Download or read book Reclaiming Purity written by Laura C. Mayer and published by WestBow Press. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It took Brian, my husband, and me some time to grasp the idea of purity while we were dating. After reading our story, you’ll see that making the commitment to purity was just the beginning. We had tasted the forbidden fruit for a number of years. Then I got to know Jesus in a new and powerful way as I recovered from an eating disorder. Brian eventually followed, and we knew things had to change. We had the difficult task of trying to figure out how to have a Christian dating relationship, living in the Garden of Eden, so to speak, right next to the tree but resisting the habit and compulsion of reaching for that fruit. How close to the forbidden tree can you get? Can you actually hold the apple in your hand but not taste it? There is no hard-and-fast rule I can give you for where to draw the line. However, I will share with you some lessons that I learned to show you how to build your relationship together through Christian dating. I will describe some strategies to keep the pilot light of your passion lit but under God’s gentle control. Then, how does it work to take two imperfect people, joined under God to become one in a loving marriage?
Download or read book Pure written by Linda Kay Klein and published by Atria Books. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Pure, Linda Kay Klein uses a potent combination of journalism, cultural commentary, and memoir to take us “inside religious purity culture as only one who grew up in it can” (Gloria Steinem) and reveals the devastating effects evangelical Christianity’s views on female sexuality has had on a generation of young women. In the 1990s, a “purity industry” emerged out of the white evangelical Christian culture. Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual “stumbling blocks” for boys and men, and any expression of a girl’s sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. This message traumatized many girls—resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—and trapped them in a cycle of shame. This is the sex education Linda Kay Klein grew up with. Fearing being marked a Jezebel, Klein broke up with her high school boyfriend because she thought God told her to and took pregnancy tests despite being a virgin, terrified that any sexual activity would be punished with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When the youth pastor of her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a twelve-year-old girl, Klein began to question purity-based sexual ethics. She contacted young women she knew, asking if they were coping with the same shame-induced issues she was. These intimate conversations developed into a twelve-year quest that took her across the country and into the lives of women raised in similar religious communities—a journey that facilitated her own healing and led her to churches that are seeking a new way to reconcile sexuality and spirituality. Pure is “a revelation... Part memoir and part journalism, Pure is a horrendous, granular, relentless, emotionally true account" (The Cut) of society’s larger subjugation of women and the role the purity industry played in maintaining it. Offering a prevailing message of resounding hope and encouragement, “Pure emboldens us to escape toxic misogyny and experience a fresh breath of freedom” (Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and founder of Together Rising).
Download or read book Talking Back to Purity Culture written by Rachel Joy Welcher and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The generation born into evangelical purity culture has grown up, but many still struggle with its complicated legacy. Examining purity culture's teachings through the lens of Scripture, Rachel Joy Welcher charts a path forward in the ongoing debates about sexuality—one that rejects legalism and license alike, steering us back instead to the good news of Jesus.
Download or read book Sex Purity and the Longings of a Girl s Heart written by Kristen Clark and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the modern Christian woman living in today's sexually charged society, embracing God's design for sex and purity can often feel like an impossible pursuit. As the culture seeks to normalize things such as pornography, erotica, and casual sex, both single and married women of all ages feel immense pressure to conform. With alluring temptations constantly inviting them to join in, they might even begin to question whether God's design is truly good. They wrestle with questions like - What is the purpose of my sexuality? - What does it mean to pursue purity? - Are my sexual longings good or bad? In this encouraging book, Kristen Clark and Bethany Beal share honestly about their own struggles and victories, and invite women on a personal journey to discover and reclaim a biblical vision for their sexuality. Kristen and Bethany help women understand why God's design for sexuality is good, relevant, and leads to true hope and lasting freedom.
Download or read book Rethinking Sexuality written by Dr. Juli Slattery and published by Multnomah. This book was released on 2018-07-24 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking resource challenges and equips Christians to think and act biblically and compassionately in matters of sexuality. Sexual abuse, sex addiction, gender confusion, brokenness, and shame plague today's world, and people are seeking clarity and hope. By contesting long-held cultural paradigms, this book equips you to see how sexuality is rooted in the broader context of God's heart and His work for us on earth. It provides a framework from which to understand the big picture of sexual challenges and wholeness, and helps you recognize that every sexual question is ultimately a spiritual one. It shifts the paradigm from combating sexual problems to confidently proclaiming and modeling the road to sacred sexuality. Instead of arguing with the world about what's right and wrong about sexual choices, this practical resource equips you to share the love and grace of Jesus as you encounter the pain of sexual brokenness--your own or someone else's.
