part of the book...
Pearcey's ability to take culture and its issues and dissect them profoundly and intrinsically is fascinating and interesting. I find that she does tend to talk "over" people's heads though and is a bit on the preachy side/self-righteous too, but the issues are real and her take on some of them realistic enough to pay attention. I would even suggest you pay attention to the unrealistic parts of this book too. Sometimes, the power behind words and their meanings can be deadly with horrific consequences and why they should be called out for what they truly are, when possible.
This book covers many controversial issues of today's society like: abortion, euthanasia, the hook up, sexuality, transgenderism, homosexuality, marriage and parenthood. I'll address a few in my review.
The author approaches these topics by laying out the current position many either implicitly or explicitly take on social issues in a somewhat accurate portrayal of what is shown by others today, and, she also covers them from her own personal standpoint too. It's these that have me the most concerned.
She describes a life, human rights and way of living that makes this world unsafe, not enjoyed and incredibly damaged. She tackles the world view as a dehumanizing force that must be addressed in the only way possible--through love, love for God, love for self and love for others. We must stop putting our own selves first. This concept is thought provoking and worthy of a read by Christians and non-Christians alike. I was intrigued by the fact that she was not afraid to take on some of the bigger issues.
In the first chapter, the author brings to light the obsessive compulsion we have with demeaning the body that is powered remotely by the brain set on 'function' only.
Without holding back, the author then tackles the issues surrounding abortion from a Christian point of view, an eye-opening part of the book for me.
She then moves on to assisted suicide and euthanasia. This section greatly bothered me since I revel from the perspective that life is precious and unique to each person, so when I began reading it, I was nervous with where the author was going. The point of money being the fundamental reason for ending a life is certainly not where I stand and I feel it shouldn't be where anyone should. Instead of killing when there is no value left (although I'm not sure who has the authority to say when this actually is), why not promote ways to fix those problems by resolving the plaguing ailments? We are an intelligent species, yet instead of encouraging the use of this said intelligence to cure and resolve, we choose to take the easier route especially one where money is involved. The scary part of all this is that voluntary euthanasia may not remain so voluntary if the almighty dollar wins out. So are we forgetting about our humanity?
The next chapter is about premarital sex and not getting married or having kids and how these decisions are killing the United States and even the world. The whole relationship factor out of necessity is brought to light and I can't help but wonder why the world has allowed money to affect this too. It's hard to raise children when both parents have to work in order to pay the bills, yet, we are encouraged to have children, to procreate for the survival of our species... yet, the burden of raising children is not getting any easier, so many opt out of "never." It's great to say this problem should be fixed out of love... but love does not pay the bills and encourage survival, thanks to society. There's a breakdown in what relationships are nowadays, most are out of convenience until the need to 'share costs' passes, then divorce comes easy. Others, have no respect, nor demand it out of fear of being alone. Then, there's the 'settling' factor... being with someone, just to say you are. The long marriages of old seem lost to time and the relationships built on trust, respect, love and honor are gone.
The next chapter discusses homosexuality. Considered still a "sin" by the author, there is a suggestion to "help them" by showing that Christianity leads them to embracing a Biblically ethical view of sexuality and marriage, or if this isn't enough, she simply suggests, stay celibate. This reeks of thoughts that homosexuality is and should be considered, an illness... Then there's the comparison of homosexuality in ancient Roman times to what it is now being the same but far worse back then. This is redundant and really not necessary to the book, but the author uses this comparison to sort of poo poo the fact that "at least it (being homosexuality) is not as bad as it was..." Bad meaning what? Rampant like a disease or plague? Something although more civil, still in need of a cure? Hmmm...
Moving on...
If not labelling homosexuality as a disease needing a cure, the author then tackles transgenderism, one she claims to be controversial and heartbreaking an issue and also one that can be "helped" by Christians embracing those in conflict about their gender and encourage them to accept the gender they were born with. No surgery, just acceptance. This whole chapter caused me to shake my head in bewilderment. Compliance has been something many generations both female and male have had forced upon them, with 'being different' is dictated as bad. As a mother of a special needs child, this chapter is the most infuriating. I always tell my daughter to embrace the fact that she's different from all the rest; it's wonderful and exciting to be this way rather than boring and the same as everyone else. It's those who are different that make the best leaders, the ones who push society forward not backward.
I think this author should focus on acceptance of differences and the world needs to treat each other as unique and wonderful just as they are.
The next chapter seems a contradiction to the previous two. In this one, with the exception of the other two issues, she reflects on how people lose sight of their value, their individuality, live, personhood... hmmm, but only as long as you're not gay or transgender... hate to see what she thinks about special needs...
She then discusses family and how people lose their rights to government and social norms... well, isn't that a contradiction in a nutshell. What I see from the author's writing, is that as long as the family fits the "normal" slot of society, without sexual issues, or intellectual complexities, then family should join together through love... so I have to ask, what the Hell is her concept of love? She goes on to say that family is joined together by biological bonds... what about those with adopted children, where's there is this so-called missing component of biology? She also adds that family shouldn't just be held together by pieces of paper... but what about her first chapters where she discusses marriage and relationships, not to mention sex. Very strange...
In conclusion, I did not like this book. It was preachy, contradictive and if this is what Christianity is about, the way she lays it out, then no wonder our world is such a mess. To me, the concept of god for Christians is suppose to be based on a loving, caring and forgiving entity, one of understanding and accepting of faults and tribulations. The way the author describes a Christian life... doesn't include these, but comes across judgmental and arrogant and self-righteous.
I can see this book creating a lot of hate and prejudice, so well done with that author!
In Love Thy Body, bestselling and award-winning author Nancy Pearcey takes on the hard questions about life and sexuality. A two-time winner of the ECPA Gold Medallion Award, Pearcey has been hailed by The Economist as "America's preeminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual."
In Love Thy Body she offers a respectful but riveting exposE of the secular worldview that lies behind trendy slogans and political talking points. A former agnostic, Pearcey is a sensitive guide to the secular ideas that shape current debates. She empowers readers to intelligently and compassionately engage today's most controversial moral and social challenges.
In a surprise shattering of stereotypes, Pearcey demonstrates that while secularism promises much, in reality it delivers little. She turns the tables on stereotypes that portray Christianity as harsh and bigoted, and invites a fresh look at its holistic, life-affirming principles: it is a worldview that matches the real world and fits with human experience.
All along, Pearcey keeps readers entranced with gripping stories of real people wrestling with hard questions in their own lives--sharing their pain, their struggles, and their triumphs.
Out January 2nd, 2018
BIO
"Nancy Randolph Pearcey is the Francis A. Schaeffer Scholar at the World Journalism Institute, where she teaches a worldview course based on the study guide edition of Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. In 2005, Total Truth won the ECPA Gold Medallion Award in the Christianity & Society category, in addition to an Award of Merit in the Christianity Today book awards.
A former agnostic, Pearcey studied violin in Heidelberg, Germany, in the early 1970s and then traveled to Switzerland to study Christian worldview under Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri Fellowship. After graduating from Iowa State University with a Distributed Studies degree (philosophy, German, music), she earned a master’s degree in Biblical Studies from Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, then pursued further graduate work in the history of philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto (with emphases on ancient and Reformational philosophy).
Pearcey is currently a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, where the focus of her work is on the cultural and philosophical implications of the evolution controversy. A frequent public lecturer, Pearcey has spoken to actors and screenwriters in Hollywood; students and faculty at universities such as Dartmouth, Stanford, USC, and Princeton; scientists at national labs such as Sandia and Los Alamos; staffers at Congress and the White House; and various activist and church groups around the country, including the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. She has appeared on NPR, and a lecture based on Total Truth was broadcast by C-SPAN.
She began writing in 1977 for the nationally distributed Bible-Science Newsletter, where for 13 years she wrote pioneering in-depth monthly articles on issues related to science and Christian worldview. In 1991 she became the founding editor of “BreakPoint,” a national daily radio commentary program, and continued as the program’s executive editor for nearly nine years, heading up a team of writers. Under her leadership, the program grew into an influential organ for teaching a Christian worldview perspective on current events, with an estimated weekly audience of five million. She was also policy director and senior fellow of the Wilberforce Forum, and for five years coauthored a monthly column in Christianity Today.
Pearcey has served as a visiting scholar at Biola University’s Torrey Honors Institute, managing editor of the science journal Origins & Design, an editorial board member for Salem Communications Network, and a commentator on Public Square Radio. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including the Washington Times, Human Events, First Things, Books & Culture, World, Pro Rege, Human Life Review, American Enterprise, The World & I, Homeschool Enrichment, Christianity Today, and the Regent University Law Review.
Pearcey has authored or contributed to several works, including The Soul of Science, which treats the history of science and Christianity, and the bestselling, award-winning How Now Shall We Live? She was invited to contribute the Foreword in The Right Questions, as well as chapters in Mere Creation, Of Pandas and People, Pro-Life Feminism, Genetic Ethics, Signs of Intelligence, Reading God’s World, Uncommon Dissent, and a Phillip Johnson Festschrift titled Darwin’s Nemesis.
Pearcey resides in Northern Virginia, where she and her husband are homeschooling the second of their two sons."
MY THOUGHTS:
I received this book in exchange for my honest review.
Wow!
What a nightmare... I seldom like to give my own religious thoughts about any writings since I believe everyone is entitled to their own and who am I to judge another when I'm certainly not perfect. I just wish others would practice this way of life. Let's begin with what I could find as the better part of the book...
Pearcey's ability to take culture and its issues and dissect them profoundly and intrinsically is fascinating and interesting. I find that she does tend to talk "over" people's heads though and is a bit on the preachy side/self-righteous too, but the issues are real and her take on some of them realistic enough to pay attention. I would even suggest you pay attention to the unrealistic parts of this book too. Sometimes, the power behind words and their meanings can be deadly with horrific consequences and why they should be called out for what they truly are, when possible.
This book covers many controversial issues of today's society like: abortion, euthanasia, the hook up, sexuality, transgenderism, homosexuality, marriage and parenthood. I'll address a few in my review.
The author approaches these topics by laying out the current position many either implicitly or explicitly take on social issues in a somewhat accurate portrayal of what is shown by others today, and, she also covers them from her own personal standpoint too. It's these that have me the most concerned.
She describes a life, human rights and way of living that makes this world unsafe, not enjoyed and incredibly damaged. She tackles the world view as a dehumanizing force that must be addressed in the only way possible--through love, love for God, love for self and love for others. We must stop putting our own selves first. This concept is thought provoking and worthy of a read by Christians and non-Christians alike. I was intrigued by the fact that she was not afraid to take on some of the bigger issues.
In the first chapter, the author brings to light the obsessive compulsion we have with demeaning the body that is powered remotely by the brain set on 'function' only.
Without holding back, the author then tackles the issues surrounding abortion from a Christian point of view, an eye-opening part of the book for me.
She then moves on to assisted suicide and euthanasia. This section greatly bothered me since I revel from the perspective that life is precious and unique to each person, so when I began reading it, I was nervous with where the author was going. The point of money being the fundamental reason for ending a life is certainly not where I stand and I feel it shouldn't be where anyone should. Instead of killing when there is no value left (although I'm not sure who has the authority to say when this actually is), why not promote ways to fix those problems by resolving the plaguing ailments? We are an intelligent species, yet instead of encouraging the use of this said intelligence to cure and resolve, we choose to take the easier route especially one where money is involved. The scary part of all this is that voluntary euthanasia may not remain so voluntary if the almighty dollar wins out. So are we forgetting about our humanity?
The next chapter is about premarital sex and not getting married or having kids and how these decisions are killing the United States and even the world. The whole relationship factor out of necessity is brought to light and I can't help but wonder why the world has allowed money to affect this too. It's hard to raise children when both parents have to work in order to pay the bills, yet, we are encouraged to have children, to procreate for the survival of our species... yet, the burden of raising children is not getting any easier, so many opt out of "never." It's great to say this problem should be fixed out of love... but love does not pay the bills and encourage survival, thanks to society. There's a breakdown in what relationships are nowadays, most are out of convenience until the need to 'share costs' passes, then divorce comes easy. Others, have no respect, nor demand it out of fear of being alone. Then, there's the 'settling' factor... being with someone, just to say you are. The long marriages of old seem lost to time and the relationships built on trust, respect, love and honor are gone.
The next chapter discusses homosexuality. Considered still a "sin" by the author, there is a suggestion to "help them" by showing that Christianity leads them to embracing a Biblically ethical view of sexuality and marriage, or if this isn't enough, she simply suggests, stay celibate. This reeks of thoughts that homosexuality is and should be considered, an illness... Then there's the comparison of homosexuality in ancient Roman times to what it is now being the same but far worse back then. This is redundant and really not necessary to the book, but the author uses this comparison to sort of poo poo the fact that "at least it (being homosexuality) is not as bad as it was..." Bad meaning what? Rampant like a disease or plague? Something although more civil, still in need of a cure? Hmmm...
Moving on...
