Sarah Coakley::God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity
I am including in this post a review of another book by Coakley. Review of The New Asceticism Sarah Coakley’s The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God Bloomsbury Continuum, 2015) is a compact but ambitious theological intervention into some of the most divisive questions in contemporary Christian life: sexuality, gender, priesthood, celibacy, prayer, and the meaning of desire. The book gathers essays around a single constructive proposal: the churches will not move beyond their exhausted polarities until they recover a serious theology of asceticism. Coakley is not calling for a return to repression, moralism, or ecclesiastical control. She refuses to enter the familiar debates over biblical texts, ecclesiastical policies, or competing ethical positions. Rather, she argues that Christian asceticism, rightly understood, is the lifelong training, purification, and intensification of desire in relation to God. The modern church has lost a coherent theol...