Sexuality and Holy Longing: Second Edition: Embracing Intimacy in a Beautiful, Broken World

Lisa Graham McMinn

Mar 2019 · Fortress Press

About this ebook

In this newly revised edition of Sexuality and Holy Longing, author Lisa Graham McMinn beautifully describes how people are created by God for relationship, and our sexuality guarantees that we will long for and be drawn toward others. McMinn provides a blueprint for understanding sexuality--and our longing to be loved--at all stages of life (childhood, teen years, early adulthood, midlife, and old age). In the context of faith and a changing culture, she explores sexual awakenings in adolescence, choices, opportunities and challenges of single people, and mysteries of committed covenantal relationships. She addresses tough topics, including reproductive issues, sexuality for those who are single (divorced, widowed, or never married), and in this new edition, LGBT issues and same-sex marriage.

The author details practical solutions for ways that parents, educators, and churches can nurture others and ourselves in the quest to understand sexuality as a longing that draws us toward God and others, and to embrace it as a God-given gift. Thought-provoking study questions at the end of each chapter inspire readers to reflection and action in reclaiming our sexuality through grace.

About the author

Lisa Graham McMinn is currently a writer in residence at George Fox University. Her other books include To the Table (2016), The Contented Soul (2006), and Growing Strong Daughters (2000). She also describes herself as a farmer, Quaker, beekeeper, and sometimes potter, whose job is to love God's creation--to laugh, hope, nurture, and mostly, to pay attention.

David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 22 books and approximately 150 book chapters, journal articles, and reviews, including Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, Kingdom Ethics, The Sacredness of Human Life, Evangelical Ethics, A Letter to My Anxious Christian Friends, Still Christian, and the forthcoming Moral Leadership for a Divided Age: Fourteen People Who Dared to Change Our World. He has been President of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics. He has also been heavily involved in numerous activist efforts for peace, justice, human dignity, and the integrity of God's creation, most notably in addressing torture, climate change, and the continued harm being inflicted on LGBTQ persons by Christian churches and families.