Download or read book Reclaiming Adat written by Gaik Cheng Khoo and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1990s, the animist and Hindu traces in adat, or Malay custom, became contentious for resurgent Islam in Malaysia. Reclaiming Adat focuses on the filmmakers, intellectuals, and writers who reclaimed adat to counter the homogenizing aspects of both Islamic discourse and globalization in this period. They practised their project of recuperation with an emphasis on sexuality and a return to archaic forms such as magic and traditional healing. Using close textual readings of literature and film, Khoo Gaik Cheng reveals the tensions between gender, modernity, and nation. Khoo weaves a wealth of cultural theory into a rare analysis of Malay cinema and the work of new Malaysian anglophone writers. Reclaiming Adat makes an essential contribution to our knowledge of the complexities embedded in modern Malaysian culture, politics, and identity.
Download or read book Moral Revolution written by Kris Vallotton and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2012-12-04 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sex. Purity. Virginity. Love. Moral Revolution seeks to inspire a culture of love, honor and respect with people who walk in purity, passion and power. This intimate and honest book addresses the root causes of purity issues rather than merely communicating to the masses to "abstain from having sex." It will call you to a higher standard of living, imparting value for your heart and encouraging you to walk in all God has created you to be. Many who have given in to the power of peer pressure and the lure of distorted cultural values will find hope and courage to start over again. Moral Revolution is written for radical and passionate people who dream of being catalysts to a different kind of sexual revolution--one that transforms the way the world views sexuality, defines the unborn and embraces the family. Join the Moral Revolution!
Download or read book Reclaiming Intimacy written by Heather Jamison and published by Kregel Publications. This book was released on with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author speaks to couples and counselors dealing with the complicated emotional and spiritual problems generated by physical relationships that precede long-term commitment.
Download or read book Sexless in the City written by Kat Harris and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover a renewed biblical vision for sex, singleness, and relationships, and transform into an empowered woman of faith equipped to navigate today's dating culture with vision, clarity, and freedom. Let's face it: being single in today's culture as a woman of faith can be a STRUGGLE FEST. But it doesn't have to be. With real talk and straight wisdom, speaker, podcaster, and founder of The Refined Woman Kat Harris says it's time for a new conversation about singleness, sex, and desire. Growing up at the height of the purity movement, Kat knew this much: good Christians don't have sex until marriage. But approaching 30 and thrust into the New York City dating scene, she found a set of rules was not a compelling enough reason to keep her clothes on. Caught between purity culture's rules and popular culture's do what feels good, Kat began a multi-year journey searching for answers to the biggest questions about sexuality and faith: What does the Bible really say about sex? Why does almost everyone deal with some sort of sexual shame? But really--what's a single girl to do with her sexual desire? What if we never get married . . . then what? It turns out Kat was asking questions that countless women were dying to ask but didn't know they had the permission to do so. Hungry for clarity, she researched, wrestled, and discovered a God who wasn't afraid or ashamed of sex and desire as she thought He might be. In actuality, God created sex and desire within humanity and called it very good. Now she believes God desires to restore a generation disillusioned with purity culture and Christian dating, discouraged about their singleness, ashamed of their sexual desire, and uncertain how to practically walk this season out well. Join Kat on her messy, sometimes painful, and always honest journey to discovering God's heart for sexuality, desire, singleness, and our purpose within it all.
