This volume by William J. Webb explores the hermeneutical maze that accompanies any treatment of these three controversial topics and takes a new step toward breaking down walls within the evangelical community related to them.

This volume by William J. Webb explores the hermeneutical maze that accompanies any treatment of these three controversial topics and takes a new step toward breaking down walls within the evangelical community related to them.

The redemptive-movement hermeneutic is a new and seductive egalitarian argument. It is also a fascinating hermeneutical discussion as it relates to issues such as slavery. This book deals thoroughly with these issues from a complementarian perspective.

William J. Webb defuses misguided readings of biblical passages that call for the corporal punishment of children, slaves and wrongdoers. Setting these passages in their ancient cultural context, Webb reaffirms the importance of reading Scripture with God?s redemptive movement in mind.

"Out of the Closets: The Sociology of Homosexual Liberation is the long-awaited book that Colin Williams of Indiana University's Institute for Sex Research praises as a beautifully written, provocative book on the contemporary homosexual scene. In this compelling and illuminating history of one of America's most radical social movements, Laud Humphreys, winners of the C. Wright Mills award for his book Tearoom Trade, tells the complete story of the birth and growth of gay liberation. From the organization of the first homosexual leagues over forty years ago to the 1970s, when gay men and women by the thousands are leaving the closets and taking to the streets, Humphreys gives a gull account of the evolution of gay lib's aspirations and goals, its search for internal unity, and its growing militancy. The life story of the homophile movement, told here with an all-too-rare blend of sympathy and objectivity, offers the readers the insight he needs to understand one of the most urgent pleas ever made for personal freedom." -- back cover.

For sociologist Henning Bech, the image of the male homosexual has become emblematic of the modern urban condition, in which freedom and mobility contend with transience and superficiality, in which possibility, energy, and engagement vie with uncertainty and restlessness. In this powerful and frankly provocative critique, Bech skillfully examines the distinctive relationship between urban modernism and the gay experience, exploring in compelling fashion its growing ramifications for the cultural mainstream. Gay society has persevered, even flourished, in this highly charged urban environment, aestheticizing and sexualizing the spaces, both public and private, where men meet. With profound insight and honesty, Bech details this world, candidly reflecting on sex, friendship, love, and life as manifest in the homosexual form of existence. He convincingly demonstrates that, in the face of modern alienation, successful coping strategies developed by gay men are gradually being adopted by mainstream heterosexual society. These adaptations are often masked by what Bech calls an "absent homosexuality, " in which sublimated themes of homosexuality and masculine love surface, only to be disavowed in expressions of social anxiety. This "absent homosexuality" acts as a kind of cultural filter, allowing key traits of gay life to be absorbed by the mainstream, while shielding heterosexual males from their own homophobic anxieties. Ultimately, Bech foresees, a postmodern convergence of hetero- and homosexual forms of exisce emergent from this urban landscape and, with it, a new masculine synthesis. Certain to ignite immediate controversy, When Men Meet offers both a penetrating scholarly analysis of the modern homosexual condition and an unflinching cultural vision of the masculine in transition.