If not labelling homosexuality as a disease needing a cure, the author then tackles transgenderism, one she claims to be controversial and heartbreaking an issue and also one that can be "helped" by Christians embracing those in conflict about their gender and encourage them to accept the gender they were born with. No surgery, just acceptance. This whole chapter caused me to shake my head in bewilderment. Compliance has been something many generations both female and male have had forced upon them, with 'being different' is dictated as bad. As a mother of a special needs child, this chapter is the most infuriating. I always tell my daughter to embrace the fact that she's different from all the rest; it's wonderful and exciting to be this way rather than boring and the same as everyone else. It's those who are different that make the best leaders, the ones who push society forward not backward.
I think this author should focus on acceptance of differences and the world needs to treat each other as unique and wonderful just as they are.
The next chapter seems a contradiction to the previous two. In this one, with the exception of the other two issues, she reflects on how people lose sight of their value, their individuality, live, personhood... hmmm, but only as long as you're not gay or transgender... hate to see what she thinks about special needs...
She then discusses family and how people lose their rights to government and social norms... well, isn't that a contradiction in a nutshell. What I see from the author's writing, is that as long as the family fits the "normal" slot of society, without sexual issues, or intellectual complexities, then family should join together through love... so I have to ask, what the Hell is her concept of love? She goes on to say that family is joined together by biological bonds... what about those with adopted children, where's there is this so-called missing component of biology? She also adds that family shouldn't just be held together by pieces of paper... but what about her first chapters where she discusses marriage and relationships, not to mention sex. Very strange...
In conclusion, I did not like this book. It was preachy, contradictive and if this is what Christianity is about, the way she lays it out, then no wonder our world is such a mess. To me, the concept of god for Christians is suppose to be based on a loving, caring and forgiving entity, one of understanding and accepting of faults and tribulations. The way the author describes a Christian life... doesn't include these, but comes across judgmental and arrogant and self-righteous.
I can see this book creating a lot of hate and prejudice, so well done with that author!
October 8, 2018
This is not a book you can choose to read or not. The times in which we are living force us to read it. We, Christians, must prepare our minds to action, to think through the social issues we are facing each day in a biblical and logical way, and this book is fantastic starting point
The only reason I am not giving this -excellent- book 5 stars is because at the end of chapter 6, Mrs. Pearcey's argument weakened when she wrote things like, "Christians should be on the forefront of creative thinking to recover richer definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman. The church should be the first place where young people can find freedom from unbiblical stereotypes- the freedom to work out what it means to be created in God's image as a wholistic and redeemed people." (p.218)
I think that the Church should not strive to be thinking creative about these things, but should be thinking unashamedly more biblically. We must return to the definitions we find in the Bible, and to the different roles ("stereotypes") that the Word of God has given us.
Go get yourself a copy of this book, read it, think through it, and apply it.
The only reason I am not giving this -excellent- book 5 stars is because at the end of chapter 6, Mrs. Pearcey's argument weakened when she wrote things like, "Christians should be on the forefront of creative thinking to recover richer definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman. The church should be the first place where young people can find freedom from unbiblical stereotypes- the freedom to work out what it means to be created in God's image as a wholistic and redeemed people." (p.218)
I think that the Church should not strive to be thinking creative about these things, but should be thinking unashamedly more biblically. We must return to the definitions we find in the Bible, and to the different roles ("stereotypes") that the Word of God has given us.
Go get yourself a copy of this book, read it, think through it, and apply it.
Read
February 6, 2021TW!!!!! homophobia/transphobia/queerphobia/mention of rape/pedophilia
Ok, so i’ll start by saying i’m not going to rate this book because it’s impossible for me to give it a fair rating. here’s why:
Reading this book was like that one ‘Friends’ meme where Joey is trying to learn french (iykyk). The author’s philosophy genuinely makes sense to me — UP TO A CERTAIN POINT. So I’d be following this line of logic from one point to another, finding it totally reasonable, and then suddenly there’d be this LEAP at the end. It felt like she was saying 1+1=2, 2+2=4, and then suddenly 4+4 = 9???? And i was like: wait, I agree with the previous statements, but THIS???? just doesn’t follow???
Ok let me explain.
This whole book is based on the philosophy that the body and soul are inseparable, and rejects the dualistic view that you can be biologically human without being a person. The author then argues that this dualistic view of a human being is what justifies ~secular~ issues of the body such as abortion, assisted death, sexuality, etc. Furthermore, Christians have a teleological view of nature, which means that nature is structured for a purpose. “…Christianity holds that body and soul together form an integrated unity — that the human being is an embodied soul…” (pg. 31). The argument is that if you are a Christian and hold this worldview, then you logically cannot support an issue that “demeans the body as extrinsic to the person — something inferior that can be used for purely pragmatic purposes” (pg. 32).
Ok, so at this point either you:
1. disagree with this whole philosophy that the body and soul are inseparable, or
2. agree with this philosophy and decide to keep reading to see what conclusions are drawn.
(I was number 2.) So from here on out I’ll speak having already addressed my position, which to recap is: Agree with the philosophy, have issues with the conclusions.
I don’t want to talk about the abortion and assisted death chapters because I don’t have the energy rn. But basically as an example: abortion follows the two-tiered view of humanity: the belief that a fetus can be biologically human without being a person with rights, etc., which is contrary to the Christian worldview that to be biologically human IS to be a person. This was the first time ever I could actually comprehend what a pro-life person was saying. But yeah, still disagree but whatever. Saving my energy for the HORRID STUFF SAID ABOUT LIVING BREATHING GAY/TRANS/QUEER HUMANS.
Ok, wait. The chapter on hookup culture made me LAUGH so hard so I will talk about that. “The dualistic mentality encourages young people to disassociate their bodies sexually from who they are as whole persons” (pg. 197). I believe that body and soul are inseparable, so I agree that yeah, sex can’t be purely physical. BUT.....LOVE. ISN’T. THE ONLY. EMOTION.... This is where I do not understand. Of course sex can be unhealthy and dehumanizing, of COURSE! But it’s not unhealthy and dehumanizing purely because it’s taking place within a hookup context. I also believe that you can have a deep connection with someone without committing to them for life. Also all the examples she gives are of super unhealthy hookups and she uses that to try to claim that every hookup is immoral. Ugh there’s so much more to say but I need to talk about the gay stuff.
Ah, chapter five. Where I suddenly wanted to scream and throw my computer (ebook) across the room. Following the worldview of body and soul being inseparable, the author argues that since our bodies were designed by God, male and female, counterparts, that it’s immoral to be in a same-sex relationship.
In this chapter the author cites Sean Doherty, who is a man attracted to other men. “In short, Doherty focused on the fact that biologically, genetically, physiologically, and chromosomally he is male, oriented toward a female, no matter what his feelings and desires were…He began to base his identity on his body…His feelings changed enough that eventually he fell in love with a woman…Though our feelings are important, Doherty concluded, they are not what define our identity” (pg. 263).
She then goes on to say “Does that mean Doherty is free from sexual attraction to men? No; like all other fallen, sinful human beings, he is sometimes attracted to someone other than his spouse” (264). This made me upset because she frames this as if this guy is obviously attracted to other people, just like we all are, but he’s faithful to his wife. But that’s not the point???? This has nothing to do with being faithful, and has everything to do with the fact that this guy literally says he’s “still predominantly same-sex attracted” (264). That’s so……. UNHEALTHY?????? TF???
But wait… body and soul are equally important right, so why do we suddenly disregard our identity (soul) and follow our bodies???? OH, BECAUSE IT aligns with YOUR AGENDA!!!
Some things that made me spit out my coffee (ok i wasn't drinking coffee but i would've):
“Same-sex practice entails the postmodern view that our identity is defined by our feelings and desires; that we may use our bodies in ways that contradict our biological structure” (280). My note next to this says: “men have a g spot in their buttholes which is a part of their biological structure.”
“By contrast, Christianity affirms that we live in a universe structured not by blind forces but by the loving purposes of a personal Creator” (280). My note next to this says: “so he lovingly and purposefully created my vagina but not my mind?”
Why is being gay a ‘consequence of the fall’ like why did u get to decide this. (Later on she talks about how IVF is immoral when used for same-sex couples to have kids, but totally moral when helping infertile couples have kids, because one is HELPING nature do what it’s supposed to do, and one is MANIPULATING nature… Again… why do you get to decide when science/medicine is good or bad.)
One thing i appreciate is that she recognizes that sexual orientation is not binary and can be fluid. I was like WOW YES! but then she’s like: but if ur 100% gay then u should just be celibate! -_- RIGHT FORMULA WRONG ANSWER. U WERE SO CLOSE.
But here’s when the real rage started. (TW: extremely homophobic comment coming up)
“You cannot be a whole person when your emotions are at war with your physiology” (294). Man, talk about dehumanizing! This mentality is literally so damaging I am SICK.
TW: brief mention of rape and pedophilia
Also, she talks about how people would have same sex relationships (as well as sex outside of marriage) in ancient times, and how men would literally have sex with servants (including children) ((including boy children)), and how Christianity was actually radical because it told men to stop having sex with whoever they wanted and only have sex with their wives.
So this was immoral because before they were having sex outside of marriage, and with other males, right?
Uh, NO???? it was immoral because it was LITERALLY RAPE AND PEDOPHILIA??? TF????
Then she’s all like, “Ancient culture also provides a vivid image of where Western culture may well be heading. As Christian influence wanes, will Western culture revert back to a sexual free-for-all like that of the ancient world?” (322). I’m not even going to say anything because my face was like 👁👄👁
The anger continues into chapter six where she pretty much says the same thing: that our identity should be based off of our body and it’s teleological purpose. Throughout this chapter she CONSTANTLY misgenders people which is super upsetting and disrespectful. She says that SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) laws “are based on the assumption that a person can be born in the wrong body” (328). WOW. WILD that ‘the fall’ can cause all these imperfect things to happen, including being infertile — which is totally okay to fix with medical intervention, but when someone doesn’t identify with their assigned sex it’s IMMORAL and UNNATURAL to seek medical intervention for that?? Like you can’t just pick and choose. Also, she says that intersex people can choose their sex because they have some male and female in them.. BUT BUT — wHaT oF thEir gEniTaLs?!?!??!!??!
She also says in regards to trans people: “when a person senses a dissonance between body and mind, the mind wins. The body is dismissed as irrelevant” (329). But dude, if the body was so irrelevant then trans people wouldn’t feel the need to transition? Also, being trans IS a part of a person’s identity. Also, if any part of the body is being dismissed it’s their sex organs, not their entire fricking body. You’re the one reducing a person to their fricking genitals?????? IT JUST literally makes no sense.
She also said that if sex (i think she meant gender?) is a social construct then there’s no point fighting for women’s rights. Because “we cannot legally protect a category of people if we cannot identify that category” (358). I—
...Because we identify who women are by checking to see if they have a vagina, right? Not by just..... i don't know.... asking them.......
In the last chapter she talks about how by giving people choice with regards to their relationships and bodies, marriage is “de-naturalized” and “undermined", because we are actually making relationships/marriage a legal contract, and therefore giving more power to the state. That last chapter was just a little too conspiracy-ish for me LOL but i laughed.
Long story short:
The philosophy makes sense, but the conclusions are drawn to satisfy a very specific agenda. After reading this I have come to the conclusion that I can believe that the body and mind are inseparable while still being LGBTQ+ affirming. The end.
Ok, so i’ll start by saying i’m not going to rate this book because it’s impossible for me to give it a fair rating. here’s why:
Reading this book was like that one ‘Friends’ meme where Joey is trying to learn french (iykyk). The author’s philosophy genuinely makes sense to me — UP TO A CERTAIN POINT. So I’d be following this line of logic from one point to another, finding it totally reasonable, and then suddenly there’d be this LEAP at the end. It felt like she was saying 1+1=2, 2+2=4, and then suddenly 4+4 = 9???? And i was like: wait, I agree with the previous statements, but THIS???? just doesn’t follow???
Ok let me explain.
This whole book is based on the philosophy that the body and soul are inseparable, and rejects the dualistic view that you can be biologically human without being a person. The author then argues that this dualistic view of a human being is what justifies ~secular~ issues of the body such as abortion, assisted death, sexuality, etc. Furthermore, Christians have a teleological view of nature, which means that nature is structured for a purpose. “…Christianity holds that body and soul together form an integrated unity — that the human being is an embodied soul…” (pg. 31). The argument is that if you are a Christian and hold this worldview, then you logically cannot support an issue that “demeans the body as extrinsic to the person — something inferior that can be used for purely pragmatic purposes” (pg. 32).
Ok, so at this point either you:
1. disagree with this whole philosophy that the body and soul are inseparable, or
2. agree with this philosophy and decide to keep reading to see what conclusions are drawn.
(I was number 2.) So from here on out I’ll speak having already addressed my position, which to recap is: Agree with the philosophy, have issues with the conclusions.
