Status Updates From Into the Deep: An Unlikely ...

this book is going to transform me (not into a Catholic, but somehow else spiritually. open hands to the Lord’s work). one outstanding line, in relation to Abigail’s discernment regarding becoming Catholic- “you need to read less, and pray more”. me for real

"...I had been given no guidance on how to live out a holy sexual life within marriage. Evangelicalism, as it turns out, has little say on that topic, echoing the secular view of sex as primarily recreational. The only key difference is that evangelicalism situates that recreational activity within marriage... I never heard, as an evangelical, sex spoken of in teleological terms.

"In this world, our bodies do not speak, because they have no intrinsic meaning to profess. They are not divine signs, but material objects, tools for us to wield. They are not part of a created order animated with divine intentionality. There is no givenness to our embodied humanity to which we are accountable. This is the world I used to inhabit, and I came to see that it is not, at its root, a Christian world..."

"In the entire ninety minutes of discussion, with multiple scholars presenting and an audience of female academics actively engaging, not once did anyone mention the fact that sex can result in pregnancy. It was as if we were operating within a world where that no longer happens, where new human beings emerge out of cabbage patches, or spring from men’s thighs, like Dionysus from Zeus."

"The myth of complete sexual freedom, complete autonomy, is based on male biology, and women can only pursue that ideal by doing violence to themselves."
^but violence to a man's biology is totally fine for some reason

"Funnily enough, I had received similar messages [as secular culture] within evangelicalism, where married sex is dangled like a ripe carrot in front of chaste singles: just make it through this time of abstinence, and then you can enter the marital wonderland of sex-on-demand, where all your desires will be met, and all your fantasies come true!"
lol

"...I see the old, the young, the fat, the poor, the clean, the weary, the grimy, the keen, all bent, all broken, in one way or another—all hungry and weak. All of these bodies, like a river rushing up, like a tide of human frailty and beauty and need, I watch them and long to be one of them, to enter the current with my thirst and my wounds, to be buoyed up—not moving, but being moved."

"There’s sort of a sickness of our age that treats our desires as godlike, infallible, one that confuses desire with conscience, what I ought to do with what I want to do."

Re-read

“I pray not to bring God’s heart around to my desires but to bring my heart around to his.”