Nunsploitation Films And The True Sexual Conscience of Religion

We’ve all had that experience when we’ve been watching a nunsploitation film and wondered, “What collision between a religious conscience and libertinism does this genre represent?  How does it relate to the individual and collective conscience about sex, and what does it have to do with the fact that this allegedly medieval nun is wearing nail-polish and sporting a navel-piercing?”

Reflections on the nunsploitation genre, sex, Catholicism, guilt, French literature, Freud, and conscience.

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Polyamory, Monogamy, and the Christian's Conscience

Updated on Monday, February 6, 2012 at 3:50PM by Otter

I’m emphatically not saying that polyamorous relationships are not comforting, good, and even strong in love in a lot of cases.  Nor am I arguing for monogamy, which I think has its roots in some complicated biological and economic realities that shouldn’t always have the final word.

I’m saying that polyamory can never be consonant with a fully Christian vision of the world, and that this is not because Christianity reveres monogamy but because it reveres God, who is jealous and who (if Jesus and Paul are right) in the end will have nobody sharing your soul.

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The Christians Of St. Tammany Parish: Straightening Up

These same parents pay for programs for their own autistic spectrum kids, children born with brains that are out of the normal run.  I know for a fact that they tolerate girls with autistic spectrum disorders in the Girl Scouts.  But only some such abnormalities merit their toleration: the compassion has a limit.

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The Bible Gets Its Freak On: Book Recommendation

Updated on Sunday, September 4, 2011 at 10:29PM by Otter

For years I've been meaning to edit a version of the Bible in which the naughty bits are in red: they're as common as the words of Jesus, I think. So imagine my delight when I found this in the mailbag... The clarity and precision of Coogan's insights into scripture are not rarified ivory-tower evasions of the text, but an unsentimental look at what's really there, in most cases.

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Ecclesiastes in Sickness and in Health

The golden bowl, the lifegiving womb and the seat of the feminine energy of procreation. (Can we please stop talking about sex?) Yes, Virginia: your golden bowl will be shattered.This strange little book... what nonsense it has urged from interpreters afraid of its message, which is just that your life counts for nothing in the scheme of the enormous universe... Did Ecclesiastes mean to use sex as a metaphor for some "spiritual" life? I doubt it. Or if it did, it was because sex is (biologically speaking) coextensive with continuing life for apes like us, and we are only spiritual insofar as we have a belief in our connectedness to things beyond ourselves, a connectedness that comes with all the energy and creativity and lifegiving power of sex.

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