Debbie Blue approaches scripture like a farm wife handles a chicken, carefully but not delicately, thoroughly but not exactly cautiously. Debbie sees tangled questions about a God who gets a body. Though religion often abstracts, the story of Christ is the opposite. God becomes physical. God is made human in the womb of Mary and born through the birth canal.

A Sociology of Sex and Sexuality offers an historical sociological analysis of ideas about expressions of sexual desire, combining both primary and secondary historical and theoretical material with original research and popular imagery in the contemporary context.

In this pioneering book, Eve Levin explores sexual behavior among the peoples of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Russia from their conversion to Christianity in the ninth and tenth centuries until the end of the seventeenth century. By ranging across all these societies, Levin is able to fulfill three basic aims: to delineate the general character of sexuality among the Orthodox Slavs, to enrich that account by drawing our attention to regional variations in the sexual mores of these peoples, and to draw suggestive comparisons between the world of the medieval Orthodox Slavs and their contemporaries in the Latin West. Levin begins with a study of the ecclesiastical image of sexuality as expressed in didactic and literary texts, showing that the Orthodox Church was deeply suspicious of sexuality. Her second chapter, on canon law and marfiage, examines the conditions for marriage, divorce, and remarriage, the obligation of the conjugal relationship, and the impact of these rules on social order. Levin looks at church regulations concerning sexual relations among relatives by blood, marriage, spiritual kinship, and adoption in Chapter Three, and she devotes Chapter Four to prohibited sexual practices, both inside and outside of marriage. In the fifth chapter she studies Russian and South Slavic responses to rape, and demonstrates that these societies simultaneously censured violence against women and sanctioned the attitudes and social structures that justified it. Chapter Six deals with the rules on sexual conduct for the clergy, whose job it was to enforce sexual precepts. Throughout her work, Levin argues that, despite its conviction that sexual expression was diabolical, the medieval Orthodox Church approached sexual matters in a surprisingly practical way; its official sexual ethic corresponded to a great degree with popular views. Historians of the Slavic world, both medieval and modern, will welcome this accessible study. It should also attract comparativists who work in such fields as church history, the history of women and the family, and the history of sexuality.

Twelve groundbreaking essays show the varied and complex ways in which ideas about sexuality, gender, and the body have shaped and been influenced by Russian literature, history, art, and philosophy from the medieval period to the present day.

"There’s nothing worse than catatonic Christians standing still in a world of falling people." Godology is for those who crave to know more about God and why it matters. Think Knowing God meets Celebration of Discipline, for twenty-somethings. In each chapter, Christian George discloses a biblical reality about the nature of God, a spiritual discipline that connects us to Him, and a practical way to express our faith. Using humorous experiences and honest reflections, George grapples with real-life issues like purpose, despair, triumph, and tragedy. In an age when thinking about God can be academic and abstract, George invites you to really know God. But be warned: it will change everything.

Being human is hard. Being a good human is even harder. Practicing kindness, honesty, and self-awareness in the face of doubt, failure, ambiguity, and vulnerability can feel insurmountable. How to Human is here to help. Alice Connor draws on nearly a decade of experience as a college chaplain to provide a tender and irreverent take on one of life's most fundamental questions: how to be a better human in a world dead set against it. Connor offers sage wisdom and no-nonsense realism through real-life examples that strike right at the rashes and rubs of the human experience. She'll take you by the hand, tell you what you need to hear, and encourage you to embrace the chaos. How to Human will help you see life as an experiment--not a quest for the right answers.