Download or read book Girl Defined written by Kristen Clark and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a Culture of Distortions, Discover God-Defined Womanhood and Beauty In a culture where airbrushed models and career-driven women define beauty and success, it's no wonder we have a distorted view of femininity. Our impossible standards place an incredible burden of stress on the backs of women and girls of all ages, resulting in anxiety, eating disorders, and depression. One question we often forget to ask is this: What is God's design for womanhood? In Girl Defined, sisters and popular bloggers Kristen Clark and Bethany Beal offer women a countercultural view of beauty, femininity, and self-worth. Based firmly in God's design for their lives, this book helps women rethink what true success and beauty look like. It invites them on a liberating journey toward a radically better vision for femininity that ends with the discovery of the kind of hope, purpose, and fulfillment they've been yearning for. Girl Defined helps readers · discover God's design for femininity and his definition of a successful woman · uncover the secrets of lasting worth, purpose, and fulfillment · be equipped and empowered to live out a radically better vision for womanhood · gain personal insight through the chapter-by-chapter study guide
Download or read book Finding the Hero in Your Husband Revisited written by Juli Slattery and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an update of the groundbreaking original title, Dr. Juli Slattery illuminates the power of women in marriage, with an emphasis on the uniqueness of a woman’s capacity to build intimacy. What do you do if your husband won’t get a job? When you don’t like the way he's parenting the kids? How do you know when to stand up to a controlling husband—or if you’ve become a controlling or manipulative wife? Many women feel lost in their marriages. They don't know what to do with their disappointment, when to ask for help, or what it looks like to let go of the need to control. Yet, God has given women incredible power in marriage—but they have to learn how to use it. In a complete rewrite of her bestselling book, Finding the Hero in Your Husband, psychologist Dr. Juli Slattery gently guides women to see how their attempts to manage or fix the messiness of marriage may actually undermine the very connection they want to build. As you read this book, you will: See how disappointment in marriage isn’t the end of intimacy, but an opportunity to build true intimacy that will go the distance. Learn to use your relational power in a way that builds intimacy—instead of sabotaging it. Recognize the ways you unknowingly sabotage intimacy by using your power to take over in marriage. Understand what biblical submission isn’t and be empowered to step into the influence and responsibility you have within marriage. Solidly grounded in biblical truth, Juli covers topics such as work, home life, conflict, and intimacy. As a mentor and friend, she offers explanations of God’s design, healthy expectations, and relatable applications that women of faith can practice to influence their marriage and deepen their relationship with God. Ultimately, Finding the Hero in Your Husband, Revisited, will help a wife more clearly see and encourage the hero within her husband by examining her own heart.
Download or read book Christian Cosmo written by Phylicia Masonheimer and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the church silent on the topic of sex, thousands of Christian young women learn about sex from the pages of Cosmopolitan Magazine: the only place that frankly explains what sex actually is. Unsure what is biblical and what is cultural, these girls come to dating and marriage misunderstanding their own sexuality. No one every taught them about sex from God's perspective. Christian Cosmo is the sex talk many girls never get. Rather than learn about sex from the culture, Christian Cosmo answers sexual questions from a Scriptural standpoint. By reframing sex for the single girl, we lay the foundation for God-honoring marriages and end the stigma on female sexuality.
Download or read book ChurchToo written by Emily Joy Allison and published by Broadleaf Books . This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Emily Joy Allison outed her abuser on Twitter, she launched #ChurchToo, a movement to expose the culture of sexual abuse and assault utterly rampant in Christian churches in America. Not a single denomination is unaffected. And the reasons are somewhat different than those you might find in the #MeToo stories coming out of Hollywood or Washington. While patriarchy and misogyny are problems everywhere, they take on a particularly pernicious form in Christian churches where those with power have been insisting, since many decades before #MeToo, that this sexually dysfunctional environment is, in fact, exactly how God wants it to be. #ChurchToo turns over the rocks of the church's sexual dysfunction, revealing just what makes sexualized violence in religious contexts both ubiquitous and uniquely traumatizing. It also lays the groundwork for not one but many paths of healing from a religious culture of sexual shame, secrecy, and control, and for survivors of abuse to live full, free, healthy lives.
Download or read book Sex and the Single Christian Girl written by Marian Jordan Ellis and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can purity survive real-world temptation? "True love waits"--but what exactly are you waiting for? After all, we're constantly bombarded with Hollywood's idea of romance--that sex is no big deal, that everyone is doing it, that it's the only path to a happy ending. Maybe you've even begun to wonder, What am I missing? Is the wait really worth it? Marian Jordan Ellis has been there. She knows the pitfalls of giving in to temptation--but also the blessings of God's best found in waiting after she committed herself to Christ and to sexual purity. Now, from one Christian woman to another, she hopes to spare you from the heartache of sexual sin and instead point you toward God's best. Marian offers lots of practical advice, backed by biblical truth, to equip you with the tools to overcome past mistakes and future temptations. You are cherished. Whether you are happily single, casually dating, or have found "the one," your purity is worth fighting for.