I don’t want to talk about the abortion and assisted death chapters because I don’t have the energy rn. But basically as an example: abortion follows the two-tiered view of humanity: the belief that a fetus can be biologically human without being a person with rights, etc., which is contrary to the Christian worldview that to be biologically human IS to be a person. This was the first time ever I could actually comprehend what a pro-life person was saying. But yeah, still disagree but whatever. Saving my energy for the HORRID STUFF SAID ABOUT LIVING BREATHING GAY/TRANS/QUEER HUMANS.
Ok, wait. The chapter on hookup culture made me LAUGH so hard so I will talk about that. “The dualistic mentality encourages young people to disassociate their bodies sexually from who they are as whole persons” (pg. 197). I believe that body and soul are inseparable, so I agree that yeah, sex can’t be purely physical. BUT.....LOVE. ISN’T. THE ONLY. EMOTION.... This is where I do not understand. Of course sex can be unhealthy and dehumanizing, of COURSE! But it’s not unhealthy and dehumanizing purely because it’s taking place within a hookup context. I also believe that you can have a deep connection with someone without committing to them for life. Also all the examples she gives are of super unhealthy hookups and she uses that to try to claim that every hookup is immoral. Ugh there’s so much more to say but I need to talk about the gay stuff.
Ah, chapter five. Where I suddenly wanted to scream and throw my computer (ebook) across the room. Following the worldview of body and soul being inseparable, the author argues that since our bodies were designed by God, male and female, counterparts, that it’s immoral to be in a same-sex relationship.
In this chapter the author cites Sean Doherty, who is a man attracted to other men. “In short, Doherty focused on the fact that biologically, genetically, physiologically, and chromosomally he is male, oriented toward a female, no matter what his feelings and desires were…He began to base his identity on his body…His feelings changed enough that eventually he fell in love with a woman…Though our feelings are important, Doherty concluded, they are not what define our identity” (pg. 263).
She then goes on to say “Does that mean Doherty is free from sexual attraction to men? No; like all other fallen, sinful human beings, he is sometimes attracted to someone other than his spouse” (264). This made me upset because she frames this as if this guy is obviously attracted to other people, just like we all are, but he’s faithful to his wife. But that’s not the point???? This has nothing to do with being faithful, and has everything to do with the fact that this guy literally says he’s “still predominantly same-sex attracted” (264). That’s so……. UNHEALTHY?????? TF???
But wait… body and soul are equally important right, so why do we suddenly disregard our identity (soul) and follow our bodies???? OH, BECAUSE IT aligns with YOUR AGENDA!!!
Some things that made me spit out my coffee (ok i wasn't drinking coffee but i would've):
“Same-sex practice entails the postmodern view that our identity is defined by our feelings and desires; that we may use our bodies in ways that contradict our biological structure” (280). My note next to this says: “men have a g spot in their buttholes which is a part of their biological structure.”
“By contrast, Christianity affirms that we live in a universe structured not by blind forces but by the loving purposes of a personal Creator” (280). My note next to this says: “so he lovingly and purposefully created my vagina but not my mind?”
Why is being gay a ‘consequence of the fall’ like why did u get to decide this. (Later on she talks about how IVF is immoral when used for same-sex couples to have kids, but totally moral when helping infertile couples have kids, because one is HELPING nature do what it’s supposed to do, and one is MANIPULATING nature… Again… why do you get to decide when science/medicine is good or bad.)
One thing i appreciate is that she recognizes that sexual orientation is not binary and can be fluid. I was like WOW YES! but then she’s like: but if ur 100% gay then u should just be celibate! -_- RIGHT FORMULA WRONG ANSWER. U WERE SO CLOSE.
But here’s when the real rage started. (TW: extremely homophobic comment coming up)
“You cannot be a whole person when your emotions are at war with your physiology” (294). Man, talk about dehumanizing! This mentality is literally so damaging I am SICK.
TW: brief mention of rape and pedophilia
Also, she talks about how people would have same sex relationships (as well as sex outside of marriage) in ancient times, and how men would literally have sex with servants (including children) ((including boy children)), and how Christianity was actually radical because it told men to stop having sex with whoever they wanted and only have sex with their wives.
So this was immoral because before they were having sex outside of marriage, and with other males, right?
Uh, NO???? it was immoral because it was LITERALLY RAPE AND PEDOPHILIA??? TF????
Then she’s all like, “Ancient culture also provides a vivid image of where Western culture may well be heading. As Christian influence wanes, will Western culture revert back to a sexual free-for-all like that of the ancient world?” (322). I’m not even going to say anything because my face was like 👁👄👁
The anger continues into chapter six where she pretty much says the same thing: that our identity should be based off of our body and it’s teleological purpose. Throughout this chapter she CONSTANTLY misgenders people which is super upsetting and disrespectful. She says that SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) laws “are based on the assumption that a person can be born in the wrong body” (328). WOW. WILD that ‘the fall’ can cause all these imperfect things to happen, including being infertile — which is totally okay to fix with medical intervention, but when someone doesn’t identify with their assigned sex it’s IMMORAL and UNNATURAL to seek medical intervention for that?? Like you can’t just pick and choose. Also, she says that intersex people can choose their sex because they have some male and female in them.. BUT BUT — wHaT oF thEir gEniTaLs?!?!??!!??!
She also says in regards to trans people: “when a person senses a dissonance between body and mind, the mind wins. The body is dismissed as irrelevant” (329). But dude, if the body was so irrelevant then trans people wouldn’t feel the need to transition? Also, being trans IS a part of a person’s identity. Also, if any part of the body is being dismissed it’s their sex organs, not their entire fricking body. You’re the one reducing a person to their fricking genitals?????? IT JUST literally makes no sense.
She also said that if sex (i think she meant gender?) is a social construct then there’s no point fighting for women’s rights. Because “we cannot legally protect a category of people if we cannot identify that category” (358). I—
...Because we identify who women are by checking to see if they have a vagina, right? Not by just..... i don't know.... asking them.......
In the last chapter she talks about how by giving people choice with regards to their relationships and bodies, marriage is “de-naturalized” and “undermined", because we are actually making relationships/marriage a legal contract, and therefore giving more power to the state. That last chapter was just a little too conspiracy-ish for me LOL but i laughed.
Long story short:
The philosophy makes sense, but the conclusions are drawn to satisfy a very specific agenda. After reading this I have come to the conclusion that I can believe that the body and mind are inseparable while still being LGBTQ+ affirming. The end.
May 19, 2021
This book is definitely a mixed bag. It maintains a high view of the human person throughout, but it takes a sharp nose-dive towards the end of the book into Rod Dreher-esque fear-mongering (which is always based upon a confused equating of “Western Civilization” with the Church).
“Love Thy Body” suffers the same flaw many popular Christian intellectual histories/apologetics suffer, which is basically assuming every person on the left side of the American political spectrum is a part of the Frankfurt School. In other words, Pearcey gives no account of how the ideas of PhD’s and influential thinkers have actually been disseminated to everyday people (see: Carl Trueman’s “Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self”) , nor how those ideas are changed in that transmission.
On a related note, Pearcey conceives of human beings in much the same Cartesian/dualistic way she constantly critiques. She constantly asserts that the grounding of all human action is worldview. But implicit in that view is the Cartesian idea that humans are fundamentally “thinking things,” i.e. minds whose essential function is to cognize/believe. The Christian anthropology—most fully articulated by Augustine—says that human beings are not fundamentally creatures which think, but rather creatures which love (For an accessible treatment of the topic, see James KA Smith’s “Desiring the Kingdom”).
If that sounds milquetoast to you, that is only because you have bought into the modern/Cartesian conception of love as purely sentimental, rather than the power (which we, in some sense, share with God via the imago dei) which brought all things into existence out of nothing.
Of course, the fact that she’s telling this story via a book requires that she primarily floats around in the realm of ideas and worldviews. Love, unlike ideas, can’t be abstracted because it is essentially active (never potential) and in some sense always embodied/incarnated. So, I grant that it would be difficult to satisfy me on this point. Which leads me to my last one…
Pearcey’s history constantly warns of the dangers of modern sexual/identity heterodoxies because, she says, they’ll lead us back to “Pre-Christian paganism.” I grant that there is often great resemblance between sexual practices now and then, but this alarm misses a very obvious point: there is no going back to “pre-Christian” anything, because we live, well, in the wake/midst of Christendom. It seems difficult to simultaneously decry our “post-Christian” society while at the same time pointing to “pre-Christian” practices as the evidence of our “post-Christian-ness.” She makes very little, if any attempt, to explain how Christian doctrine and practices have helped contribute to modern views of sexuality.
For example, the Protestant Reformation—rightly, I believe (as a Protestant)—recovered the biblical doctrine of justification, which is essentially a question of identity: who am I most fundamentally and how can I be made right with God? It seems to me that a driving force in the “Sexual Revolution” is a desire to affirm people in their identities, i.e. who/what they see themselves most fundamentally to be. Of course, most Protestants view such an adaptation as a perversion. But nonetheless such a move could only occur within a Christian-influenced society.
“Love Thy Body” suffers the same flaw many popular Christian intellectual histories/apologetics suffer, which is basically assuming every person on the left side of the American political spectrum is a part of the Frankfurt School. In other words, Pearcey gives no account of how the ideas of PhD’s and influential thinkers have actually been disseminated to everyday people (see: Carl Trueman’s “Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self”) , nor how those ideas are changed in that transmission.
On a related note, Pearcey conceives of human beings in much the same Cartesian/dualistic way she constantly critiques. She constantly asserts that the grounding of all human action is worldview. But implicit in that view is the Cartesian idea that humans are fundamentally “thinking things,” i.e. minds whose essential function is to cognize/believe. The Christian anthropology—most fully articulated by Augustine—says that human beings are not fundamentally creatures which think, but rather creatures which love (For an accessible treatment of the topic, see James KA Smith’s “Desiring the Kingdom”).
If that sounds milquetoast to you, that is only because you have bought into the modern/Cartesian conception of love as purely sentimental, rather than the power (which we, in some sense, share with God via the imago dei) which brought all things into existence out of nothing.
Of course, the fact that she’s telling this story via a book requires that she primarily floats around in the realm of ideas and worldviews. Love, unlike ideas, can’t be abstracted because it is essentially active (never potential) and in some sense always embodied/incarnated. So, I grant that it would be difficult to satisfy me on this point. Which leads me to my last one…
Pearcey’s history constantly warns of the dangers of modern sexual/identity heterodoxies because, she says, they’ll lead us back to “Pre-Christian paganism.” I grant that there is often great resemblance between sexual practices now and then, but this alarm misses a very obvious point: there is no going back to “pre-Christian” anything, because we live, well, in the wake/midst of Christendom. It seems difficult to simultaneously decry our “post-Christian” society while at the same time pointing to “pre-Christian” practices as the evidence of our “post-Christian-ness.” She makes very little, if any attempt, to explain how Christian doctrine and practices have helped contribute to modern views of sexuality.
For example, the Protestant Reformation—rightly, I believe (as a Protestant)—recovered the biblical doctrine of justification, which is essentially a question of identity: who am I most fundamentally and how can I be made right with God? It seems to me that a driving force in the “Sexual Revolution” is a desire to affirm people in their identities, i.e. who/what they see themselves most fundamentally to be. Of course, most Protestants view such an adaptation as a perversion. But nonetheless such a move could only occur within a Christian-influenced society.
December 26, 2017
As part of the launch team for Love Thy Body, by Nancy Pearcey, I have been reading this new book for the last four weeks or so. I learned a lot. It is challenging to read, stretching my mind. I feel like I have come upon the scene of a horrible catastrophe (earthquake, hurricane, plane crash, ...) and I want to dive in to rescue and restore as many as possible.
What do abortion, euthanasia, and transgenderism have in common? They all share a common worldview which declares the body to be relatively meaningless, exalting the mind, and separating being a person from being human.
This book goes deep into the mire of modern immorality to find the underlying assumptions, misconceptions, and outright lies that mute the consciences of many. The post-modern worldview demeans the body, declaring it meaningless, and in the names of "freedom" and "choice" drifts away into whatever the mind presently conceives.
Buy this book and study it to learn what is happening in our present world, and taught in our schools, from kindergarten to post-graduate; to begin to understand the danger and the challenge or it all; and to arm yourself with tools to help those who are suffering. Two quotations:
"Christians need to help people see that the secular view of human nature does not fit who people are. It does not match the real world. As a result, it is inevitably destructive, both personally and socially."
"Christians must also show compassion to those who are pressured by a pomosexual [post-modern sexual] society to despise their own bodies and reject their biological identity. Loving God means loving those who bear his image in the world, helping to liberate people who are trapped by destructive and dehumanizing ideas."
What do abortion, euthanasia, and transgenderism have in common? They all share a common worldview which declares the body to be relatively meaningless, exalting the mind, and separating being a person from being human.
This book goes deep into the mire of modern immorality to find the underlying assumptions, misconceptions, and outright lies that mute the consciences of many. The post-modern worldview demeans the body, declaring it meaningless, and in the names of "freedom" and "choice" drifts away into whatever the mind presently conceives.
