The Atlantic Magazine reports that the US produces 89 percent of porn websites in the world today. I realize this is a free country and that porn is a multi-billion industry. But sometimes the voice of the church is all too silent on matters such as this.
The issue crosses many theological boundaries and related topics. Theologically conservative ministers now bemoan the high rates of porn use, adultery, alcoholism, drug abuse, and divorce among their members, no different from the larger society. As if all the church teaches has a minimal impact on people's lives, if any.
I think the high divorce rate is a wonderful thing. All those soul-crushing bad marriages ended. It's the high marriage rate I dislike.
ReplyDeleteThe Church of St. Mary and St. David in Kilpeck, England (a Church of England parish near the Welsh border in Herefordshire) features a medieval carving called a sheela-na-gig. Another sheela-na-gig from the 11th or 12th century may be found in Oxford on the medieval tower of the Parish Church of St. Michael at the North Gate. These figures of women displaying their pudenda -- Google sheela-na-gig to see photos of such stonework -- were a relatively common feature of medieval churches in areas of England and Ireland that were affected by the post-1066 Norman cultural conquest. A variety of theories exist regarding the intent of such carvings. Most prominent among them are 1) that they show the church's incorporation and implicit affirmation of pre-Christian pagan religion and sexuality or 2) that they are a graphic warning against the spiritual danger posed by feminine lust. When I was doing graduate research in Oxford in the early 1980's, I used to walk past the sheela-na-gig on the tower of St. Michael's parish every day and so got a sense of what it would have been like for a community to live with such art over time. My intuitive sense came to be that its effect was to represent both the inevitable erotic drive within human beings AND the potential spiritual dangers of that drive -- the dual light and dark sides of sexuality. It seems to me that the pervasiveness of contemporary pornographic images performs virtually the same dual cultural function as sheela-na-gigs performed for our medieval forbears.
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