Download or read book Virgin Nation written by Sara Moslener and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First taking hold of the American cultural imagination in the 1990s, the sexual purity movement of contemporary evangelicalism has since received considerable attention from a wide range of media outlets, religious leaders, and feminist critics. Virgin Nation offers a history of this movement that goes beyond the Religious Right, demonstrating a link between sexual purity rhetoric and fears of national decline that has shaped American ideas about morality since the nineteenth century. Concentrating on two of today's best known purity organizations, True Loves Waits and Silver Ring Thing, Sara Moslener's investigation reveals that purity work over the last two centuries has developed in concert with widespread fears of changing traditional gender roles and sexual norms, national decline, and global apocalypse. Moslener highlights a number of points in U.S. history when evangelical beliefs and values have seemed to provide viable explanations for and solutions to widespread cultural crises, resulting in the growth of their cultural and political influence. By asserting a causal relationship between sexual immorality, national decline, and apocalyptic anticipation, leaders have shaped a purity rhetoric that positions Protestant evangelicalism as the salvation of American civilization. From the purity reformers of the nineteenth century to fundamentalist leaders such as Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry, Moslener illuminates the evolution of a strain of purity rhetoric that runs throughout Protestant evangelicalism.
Download or read book Hot Buttons Sexuality Edition written by Nicole O'Dell and published by Kregel Publications. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From substance abuse to temptation, relationships to breakups, peer pressure to popularity, teens face all sorts of tough issues. How teens respond to these challenges will influence their future, possibly define their future, maybe even determine whether they have a future or not. What if parents could help their teens prepare for these hot buttonsbefore the issues arise? Now they can, and in a way thats serious but fun, direct but nonconfrontational, and abundantly beneficial to the parentteen relationship. These two new editions in the popular Hot Buttons Series each offer creative scenarios, discussion points, and Bible verses to help parents create conversation on difficult topics. Hot Buttons Sexuality Edition offers: the facts about teen sexuality, backed by statistics; specifics for how to talk frankly about sex with your kids, discussion about the growth of homosexuality and bisexuality among teens; and compassionate advice for guiding your teen to reclaim purity. The Hot Buttons Series continues to be a quick-reference resource that parents can use to safeguard their children from todays negative influences.
Download or read book Against Purity written by Alexis Shotwell and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world is in a terrible mess. It is toxic, irradiated, and full of injustice. Aiming to stand aside from the mess can produce a seemingly satisfying self-righteousness in the scant moments we achieve it, but since it is ultimately impossible, individual purity will always disappoint. Might it be better to understand complexity and, indeed, our own complicity in much of what we think of as bad, as fundamental to our lives? Against Purity argues that the only answer—if we are to have any hope of tackling the past, present, and future of colonialism, disease, pollution, and climate change—is a resounding yes. Proposing a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures, Against Purity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories of race, disability, gender, and animal ethics as a foundation for an innovative approach to the politics and ethics of responding to systemic problems. Being against purity means that there is no primordial state we can recover, no Eden we have desecrated, no pretoxic body we might uncover through enough chia seeds and kombucha. There is no preracial state we could access, no erasing histories of slavery, forced labor, colonialism, genocide, and their concomitant responsibilities and requirements. There is no food we can eat, clothes we can buy, or energy we can use without deepening our ties to complex webbings of suffering. So, what happens if we start from there? Alexis Shotwell shows the importance of critical memory practices to addressing the full implications of living on colonized land; how activism led to the official reclassification of AIDS; why we might worry about studying amphibians when we try to fight industrial contamination; and that we are all affected by nuclear reactor meltdowns. The slate has never been clean, she reminds us, and we can’t wipe off the surface to start fresh—there’s no fresh to start. But, Shotwell argues, hope found in a kind of distributed ethics, in collective activist work, and in speculative fiction writing for gender and disability liberation that opens new futures.