Buy this book and study it to learn what is happening in our present world, and taught in our schools, from kindergarten to post-graduate; to begin to understand the danger and the challenge or it all; and to arm yourself with tools to help those who are suffering. Two quotations:
"Christians need to help people see that the secular view of human nature does not fit who people are. It does not match the real world. As a result, it is inevitably destructive, both personally and socially."
"Christians must also show compassion to those who are pressured by a pomosexual [post-modern sexual] society to despise their own bodies and reject their biological identity. Loving God means loving those who bear his image in the world, helping to liberate people who are trapped by destructive and dehumanizing ideas."
December 21, 2017
Nancy Pearcey does a wonderful job of laying out the current position many either implicitly or explicitly take on social issues. It is a frighteningly dehumanizing worldview which separates the body from the person, making life, human rights and the US Constitution safe for no one. She also offers the only hope for turning away from this worldview to reunifying the body to the person: a Christian worldview based on love - love for God, love for self, and love for others.
March 14, 2018
Celebrated evangelical apologist Nancy Pearcey published Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality in 2018. The book is a sustained critique of contemporary ethical discourse, which purportedly disvalues the material body in favor of one's immaterial consciousness. Pearcey offers a "teleological view of nature," (21) in which nature is built in such a manner that the "teloi" or ends or goals of nature (humanity included) inhere in the material world. They belong, ontologically, to beings as such, which entails that individuals are not free to create their own "ends" but must rather submit to those already constraining them by virtue of their existence in the world.
Lest we get muddled from here, let's be perfectly clear. This book is not good. Despite the plethora of reviews to the contrary, Love Thy Body is sloppy and poorly argued. As a work of Philosophy--that is, as a work that critically reviews, evaluates, and appraises other philosophical ideas--it's sophomoric. (Her treatment of Kant [162 - 165] is especially heinous. The analysis would not have stood in my 3000-level Ethics course.) She pulls critique-worthy articles from Salon, The Huffington Post, and even Daily Kos, while not even registering the difficulty of citing Breitbart and The Blaze because of their problematic pieces. And so, Pearcey's scales seem weighted in favor of one side rather than the other, which, for all her talk of "objectivity" and "scientific facts" (195) over against "subjective and arbitrary" (56) determinations, strains the reader's credulity.
Pearcey's Personhood Theory
Part and parcel to Pearcey's problem of sourcing is the way in which she develops her view of the "personhood theory"--the foil for her whole project. Pearcey devotes each chapter of Love Thy Body to analyzing and critiquing a particular manifestation of "personhood theory." And so, she moves from "I Hate Me," which functions as an introduction to the theory, to "The Joy of Death," in which she addresses questions of euthanasia and abortion. From there, "Dear Valued Constituent" touches on all manner of political problems raised and "Schizoid Sex" is geared toward the obvious. "The Body Impolitic" and "Transgender, Transreality" both focus on gender theory, especially in Judith Butler. Her conclusion, "The Goddess of Choice is Dead," offers a few final thoughts and a brief positive vision: the church must cultivate and proclaim a healthy vision of bodies and of organic communities, i.e. families and the like.
Via http://puritanbob.blogspot.com/
To get at what motivates the contemporary person, Pearcey says, "we must dig down to the underlying worldview" (18). We'll address her worldview-talk below, but for now we'll attend to her construction of the "personhood theory." Pearcey diagnoses the modern vision as one which, per Schaeffer's "two-story" account, divides the human being into two substances: the modern "lower story" of material and "facts" and the postmodern "upper story" of consciousness and "values." Insofar as "personhood" is concerned, Pearcey contends that an individual today merely "values" the upper story, the one in which we impose our designs on the world. Worth does not, then, belong to the lower story, the "given" in the world. Rather than integrating the two spheres, they remain disparate. According to Pearcey, the postmodernist will say that a living being, with the genetic and physical characteristics belonging to the human species, may not yet "earn the status of personhood by achieving a certain level of cognitive functioning" (25)--that is, consciousness. Contrary to this, Pearcey asserts, "A biblical ethic is incarnational. We are made in God's image to reflect God's character, both in our minds and in our bodily actions. There is no division, no alienation. We are embodied beings" (35).
The problem, of course, is that Pearcey doesn't have somebody to point towards to say, "This person articulates personhood theory in the way I'm describing." Her personhood theory amounts to an imposition of Schaeffer's heuristic model on the world. She can't work with a tangible, concrete articulation of this theory. As a result, Pearcey can whale away at a so-called personhood theory, but there's no more substance to the theory than to the shadow in shadow-boxing.
The Schaefferian analysis reaches its limit in this regard, because it reveals itself to be an imposition. For the same reason that capitalists don't find Marxist analyses of the world persuasive, a liberal will object to Pearcey's diagnosis of the problem--precisely because the diagnosis is not framed in a manner consistent with the person's own expression of their position. In other words, Pearcey's critique speaks, at best, adjacently to the problem she's unconvered, but her refusal to cite liberal theory-builders in this project exacerbates the injury to her argument. Rather than attacking an idea which has been formulated and expressed and carefully delineated, she's constructed her own version of the liberal project, pointed out the weak spots as she's understood them, and lit into them, as though they comprised a straw-man.
Choose Your Level
It is curious, of course, that, for all Pearcey's concerns about personhood theory doing violence to the "lower level" of the material world and for her interest in maintaining the integrity of both levels simultaneously, her project ends up collapsing the two levels into each other. Rather than showing deference to the upper level of values, as the postmodernist does, Pearcey derives the whole of one's purpose from the lower level, such that any difference between the two are resolved in obeisance to the material. Would it be too far of a stretch to point out that this pattern of deference moves in exactly the opposite direction that the apostle describes in Rom. 7 and especially 7.23? Paul seems to contradict Pearcey's contention when she writes, "You cannot be a whole person when your emotions are at war with your physiology" (173).
Pearcey's strict differentiation between consciousness and the body fails to account for the ways in which "the body" is itself the mediation of our consciousness. She pays lip service to the idea, to be sure (34), but Pearcey seems to conceive of our consciousness as some kind of ethereal presence that dwells without our body, like a nut in its shell, but without a necessary relationship between the two. She refers to us as "embodied souls" (21) but never as "psychosomatic unities," which is more apt when we are discussing the differences between the material and immaterial aspects of existence. (She comes closest when she writes that we are a "psychosexual unity" [32], but this is insufficient.) Were Pearcey to pay more careful attention to the "embodied" nature of our consciousness, i.e. its location somewhere along our neural pathways, she may be more circumspect about denigrating consciousness at the expense of the body. The two are inseparable--essentially so.
Nevertheless, more to the heart of Pearcey's conception of the human's two-level existence is the question of the extensivity of sin. I touched on the issue briefly here concerning Aaron Hernandez and with reference to Karl Rahner here, but it will be good to briefly revisit the idea. When Paul writes that the creation has been subject to futility (cf. Ro. 8.20-23), we rightly understand that to mean that natural disasters aren't in fact "natural"; they're a product of our alienation from god. Illness, injury, and death are likewise the result of creation's bondage to sin. However, I frequently read commentators who elide over this passage while failing to discern the degree to which this bondage seeps into our bodies on a microscopic level. It's as though the entire world has been set against itself, and, like Paul, we witness different components of our bodies making war against others. If we were to accept the radical subversion of the created order due to the original sin, would that not at the least give us pause before blithely conceding that manifest biological appearance trumps the so-called subjective feelings, which themselves come from the biologically-rooted consciousness of the individual? Even Pearcey acquiesces that our "feelings" may have some genetic cause (196). The embodied soul, in this case, may fight a losing battle against its instantiation in the world of sin, but, if the soul is "gendered" in a manner discommensurate with its presentation, it would be difficult to name such a battle vicious.
Liberals, Progressives, and Postmoderns, oh my!
She exhibits a number of writerly traits that are more annoying than anything else, but they are also illuminative, because they give an idea of her intended audience. Although Love Thy Body appears to be an evenhanded treatment of "somatic ethics" (my term) in the contemporary world, Pearcey "tips her hand" and reveals the polemical substructure of her work. She frequently resorts to the not quite insults of "liberals" and "progressives" (93), as well as "the media" (33), each of which are to be seen as contrasted with "Christians" and "conservatives"--all while occasionally lambasting "politically correct sexual orthodoxy" (123, 130-1). Unblinking, she cites both The Federalist (212), Matt Walsh (68), and Breitbart (151). She even references Planned Parenthood's black market for organs (51). Her biggest target may be the State (84, 251-6) or "the nanny state" (243), although she does have an abiding confidence in "the family [as] a bulwark protecting the unalienable rights recognized in the Declaration of Independence" (253; cf. 60, where Pearcey references the "transcendent source" of those enumerated rights).
Were you not to recognize the characteristics above, she would fall quite neatly into the consistent GOP-voting Christian demographic, which, as far as my sphere of influence is concerned, is fairly uninteresting. This kind of person exists everywhere in my world, and they're frequently lovely people--no less so than normal, at least. But, were Pearcey's aim to convince, say, a typical liberal of her arguments, casually tossing "liberal" and "progressive" as, functionally, "people you should not wish to be" is not the way to go. It's more insulting than necessary, and Pearcey doesn't have the argumentative purchase to afford losing readers to petty name-calling. That is to say, her arguments just aren't strong enough to assume that the reader will tolerate her casually dismissing their ideology or themselves. And, further, her writing just isn't clever enough to maintain attention even in the face of polemical insult, unlike Christopher Hitchens' noted prose.
Such a posture prompts a secondary problem, however. With Pearcey's close identification of Christianity and conservatism (which identification is, again, neither remarkable nor particularly interesting) as well as her continued castigation of liberals as such, she loses not only the "secular" or irreligious liberal but also the liberal Christian--one who may even be "left" simply by virtue of not enjoying the "columnist Matt Walsh" (68). "But," you or she may protest, "a liberal Christian is an oxymoron!" Such may very well be the case, but Pearcey doesn't prove that; all the reader can tell is that she's assumed as much. Love Thy Body lacks the winsomeness that ought to attend any work that isn't pure polemics.
Pearcey's Worldview Problem
As noted above, Pearcey writes downstream from the patron saint of post-postmodern Evangelical apologetics, Francis Schaeffer (12ff). Her application of Schaeffer's two-story account of our world is more frequently ham-fisted than illustrative, more a product of reading the world as a Schaefferian than reading to understand. None of which statements should necessarily malign Schaeffer; he belonged to a period of time and was effective. Part of Pearcey's problem is a failure to amend Schaeffer's heuristic for the present moment. She quite simply regurgitates Schaeffer's method and diagnosis, whereas the best devotees know that an effective use of a teacher involves reconfiguring the teacher's material for today.
One unfortunate feature of Schaeffer's legacy, which Pearcey reproduces here, is the formal emphasis on one's "worldview" as the ground for one's actions in the world. That is to say, Pearcey premises her book on the idea that how the contemporary world does depends on what that world believes. The beliefs of an individual are the ground for their action. She positions herself clearly: "A person's morality is always derivative. It stems from his or her worldview" (136). According to the model, the fundamental mode of being-in-the-world is cognitive. That is, we are thinking things and the other facets of our humanity are built upon that first foundation; in breve, what we believe determines our actions and our affections.
However, there's good reason to believe that such a construction puts the cart before the horse. We frequently live and do subconsciously--that is, we don't rationally justify our actions. We act, rather, according to pre-conscious affections or desires. We want a hamburger more than we want a salad, even though we know that a salad would be better for us, and so we choose the burger despite our understanding. Per Smith, our fundamental mode is not cognitive--although it is neither necessarily non-cognitive--but affective. We love, and we act accordingly. We desire, and we do as a result. Smith writes, “To say that humans are, at root, lovers is to emphasize that we are the sorts of animals for whom things matter in ways that we often don’t (and can’t) articulate” (51). We desire before we can articulate the rationality for the desire, which suggests that the rationality for our desire is more likely a rationalization or post hoc justification for why we act. Worldview-talk, in this case, is not so much a submission to the way things are but more a systematization of the way we would prefer things be.
Rather than assigning fundamental priority in human existence to abstract conceptualization a la worldview and rationality, we would more aptly place the ground in the lived experience, in the chosen mode-of-being reflected by one's actions in the world. The material existence of a person in the world--how it is that they encounter and react to the world around them--matters more than their supposed view thereof. Such is why god speaks through the prophet Jeremiah, "Let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord" (Jer. 9.24), and why, continuing, he says, "Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well. Is not this to know me? declares the Lord" (Jer. 22.15b-16). Hitting on a consistent emphasis of mine, what matters is not the rationalization of action or the cognitive scaffolding that attends our actions but the action itself. Such is why faithfulness even in the face of doubt counts, while expressed belief during a life of disobedience does not. We are "loving" or "desiring" people prior to being "thinking" people, and our loves and desire have greater explanatory power for our actions (and our ethics) than the post hoc rationalizations we call "worldview."
Teleological or Theological Ethics?
