As a college freshman, I was pretty sure I’d discovered Leonard Cohen. I didn’t hear him blasting from a lot of other record players on the hall. So it was just Leonard and me. Then I graduated, got a newspaper job, got married, unmarried, remarried. Life and love being what they are, I somehow lost […] Read More

This man is making sex look bad. Among his other sins, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is using a previously-respected political position to tar the reputation of the, at best, sacred and ecstatic act of sex. Sex and Lust He is also making lust look bad. I don’t believe lust is bad. It’s desire for […] Read More

A study at Duke finds that a group of men report a stronger sense of spirituality after a dose of oxytocin, “the love hormone,” which is stimulated by sex. The news is reported on Duke Today, the study published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, the lead author social psychologist Patty Van Cappellen. I first […] Read More

I once knew a single woman pastor who was dating. What a very delicate situation she dealt with! A veteran minister warned her, “You have everything to lose.” We tend to expect the preacher to be a model of virtue, which is a terribly unfair burden to put on a human. A woman, even now, […] Read More

First of all, the subtitle to the new book Good Christian Sex is Why Chastity Isn’t the Only Option and Other Things the Bible Says About Sex. That pretty well positions the views of this author, a minister and the daughter of a minister. What I write about here is not the rights and wrongs […] Read More

At my request, Google kindly alerts me to news across the web on “sex and spirituality.” I like to keep up on what’s happening and what’s being discussed since I do write a bit about the subject. Most of what shows up has to do with sexual abuse by priests or gender roles in churches […] Read More

…For girls, that is. A caller on the Diane Rehm radio show just now described himself as “a Christian man” and went on to criticize — justly, in my view — the effect of church attitudes towards towards girls’ sexuality. The topic of the show was the new book Girls & Sex, with author Peggy […] Read More

Sex and dignity are two words that don’t seem to belong together. Sex is innately and joyously undignified, while the word dignity often implies primness and good posture. Yet in his new treatise on “The Joy of Love,” Pope Francis uses the word dignity 26 times, several times in a specifically sexual context. This led […] Read More

This is an explosively fertile week: Easter, with its eggs and resurrection; Holi, the Hindu festival of colors; Nowruz, meaning new light, the Persian New Year; Wicca’s Ostara; the Druid Eostar; Purim, celebrating survival of the Jewish people; and the official first day of spring. Flowers are blooming — my yard, though it gets only […] Read More

I long held the mistaken idea that saints always abstained from sex. I did know that St. Augustine had written his relatively steamy Confessions. But did not take in that he’d had a lover for 13 years, until I saw publication of a new novel The Confessions of X, written from the viewpoint of that […] Read More