Last night I stopped by Borders with a 20% off coupon looking for an album. Needless to say the album was out of stock so then I looked for Ron Rash’s new novel Serena. It has not been released. On the way out the door I noticed my second favorite site at Borders…the “Buy One Get One Half Off Table!”
My favorite is the “Buy Two Get One Table.”
On the table I found two very intriquing books. One, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar…Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, will wait on my shelf for awhile because the other is Sex God by Rob Bell.
Last year I picked up Bell’s first book, Velvet Elvis, and did not enjoy it at all. Essentially Bell portrayed himself as reforming the Christian faith but in a way that no reformer has tried. Reformers always had the goal of moving backward toward what they perceived as a more true form of Christianity. Bell was doing something new.
Nevertheless it is an interesting read which is enough to encourage me to buy his second book. And it doesn’t hurt it was half off.
So far, after reading the introduction and first chapter, I’m not entirely sure what the book is about. It is supposed to be about the connections between sexuality and people’s relationship with God, and them being many. So far the book has been about human dignity.
This particular topis is of great interest to me. Over the past few years a new theme has been emerging in my life and that is learning how to and treating people in a more dignified manner. In the first chapter Bell lays out Biblical principles, in a similar vein as Richard Pratt in Designed for Dignity.
One central premise in chapter one is that when we treat others in ways that strip them of their dignity their humanity is not all that is at stake, but ours is as well. This is not an uncommon thought in considerations of human rights but this goes much deeper than typical human rights initiatives. Genocide and human trafficking are horrendous attacks on the inherent dignity of people and need to be stopped but most of us are involved in much more subtle, and arguably worse, attacks on dignity each day.
Treating physically attractive women in ways where their only value is sexual. Treating Hispanic men and women as second-rate people because they want to work and take care of their families. Treating the poor among us as worthless since they do not contribute to the free market. All of these, and countless others, strip the object of lust, ridicule, and neglect of their humanity all the while we’re stripping ourselves of our own.
It’s quite sad.
Hopefully this book we’ll instruct me in various ways that human sexuality relates to a relationship with God but if all it does is prompt my desire to grow in my own humanity and see other’s grow in their own it was definately worth the price I paid.
Heck, I would paid full price for it.
Postmodern in design and font!