Pearcey envisions her project as fundamentally a work of "teleological ethics," built on a "teleological view of nature" (21). She makes the connection to natural law a few pages later, when she writes,
If nature is teleological, and the human body is part of nature, then it is likewise teleological. It has a built-in purpose, part of which is expressed as the moral law. We are morally obligated to treat people in a way that helps them fulfill their purpose. This explains why biblical morality is not arbitrary. Morality is the guidebook to fulfilling God's original purpose for humanity, the instruction manual for becoming the kind of person God intends us to be, the road map for reaching the human telos. This is sometimes called natural law ethics because it tells us how to fulfill our true nature, how to become fully human. (23)
For Pearcey, the perfection or goal of human flourishing can be achieved by acting according to the rules that already inhere within nature. Pearcey equivocates, making a poor version of the watchmaker analogy (a species of the teleological argument) (22), and argues that the creative mind responsible for the world also created the norms by which we ought to structure our lives. She argues, per her teleological ethic, "If the body has no intrinsic purpose, built in by God, then all that matters are human purposes" (24), meaning, of course, that the "givenness" of our material experience is the locus of god's purpose for us. The upper story, in short, cannot be allowed to impose its order on the lower.
Pearcey's teleological ethics assumes purposive elements in god's creative act. But, as noted above, her account fails to do justice to the Christian doctrine of sin (and its radical reach) and to the Christian doctrine of restoration. In other words, her teleological ethics could have just easily been written by a deist, because all it requires is the existence of an apparently structured world. In the absence of an immanent god, how does the ethical account presented here change in the least? The structures still exist. There's no need to account for their distortion due to sin. The lived experience doesn't require the hope of eschatological fulfillment. All that is necessary is submitting to the presented material form.
The ethics, therefore, aren't robustly Christian. They may be a robust account of natural law or even stubbornly conservative (as natural law ethics typically are), but they aren't unadulteratedly Christian. Her account of sin's extensivity is lacking, and the moral vision, which colors the Christian ethical imagination, lacks the hoping-for-which intrinsic to Christian belonging-in-the-world. A theological ethics finds the source of its energy in god's work among his people, not in the abstract structuring of creation prior to the fall.
All of which is, quite frankly, disappointing as far as Pearcey's project goes. I had picked up the work on the basis of its hype among Christian intelligentsia and because, in large measure, I agree with the arc of the project. There is something to one's givenness in the world, and, for all its talk of the resurrection, most contemporary theology does not make enough of the body. But, Pearcey's work was too reactionary and too polemical to advance the conversation. It's a new articulation of natural law and teleology, but it doesn't do much beyond this. We need an ethics of the body that centers itself on the incarnation, resurrection, and crucifixion; on the body of Christ; and on the New Jerusalem.
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Disclosure: I received this book free from Baker Books through the Baker Books Bloggers http://www.bakerbooks.com/bakerbooksb... program. The opinions I have expressed are my own, and I was not required to write a positive review. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/wa....
Lest we get muddled from here, let's be perfectly clear. This book is not good. Despite the plethora of reviews to the contrary, Love Thy Body is sloppy and poorly argued. As a work of Philosophy--that is, as a work that critically reviews, evaluates, and appraises other philosophical ideas--it's sophomoric. (Her treatment of Kant [162 - 165] is especially heinous. The analysis would not have stood in my 3000-level Ethics course.) She pulls critique-worthy articles from Salon, The Huffington Post, and even Daily Kos, while not even registering the difficulty of citing Breitbart and The Blaze because of their problematic pieces. And so, Pearcey's scales seem weighted in favor of one side rather than the other, which, for all her talk of "objectivity" and "scientific facts" (195) over against "subjective and arbitrary" (56) determinations, strains the reader's credulity.
Pearcey's Personhood Theory
Part and parcel to Pearcey's problem of sourcing is the way in which she develops her view of the "personhood theory"--the foil for her whole project. Pearcey devotes each chapter of Love Thy Body to analyzing and critiquing a particular manifestation of "personhood theory." And so, she moves from "I Hate Me," which functions as an introduction to the theory, to "The Joy of Death," in which she addresses questions of euthanasia and abortion. From there, "Dear Valued Constituent" touches on all manner of political problems raised and "Schizoid Sex" is geared toward the obvious. "The Body Impolitic" and "Transgender, Transreality" both focus on gender theory, especially in Judith Butler. Her conclusion, "The Goddess of Choice is Dead," offers a few final thoughts and a brief positive vision: the church must cultivate and proclaim a healthy vision of bodies and of organic communities, i.e. families and the like.
Via http://puritanbob.blogspot.com/
To get at what motivates the contemporary person, Pearcey says, "we must dig down to the underlying worldview" (18). We'll address her worldview-talk below, but for now we'll attend to her construction of the "personhood theory." Pearcey diagnoses the modern vision as one which, per Schaeffer's "two-story" account, divides the human being into two substances: the modern "lower story" of material and "facts" and the postmodern "upper story" of consciousness and "values." Insofar as "personhood" is concerned, Pearcey contends that an individual today merely "values" the upper story, the one in which we impose our designs on the world. Worth does not, then, belong to the lower story, the "given" in the world. Rather than integrating the two spheres, they remain disparate. According to Pearcey, the postmodernist will say that a living being, with the genetic and physical characteristics belonging to the human species, may not yet "earn the status of personhood by achieving a certain level of cognitive functioning" (25)--that is, consciousness. Contrary to this, Pearcey asserts, "A biblical ethic is incarnational. We are made in God's image to reflect God's character, both in our minds and in our bodily actions. There is no division, no alienation. We are embodied beings" (35).
The problem, of course, is that Pearcey doesn't have somebody to point towards to say, "This person articulates personhood theory in the way I'm describing." Her personhood theory amounts to an imposition of Schaeffer's heuristic model on the world. She can't work with a tangible, concrete articulation of this theory. As a result, Pearcey can whale away at a so-called personhood theory, but there's no more substance to the theory than to the shadow in shadow-boxing.
The Schaefferian analysis reaches its limit in this regard, because it reveals itself to be an imposition. For the same reason that capitalists don't find Marxist analyses of the world persuasive, a liberal will object to Pearcey's diagnosis of the problem--precisely because the diagnosis is not framed in a manner consistent with the person's own expression of their position. In other words, Pearcey's critique speaks, at best, adjacently to the problem she's unconvered, but her refusal to cite liberal theory-builders in this project exacerbates the injury to her argument. Rather than attacking an idea which has been formulated and expressed and carefully delineated, she's constructed her own version of the liberal project, pointed out the weak spots as she's understood them, and lit into them, as though they comprised a straw-man.
Choose Your Level
It is curious, of course, that, for all Pearcey's concerns about personhood theory doing violence to the "lower level" of the material world and for her interest in maintaining the integrity of both levels simultaneously, her project ends up collapsing the two levels into each other. Rather than showing deference to the upper level of values, as the postmodernist does, Pearcey derives the whole of one's purpose from the lower level, such that any difference between the two are resolved in obeisance to the material. Would it be too far of a stretch to point out that this pattern of deference moves in exactly the opposite direction that the apostle describes in Rom. 7 and especially 7.23? Paul seems to contradict Pearcey's contention when she writes, "You cannot be a whole person when your emotions are at war with your physiology" (173).
Pearcey's strict differentiation between consciousness and the body fails to account for the ways in which "the body" is itself the mediation of our consciousness. She pays lip service to the idea, to be sure (34), but Pearcey seems to conceive of our consciousness as some kind of ethereal presence that dwells without our body, like a nut in its shell, but without a necessary relationship between the two. She refers to us as "embodied souls" (21) but never as "psychosomatic unities," which is more apt when we are discussing the differences between the material and immaterial aspects of existence. (She comes closest when she writes that we are a "psychosexual unity" [32], but this is insufficient.) Were Pearcey to pay more careful attention to the "embodied" nature of our consciousness, i.e. its location somewhere along our neural pathways, she may be more circumspect about denigrating consciousness at the expense of the body. The two are inseparable--essentially so.
Nevertheless, more to the heart of Pearcey's conception of the human's two-level existence is the question of the extensivity of sin. I touched on the issue briefly here concerning Aaron Hernandez and with reference to Karl Rahner here, but it will be good to briefly revisit the idea. When Paul writes that the creation has been subject to futility (cf. Ro. 8.20-23), we rightly understand that to mean that natural disasters aren't in fact "natural"; they're a product of our alienation from god. Illness, injury, and death are likewise the result of creation's bondage to sin. However, I frequently read commentators who elide over this passage while failing to discern the degree to which this bondage seeps into our bodies on a microscopic level. It's as though the entire world has been set against itself, and, like Paul, we witness different components of our bodies making war against others. If we were to accept the radical subversion of the created order due to the original sin, would that not at the least give us pause before blithely conceding that manifest biological appearance trumps the so-called subjective feelings, which themselves come from the biologically-rooted consciousness of the individual? Even Pearcey acquiesces that our "feelings" may have some genetic cause (196). The embodied soul, in this case, may fight a losing battle against its instantiation in the world of sin, but, if the soul is "gendered" in a manner discommensurate with its presentation, it would be difficult to name such a battle vicious.
Liberals, Progressives, and Postmoderns, oh my!
She exhibits a number of writerly traits that are more annoying than anything else, but they are also illuminative, because they give an idea of her intended audience. Although Love Thy Body appears to be an evenhanded treatment of "somatic ethics" (my term) in the contemporary world, Pearcey "tips her hand" and reveals the polemical substructure of her work. She frequently resorts to the not quite insults of "liberals" and "progressives" (93), as well as "the media" (33), each of which are to be seen as contrasted with "Christians" and "conservatives"--all while occasionally lambasting "politically correct sexual orthodoxy" (123, 130-1). Unblinking, she cites both The Federalist (212), Matt Walsh (68), and Breitbart (151). She even references Planned Parenthood's black market for organs (51). Her biggest target may be the State (84, 251-6) or "the nanny state" (243), although she does have an abiding confidence in "the family [as] a bulwark protecting the unalienable rights recognized in the Declaration of Independence" (253; cf. 60, where Pearcey references the "transcendent source" of those enumerated rights).
Were you not to recognize the characteristics above, she would fall quite neatly into the consistent GOP-voting Christian demographic, which, as far as my sphere of influence is concerned, is fairly uninteresting. This kind of person exists everywhere in my world, and they're frequently lovely people--no less so than normal, at least. But, were Pearcey's aim to convince, say, a typical liberal of her arguments, casually tossing "liberal" and "progressive" as, functionally, "people you should not wish to be" is not the way to go. It's more insulting than necessary, and Pearcey doesn't have the argumentative purchase to afford losing readers to petty name-calling. That is to say, her arguments just aren't strong enough to assume that the reader will tolerate her casually dismissing their ideology or themselves. And, further, her writing just isn't clever enough to maintain attention even in the face of polemical insult, unlike Christopher Hitchens' noted prose.
Such a posture prompts a secondary problem, however. With Pearcey's close identification of Christianity and conservatism (which identification is, again, neither remarkable nor particularly interesting) as well as her continued castigation of liberals as such, she loses not only the "secular" or irreligious liberal but also the liberal Christian--one who may even be "left" simply by virtue of not enjoying the "columnist Matt Walsh" (68). "But," you or she may protest, "a liberal Christian is an oxymoron!" Such may very well be the case, but Pearcey doesn't prove that; all the reader can tell is that she's assumed as much. Love Thy Body lacks the winsomeness that ought to attend any work that isn't pure polemics.
Pearcey's Worldview Problem
As noted above, Pearcey writes downstream from the patron saint of post-postmodern Evangelical apologetics, Francis Schaeffer (12ff). Her application of Schaeffer's two-story account of our world is more frequently ham-fisted than illustrative, more a product of reading the world as a Schaefferian than reading to understand. None of which statements should necessarily malign Schaeffer; he belonged to a period of time and was effective. Part of Pearcey's problem is a failure to amend Schaeffer's heuristic for the present moment. She quite simply regurgitates Schaeffer's method and diagnosis, whereas the best devotees know that an effective use of a teacher involves reconfiguring the teacher's material for today.
One unfortunate feature of Schaeffer's legacy, which Pearcey reproduces here, is the formal emphasis on one's "worldview" as the ground for one's actions in the world. That is to say, Pearcey premises her book on the idea that how the contemporary world does depends on what that world believes. The beliefs of an individual are the ground for their action. She positions herself clearly: "A person's morality is always derivative. It stems from his or her worldview" (136). According to the model, the fundamental mode of being-in-the-world is cognitive. That is, we are thinking things and the other facets of our humanity are built upon that first foundation; in breve, what we believe determines our actions and our affections.
