Many of the ethical issues our culture is wrestling with have an underlying issue in common. The growing confusion we see around us on matters such as abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, transgenderism, and sexual promiscuity all flow downstream from our lack of understanding of what the human body is and means.
One person who has sought to account for this confusion and to offer a corrective is Nancy Pearcey, professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University, where she is also a scholar in residence. Many will be familiar with her previous books, such as Finding Truth and the award-winning Total Truth. Her book, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality, addresses the worldview that lies behind the huge cultural shifts we have recently experienced in the West—and provides a biblical account of what it means to be made in God’s image as men and women.
There is a reason the Ten Commandments start with the command to love and worship God above all other things: when our hearts are centered on God, only then are we empowered to fulfill the rest of the commandments that deal with behavior—what we do with our bodies. In this conversation about honoring our human bodies, Sammie and Nancy explore tough questions that Christians face as we navigate what this means in light of our identities.
Professor Pearcey is the author of Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality, as well as The Toxic War on Masculinity, The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo, Finding Truth, and two ECPA Gold Medallion Award Winners: How Now Shall We Live (coauthored with Harold Fickett and Chuck Colson) and Total Truth. Her books have been translated into 19 languages. She is professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. A former agnostic, Pearcey has spoken at universities such as Princeton, Stanford, USC, and Dartmouth. She has been quoted in The New Yorker and Newsweek, highlighted as one of the five top women apologists by Christianity Today, and hailed in The Economist as "America's pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual."
Here are some things we mentioned in the episode:
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