However, there's good reason to believe that such a construction puts the cart before the horse. We frequently live and do subconsciously--that is, we don't rationally justify our actions. We act, rather, according to pre-conscious affections or desires. We want a hamburger more than we want a salad, even though we know that a salad would be better for us, and so we choose the burger despite our understanding. Per Smith, our fundamental mode is not cognitive--although it is neither necessarily non-cognitive--but affective. We love, and we act accordingly. We desire, and we do as a result. Smith writes, “To say that humans are, at root, lovers is to emphasize that we are the sorts of animals for whom things matter in ways that we often don’t (and can’t) articulate” (51). We desire before we can articulate the rationality for the desire, which suggests that the rationality for our desire is more likely a rationalization or post hoc justification for why we act. Worldview-talk, in this case, is not so much a submission to the way things are but more a systematization of the way we would prefer things be.
Rather than assigning fundamental priority in human existence to abstract conceptualization a la worldview and rationality, we would more aptly place the ground in the lived experience, in the chosen mode-of-being reflected by one's actions in the world. The material existence of a person in the world--how it is that they encounter and react to the world around them--matters more than their supposed view thereof. Such is why god speaks through the prophet Jeremiah, "Let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord" (Jer. 9.24), and why, continuing, he says, "Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well. Is not this to know me? declares the Lord" (Jer. 22.15b-16). Hitting on a consistent emphasis of mine, what matters is not the rationalization of action or the cognitive scaffolding that attends our actions but the action itself. Such is why faithfulness even in the face of doubt counts, while expressed belief during a life of disobedience does not. We are "loving" or "desiring" people prior to being "thinking" people, and our loves and desire have greater explanatory power for our actions (and our ethics) than the post hoc rationalizations we call "worldview."
Teleological or Theological Ethics?
Pearcey envisions her project as fundamentally a work of "teleological ethics," built on a "teleological view of nature" (21). She makes the connection to natural law a few pages later, when she writes,
If nature is teleological, and the human body is part of nature, then it is likewise teleological. It has a built-in purpose, part of which is expressed as the moral law. We are morally obligated to treat people in a way that helps them fulfill their purpose. This explains why biblical morality is not arbitrary. Morality is the guidebook to fulfilling God's original purpose for humanity, the instruction manual for becoming the kind of person God intends us to be, the road map for reaching the human telos. This is sometimes called natural law ethics because it tells us how to fulfill our true nature, how to become fully human. (23)
For Pearcey, the perfection or goal of human flourishing can be achieved by acting according to the rules that already inhere within nature. Pearcey equivocates, making a poor version of the watchmaker analogy (a species of the teleological argument) (22), and argues that the creative mind responsible for the world also created the norms by which we ought to structure our lives. She argues, per her teleological ethic, "If the body has no intrinsic purpose, built in by God, then all that matters are human purposes" (24), meaning, of course, that the "givenness" of our material experience is the locus of god's purpose for us. The upper story, in short, cannot be allowed to impose its order on the lower.
Pearcey's teleological ethics assumes purposive elements in god's creative act. But, as noted above, her account fails to do justice to the Christian doctrine of sin (and its radical reach) and to the Christian doctrine of restoration. In other words, her teleological ethics could have just easily been written by a deist, because all it requires is the existence of an apparently structured world. In the absence of an immanent god, how does the ethical account presented here change in the least? The structures still exist. There's no need to account for their distortion due to sin. The lived experience doesn't require the hope of eschatological fulfillment. All that is necessary is submitting to the presented material form.
The ethics, therefore, aren't robustly Christian. They may be a robust account of natural law or even stubbornly conservative (as natural law ethics typically are), but they aren't unadulteratedly Christian. Her account of sin's extensivity is lacking, and the moral vision, which colors the Christian ethical imagination, lacks the hoping-for-which intrinsic to Christian belonging-in-the-world. A theological ethics finds the source of its energy in god's work among his people, not in the abstract structuring of creation prior to the fall.
All of which is, quite frankly, disappointing as far as Pearcey's project goes. I had picked up the work on the basis of its hype among Christian intelligentsia and because, in large measure, I agree with the arc of the project. There is something to one's givenness in the world, and, for all its talk of the resurrection, most contemporary theology does not make enough of the body. But, Pearcey's work was too reactionary and too polemical to advance the conversation. It's a new articulation of natural law and teleology, but it doesn't do much beyond this. We need an ethics of the body that centers itself on the incarnation, resurrection, and crucifixion; on the body of Christ; and on the New Jerusalem.
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Disclosure: I received this book free from Baker Books through the Baker Books Bloggers http://www.bakerbooks.com/bakerbooksb... program. The opinions I have expressed are my own, and I was not required to write a positive review. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/wa....
January 30, 2025
Nancy Pearcey recognizes the common question at the heart of our most controversial public ethics conversations: What is our body for? A whole host of timely topics can be traced back to the same philosophical assumption that our bodies are something we simply have instead of our bodies defining who we are.
I don't know of any other public thinker whose thesis better explains what is at stake when we separate the human being into two parts: the "upper story" which houses our emotional and thought lives, and the "lower story" which contains our physical selves. She's used this thesis to make sense of contemporary art in Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning and to explain how recent history has created our contemporary assumptions about truth in Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity.
Pearcey explains the phenomena of personhood theory--the theory that we are not necessarily persons simply by virtue of being alive, but that we achieve personhood through subjective achievements which vary widely depending on who is determining personhood status. By making personhood a special status, people can justify infanticide (abortion), suicide (euthanasia), and can divorce physical sex from love or physical identity from felt identity.
When we limit the authority of the body, we increase the authority of our own choices. When we make personhood a status, we increase the power of those who get to determine who achieves that status. As Pearcey says, "When the concept of personhood is detached from biology, it becomes arbitrary, with no objective criteria. Eventually, the definition of a person will be enforced by whichever group has the most power" (84).
Because she refuses to shy away from even the most sensitive of political controversies, there were a few times when I cringed at Pearcey's politics because they seemed too narrow, but her celebration of the Christian worldview is anything but narrow. I don't know of anyone else who explains our worldview as perceptively. In every one of her books (Love Thy Body included), Pearcey shows how every other worldview reduces human beings to less than they are. To Pearcey, a human being is always more than the sum of his or her parts, more than just Descartes' "ghost in a machine" but a glorious whole. Our whole selves are designed by the creator, and every aspect of our mind, body, and soul reflects His purpose.
When we see human beings as glorious wholes, "the pressure is off to prove our worth or persuade people that our lives have value" (93). But when we have inherent value, we have to stop excusing misuses of the body.
Pearcey is asking the right questions. I agree that "our actions can imply ideas that we have not clearly thought through" and that, as a culture, we often make choices about what is best for individuals without thinking through the worldview that these ideas imply (52). I hate to get political, but I love to get philosophical. I hope people who agree with Pearcey will be encouraged by the logical, compassionate foundations of our worldview. I hope people who disagree with Pearcey will read this book and examine the implications of embracing personhood theory. I hope this is a book that spurs a thousand lively discussions.
I don't know of any other public thinker whose thesis better explains what is at stake when we separate the human being into two parts: the "upper story" which houses our emotional and thought lives, and the "lower story" which contains our physical selves. She's used this thesis to make sense of contemporary art in Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning and to explain how recent history has created our contemporary assumptions about truth in Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity.
Pearcey explains the phenomena of personhood theory--the theory that we are not necessarily persons simply by virtue of being alive, but that we achieve personhood through subjective achievements which vary widely depending on who is determining personhood status. By making personhood a special status, people can justify infanticide (abortion), suicide (euthanasia), and can divorce physical sex from love or physical identity from felt identity.
When we limit the authority of the body, we increase the authority of our own choices. When we make personhood a status, we increase the power of those who get to determine who achieves that status. As Pearcey says, "When the concept of personhood is detached from biology, it becomes arbitrary, with no objective criteria. Eventually, the definition of a person will be enforced by whichever group has the most power" (84).
Because she refuses to shy away from even the most sensitive of political controversies, there were a few times when I cringed at Pearcey's politics because they seemed too narrow, but her celebration of the Christian worldview is anything but narrow. I don't know of anyone else who explains our worldview as perceptively. In every one of her books (Love Thy Body included), Pearcey shows how every other worldview reduces human beings to less than they are. To Pearcey, a human being is always more than the sum of his or her parts, more than just Descartes' "ghost in a machine" but a glorious whole. Our whole selves are designed by the creator, and every aspect of our mind, body, and soul reflects His purpose.
When we see human beings as glorious wholes, "the pressure is off to prove our worth or persuade people that our lives have value" (93). But when we have inherent value, we have to stop excusing misuses of the body.
Pearcey is asking the right questions. I agree that "our actions can imply ideas that we have not clearly thought through" and that, as a culture, we often make choices about what is best for individuals without thinking through the worldview that these ideas imply (52). I hate to get political, but I love to get philosophical. I hope people who agree with Pearcey will be encouraged by the logical, compassionate foundations of our worldview. I hope people who disagree with Pearcey will read this book and examine the implications of embracing personhood theory. I hope this is a book that spurs a thousand lively discussions.
May 25, 2022
3.5⭐️ I know I’m in the minority with this rating. Excellent book but I just can’t give it a higher rating because I felt the descriptions/details were just too much in the chapters on pornography and homosexuality. I listened to the audiobook so my chapter topics may be off a bit without looking at the table of contents. My biggest concern was that the audience for this book should really exclude the unmarried Christian and those that have ever struggled with pornography or homosexuality (especially males). For the former it would introduce concepts and images that shouldn’t be in their minds and for the latter I can see it leading to major temptation or backsliding. I might be more on the sensitive side since I have many children and I biblically counsel young single women.
September 13, 2024
Discusses important ideas such as: the place and value of the body in modern secular ethics, the false body/spirit divide, perceptions surrounding abortion and the value of unborn children, euthanasia and assisted suicide, personhood theory, the elevation of women's bodily autonomy in Christianity, the consequences of hookup culture, the way relationships are now seen as social contracts, and the way homosexuality and transgenderism play into the body/spirit divide.
Pearcey's voice here is easy to understand, and she speaks clearly and confidently. Would recommend as a college class textbook.
Basically, Pearcey takes the principles she established in Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity and applies them to the body.
I would also recommend from Pearcey: Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning.
Pearcey's voice here is easy to understand, and she speaks clearly and confidently. Would recommend as a college class textbook.
Basically, Pearcey takes the principles she established in Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity and applies them to the body.
I would also recommend from Pearcey: Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning.
April 20, 2018
Over and over, I hear from those in the church that they often have no idea how to talk to others about the very complex issues of homosexuality, transgenderism, euthanasia, and a host of other difficult issues impacting our culture and our churches. Enter Nancy Pearcey's book, "Love Thy Body", a well-written, comprehensive resource that provides a framework to engage with these very issues. The premise of the book is straight-forward, showing how our culture has accepted the lie of a divide between "personhood" and our biological body, where our very body is no longer given value and our feelings instead reign supreme, even when they are at complete odds with our design. Pearcey patiently tackles each issue in light of this belief, showing that Christianity actually holds a high and respectful view of the body, that biology and the Christian view go hand in hand, and that this informs a loving response to worldviews that differ from Biblical truth. I greatly enjoyed the way she weaves together science and philosophy along with real stories from people who have wrestled with these issues and found grace along with courage to follow God's Word. Pearcey writes in a manner that is straightforward, without judgement, and seeking the best for people, and I am confident that those who take the time to work through each chapter are going to be truly blessed as they learn from her wisdom.
Quite honestly, "Love Thy Body" should be required reading for every Christian longing to connect with those around us, whether they are family members, friends, neighbours, or co-workers. Pearcey's book will empower us to engage in intelligent conversation seasoned with God's wisdom and his grace. I award this book my absolutely highest rating of 5 out of 5 stars.
Book has been provided courtesy of Baker Publishing Group and Graf-Martin Communications, Inc.
Quite honestly, "Love Thy Body" should be required reading for every Christian longing to connect with those around us, whether they are family members, friends, neighbours, or co-workers. Pearcey's book will empower us to engage in intelligent conversation seasoned with God's wisdom and his grace. I award this book my absolutely highest rating of 5 out of 5 stars.
Book has been provided courtesy of Baker Publishing Group and Graf-Martin Communications, Inc.
October 2, 2024
FIVE STAR REVIEW ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
#bookreview #readfineprintreviews
I’m a part of an apologetics book club and we recently read Love Thy Body by Nancy Pearcey. It greatly impacted my thoughts on God, our bodies, culture’s view of our bodies and gender/sexual issues.
I had some thoughts before I read it. Maybe you are having these same thoughts:
THE TITLE SOUNDS LIKE IT’S ABOUT LOVING YOURSELF?
It is not about loving yourself, in the typical way we see this idea. It’s about how we should value our bodies because God created us.
THIS BOOK LOOKS LIKE A DIFFICULT READ?
It is. And it’s not a short read, but I have thought about the concepts in this book every day since I read it. It has literally reshaped how I think about many issues.
I NEED A BRIEF SUMMARY SO I’LL KNOW WHAT I’M GETTING INTO.
Ok, here’s the premise: Popular culture today views our bodies through a dualistic lens. They separate our bodies—our physical body—from who we are spiritually/emotionally/mentally. From hook-up culture to abortion to gender, many pretend the body can be detached from who the person actually is. God made our bodies to be one with our whole person, and He made us exactly how we are. See what I mean? It’s not an easy concept to explain. Now you see why it took Nancy Pearcey a few pages to do it.
WHAT’S WITH THE PICTURE ON THE FRONT?
I don’t know. I just don’t know.
#bookreview #readfineprintreviews
I’m a part of an apologetics book club and we recently read Love Thy Body by Nancy Pearcey. It greatly impacted my thoughts on God, our bodies, culture’s view of our bodies and gender/sexual issues.
I had some thoughts before I read it. Maybe you are having these same thoughts:
THE TITLE SOUNDS LIKE IT’S ABOUT LOVING YOURSELF?
It is not about loving yourself, in the typical way we see this idea. It’s about how we should value our bodies because God created us.
THIS BOOK LOOKS LIKE A DIFFICULT READ?
It is. And it’s not a short read, but I have thought about the concepts in this book every day since I read it. It has literally reshaped how I think about many issues.
I NEED A BRIEF SUMMARY SO I’LL KNOW WHAT I’M GETTING INTO.
Ok, here’s the premise: Popular culture today views our bodies through a dualistic lens. They separate our bodies—our physical body—from who we are spiritually/emotionally/mentally. From hook-up culture to abortion to gender, many pretend the body can be detached from who the person actually is. God made our bodies to be one with our whole person, and He made us exactly how we are. See what I mean? It’s not an easy concept to explain. Now you see why it took Nancy Pearcey a few pages to do it.
WHAT’S WITH THE PICTURE ON THE FRONT?
I don’t know. I just don’t know.
February 18, 2020
This is the book I have been looking for to help me to make sense of the culture war that is raging. The issues that are swirling around us today all stem from the theory of personhood. When you understand that, it is easier to see why secular and biblical worldviews are at odds with each other. What is considered progressive is not really new, but gnosticism dressed up in new clothing. There really is nothing new under the sun. Pearcey takes a chapter each to deal with issues like abortion, euthansia, homosexuality, the transgender narrative, and how the social contract has the institution of the family. Included is a study guide to help interact more deeply with the ideas in the book. Pearcey's book is worth rereading and sharing with others. I checked this title out from my local library, but I will definitely purchase a copy for my own library so I can share it with others.
July 5, 2018
The audience for this book must be very limited. It is filled with half-backed facts and quotes taken out of context to support a bronze-aged world-view that has had unquestionably had a profound impact on our western society. If you are a black and white thinker and not interested, or incapable, of expanding your mind beyond the faith of your fathers (and perhaps more importantly the politics of your fathers) this may be a book you will love. It contains anecdotes and defines confirmation bias. It's a sad attempt to reconcile a conservative Baptist worldview (posing as a christian world view) with the knowledge of what truly and simply "is." It fails on every front and I regret the purchase. Very disappointing.
December 20, 2017
Love Thy Body, Nancy Pearcey
Written for Tenth Grade upwards (My granddaughter will read it.)
Apologetics. They can be a rollercoaster ride. With each page I found myself saying, “Yes. OK, that’s good.” Then again, “Push that a step further. A chink in the wall opened, but now a bit further. Just a bit more!”
As Pearcey reminds her readers, we are not in a “cultural war,” but in a “rescue mission.” Apologetics aims at understanding the position of the “other” in order to find their weaknesses and demonstrate them so their logic falls on itself. Pearcey is an excellent cultural dissector. Love Thy Body tackles issues of abortion, euthanasia, the hook up, sexuality, transgenderism, homosexuality, marriage and parenthood.
Pearcey does a thorough job explaining the philosophical underpinnings of the dualist worldview splitting personhood and body supporting abortion that eventually evolves into the cultural disavowal of both gender and body. She presents scripture’s Christian worldview of the embodied soul created by God and redeemed, saved, and restored in Christ as the one that is truly freeing.
"The main reason to address moral issues is that they have become a barrier to even hearing the message of salvation. People are inundated with rhetoric that Bible is hateful, narrow and negative. While it is crucial to be clear about the biblical teaching of sin, the context must be an overall positive message: that Christianity alone gives the basis for a high view of the value and meaning of the body as a good gift from God. In our communication with people struggling with moral issues, we need to reach out with a life-giving, life-affirming message. We should work to draw people in by the beauty of the biblical vision of life."
There were times though, that I wanted to rush the reader to the nearest pastor for a good dose of Word and Sacrament. “Get thee to a church!” But, again, this is apologetics. This is the wall-breaker. This is, “Oh, wow! Yeah! Now what do I do?” And in the hands of Christians, we should know what next to do. We speak of Christ, filling in what apologetics opens up.
Sometimes repetitive, but that’s a good thing for students and people like me with short attention spans.
Available at CBD and Amazon
Written for Tenth Grade upwards (My granddaughter will read it.)
Apologetics. They can be a rollercoaster ride. With each page I found myself saying, “Yes. OK, that’s good.” Then again, “Push that a step further. A chink in the wall opened, but now a bit further. Just a bit more!”
As Pearcey reminds her readers, we are not in a “cultural war,” but in a “rescue mission.” Apologetics aims at understanding the position of the “other” in order to find their weaknesses and demonstrate them so their logic falls on itself. Pearcey is an excellent cultural dissector. Love Thy Body tackles issues of abortion, euthanasia, the hook up, sexuality, transgenderism, homosexuality, marriage and parenthood.
Pearcey does a thorough job explaining the philosophical underpinnings of the dualist worldview splitting personhood and body supporting abortion that eventually evolves into the cultural disavowal of both gender and body. She presents scripture’s Christian worldview of the embodied soul created by God and redeemed, saved, and restored in Christ as the one that is truly freeing.
"The main reason to address moral issues is that they have become a barrier to even hearing the message of salvation. People are inundated with rhetoric that Bible is hateful, narrow and negative. While it is crucial to be clear about the biblical teaching of sin, the context must be an overall positive message: that Christianity alone gives the basis for a high view of the value and meaning of the body as a good gift from God. In our communication with people struggling with moral issues, we need to reach out with a life-giving, life-affirming message. We should work to draw people in by the beauty of the biblical vision of life."
There were times though, that I wanted to rush the reader to the nearest pastor for a good dose of Word and Sacrament. “Get thee to a church!” But, again, this is apologetics. This is the wall-breaker. This is, “Oh, wow! Yeah! Now what do I do?” And in the hands of Christians, we should know what next to do. We speak of Christ, filling in what apologetics opens up.
Sometimes repetitive, but that’s a good thing for students and people like me with short attention spans.
Available at CBD and Amazon
December 14, 2020
Many of the reviews for this book call it “transphobic,” “misogynistic,” “homophobic,” and “dangerous.” The reality of the book is that it’s rooted more so in a biological understanding of the world than ideological hope. Pearcey does not put away her Christian worldview, but as she records statistics and biological data it is hard to see the bias in her writing. This is made even more evident by the fact that she often quotes from those with differing world views. This book truly breaks down how society has segregated personhood and the body, and seeks to reconcile the two as Pearcey looks at the issue of abortion to transgenderism to same sex marriage. This book is vital for Christians to read for the sake of better understanding the secular movement rising in the West.
May 22, 2021
This books needs to be translated to portuguese asaaaap! Very heavy book to go through, but it is definitely worthy. I think that if you have already read "Total truth" from Nancy, you'll likely to have a more soft path in reading this volume (not my case).
It is very clarifying the way that Nancy debunks the dualistic views of human body and all the nuances that even without us noticing it, influences our day to day lives, and mainly, our worldview.
I got so utterly shocked in most of the chapters with some of the horrors that she describes related to the right of life and who is in charge to allow people to live...oh boy, it's tough. We are really doing a good job in being the fallen creatures that we are.
However, it is amazing how she sheds the light of the countercultural gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and in doing so, she paints an amazing picture of the theology of the body and who we are related to that and what we should do to be really awaken in the middle of all this delusional reality that we are in, where to state that a man cannot give birth, which is to say the obvious reality, is now perceived as a prejudice to trans people.
The book goes further in many other urgent issues, for example: euthanasia, abortion, people with mental illness, people with disabilities, eugenics and the very shocking one...transhumanism.
Seems like things are going to be pretty uglier into the future, but what's the news? The bible already told us that.
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK specially to moms of little ones and to teenagers.
It is very clarifying the way that Nancy debunks the dualistic views of human body and all the nuances that even without us noticing it, influences our day to day lives, and mainly, our worldview.
I got so utterly shocked in most of the chapters with some of the horrors that she describes related to the right of life and who is in charge to allow people to live...oh boy, it's tough. We are really doing a good job in being the fallen creatures that we are.
However, it is amazing how she sheds the light of the countercultural gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and in doing so, she paints an amazing picture of the theology of the body and who we are related to that and what we should do to be really awaken in the middle of all this delusional reality that we are in, where to state that a man cannot give birth, which is to say the obvious reality, is now perceived as a prejudice to trans people.
The book goes further in many other urgent issues, for example: euthanasia, abortion, people with mental illness, people with disabilities, eugenics and the very shocking one...transhumanism.
Seems like things are going to be pretty uglier into the future, but what's the news? The bible already told us that.
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK specially to moms of little ones and to teenagers.
March 9, 2022
4.6 Stars
Nancy Pearcey, in her book "Love Thy Body" brings Biblical clarity to the issues of sexuality, gender, and family. That is the purpose of Pearcey’s book, and she aims to explain the underlying worldview behind all these secular mindsets and show how the Biblical worldview offers a far better picture.
In Love Thy Body Pearcey dissects the issues of casual sex, abortion rights, homosexuality, and transgenderism and shows that they are rooted in personhood theory. She explains that personhood theory is a secular worldview that divides the mind from the body, facts from values. She calls this a “two-story dualism” where what is true is relegated to the upper story, but what is subjective is relegated to the lower story. Science is relegated to the upper story, where facts can be known, but values are relegated to the lower story since they cannot be known. Since science does not give us any values when it comes to our body, we are free to use our body in any way that we like – constructing our subjective values onto our bodies and rejecting God’s values.
Pearcey shows how personhood theory applies to a multitude of issues. She explains that casual sex is only possible when a person’s body is diminished, and sex is seen as a valueless act. She explains that abortion is only possible when personhood is not inherent but a subjective reality. And as well she explains that transgenderism is only possible when gender is perceived as a subjective reality rather than a biological fact. What is wrong with all these viewpoints is that they reject that biology can tell us the truth about reality. They reject that reality can be known apart from the scientific and that our bodies are mere tools to be used for whatever we want. But Pearcey explains that our bodies are given to us by God and come with certain responsibilities and values.
The strengths of Pearcey’s book are many. Her most prominent one is that she takes a complicated issue like sexuality and helps us to see the root cause of its perversion, in personhood theory. She explains this worldview skillfully and helps the reader to understand how all these issues are connected to a devaluing of the body. Another strength is that she shows the beauty of the biblical view of the body and that only the Christian worldview sees the mind and body as a unified whole.
One weakness of this book is Pearcey’s lack of biblical depth. She offers no biblical survey of its view of the body and only skims a couple of texts. Of course, this book is an apologetics book, so much of the book is focused on deconstructing secular worldviews. But at the same time, Pearcey’s book would have been better served by a broader survey of the biblical doctrine of the body.
Overall, Love Thy Body is an excellent book that I loved. She has brought me an overabundance of clarity concerning issues of sexuality and has shown me how the Biblical worldview offers a greater picture of the human body, rather than the secular worldview of the divided person. There is a multitude of Christian books that specialize in the issues of sexuality, transgenderism,, and homosexuality, but before you read those books, I highly recommend that you start with Nancy Pearcey’s Love Thy Body.
Nancy Pearcey, in her book "Love Thy Body" brings Biblical clarity to the issues of sexuality, gender, and family. That is the purpose of Pearcey’s book, and she aims to explain the underlying worldview behind all these secular mindsets and show how the Biblical worldview offers a far better picture.
In Love Thy Body Pearcey dissects the issues of casual sex, abortion rights, homosexuality, and transgenderism and shows that they are rooted in personhood theory. She explains that personhood theory is a secular worldview that divides the mind from the body, facts from values. She calls this a “two-story dualism” where what is true is relegated to the upper story, but what is subjective is relegated to the lower story. Science is relegated to the upper story, where facts can be known, but values are relegated to the lower story since they cannot be known. Since science does not give us any values when it comes to our body, we are free to use our body in any way that we like – constructing our subjective values onto our bodies and rejecting God’s values.
Pearcey shows how personhood theory applies to a multitude of issues. She explains that casual sex is only possible when a person’s body is diminished, and sex is seen as a valueless act. She explains that abortion is only possible when personhood is not inherent but a subjective reality. And as well she explains that transgenderism is only possible when gender is perceived as a subjective reality rather than a biological fact. What is wrong with all these viewpoints is that they reject that biology can tell us the truth about reality. They reject that reality can be known apart from the scientific and that our bodies are mere tools to be used for whatever we want. But Pearcey explains that our bodies are given to us by God and come with certain responsibilities and values.
The strengths of Pearcey’s book are many. Her most prominent one is that she takes a complicated issue like sexuality and helps us to see the root cause of its perversion, in personhood theory. She explains this worldview skillfully and helps the reader to understand how all these issues are connected to a devaluing of the body. Another strength is that she shows the beauty of the biblical view of the body and that only the Christian worldview sees the mind and body as a unified whole.
One weakness of this book is Pearcey’s lack of biblical depth. She offers no biblical survey of its view of the body and only skims a couple of texts. Of course, this book is an apologetics book, so much of the book is focused on deconstructing secular worldviews. But at the same time, Pearcey’s book would have been better served by a broader survey of the biblical doctrine of the body.
Overall, Love Thy Body is an excellent book that I loved. She has brought me an overabundance of clarity concerning issues of sexuality and has shown me how the Biblical worldview offers a greater picture of the human body, rather than the secular worldview of the divided person. There is a multitude of Christian books that specialize in the issues of sexuality, transgenderism,, and homosexuality, but before you read those books, I highly recommend that you start with Nancy Pearcey’s Love Thy Body.
January 10, 2018
I wish everyone in America would have to read this book.
It’s THAT good and THAT important.
Pearcey’s newest book looks at the biggest moral issues today (such as abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, transgenderism, the hookup culture, and more) and systematically shows how secularism denigrates the body and destroys the basis for human rights. There are a lot of books available that do a good job of hitting these topics one by one, but what makes this book different (and so valuable) is that Pearcey offers a single framework that she applies to each issue so you come away with a worldview APPROACH rather than a predictable set of issue-by-issue talking points.
Pearcey shows that while the secular world separates the body from the person, “A Christian concept of personhood depends not on what I can do but on who I am—that I am created in the image of God, and that God has called me into existence and continues to know and love me. Human beings do not need to earn the right to be treated as creatures of great value. Our dignity is intrinsic, rooted in the fact that God made us, knows us, and loves us.”
In a secular worldview, there is NO inherent value to the body, so it follows that the body has (practically, if not explicitly) been reduced to a “mindless machine to be used and exploited, like the rest of nature.” This simple implication of the secular worldview has far reaching consequences for each of the moral issues today, and Pearcey powerfully walks the reader through those consequences in this book.
As an author and speaker on Christian parenting in a secular world, I'm always looking for the best books to recommend to parents. Love Thy Body will be my go-to recommendation on talking with your kids about today's moral issues. Get this book! You won’t regret it.
It’s THAT good and THAT important.
Pearcey’s newest book looks at the biggest moral issues today (such as abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, transgenderism, the hookup culture, and more) and systematically shows how secularism denigrates the body and destroys the basis for human rights. There are a lot of books available that do a good job of hitting these topics one by one, but what makes this book different (and so valuable) is that Pearcey offers a single framework that she applies to each issue so you come away with a worldview APPROACH rather than a predictable set of issue-by-issue talking points.
Pearcey shows that while the secular world separates the body from the person, “A Christian concept of personhood depends not on what I can do but on who I am—that I am created in the image of God, and that God has called me into existence and continues to know and love me. Human beings do not need to earn the right to be treated as creatures of great value. Our dignity is intrinsic, rooted in the fact that God made us, knows us, and loves us.”
In a secular worldview, there is NO inherent value to the body, so it follows that the body has (practically, if not explicitly) been reduced to a “mindless machine to be used and exploited, like the rest of nature.” This simple implication of the secular worldview has far reaching consequences for each of the moral issues today, and Pearcey powerfully walks the reader through those consequences in this book.
As an author and speaker on Christian parenting in a secular world, I'm always looking for the best books to recommend to parents. Love Thy Body will be my go-to recommendation on talking with your kids about today's moral issues. Get this book! You won’t regret it.
August 2, 2020
This was required reading for my seminary classes (I guess it says something about how I felt about this book that I feel pressed to mention that at the beginning). For context, I am a celibate gay Christian man who submits to the traditional sexual ethic and is therefore pursuing lifelong celibacy.
The book is a real mixed bag, in my opinion. There is some devastating cultural critique and some really solid argumentation, mixed with some poor logic and a strong culture warrior mindset; large sections were difficult to get through due not only to her combative tone, but also her frequent reliance upon politically ultra-conservative sources.
Glad I read it, would probably recommend a different book to others who are looking to engage with the topics of marriage, abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, and trans issues.
The book is a real mixed bag, in my opinion. There is some devastating cultural critique and some really solid argumentation, mixed with some poor logic and a strong culture warrior mindset; large sections were difficult to get through due not only to her combative tone, but also her frequent reliance upon politically ultra-conservative sources.
Glad I read it, would probably recommend a different book to others who are looking to engage with the topics of marriage, abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, and trans issues.
November 7, 2019
This is the Home Depot for tools to understand the sexual revolution and beyond. Pearcey identifies the gnosticism at work, disconnecting the body from the person. She addresses euthanasia, abortion and infanticide, transgenderism, the hookup culture and more, all ways people are devalued and given to death. There's one fly in the ointment in a footnote positively referring to the Spiritual Friendship confusion, but otherwise this is outstanding stuff.
July 7, 2022
Insightful and brilliantly argued. This book's positive perspective on the body and sexuality is deeply compelling and beautiful. One of my favorite takeaways is her argument that being male or female is rooted in one's biology, not in the current gender expression fads like color preferences, clothing styles, who is the primary provider, or level of comfort with dirt.
December 27, 2017
Really eye-opening, and very thoughtful.
January 12, 2024
If you call yourself a Christian, you should be reading this book. Even more so if you struggle to talk about subjects like abortion, transgenderism, and euthanasia. Pearcey uses scientific data, logic, and scripture to break apart our culture’s separation of the body and person, and the lack of value we place on human beings. “Once a culture abandons the conviction that all humans are valuable because they’re created in the image of God, then human rights are up for grabs and any category of humans is fair game to be excluded or eliminated. Moral worth becomes subjective and a matter of who has the power to decide. We all know what happens then.” 👏🏻 This was a dense academic read, which is not usually my vibe, but every paragraph had me thinking, “YES, that is SO good.”
March 18, 2023
I read it in 3 sittings if that tells you how good it is. I thoroughly enjoyed. This book, alongside Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, compliment each other very well. Pearcey researched well and her writing was even better. These topics are very sensitive to Christianity and I think she defended certain doctrines well. She presented a Christian worldview that is compassionate towards those in the LBGTQ community and highlights that Christianity has a higher view of the body than any other secular ideology.
January 17, 2018
The publication of Nancy Pearcey’s book, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity From Its Cultural Captivity sent shockwaves throughout the evangelical world and help equip a new generation of apologists. Total Truth confronted the notion that scientific knowledge and moral knowledge were separated into two domains. The lower story includes objective truths that are public and valid for all people. This is the realm of empirical science. These truths are true and verifiable. The upper story includes the realm of moral knowledge which is private, relative, and subjective. Hence, the so-called unified concept of truth was obliterated and separated into two domains.
Pearcey’s subsequent works, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning and Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes have also left an indelible mark on the church and culture at large. The impact of these books on me personally, cannot be overstated. My suspicion is that many people would concur.
Nancy Pearcey’s newest offering, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality pick up where the other titles left off. The overarching goal of Love Thy Body is to “uncover the worldview that drives the secular ethic.” Ultimately, the book is designed to “show that a secular morality doesn’t fit the real universe.”
Readers familiar with Pearcey will quickly see the influence of Francis Schaeffer on her thought. It was Schaeffer who originally exposed the so-called “fact/value” split which has created a fracture epistemology that continues to be propagated today.
Pearcey shows the practical outgrowth of this fragmented worldview (or the two-story worldview) by pointing to several contemporary culture matters including abortion, euthanasia, “same-sex marriage,” and transgenderism. She helps readers understand how these various worldviews have been smuggled into our culture and links each of them to the two-story dichotomy.
Readers will be encouraged and challenged to walk through the argument of Love Thy Body and will be better equipped to not only contend with culture but also reach out to people who have been deceived by a pagan worldview.
Readers will discover that Pearcey’s argument is not combative. Rather, her heart cries for people who have been co-opted by this deviant worldview. She pleads with readers to reach out and love people with Christ-centered love: “Christians must present biblical morality in a way that reveals the beauty of the biblical view of the human person so that people actually want it to be true.”
Love Thy Body is a book that is filled with description and prescription. Facts and figures run through the book but the author is not content to leave her readers with data alone. She sets forth a workable prescription which is set on helping people and healing them at the deepest level. Therefore, “We must work to educate and persuade on a worldview level,” writes Pearcey. Such an approach is imperative if Christ-followers have any hope of reaching a lost world with the saving message of the gospel. Running through the book is a mindset that Pearcey, no doubt, learned from Schaeffer, namely, sharing the gospel with a tear in one’s eye.
Love Thy Body is riveting, challenging, educational, a shot to the heart, a challenge for the mind, and bold push for the feet. It will spark controversy in some venues and may even precipitate debate in the local church. Surely, this kind of debate is necessary as Christians seek to influence culture for God’s glory.
I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review.
Pearcey’s subsequent works, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning and Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes have also left an indelible mark on the church and culture at large. The impact of these books on me personally, cannot be overstated. My suspicion is that many people would concur.
Nancy Pearcey’s newest offering, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality pick up where the other titles left off. The overarching goal of Love Thy Body is to “uncover the worldview that drives the secular ethic.” Ultimately, the book is designed to “show that a secular morality doesn’t fit the real universe.”
Readers familiar with Pearcey will quickly see the influence of Francis Schaeffer on her thought. It was Schaeffer who originally exposed the so-called “fact/value” split which has created a fracture epistemology that continues to be propagated today.
Pearcey shows the practical outgrowth of this fragmented worldview (or the two-story worldview) by pointing to several contemporary culture matters including abortion, euthanasia, “same-sex marriage,” and transgenderism. She helps readers understand how these various worldviews have been smuggled into our culture and links each of them to the two-story dichotomy.
Readers will be encouraged and challenged to walk through the argument of Love Thy Body and will be better equipped to not only contend with culture but also reach out to people who have been deceived by a pagan worldview.
Readers will discover that Pearcey’s argument is not combative. Rather, her heart cries for people who have been co-opted by this deviant worldview. She pleads with readers to reach out and love people with Christ-centered love: “Christians must present biblical morality in a way that reveals the beauty of the biblical view of the human person so that people actually want it to be true.”
Love Thy Body is a book that is filled with description and prescription. Facts and figures run through the book but the author is not content to leave her readers with data alone. She sets forth a workable prescription which is set on helping people and healing them at the deepest level. Therefore, “We must work to educate and persuade on a worldview level,” writes Pearcey. Such an approach is imperative if Christ-followers have any hope of reaching a lost world with the saving message of the gospel. Running through the book is a mindset that Pearcey, no doubt, learned from Schaeffer, namely, sharing the gospel with a tear in one’s eye.
Love Thy Body is riveting, challenging, educational, a shot to the heart, a challenge for the mind, and bold push for the feet. It will spark controversy in some venues and may even precipitate debate in the local church. Surely, this kind of debate is necessary as Christians seek to influence culture for God’s glory.
I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review.
November 19, 2023
This book explores the relationship between Christian ethics, contemporary culture, and the human body. Pearcey deftly critiques secular ideologies that detach the body from personhood, addressing complex issues like abortion and gender identity.
With a foundation in Christian principles, she presents profound insights backed by philosophy, science, and personal stories. Accessible and engaging, the book deconstructs prevailing ideologies and provides a positive vision for understanding the body's inherent worth.
This book offers intellectual depth and compassionate guidance for readers seeking a nuanced Christian perspective on cultural debates.
I highly recommend them for navigating the challenges of our time. This has been a go-to reference for me over and over again.
With a foundation in Christian principles, she presents profound insights backed by philosophy, science, and personal stories. Accessible and engaging, the book deconstructs prevailing ideologies and provides a positive vision for understanding the body's inherent worth.
This book offers intellectual depth and compassionate guidance for readers seeking a nuanced Christian perspective on cultural debates.
I highly recommend them for navigating the challenges of our time. This has been a go-to reference for me over and over again.
September 5, 2018
We live in a time where we encounter the death of man as consequence of the death of truth, which is the death of God. Science is in decay since the quest for truth has ceased. Modern anthropology, for example, can not explain who and what man is due to the -separation- of the umbilical cord of his origin and author, God. As a result this entire generation is becoming a victim of the secular worldview that disintegrates and mutilates its identity and human dignity from the body. In this way, even modern psychology is a discipline in decline since man does not possess a self and becomes just a complex organism with cognitive abilities developed by physical and chemical reactions, although its matter, its body, has no intrinsic value in society. In an era in which man has died, Nancy R. Pearcey not only writes about controversial issues of the postmodern worldview, but also brings dignity back to the human being, which has been impregnated from his origin and birth, as she revives and reorients disciplines such as anthropology and psychology to give the effective statements that the human being needs to find his integrity and worth.
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